“How weird to think of people speaking and you couldn’t understand them!”

“They can’t even understand each other. They speak hundreds of different languages, all the crazy archists on the Moon…”

“Water, water,” said Bedap, still panting.

“There is no water,” said Terrus. “It hasn’t rained for eighteen decads. A hundred and eighty-three days to be precise. Longest drought in Abbenay for forty years.”

“If it goes on, we’ll have to recycle urine, the way they did in the Year 20. Glass of piss, Shev?”

“Don’t joke,” said Terrus. “That’s the thread we walk on. Will it rain enough? The leaf crops in Southrising are a dead loss already. No rain there for thirty decads.”

They all looked up into the hazy, golden sky. The serrated leaves of the trees under which they sat, tall exotics from the Old World, dropped on their branches, dusty, curled by the dryness.

“Never be another Great Drought,” Desar said. “Modern desalinization plants. Prevent.”

“They might help alleviate it,” Terrus said.

• • •

Winter that year came early, cold, and dry in the Northern Hemisphere. Frozen dust on the wind in the low, wide streets of Abbenay. Water to the baths strictly rationed: thirst and hunger outranked cleanliness. Food and clothing for the twenty million people of Anarres came from the holum plants, leaf, seed, fiber, root. There was some stockpile of textiles in the warehouses and depots, but there had never been much reserve of food. Water went to the land, to keep the plants alive. The sky over the city was cloudless and would have been clear, but it was yellowed with dust windborne from drier lands to the south and west. Sometimes when the wind blew down from the north, from the Ne Theras, the yellow haze cleared and left a brilliant, empty sky, dark blue hardening to purple at the zenith.

Takver was pregnant. Mostly she was sleepy and benign. “I am a fish,” she said, “a fish in water. I am inside the baby inside me.” But at times she was overtaxed by her work, or left hungry by the slightly decreased meals at commons. Pregnant women, like children and old people, could get a light extra meal daily, lunch at eleven, but she often missed this because of the exacting schedule of her work. She could miss a meal, but the fish in her laboratory tanks could not. Friends often brought by something saved out from their dinner or left over at their commons, a filled bun or a piece of fruit. She ate all gratefully but continued to crave sweets, and sweets were in short supply. When she was tired she was anxious and easily upset, and her temper flared at a word.

Late in the autumn Shevek completed the manuscript of the Principles of Simultaneity. He gave it to Sabul for approval for the press. Sabul kept it for a decad, two decads, three decads, and said nothing about it. Shevek asked him about it. He replied that he had not yet got around to reading it, he was too busy. Shevek waited. It was midwinter. The dry wind blew day after day; the ground was frozen. Everything seemed to have come to a halt, an uneasy halt, waiting for rain, for birth.