The room was dark. The lights had just come on in the city; they looked weak under the high, dark-grey sky. Takver came in, lit the lamp, crouched down in her overcoat by the heat grating. “Oh it’s cold! Awful. My feet feel like I’ve been walking on glaciers, I nearly cried on the way home they hurt so. Rotten profiteering boots! Why can’t we make a decent pair of boots? What are you sitting in the dark for?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you go to commons? I got a bite at Surplus on the way home. I had to stay, the kukuri eggs were hatching and we had to get the fry out of the tanks before the adults ate them. Did you eat?”

“No.”

“Don’t be sulky. Please don’t be sulky tonight. If one more thing goes wrong, I’ll cry. I’m sick of crying all the time. Damned stupid hormones! I wish I could have babies like the fish, lay the eggs and swim off and that’s the end of it. Unless I swam back and ate them… Don’t sit and look like a statue like that. I just can’t stand it.” She was slightly in tears, as she crouched by the breath of heat from the grating, trying to unfasten her boots with stiff fingers.

Shevek said nothing.

“What is it? You can’t just sit there!”

“Sabul called me in today. He won’t recommend the Principles for publication, or export.”

Takver stopped struggling with the bootlace and sat still. She looked at Shevek over her shoulder. At last she said, “What did he say exactly?”

“The critique he wrote is on the table.”

She got up, shuffled over to the table wearing one boot, and read the paper, leaning over the table, her hands in her coat pockets.

“ ‘That Sequency Physics is the high road of chronosophical thought in the Odonian Society has been a mutually agreed principle since the Settlement of Anarres. Egoistic divagation from this solidarity of principles can result only in sterile spinning of impractical hypotheses without social organic utility, or repetition of the superstitious-religious speculations of the irresponsible hired scientists of the Profit States of Urras…’ Oh, the profiteer! The petty-minded, envious little Odo-spouter! Will he send this critique to the Press?”

“He’s done so.”

She knelt to wrestle off her boot. She glanced up several times at Shevek, but she did not go to him or try to touch him, and for some while she did not say anything. When she spoke her voice was not loud and strained as before, but had its natural husky, furry quality. “What will you do, Shev?”

“There’s nothing to do.”

“We’ll print the book. Form a printing syndicate, learn to set type, and do it.”

“Paper’s at minimum ration. No nonessential printing. Only PDC publications, till the tree-holum plantations are safe.”

“Then can you change the presentation somehow? Disguise what you say. Decorate it with Sequency trimmings. So that he’ll accept it.”

“You can’t disguise black as white.”