She did not ask if he could bypass Sabul or go over his head. Nobody on Anarres was supposed to be over anybody’s head. There were no bypasses. If you could not work in solidarity with your syndics, you worked alone.

“What if…” She stopped. She got up and put her boots by the heater to dry. She took off her coat, hung it up, and put a heavy hand-loomed shawl over her shoulders. She sat down on the bed platform, grunting a little as she lowered herself the last few inches. She looked up at Shevek, who sat in profile between her and the windows.

“What if you offered to let him sign as co-author? Like the first paper you wrote.”

“Sabul won’t put his name to ‘superstitious-religious speculations.’ ”

“Are you sure? Are you sure that isn’t just what he wants? He knows what this is, what you’ve done. You’ve always said he’s shrewd. He knows it’ll put him and the whole Sequency school in the recycle bin. But if he could share with you, share the credit? All he is, is ego. If he could say that it was his book…”

Shevek said bitterly, “I’d as soon share you with him as that book.”

“Don’t look at it that way, Shev. It’s the book that’s important—the ideas. Listen. We want to keep this child to be born with us as a baby, we want to love it. But if for some reason it would die if we kept it, it could only live in a nursery, if we never could set eyes on it or know its name—if we had that choice, which would we choose? To keep the stillborn? Or to give life?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He put his head in his hands, rubbing his forehead painfully. “Yes, of course. Yes. But this— But I—”

“Brother, dear heart,” Takver said. She clenched her hands together on her lap, but she did not reach out to him. “It doesn’t matter what name is on the book. People will know. The truth is the book.”

“I am that book,” he said. Then he shut his eyes, and sat motionless. Takver went to him then, timidly, touching him as gently as if she touched a wound.

• • •

Early in the year 164 the first, incomplete, drastically edited version of the Principles of Simultaneity was printed in Abbenay, with Sabul and Shevek as joint authors. PDC was printing only essential records and directives, but Sabul had influence at the Press and in the Information division of PDC, and had persuaded them of the propaganda value of the book abroad. Urras, he said, was rejoicing over the drought and possible famine on Anarres; the last shipment of Ioti journals was full of gloating prophecies of the imminent collapse of the Odonian economy. What better denial, said Sabul, than the publication of a major work of pure thought, “a monument of science,” he said in his revised critique, “soaring above material adversity to prove the unquenchable vitality of the Odonian Society and its triumph over archist propertarianism in every area of human thought.”