The midwife came back, went around putting things to rights. “You did a first-rate job,” she remarked, to both of them. They assented mildly. “I’ll look in in the morning,” she said leaving. The baby and Takver were already asleep. Shevek put his head down near Takver’s. He was accustomed to the pleasant musky smell of her skin. This had changed; it had become a perfume, heavy and faint, heavy with sleep. Very gently he put one arm over her as she lay on her side with the baby against her breast. In the room heavy with life he slept.

• • •

An Odonian undertook monogamy just as he might undertake a joint enterprise in production, a ballet or a soap works. Partnership was a voluntarily constituted federation like any other. So long as it worked, it worked, and if it didn’t work it stopped being. It was not an institution but a function. It had no sanction but that of private conscience.

This was fully in accord with Odonian social theory. The validity of the promise, even promise of indefinite term, was deep in the grain of Odo’s thinking; though it might seem that her insistence on freedom to change would invalidate the idea of promise or vow, in fact the freedom made the promise meaningful. A promise is a direction taken, a self-limitation of choice. As Odo pointed out, if no direction is taken, if one goes nowhere, no change will occur. One’s freedom to choose and to change will be unused, exactly as if one were in jail, a jail of one’s own building, a maze in which no one way is better than any other. So Odo came to see the promise, the pledge, the idea of fidelity, as essential in the complexity of freedom.

Many people felt that this idea of fidelity was misapplied to sexual life. Odo’s femininity swayed her, they said, towards a refusal of real sexual freedom; here, if nowhere else, Odo did not write for men. As many women as men made this criticism, so it would appear that it was not masculinity that Odo failed to understand, but a whole type or section of humanity, people to whom experiment is the soul of sexual pleasure.

Though she may not have understood them, and probably considered them propertarian aberrations from the norm—the human species being, if not a pair-bonding species, yet a time-binding one—still she provided better for the promiscuous than for those who tried long-term partnership. No law, no limit, no penality, no punishment, no disapproval applied to any sexual practice of any kind, except the rape of a child or woman, for which the rapist’s neighbors were likely to provide summary revenge if he did not get promptly into the gentler hands of a therapy center. But molestation was extremely rare in a society where complete fulfillment was the norm from puberty on, and the only social limit imposed on sexual activity was the mild one of pressure in favor of privacy, a kind of modesty imposed by the communality of life.