The night before he left, Bedap came and ate at the Institute refectory with them, and they came back together to the room. They sat talking in the hot night, the lamp unlit, the windows open. Bedap, who ate at a small commons where special arrangements were not a burden for the cooks to handle, had saved up his special-beverages ration for a decad and taken it all in the form of a liter bottle of fruit juice. He produced it with pride: a going-away party. They doled it around and savored it luxuriously, curling their tongues. “Do you remember,” Takver said, “all the food, the night before you left Northsetting? I ate nine of those fried cakes.”

“You wore your hair cut short then,” Shevek said, startled by the recollection, which he had never before paired up to Takver. “That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Who did you think it was?”

“By damn, what a kid you were then!”

“So were you, it’s ten years now. I cut my hair so I’d look different and interesting. A lot of good it did!” She laughed her loud, cheerful laugh, quickly strangling it so as not to wake the baby, asleep in her crib behind the screen. Nothing, however, woke the baby once she had got to sleep. “I used to want so badly to be different. I wonder why?”

“There’s a point, around age twenty,” Bedap said, “when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”

“Or at least accept them with resignation,” said Shevek.

“Shev is on a resignation binge,” Takver said. “It’s old age coming on. It must be terrible to be thirty.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be resigned at ninety,” Bedap said, patting her back. “Are you even resigned to your child’s name yet?”

The five- and six-letter names issued by the central registry computer, being unique to each living individual, took the place of the numbers which a computer-using society must otherwise attach to its members. An Anarresti needed no identification but his name. The name, therefore, was felt to be an important part of the self, though one no more chose it than one’s nose or height. Takver disliked the name the baby had got, Sadik. “It still sounds like a mouthful of gravel,” she said, “it doesn’t fit her.”

“I like it,” Shevek said. “It sounds like a tall, slender girl with long black hair.”

“But it is a short, fat girl with invisible hair,” Bedap observed.

“Give her time, brother! Listen. I’m going to make a speech.”

“Speech! Speech!”

“Shh—”

“Why shh? That baby would sleep through a cataclysm.”

“Be quiet. I feel emotional.” Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. “I want to say— What I want to say is this. I’m glad Sadik was born now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I’m glad she was born now, and here. I’m glad she’s one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. I’m glad she’s sister to Bedap. That she’s sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will fall…”