Shevek laughed. “I’ve got to go. I’ll be home in an hour or so. Come eat with us tonight.”

“I’ll meet you at the room.”

Shevek set off down the street with his long stride; Bedap stood hesitating in front of the PDC building. It was midafternoon, a windy, sunny, cold spring day. The streets of Abbenay were bright, scoured-looking, alive with light and people. Bedap felt both excited and let down. Everything, including his emotions, was promising yet unsatisfactory. He went off to the domicile in the Pekesh Block where Shevek and Takver now lived, and found, as he had hoped, Takver at home with the baby.

Takver had miscarried twice and then Pilum had come along, later and a little unexpected, but very welcome. She had been small at birth and now, getting on to two, was still small, with thin arms and legs. When Bedap held her he was always vaguely frightened of or repelled by the feeling of those arms, so fragile that he could have broken them simply with a twist of his hand. He was very fond of Pilun, fascinated by her cloudy grey eyes and won by her utter trustfulness, but whenever he touched her he knew consciously, as he had not done before, what the attraction of cruelty is, why the strong torment the weak. And therefore—though he could not have said why “therefore”—he also understood something that had never made much sense to him, or interested him at all: parental feeling. It gave him a most extraordinary pleasure when Pilun called him “tadde.”

He sat down on the bed platform under the window. It was a good-sized room with two platforms. The floor was matted; there was no other furniture, no chairs or tables, only a little movable fence that marked off a play space or screened Pilun’s bed. Takver had the long, wide drawer of the other platform open, sorting piles of papers kept in it. “Do hold Pilun, dear Dap!” she said with her large smile, when the baby began working towards him. “She’s been into these papers at least ten times, every time I get them sorted. I’ll be done in just a minute here—ten minutes.”

“Don’t hurry. I don’t want to talk. I just want to sit here. Come on, Pilun. Walk—there’s a girl! Walk to Taddle Dap. Now I’ve got you!”

Pilun sat contentedly on his knees and studied his hand. Bedap was ashamed of his nails, which he no longer bit but which remained deformed from biting, and at first he closed his hand to hide them; then he was ashamed of shame, and opened up his hand. Pilun patted it.

“This is a nice room,” he said. “With the north light. It’s always calm in here.”

“Yes. Shh, I’m counting these.”

After a while she put the piles of papers away and shut the drawer. “There! Sorry. I told Shev I’d page that article for him. How about a drink?”

Rationing was still in force on many staple foods, though much less strict than it had been five years before. The fruit orchards of Northrising had suffered less and recovered quicker from the drought than the grain-growing regions, and last year dried fruits and fruit juices had gone off the restricted list. Takver had a bottle standing in the shaded window. She poured them each a cupful, in rather lumpy earthenware cups which Sadik had made at school. She sat down opposite Bedap and looked at him, smiling. “Well, how’s it going at PDC?”