“Same as ever. How’s the fish lab?”

Takver looked down into her cup, moving it to catch the light on the surface of the liquid. “I don’t know. I’m thinking of quitting.”

“Why, Takver?”

“Rather quit than be told to. The trouble is, I like that job, and I’m good at it. And it’s the only one like it in Abbenay. But you can’t be a member of a research team that’s decided you’re not a member of it.”

“They’re coming down harder on you, are they?”

“All the time,” she said, and looked rapidly and unconsciously at the door, as if to be sure that Shevek was not there, hearing. “Some of them are unbelievable. Well, you know. There’s no use going on about it.”

“No, that’s why I’m glad to catch you alone. I don’t really know. I, and Shev, and Skovan, and Gezach, and the rest of us who spend most of the time at the printing shop or the radio tower, don’t have postings, and so we don’t see much of people outside the Syndicate of Initiative. I’m at PDC a lot, but that’s a special situation, I expect opposition there because I create it. What is it that you run up against?”

“Hatred,” Takver said, in her dark, soft voice. “Real hatred. The director of my project won’t speak to me any more. Well, that’s not much loss. He’s a stick anyhow. But some of the others do tell me what they think… There’s a woman, not at the fish labs, here in the dom. I’m on the block sanitation committee and I had to go speak to her about something. She wouldn’t let me talk. ‘Don’t you try to come into this room, I know you, you damned traitors, you intellectuals, you egoizers,’ and so on and so on, and then slammed the door. It was grotesque.” Takver laughed without humor. Pilun, seeing her laugh, smiled as she sat curled in the angle of Bedap’s arm, and then yawned. “But you know, it was frightening. I’m a coward, Dap. I don’t like violence. I don’t even like disapproval!”

“Of course not. The only security we have is our neighbors’ approval. An archist can break a law and hope to get away unpunished, but you can’t ‘break’ a custom; it’s the framework of your life with other people. We’re only just beginning to feel what it’s like to be revolutionaries, as Shev put it in the meeting today. And it isn’t comfortable.”

“Some people understand,” Takver said with determined optimism. “A woman on the omnibus yesterday. I don’t know where I’d met her, tenth-day work some time, I suppose; she said, ‘It must be wonderful to live with a great scientist, it must be so interesting!’ And I said, ‘Yes, at least there’s always something to talk about’… Pilun, don’t go to sleep, baby! Shevek will be home soon and we’ll go to commons. Jiggle her, Dap. Well, anyway, you see, she knew who Shev was, but she wasn’t hateful or disapproving, she was very nice.”