He worked now in a planting crew. The trucks had come down from Northeast full of tiny trees, thousands of seedlings raised in the Green Mountains, where it rained up to forty inches a year, the rain belt. They planted the little trees in the dust.

When they were done, the fifty crews who had worked the second year of the project drove away in the flatbed trucks, and they looked back as they went. They saw what they had done. There was a mist of green, very faint, on the pallid curves and terraces of the desert. On the dead land lay, very lightly, a veil of life. They cheered, sang, shouted from truck to truck. Tears came into Shevek’s eyes. He thought, She brings the green leaf from the stone… Gimar had been posted back to Southrising a long time ago. “What are you making faces about?” Beshun asked him, squeezing next to him as the truck jounced and running her hand up and down his hard, dust-whitened arm.

• • •

“Women,” Vokep said, in the truck depot in Tin Ore, Southwest. “Women think they own you. No woman can really be an Odonian.”

“Odo herself—?”

“Theory. And no sex life after Asieo was killed, right? Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

“You think they’re different from men there?”

“I know it. What a man wants is freedom. What a woman wants is property. She’ll only let you go if she can trade you for something else. All women are propertarians.”

“That’s a hell of a thing to say about half the human race,” said Shevek, wondering if the man was right. Beshun had cried herself sick when he got posted back to Northwest, had raged and wept and tried to make him tell her he couldn’t live without her and insisted she couldn’t live without him and they must be partners. Partners, as if she could have stayed with any one man for half a year!

The language Shevek spoke, the only one he knew, lacked any proprietary idioms for the sexual act. In Pravic it made no sense for a man to say that he had “had” a woman. The word which came closest in meaning to “fuck,” and had a similar secondary usage as a curse, was specific: it meant rape. The usual verb, taking only a plural subject, can be translated only by a neutral word like copulate. It meant something two people did, not something one person did, or had. This frame of words could not contain the totality of experience any more than any other, and Shevek was aware of the area left out, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Certainly he had felt that he owned Beshun, possessed her, on some of those starlit nights in the Dust. And she had thought she owned him. But they had both been wrong; and Beshun, despite her sentimentality, knew it; she had kissed him goodbye at last smiling, and let him go. She had not owned him. His own body had, in its first outburst of adult sexual passion, possessed him indeed—and her. But it was over with. It had happened. It would never (he thought, eighteen years old, sitting with a traveling-acquaintance in the truck depot of Tin Ore at midnight over a glass of sticky sweet fruit drink, waiting to hitch a ride on a convoy going north), it could never happen again. Much would yet happen, but he would not be taken off guard a second time, knocked down, defeated. Defeat, surrender, had its raptures. Beshun herself might never want any joy beyond them. And why should she? It was she, in her freedom, who had set him free.