The otter grunted, dropped to all fours, and examined Shevek’s shoes with interest.

“He likes you,” Ini said.

“I like him,” Shevek replied, a little sadly. Whenever he saw an animal, the flight of birds, the splendor of autumn trees, that sadness came into him and gave delight a cutting edge. He did not think consciously of Takver at such moments, he did not think of her absence. Rather it was as if she were there though he was not thinking about her. It was as if the beauty and strangeness of the beasts and plants of Urras had been charged with a message for him by Takver, who would never see them, whose ancestors for seven generations had never touched an animal’s warm fur or seen the flash of wings in the shade of trees.

He spent the night in a bedroom under the eaves. It was cold, which was welcome after the perpetual overheating of rooms at the University, and quite plain: the bedstead, bookcases, a chest, a chair, and a painted wooden table. It was like home, he thought, ignoring the height of the bedstead and the softness of the mattress, the fine woollen blankets and silk sheets, the knickknacks of ivory on the chest, the leather bindings of the books, and the fact that the room, and everything in it, and the house it was in, and the land the house stood on, was private property, the property of Demaere Oiie, though he hadn’t built it, and didn’t scrub its floors. Shevek put aside such tiresome discriminations. It was a nice room and not really so different from a single in a domicile.

Sleeping in that room, he dreamed of Takver. He dreamed that she was with him in the bed, that her arms were about him, her body against his body… but what room, what room were they in? Where were they? They were on the Moon together, it was cold, and they were walling along together. It was a flat place, the Moon, all covered with bluish-white snow, though the snow was thin and easily kicked aside to show the luminous white ground. It was dead, a dead place. “It isn’t really like this,” he told Takver, knowing she was frightened. They were walking towards something, a distant line of something that looked flimsy and shiny, like plastic, a remote, hardly visible barrier across the white plain of snow. In his heart Shevek was afraid to approach it, but he told Takver, “We’ll be there soon.” She did not answer him.

CHAPTER SIX

Anarres

WHEN Shevek was sent home after a decad in hospital, his neighbor in Room 45 came in to see him. He was a mathematician, very tall and thin. He had an uncorrected walleye, so that you never could be sure whether he was looking at you and/or you were looking at him. He and Shevek had coexisted amicably, side by side in the Institute domicile, for a year, without ever saying a full sentence to each other.