He found her on the steep slope, sitting among the delicate bushes of moonthorn that grew like knots of lace over the mountainsides, its stiff, fragile branches silvery in the twilight. In a gap between eastern peaks a colorless luminosity of the sky heralded moonrise. The stream was noisy in the silence of the high, bare hills. There was no wind, no cloud. The air above the mountains was like amethyst, hard, clear, profound.

They had been sitting there some while without speaking.

“I’ve never been drawn to a woman in my life as I have been to you. Ever since we started this hike.” Shevek’s tone was cold, almost resentful.

“I didn’t mean to spoil your vacation,” she said, with her large childish laugh, too loud for the twilight.

“It doesn’t spoil it!”

“That’s good. I thought you meant it distracted you.”

“Distracted! It’s like an earthquake.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s not you,” he said harshly. “It’s me.”

“That’s what you think,” she said.

There was a longish pause.

“If you want to copulate,” she said, “why haven’t you asked me?”

“Because I’m not sure that’s what I do want.”

“Neither am I.” Her smile was gone. “Listen,” she said. Her voice was soft, and had not much timbre; it had the same furry quality as her eyes. “I ought to tell you.” But what she ought to tell him remained unsaid for quite a while. He looked at her at last with such pleading apprehension that she hastened to speak, and said in a rush, “Well, all I mean is, I don’t want to copulate with you now. Or anybody.”

“You’ve sworn off sex?”

“No!” she said with indignation, but no explanation.

“I might as well have,” he said, flinging a pebble down into the stream. “Or else I’m impotent. It’s been half a year, and that was just with Dap. Nearly a year, actually. It kept getting more unsatisfying each time, till I quit trying. It wasn’t worth it. Not worth the trouble. And yet I—I remember—I know what it ought to be.”

“Well, that’s it,” said Takver. “I used to have an awful lot of fun copulating, until I was eighteen or nineteen. It was exciting, and interesting, and pleasure. But then… I don’t know. Like you said, it got unsatisfying. I didn’t want pleasure. Not just pleasure, I mean.”

“You want kids?”

“Yes, when the time comes.”

He pitched another rock down into the stream, which was fading into the shadows of the ravine leaving only its noise behind, a ceaseless harmony composed of disharmonies.

“I want to get a job done,” he said.

“Does being celibate help?”

“There’s a connection. But I don’t know what it is, it’s not causal. About the time sex began to go sour on me, so did the work. Increasingly. Three years without getting anywhere. Sterility. Sterility on all sides. As far as the eye can see the infertile desert lies in the pitiless glare of the merciless sun, a lifeless, trackless, feckless, fuckless waste strown with the bones of luckless wayfarers…”