"I've made some mistake in shifgrethor. I'm sorry; I can't learn. I've never even really understood the meaning of the word."
"Shifgrethor? It comes from the old word foreshadow." We were both silent for a little, and then he looked at me with a direct, gentle gaze. His face in the reddish light was as soft, as vulnerable, as remote as the face of a woman who looks at you out of her thoughts and does not speak.
And I saw then again, and for good, what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in him: that he was a woman as well as a man. Any need to explain the sources of that fear vanished with the fear; what I was left with was, at last, acceptance of him as he was. Until then I had rejected him, refused him his own reality. He had been quite right to say that he, the only person Gethen who trusted me, was the only Gethenian I distrusted. For he was the only one who had entirely accepted me as a human being: who had liked me personally and given me entire personal loyalty: and who therefore had demanded of me an equal degree of recognition, of acceptance. I had not been willing to give it. I had been afraid to give it. I had not wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.
He explained, stiffly and simply, that he was in kemmer and had been trying to avoid me, insofar as one of us could the other. "I must not touch you," he said, his voice subdued with extreme constraint. He looked away.
"I understand. I agree completely." I said.
The blizzard continued to rage outside the tent. Gale wind howled outside; the snow was so thick I had not been able to see Estraven six feet away.
For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love.
He looked at me. His usually firm, broad face showed telltale signs of weight loss. His brow was rimmed with sweat and I could see deep in his gaze, a feminine hunger fighting to be released. It was then I did notice with a start how the kemmer had already changed him.
He shoulders were narrower, and his face thinner. Already it was hard to tell whether the man in front of me was a man, or a boyish woman. He was both, I forced myself to think; he was both a man and a woman, every person on this planet was.
The wind howled outside and the walls of the tend rippled and snapped in the wind, but the noise was deafened in my ears as I fell deeper into Estraven's dark brown eyes. It wasn't right, I'd never been attracted to men. But I knew that he would not always be, that he would change. Was it really then, so bad, so taboo to feel the way I did?
"Ai..." Estraven said quietly. "Don't look at me like that." Estaven's eyes widened as I shifted closer.
I had been so lonely on this planet. It had been years since I'd lain with another person. My own inhibitions stopping me from growing close to this planet's people. There was a pounding tightness in my chest, a burning heat in my face that I could not assuage.
"Ai... Ai -- please -- stop, you're make it worse." Estraven said. His voice was high, barely a whisper as sweat began to bead on above his brow. "Ai, the kemmer."
