As Mitis had predicted, he was “Sabul’s man.” Sabul had ceased to be a functioning physicist years ago; his high reputation was built on expropriations from other minds, Shevek was to do the thinking, and Sabul would take the credit.
Obviously an ethically intolerable situation, which Shevek would denounce and relinquish. Only he would not. He needed Sabul. He wanted to publish what he wrote and to send it to the men who could understand it, the Urrasti physicists; he needed their ideas, their criticism, their collaboration.
So they had bargained, he and Sabul, bargained like profiteers. It had not been a battle, but a sale. You give me this and I’ll give you that. Refuse me and I’ll refuse you. Sold? Sold! Shevek’s career, like the existence of his society, depended on the continuance of a fundamental, unadmitted profit contract. Not a relationship of mutual aid and solidarity, but an exploitative relationship; not organic, but mechanical. Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
But all I want to do is get the job done, Shevek pleaded in his mind, as he walked across the mall towards the domicile quadrangle in the grey, windy afternoon. It’s my duty, it’s my joy, it’s the purpose of my whole life. The man I have to work with is competitive, a dominance-seeker, a profiteer, but I can’t change that; if I want to work, have to work with him.
He thought about Mitis and her warning. He thought about the Northsetting Institute and the party the night before he left. It seemed very long ago now, and so childishly peaceful and secure that he could have wept in nostalgia. As he passed under the porch of the Life Sciences Building a girl passing looked sidelong at him, and he thought that she looked like that girl — what was her name? — the one with short hair, who had eaten so many fried cakes the night of the party. He stopped and turned, but the girl was gone around the corner. Anyhow she had had long hair. Gone, gone, everything gone. He came out from the shelter of the porch into the wind. There was a fine rain on the wind, sparse. Rain was sparse when it fell at all. This was a dry world. Dry, pale, inimical. “Inimical!” Shevek said out loud in Iotic. He had never heard the language spoken; it sounded very strange. The rain stung his face like thrown gravel. It was an inimical rain. His sore throat had been joined by a terrific headache, of which he had only just become aware. He got to Room 46 and lay down on the bed platform, which seemed to be much farther down than usual. He shook, and could not stop shaking. He pulled the orange blanket up around him and huddled up, trying to sleep, but he could not stop shaking, because he was under constant atomic bombardment from all sides, increasing as the temperature increased.
He had never been ill, and never known any physical discomfort worse than tiredness. Having no idea what a high fever was like, he thought, during the lucid intervals of that long night, that he was going insane. Fear of madness drove him to seek help when day came. He was too frightened of himself to ask help from his neighbors on the corridor: he had heard himself raving in the night. He dragged himself to the local clinic, eight blocks away, the cold streets bright with sunrise spinning solemnly about him. At the clinic they diagnosed his insanity as a light pneumonia and told him to go to bed in Ward Two. He protested. The aide accused him of egoizing and explained that if he went home a physician would have to go to the trouble of calling on him there and arranging private care for him. He went to bed in Ward Two. All the other people in the ward were old. An aide came and offered him a glass of water and a pill. “What is it?” Shevek asked suspiciously. His teeth were chattering again.
“Antipyretic.”
“What’s that?”
“Bring down the fever.”
“I don’t need it.”
The aide shrugged. “All right,” she said, and went on.
Most young Anarresti felt that it was shameful to be ilclass="underline" a result of their society’s very successful prophylaxy, and also perhaps a confusion arising from the analogic use of the words “healthy” and “sick.” They felt illness to be a crime, if an involuntary one. To yield to the criminal impulse, to pander to it by taking pain relievers, was immoral. They fought shy of pills and shots. As middle age and old age came on, most of them changed their view. The pain got worse than the shame. The aide gave the old men in Ward Two their medicine, and they joked with her. Shevek watched with dull incomprehension.
Later on there was a doctor with an injection needle.
“I don’t want it,” Shevek said. “Stop egoizing,” the doctor said. “Roll over.” Shevek obeyed.
Later on there was a woman who held a cup of water for him, but he shook so much that the water was spilt, wetting the blanket. “Let me alone,” he said. “Who are you?” She told him, but he did not understand. He told her to go away, he felt very well. Then he explained to her why the cyclic hypothesis, though unproductive in itself, was essential to his approach to a possible theory of Simultaneity, a cornerstone. He spoke partly in his own language and partly in Iotic, and wrote the formulas and equations on a slate with a piece of chalk so that she and the rest of the group would understand, as he was afraid they would misunderstand about the cornerstone. She touched his face and tied his hair back for him. Her hands were cool. He had never felt anything pleasanter in all his life than the touch of her hands. He reached out for her hand. She was not there, she had gone.
A long time later, he was awake. He could breathe. He was perfectly well. Everything was all right. He felt disinclined to move. To move would disturb the perfect, stable moment, the balance of the world. The winter light along the ceiling was beautiful beyond expression. He lay and watched it. The old men down the ward were laughing together, old husky cackling laughs, a beautiful sound. The woman came in and sat down by his cot He looked at her and smiled.
“How do you feel?”
“Newborn. Who are you?”
She also smiled. “The mother.”
“Rebirth. But I’m supposed to get a new body, not the same old one.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Nothing on earth. On Urras. Rebirth is part of their religion.”
“You’re still lightheaded.” She touched his forehead. “No fever.” Her voice in saying those two words touched and struck something very deep in Shevek’s being, a dark place, a place walled in, where it reverberated back and back in the darkness. He looked at the woman and said with terror, “You are Rulag.”
“I told you I was. Several times!”
She maintained an expression of unconcern, even of humor. There was no question of Shevek’s maintaining anything. He had no strength to move, but he shrank away from her in unconcealed fear, as if she were not his mother, but his death. If she noticed this weak movement, she gave no sign.
She was a handsome woman, dark, with fine and well-proportioned features showing no lines of age, though she must be over forty. Everything about her person was harmonious and controlled. Her voice was low, pleasant in timbre. “I didn’t know you were here in Abbenay,” she said, “or where you were — or even whether you were. I was in the Press depot looking through new publications, picking things up for the Engineering library, and I saw a book by Sabul and Shevek. Sabul I knew, of course. But who’s Shevek? Why does it sound so familiar? I didn’t arrive at it for a minute or more. Strange, isn’t it? But it didn’t seem reasonable. The Shevek I knew would be only twenty, not likely to be co-authoring treatises in metacosmology with Sabul. But any other Shevek would have to be even younger than twenty!… So I came to see. A boy in the domicile said you were here… This is a shockingly understaffed clinic. I don’t understand why the syndics don’t request some more postings from the Medical Federation, or else cut down the number of admissions; some of these aides and doctors are working eight hours a day! Of course, there are people in the medical arts who actually want that: the self-sacrifice impulse. Unfortunately it doesn’t lead to maximum efficiency… It was strange to find you. I would never have known you… Are you and Palat in touch? How is he?”