“He’s dead.”
“Ah.” There was no pretense of shock or grief in Rulag’s voice, only a kind of dreary accustomedness, a bleak note, Shevek was moved by it, enabled to see her, for a moment, as a person.
“How long ago did he die?”
“Eight years.”
“He couldn’t have been more than thirty-five.”
“There was an earthquake in Wide Plains. We’d been living there about five years, he was construction engineer for the community. The quake damaged the learning center. He was with the others trying to get out some of the children who were trapped inside. There was a second quake and the whole thing went down. There were thirty-two people killed.”
“Were you there?”
“I’d gone to start training at the Regional Institute about ten days before the quake.”
She mused, her face smooth and still. “Poor Palat. Somehow it’s like him — to have died with others, a statistic, one of thirty-two…”
“The statistics would have been higher if he hadn’t gone into the building,” Shevek said.
She looked at him then. Her gaze did not show what emotions she felt or did not feel. What she said might be spontaneous or deliberate, there was no way to tell. “You were fond of Palat.”
He did not answer.
“You don’t look like him. In fact you look like me, except in coloring. I thought you’d look like Palat. I assumed it. It’s strange how one’s imagination makes these assumptions. He stayed with you, then?”
Shevek nodded.
“He was lucky.” She did not sigh, but a suppressed sigh was in her voice.
“So was I.”
There was a pause. She smiled faintly. “Yes. I could have kept in touch with you. Do you hold it against me, my not having done so?”
“Hold it against you? I never knew you.”
“You did. Palat and I kept you with us in the domicile, even after you were weaned. We both wanted to. Those first years are when the individual contact is essential; the psychologists have proved it conclusively. Full socialization can be developed only from that affectional beginning… I was willing to continue the partnership. I tried to have Palat posted here to Abbenay. There never was an opening in his line of work, and he wouldn’t come without a posting. He had a stubborn streak… At first he wrote sometimes to tell me how you were, then he stopped writing.”
“It doesn’t matter,” the young man said. His face, thin from illness, was covered with very fine drops of sweat, making his cheeks and forehead look silvery, as if oiled.
There was silence again, and Rulag said in her controlled, pleasant voice, “Well, yes; it mattered, and it still matters. But Palat was the one to stay with you and see you through your integrative years. He was supportive, he was parental, as I am not. The work comes first, with me. It has always come first. Still, I’m glad you’re here now, Shevek. Perhaps I can be of some use to you, now. I know Abbenay is a forbidding place at first. One feels lost, isolated, lacking the simple solidarity the little towns have. I know interesting people, whom you might like to meet. And people who might be useful to you. I know Sabul; I have some notion of what you may have come up against, with him, and with the whole Institute. They play dominance games there. It takes some experience to know how to outplay them. In any case, I’m glad you’re here. It gives me a pleasure I never looked for — a kind of joy… I read your book. It is yours, isn’t it? Why else would Sabul be co-publishing with a twenty-year-old student? The subject’s beyond me, I’m only an engineer. I confess to being proud of you. That’s strange, isn’t it? Unreasonable. Propertarian, even. As if you were something that belonged to me! But as one gets older one needs certain reassurances that aren’t, always, entirely reasonable. In order to go on at all.”
He saw her loneliness. He saw her pain, and resented it. It threatened him. It threatened his father’s loyalty, that clear constant love in which his life had taken root. What right had she, who had left Palat in need, to come in her need to Palat’s son? He had nothing, nothing to give her, or anyone. “It might have been better,” he said, “if you’d gone on thinking of me as a statistic too.”
“Ah,” she said, the soft, habitual, desolate response. She looked away from him.
The old men down at the end of the ward were admiring her, nudging each other.
“I suppose,” she said, “that I was trying to make a claim on you. But I thought in terms of your making a claim on me. If you wanted to.”
He said nothing.
“We aren’t, except biologically, mother and son, of course.” She had regained her faint smile. “You don’t remember me, and the baby I remember isn’t this man of twenty. All that is time past, irrelevant. But we are brother and sister, here and now. Which is what really matters, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat without speaking for a minute, then stood up. “You need to rest. You were quite ill the first time I came. They say you’ll be quite all right now. I don’t suppose I’ll be back.”
He did not speak. She said, “Goodbye, Shevek,” and turned from him as she spoke. He had either a glimpse or a nightmare imagination of her face changing drastically as she spoke, breaking down, going all to pieces. It must have been imagination. She walked out of the ward with the graceful measured gait of a handsome woman, and he saw her stop and speak, smiling, to the aide out in the hall.
He gave way to the fear that had come with her, the sense of the breaking of promises, the incoherence of time. He broke. He began to cry, trying to hide his face in the shelter of his arms, for he could not find the strength to turn over. One of the old men, the sick old men, came and sat on the side of the cot and patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, brother. It’ll be all right, little brother,” he muttered. Shevek heard him and felt his touch, but took no comfort in it. Even from the brother there is no comfort in the bad hour, in the dark at the foot of the wall.
Chapter 5
Shevek ended his career as a tourist with relief. The new term was opening at Ieu Eun; now he could settle down to live, and work, in Paradise, instead of merely looking at it from outside.
He took on two seminars and an open lecture course. No teaching was requested of him, but he had asked if he could teach, and the administrators had arranged the seminars. The open class was neither his idea nor theirs. A delegation of students came and asked him to give it. He consented at once. This was how courses were organized in Anarresti learning centers: by student demand, or on the teacher’s initiative, or by students and teachers together. When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said, “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up!” He had no intention of being administered out of the course — he had fought this kind of battle before — and because he communicated his firmness to the students, they held firm. To avoid unpleasant publicity the Rectors of the University gave in, and Shevek began his course to a first-day audience of two thousand. Attendance soon dropped. He stuck to physics, never going off into the personal or the political, and it was physics on a pretty advanced level. But several hundred students continued to come. Some came out of mere curiosity, to see the man from the Moon; others were drawn by Shevek’s personality, by the glimpses of the man and the libertarian which they could catch from his words even when they could not follow his mathematics. And a surprising number of them were capable of following both the philosophy and the mathematics.