The spirit in him was like a child running out into the sunlight. There was no end, no end…
And yet in his utter ease and happiness he shook with fear; his hands trembled, and his eyes filled up with tears, as if he had been looking into the sun, After all, the flesh is not transparent. And it is strange, exceedingly strange, to know that one’s life has been fulfilled.
Yet he kept looking, and going farther, with that same childish joy, until all at once he could not go any farther; he came back, and looking around through his tears saw that the room was dark and the high windows were full of stars.
The moment was gone; he saw it going. He did not try to hold on to it. He knew he was part of it, not it of him. He was in its keeping.
After a while he got up shakily and lighted the lamp. He wandered around the room a little, touching things, the binding of a book, the shade of a lamp, glad to be back among these familiar objects, back in his own world — for at this instant the difference between this planet and that one, between Urras and Anarres, was no more significant to him than the difference between two grains of sand on the shore of the sea. There were no more abysses, no more walls. There was no more exile. He had seen the foundations of the universe, and they were solid.
He went into the bedroom, walking slowly and a little unsteadily, and dropped onto the bed without undressing. He lay there with his arms behind his head, occasionally foreseeing and planning one detail or another of the work that had to be done, absorbed in a solemn and delightful thankfulness, which merged gradually into serene reverie, and then into sleep.
He slept for ten hours. He woke up thinking of the equations that would express the concept of interval. He went to the desk and set to work on them. He had a class that afternoon, and met it; he took his dinner at the Senior Faculty commons and talked with his colleagues there about the weather, and the war, and whatever else they brought up. If they noticed any change in him he did not know it, for he was not really aware of them at all. He came back to his room and worked.
The Urrasti counted twenty hours in the day. For eight days he spent twelve to sixteen hours daily at his desk, or roaming about his room, his light eyes turned often to the windows, outside which shone the warm spring sunlight, or the stars and the tawny, waning Moon.
Coming in with the breakfast tray, Efor found him lying half-dressed on the bed, his eyes shut, talking in a foreign language. He roused him. Shevek woke with a convulsive start, got up and staggered into the other room, to the desk, which was perfectly empty; he stared at the computer, which had been cleared, and then stood there like a man who has been hit on the head and does not know it yet. Efor succeeded in getting him to He down again and said, “Fever there, sir. Call the doctor?”
“No!”
“Sure, sir?”
“No! Don’t let anybody in here. Say I am ill, Efor.”
“Then they’ll fetch the doctor sure. Can say you’re still working, sir. They like that.”
“Lock the door when you go out,” Shevek said. His nontransparent body had let him down; he was weak with exhaustion, and therefore fretful and panicky. He was afraid of Pae, of Oiie, of a police search party. Everything he had heard, read, half-understood about the Urrasti police, the secret police, came vivid and terrible into his memory, as when a man admitting his illness to himself recalls every word he ever read about cancer. He stared up at Efor in feverish distress,
“You can trust me,” the man said in his subdued, wry, quick way. He brought Shevek a glass of water and went out, and the lock of the outer door clicked behind him.
He looked after Shevek during the next two days, with a tact that owed little to his training as a servant.
“You should have been a doctor, Efor,” Shevek said, when his weakness had become a merely bodily, not unpleasant lassitude.
“What my old sow say. She never wants nobody nurse her beside me when she get the pip. She say, ‘You got the touch.’ I guess I do.”
“Did you ever work with the sick?”
“No sir. Don’t want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to the in one of them pest-holes.”
“The hospitals? What’s wrong with them?”
“Nothing, sir, not them you be took to if you was worse,” Efor said with gentleness.
“What kind did you mean, then?”
“Our kind. Dirty. Like a trashman’s ass-hole,” Efor said, without violence, descriptively. “Old. Kid die in one.
There’s holes in the floor, big holes, the beams show through, see? I say, ‘How come?’ See, rats come up the holes, right in the beds. They say, ‘Old building, been a hospital six hundred years.’ Stablishment of the Divine Harmony for the Poor, its name. An ass-hole what it is.”
“It was your child that died in the hospital?”
“Yes, sir, my daughter Laia.”
“What did she die of?”
“Valve in her heart They say. She don’t grow much, Two years old when she died.”
“You have other children?”
“Not living. Three born. Hard on the old sow. But now she say, “Oh, well, don’t have to be heartbreaking over’em, just as well after all!’ Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?” The sudden switch to upper-class syntax jolted Shevek; he said impatiently, “Yes! Go on talking.”
Because he had spoken spontaneously, or because he was unwell and should he humored, this time Ef or did not istiffen up. “Think of going for army medic, one time,” he said, “but they get me first. Draft. Say, ‘Orderly, you be orderly.’ So I do. Good training, orderly. Come out of the army straight into gentlemen’s service.”
“You could have been trained as a medic, in the army?” The conversation went on. It was difficult for Shevek to follow, both in language and in substance. He was being told about things he had no experience of at all. He had never seen a rat, or an army barracks, or an insane asylum, or a poorhouse, or a pawnshop, or an execution, or a thief, or a tenement, or a rent collector, or a man who wanted to work and could not find work to do, or a dead baby in a ditch. All these things occurred in Efor’s reminiscences as commonplaces or as commonplace horrors. Shevek had to exercise his imagination and summon every scrap of knowledge he had about Urras to understand them at all. And yet they were familiar to him in a way that nothing he bad yet seen here was, and he did understand.
This was the Urras he had learned about in school on Anarres. This was the world from which his ancestors had fled, preferring hunger and the desert and endless exile. This was the world that had formed Odo’s mind and had jailed her eight times for speaking it. This was the human suffering in which the ideals of his society were rooted, the ground from which they sprang.
It was not “the real Urras.” The dignity and beauty of the room he and Efor were in was as real as the squalor to which Efor was native. To him a thinking man’s job was not to deny one reality at the expense of the other, but to include and to connect. It was not an easy job. “Look tired again, sir,” Efor said. “Better rest.”