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?”

“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.