“Did you ever work with the sick?”

“No sir. Don’t want to mix up with hospitals. Black day the day I got to die 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 be humored, this time Efor did not stiffen 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 had 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.