“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.”