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.”