A MILLENNIUM AFTER THE WORLDS HAD WARRED
Scattered here and there, small isolated
groups of humanity lived in a state of semi-barbarity: Lost were the skills and science, the
knowledge that had been Earth's in the golden
age of the League of Worlds.
Each time a colony of Earthmen began to stir
the ashes of half-forgotten technology, the Shing,
mindlying ravagers of Terra, would crush them
out.
Only one man dared stand against the Shing's
hunger for Earth conquest, and that man—the
alien with the amber eyes—would first have to
prove to a lie-tormented humanity that he himself was not a tool of the enemy Shing. . . .
CITY OF ILLUSIONS
by
URSULA K. LeGUIN
ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of
the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
city of illusions
Copyright ©, 1967, by Ursula K. Le Guin An
Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Jack Gaughan.
By the same author:
ROCANNON'S WORLD (G-574) PLANET OF EXILE
(G-597)
Printed in the U.S.A.
I
Imagine
darkness. In
the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had
no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.
As unremembered light brightened about him he
moved, crawling, running sometimes on all fours, sometimes pulling himself
erect, but not going anywhere. He had no way through the world in which he was,
for a way implies a beginning and an end. AH things about him were tangled, all things
resisted him. The confusion of his being was impelled to movement by forces
for which he knew no name: terror, hunger, thirst, pain. Through the dark
forest of things he blundered in silence till the night stopped him, a greater
force. But when the light began again he groped on. When he broke out into the
sudden broad sunlight of the Clearing he rose upright and stood a moment. Then
he put his hands over his eyes and cried out aloud.
Weaving at her loom in the sunlit garden, Parth saw him at the forest's
edge. She called to the others with a quick beat of her mind. But she feared
nothing, and by the time the others came out of the house she had gone across
the Clearing to the uncouth figure that crouched among the high,
ripe grasses. As they approached they saw her put
her hand on his shoulder and bend down to him, speaking softly.
She turned to them with a wondering look,
saying, "Do you see his eyes . . . P"
They
were strange eyes, surely. The pupil was large; the iris, of a grayed amber
color, was oval lengthwise so that the white of the eye did not show at all.
"Like a cat," said Garra. "Like an egg all yolk," said Kai,
voicing the slight distaste of uneasiness roused by that small, essential
difference. Otherwise the stranger seemed only a man, under the mud and
scratches and filth he had got over his face and naked body in his aimless
struggle through the forest; at most he was a little paler-skinned than the
brown people who now surrounded him, discussing him quietly as he crouched in
the sunlight, cowering and shaking with exhaustion and fear.
Though
Parth looked straight into his strange eyes no spark of human recognition met
her there. He was deaf to their speech, and did not understand their gestures.
"Mindless or out of his mind," said
Zove. "But also starving; we can remedy that." At this Kai and young
Thurro half led half dragged the shambling fellow into the house. There they
and Parth and Buckeye managed to feed and clean him, and got him onto a pallet,
with a shot of sleep-dope in his veins to keep him there.
"Is he a Shing?" Parth asked her father.
"Are you? Am I? Don't be naive, my dear," Zove answered.
"If I could answer that question I could set Earth free. However, I hope
to find out if he's mad or sane or imbecile, and where he came from, and how he
came by those yellow eyes. Have men taken to breeding with cats and falcons in
humanity's- degenerate old age? Ask Kretyan to come up to the sleeping-porches,
daughter."
Parth followed her blind cousin Kretyan up the stairs to the shady,
breezy balcony where the stranger slept. Zove and his sister Karell, called
Buckeye, were waiting there. Both sat cross-legged and straight-backed, Buckeye
playing with her patterning frame, Zove doing nothing at all: a brother and
sister getting on in years, their broad, brown faces alert and very tranquil.
The girls sat down near them without breaking the easy silence. Parth,was a reddish-brown color with a flood of long, bright, black hair. She wore
nothing but a pair of loose silvery breeches. Kretyan, a little older, was
6
dark and frail; a red band covered her empty eyes
and held her thick hair back. Like her mother she wore a tunic ot delicately woven figured cloth. It was hot. Midsummer afternoon bumed on the gardens below the balcony and out
on the rolling fields of the Clearing. On every side, so close to this
wing of the house as to shadow it with branches full of leaves and wings, so
far in other directions as to be blued and hazed by distance, the forest
surrounded them.
The
four people sat still for quite a while, together and separate, unspeaking but
linked. "The amber bead keeps slithering off into the Vastness
pattern," Buckeye said with a smile, setting down her frame with its
jewel-strung, crossing wires.
"All
your beads end up in Vastness," her brother said. "An
effect of your suppressed mysticism. YouTl end up like our mother, see if you don't, able to see the patterns on an
empty frame."
"Suppressed fiddlediddle," Buckeye
remarked. "I never suppressed anything in my life."
"Kretyan," said Zove, "the man's eyelids move. He may be
in a dreaming cycle."
The blind girl moved closer to the pallet. She reached out her hand, and
Zove guided it gently to the stranger's forehead. They were all silent again.
All listened. But only Kretyan could hear.
She lifted her bowed, blind
head at last.
"Nothing," she
said, her voice a little strained.
"Nothingr
"A jumble—a void. He
has no mind."
"Kretyan, let me tell you how he looks. His feet have walked,
his hands have worked. Sleep and the drug relax his face, but only a thinking
mind could use and wear a face into these lines."
"How did he look when he was
awake?"
"Afraid," said Perth.
""Afraid, bewildered."
"He may be . an alien," Zove said, "not a Terran man, though
how that could be— But he may think differentiy than we. Try once more, while
he still dreams."
"Ill try,
uncle. But I have no sense of any mind, of any true emotion or direction. A
baby's mind is frightening but this ...
is worse—darkness and a kind of empty jumble—"
7
"Well, then keep out," Zove said
easily. "No-mind is an evil place for mind to stay."
"His darkness is worse than mine,"
said the girl. "This is a ring, on his hand. . . ." She had laid her
hand a moment on the man's, in pity or as if asking his unconscious pardon for
her eavesdropping on his dreams.
"Yes, a gold
ring without marking or design. It was all he wore on his body. And his mind
stripped naked as his flesh. So the poor brute comes to us out of the
forest—sent by whom?"
All the family of Zove's House except the little children gathered that
night in the great hall downstairs, where high windows stood open to the moist
night air. Starlight and the presence of trees and the sound of the brook all
entered into the dimly lit room, so that between each person and the next, and
between the words they said, there was a certain
space for shadows, night-wind, and silence.
"Truth, as ever, avoids the
Stranger," the Master of the House said to them in his deep voice.
"This stranger brings us a choice of several unlikelihoods. He may be an
idiot born, who blundered here by chance; but then, who lost him? He may be a
man whose brain has been damaged by accident, or tampered with by intent. Or he
may be a Shing masking his mind behind a seeming amentia. Or he may be neither
man nor Shing; but then, what is he? There's no proof or disproof for any of
these notions. What shall we do with him?"
"See if he can be taught," said Zove's wife Rossa.
The Master's eldest son Metock spoke: "If he can be taught, then he
is to be distrusted. He may have been sent here to be' taught, to leam our
ways, insights, secrets. The cat brought up by the kindly mice."
"I
am not a kindly mouse, my son," the Master said. "Then you think him
a Shing?"
"Or
their tool."
"We're
all tools of the Shing. What would you do with him?"
"Kill him before he wakes."
The
wind blew faintly, a whippoorwill
called out in the humid, starlit Clearing.
"I wonder," said the Oldest Woman, "if he might be a
8
victim,
not a tool. Perhaps the Shing destroyed his mind as punishment for something he
did or thought. Should we then finish their punishment?"
"It would be truer mercy," Metock said.
"Death is a false mercy," the Oldest Woman said bitterly.
So they discussed the matter back and forth for some while, equably but
with a gravity that included both moral concern and a heavier, more anxious
care, never stated but only hinted at whenever one of them spoke the word Shing. Parth took no part in the discussion, being
only fifteen, but she listened intently. She was bound by sympathy to the
stranger and wanted him to live.
Rayna and Kretyan joined the group; Rayna had
been running what physiological tests she could on the stranger, with Kretyan
standing by to catch any mental response. They had little to report as yet,
other than that the stranger's nervous system and the sense areas and basic
motor capacity of his brain seemed normal, though his physical responses and
motor skill compared with those of a year-old child, perhaps, and no stimulus
of localities in the speech area had got any response at all. "A man's
strength, a baby's coordination, an empty mind," Ranya said.
"If we don't kill him like a wild beast," said Buckeye,
"then we shall have to tame him like a wild beast. . . ."
Kretyan's
brother Kai spoke up. "It seems worth trying. Let some of us younger ones
have charge of him; we'll see what we can do. We don't have to teach him the
Inner Canons right away, after all. At least teaching him not to wet the bed
comes first. ... I want to know if
he's human. Do you think he is, Master?"
Zove
spread out his big hands. "Who knows? Rayna's blood-tests may tell us. I
never heard that any Shing had yellow eyes, or any visible differences from
Terran men. But if he is neither Shing nor human, what is he? No being from the
Other Worlds that once were known has walked on Earth for twelve hundred years.
Like you, Kai, I think I would risk his presence here among us out of pure
curiosity. . . ."
So they let their guest live.
At first he was little trouble to the young
people who looked after him. He
regained strength slowly, sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most of the
time he was awake. Parth
9
named him Falk, which in the dialect of the
Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.
One morning several days after his arrival,
coming to an unpatterned stretch in the cloth she was weaving, she left her
sunpowered loom to purr away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the
screened balcony where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He
was sitting on his pallet gazing intently up at the haze-dimmed summer sky. The
glare made his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his hand, then
seeing his hand stared at it, the back and the palm. He clenched and extended
the fingers, frowning. Then he raised his face again to the white glare of the
sun and slowly, tentative, reached his open hand up towards it.
"That's the sun, Falk," Parth said.
"Sun_______ "
"Sun," he repeated, gazing at it, centered on it, the void
and vacancy of his being filled with the light
of the sun and
the sound of its name. So his education began.
Parth came up from the cellars and passing
through the Old Kitchen saw Falk hunched up in one of the window-bays, alone,
watching the snow fall outside the grimy glass. It was a tennight now since he
had struck Rossa and they had to lock him up till he calmed down. Ever since
then he had been dour and would not speak. It was strange to see his man's face
dulled and blunted by a child's sulky obstinate suffering. "Come on in by
the fire, Falk," Parth said, but did not stop to wait for him. In the
great hall by the fire she did wait a little, then gave him up and looked for
something to raise her own low spirits. There was nothing to do; the snow fell,
all the faces were too familiar, all the books told of things long ago and far
away that were no longer true. All around the silent House and its fields lay
the silent forest, endless, monotonous, indifferent; winter after winter, and
she would never leave this House, for where was there to go, what was there to
do? . . .
On one of the empty tables Ranya had left her
teanb, a hat, keyed instrument, said to be of
Hainish origin. Parth picked out a tune in the melancholic Stepped Mode of the
Eastern Forest, then retuned the instrument to its native scale and began anew.
She had no skill with the teanb
10
and found the notes slowly, singing the words,
spinning them out to keep the melody going as she sought the next note.
Beyond the sound of wind in trees
beyond the storm-enshadowed seas,
on stairs of sunlit stone the fair
daughters of Airek stands ... i
She lost the tune, then found it again:
.. . stands,
silent, with empty hands.
A legend who knew how old, from a world
incredibly remote, its words and tune had been part of man's heritage for
centuries. Parth sang on very softly, alone in the great firelit room, snow and
twilight darkening the windows.
There
was a sound behind her and she turned to see Falk standing there. There were
tears in his strange eyes. He said, "Parth-stop-"
"Falk, what's
wrong?"
"It hurts me," he said, turning
away his face that so clearly revealed the incoherent and defenseless mind.
"What a compliment to my singing, " she teased him, but she was moved, and sang no
more. Later that night she saw Falk stand by the table on which the teanb lay.
He raised his hand to it but dared not touch it, as if fearing to release the
sweet relentless demon within it that had cried out under Parth's hands and
changed her voice to music.
"My child leams faster than yours,"
Parth said to her cousin Garra, "but yours grows faster. Fortunately."
"Yours
is quite big enough," Garra agreed, looking down across the kitchen-garden
to the brookside where Falk stood with Garra's
year-old baby on his shoulder. The early summer afternoon sang with the
shrilling of crickets and gnats. Parth's hair clung in black locks to her
cheeks as she tripped and reset and tripped the catches of her loom. Above her
patterning shuttle rose the heads and necks of a row
of dancing herons, silver thread on gray. At seventeen she was the best weaver
among the women. In winter her hands were always stained with the chemicals of
which her threads
11
and
yams were made and the dyes that colored them, and all summer she wove at her
sunpowered loom the delicate and various stuff of her imagination.
"Little spider," said her mother
nearby, "a joke
is a joke. But a man is a man."
"And
you want me to go along with Metock to Kathol's house and trade my
heron-tapestry for a husband.
I know," said Parth.
"I never said it—did I?"
inquired her mother, and went weeding on away between the lettuce-rows.
Falk came up the path, the baby on his
shoulder squinting in the glare and smiling benignly. He put her down on the
grass and said, as if to a grown
person, "It's hotter up here, isn't it?" Then turning to Parth with
the grave candor that was characteristic of him he asked, "Is there an end
to the Forest, Parth?"
"So they say. The maps are all
different. But that way lies the sea at last—and that
way the prairie."
"Prairie?"
"Open
lands, grasslands. Like the Clearing but going on for a thousand miles to the
mountains."
"The
mountains?" he asked, innocently relentless as any child.
"High hills, with snow on their tops all year. Like this." Pausing to reset her
shuttle, Parth put her long, round, brown fingers together in the shape of a
peak.
Falk's yellow eyes lit up suddenly, and his
face became intense. "Below the white is blue, and below that the—the
lines—the hills far away—"
Parth looked at him, saying nothing. A great
part of all he knew had-come straight from her, for she had always been the one
who could teach him. The remaking of his life had been an effect and a part of
the growth of her own. Their minds were very closely
interwoven.
"I see it—have seen it. I remember
it," the man stammered.
"A projection, Falk?"
"No.
Not from a book. In my mind. I do remember it. Sometimes
going to sleep I see it. I didn't know its name: the Mountain."
"Can you draw it?"
Kneeling beside her he sketched quickly in the dust the
12
outline of an irregular cone, and beneath it two
lines of foothills. Garra craned to see the sketch, asking, "And it's
white with snow?"
"Yes. It's as if I see it through
something—a big window, big and high up. ...
Is it from your mind, Parth?" he asked a little anxiously.
"No," the girl said. "None of us in the House have ever
seen high mountains. I think there are none this side
of the Inland River. It must be far from here, very far." She spoke like
one on whom a chill had fallen.
Through the edge of dreams a sawtooth sound
cut, a faint jagged droning, eerie. Falk roused and sat up beside Parth; both
gazed with strained, sleepy eyes northward where the remote sound throbbed and
faded and first light paled the sky above the darkness of the trees. "An
aircar," Parth whispered. "I heard one once before, long ago. . .
." She shivered. Falk put his arm around her shoulders, gripped by the
same unease, the sense of a remote, uncomprehended, evil presence passing off
there in the north through the edge of daylight.
The sound died away; in the vast silence of
the Forest a few birds piped up for the sparse dawn-chorus of autumn. Light in
the east brightened. Falk and Parth lay back down in the warmth and the
infinite comfort of each other's arms; only half wakened, Falk slipped back
into sleep. When she kissed him and slipped away to go about the day's work he
murmured, "Don't go yet . . . little hawk, little one . . ." But she
laughed a^J slipped away, and he drowsed on a while,
unable as yet to come up out of the sweet lazy depths of pleasure and of peace.
The
sun shone bright and level in his eyes. He turned over, then sat up yawning and
stared into the deep, red-leaved branches of the oak that towered up beside the
sleeping-porch. He became aware that in leaving Parth had turned on the
sleepteacher beside his pillow; it was muttering softly away, reviewing Cetian
number theory. That made him laugh, and the cold of the bright November morning
woke him fully. He pulled on his shirt and breeches—heavy, soft, dark cloth of
Parth's weaving, cut and fitted for him by Buckeye—and stood at the wooden rail
of the porch looking
13
across the Clearing to the brown and red and gold
of the endless trees.
Fresh,
still, sweet, the morning was as it had been when the first people on this land
had waked in their frail, pointed houses and stepped outside to see the sun
rise free of the dark forest. Mornings are all one, and autumn always autumn,
but the years men count are many. There had been a first race on this land . . . and a second, the conquerors; both were
lost, conquered and conquerors, millions of lives, all drawn together to a
vague point on the horizon of past time. The stars had been gained, and lost
again. Still the years went on, so many years that the Forest of archaic times,
destroyed utterly during the era when men had made and kept their history, had
grown up again. Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not
every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's
first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumerable wind-stirred
branches. . . .
Falk stood rejoicing in it, perhaps the more
intensely because for him behind this morning there were so few other
mornings, so short a stretch of remembered days between him and the dark. He
listened to the remarks made by a chickadee in the oak, then stretched, scratched
his head vigorously, and went off to join the work and company of the house.
Zove's House was a rambling, towering,
intermitted chalet-castle-farmhouse of stone and timber; some parts of it had
stood a century or so, some longer. There was a primitive-ness to its aspect: dark staircases, stone hearths and
cellars, bare floors of tile or wood. But nothing in it was unfinished; it was
perfectly fireproof and weatherproof; and certain elements of its fabric and
function were highly sophisticated devices or machines—the pleasant, yellowish
fusion-lights, the libraries of music, words and images, various automatic
tools or devices used in house-cleaning, cooking, washing, and farmwork, and
some subtler and more specialized instruments kept in workrooms in the East
Wing. All these things were part of the House, built into it or along with it,
made in it or in another of the Forest Houses. The machinery was heavy and
simple, easy to repair; only the knowledge behind its power-source was delicate
and irreplaceable.
14
One type of technological device was notably lacking. The library-
evinced a skill with electronics that had become practically instinctive; the
boys liked to build little tellies to signal one another with from room to
room. But there was no television, telephone, radio, telegraph transmitting or
receiving beyond the Clearing. There were no instruments of communication over
distance. There were a couple of homemade air-cushion sliders in the East Wing,
but again they featured mainly in the boys' games. They were hard to handle in
the woods, on wilderness trails. When people went to visit and trade at another
House they went afoot, perhaps on horseback if the way was very long.
The work of the House and farm was light, no
hard burden to anyone. Comfort did not rise above warmth and cleanliness, and
the food was sound but monotonous. Life in the House had the drab Ievelnesj of
communal existence, a clean, serene frugality. Serenity and monotony rose from
isolation. Forty-four people lived here together. Kathol's House, the nearest,
was nearly thirty miles to the south. Around the Clearing mile after mile
uncleared, unexplored, indifferent, the forest went on. The
wild forest, and over it the sky. There was no shutting out the inhuman
here, no narrowing man's life, as in the cities of earlier ages, to within
man's scope. To keep anything at all of a complex civilization intact here
among so few was a singular and very perilous achievement, though to most of
them it seemed quite natural: it was the way one did; no other way was known.
Falk saw it a little differently than did the children of the House, for he
must always be aware that he had come out of that immense unhuman wilderness,
as sinister and solitary as any wild beast that roamed it, and that all he had
learned in Zove's House was like a single candle burning in a great field of
darkness.
At breakfast—bread, goat's-milk cheese and
brown ale— Metock asked him to come with him to the deer-blinds for the day.
That pleased Falk. The Elder Brother was a very skillful hunter, and he was
becoming one himself; it gave him and Metock, at last, a common ground. But the
Master intervened: Take Kai today, my son. I want to talk with Falk."
Each person of the household had his own room
for a study or workroom and to sleep in in freezing weather; Zove's
15
was small, high, and light, with windows west
and north and east. Looking across the stubble and fallow of the autumnal
fields to the forest the Master said, "Parth first saw you there, near
that copper beech, I think. Five and a half years ago A
long timet Is it time we talked?"
"Perhaps it is, Master," Falk said,
diffident.
"It's
hard to tell, but I guessed you to be about twenty-five when you first came.
What have you now of those twenty-five years?"
Falk held out his left hand
a moment: "A ring," he said.
"And the memory of a
mountain?"
"The memory of a
memory."
Falk shrugged. "And often, as I've told you, I find for a moment in my
mind the sound of a voice, or the sense of a motion, a gesture, a distance. These don't fit into my memories of my life here
with you. But they make no whole, they have no meaning."
Zove sat down in the windowseat and nodded
for Falk to do the same. "You had no growing to do; your gross motor
skills were unimpaired. But even given that basis, you have learned with
amazing quickness. I've wondered if the Shing, in controlling human genetics in
the old days and weeding out so many as colonists, were selecting us for
docility and stupidity, and if you spring from some mutant race that somehow
escaped control. Whatever you were, you were a highly intelligent man. . . .
And now you are one again. And I should like to know what you yourself think
about your mysterious past."
Falk was silent a minute. He was a short,
spare, well-made man; his very lively and expressive face just now looked
rather somber or apprehensive, reflecting his feelings as candidly as a
child's face. At last, visibly summoning up his resolution, he said,
"While I was studying with Ranya this past summer, she showed me how I
differ from the human generic norm. It's only a twist or two of a helix ... a very small difference. Like the
difference between wei and o." Zove looked up with a smile at the reference
to the Canon which fascinated Falk, but the younger man was not smiling.
"However, I am unmistakably not human. So I may be a freak; or a mutant,
accidental or intentionally produced; or an alien. I suppose most likely I am
an unsuccessful genetic experiment, discarded by the experimenters. . . .
There's no telling. I'd prefer to think I'm an alien, from some other
16
world. It would mean that at least I'm not the
only creature of my kind in the universe."
"What makes you sure there are other
populated worlds?"
Falk looked up, startled, going at once with
a child's credulity but a man's logic to the conclusion: "Is there reason
to think the other Worlds of the League were destroyed?"
"Is there reason to think they ever
existed?"
"So you taught me yourself, and the
books, the histories—"
"You believe them? You believe all we
tell you?"
"What else can I believe?" He
flushed red. "Why would you lie to me?"
"We
might lie to you day and night about everything, for either of two good
reasons. Because we are Shing. Or because we think
you serve them."
There was a pause. "And I might serve
them and never know it," Falk said, looking down.
"Possibly," said the Master.
"You must consider that possibility, Falk. Among us, Metock has always
believed you to be a programmed mind, as they call it. —But all the same, he's
never lied to you. None of us has, knowingly. The River Poet said a thousand
years ago, 'In truth manhood lies. . . .' " Zove
rolled the words out oratorically, then laughed. "Double-tongued,
like all poets. Well, we've told you what truths and facts we know,
Falk. But perhaps not all the guesses and the legends, the stuff that comes
before the facts. . . ."
"How could you teach me those?"
"We could not. You learned to see the
world somewhere else—some other world, maybe. We could help you become a man
again, but we could not give you a true childhood. That one has only once. . .
."
"I feel childish enough, among
you," Falk said with a somber ruefulness.
"You're not childish. You are an
inexperienced man. You are a cripple, because there is no child in you, Falk; you are cut off from your roots, from your
source. Can you say that this is your home?"
"No," Falk answered, wincing. Then
he said, "I have been very happy here."
The
Master paused a little, but returned to his questioning. "Do you think our
life here is a good one, that we follow a good way for men to go?"
"Yes."
"Tell me another thing. Who is our
enemy?"
"The
Shing."
yjhy?"
"They
broke the League of All Worlds, took choice and freedom from men,
wrecked all man's works and records, stopped the
evolution of the race. They are tyrants, and liars."
"But they don't keep us from leading our
good life here."
"We're
in hiding—we live apart, so that they'll let us be. If we tried to build any of
the great machines, if we gathered in groups or towns or nations to do any great work together, then the Shing would iniiltrate and ruin the work and disperse
us. I tell you only what you told me and I believed, Masterl"
"I know. I wondered if behind the fact
you had perhaps sensed the . . . legend, the guess, the hope. . . Falk did not
answer.
"We hide from the Shing. Also we hide
from what we were. Do you see that, Falk? We live well in the Houses-well
enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships
between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a
little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to
weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged
the chances of life. We did man's work."
After another silence Zove went on, looking
up into the bright November sky: "Consider the worlds, the various men and
beasts on them, the constellations of their skies, the cities they built, their
songs and ways. All that is lost, lost to us, as
utterly as your childhood is lost to you. What do we really know of the time of
our greatness? A few names of worlds and heroes, a ragtag of facts we've tried
to patch into a history. The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed
knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what was
left. They slipped in the Lie, as always. We aren't sure of anything
concerning the Age of the League; how many of the documents are forged? You
must remember, you see, wherein the Shing are our Enemy. It's easy enough to live one's whole
life without ever seeing one of them—knowingly; at nosL one hears an aircar passing by far away. Here in the Forest they let us
be, and it may be the same now all over the Earth, though we don't know.
18
They let us be so long as we stay here, in
the cage of our ignorance and the wilderness, bowing when they pass by above
our heads. But they don't trust us. How could they, even after twelve hundred
years? There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them. They honor
no compact, break any promise, perjure, betray and lie inexhaustibly; and
certain records from the time of the Fall of the
League hint that they could mindlie. It was the Lie that defeated all the races
of the League and left us subject to the Shing. Remember that, Falk. Never
believe the truth of anything the Enemy has said."
"I will remember, Master, if I ever meet
the Enemy."
"You will not, unless you go to
them."
The apprehensiveness in Falk's face gave way
to a listening, still look. What he had been waiting for had arrived. "You
mean leave the House," he said.
"You have thought of it yourself,"
Zove said as quietly.
"Yes, I have. But there is no way for me
to go. I want to live here. Parth and I—"
He
hesitated, and Zove struck in, incisive and gentle. "I honor the love
grown between you and Parth, your joy and your fidelity. But you came here on
the way to somewhere else, Falk. You are welcome here; you have always been
welcome. Your partnership with my daughter must be childless; even so, I have
rejoiced in it. But I do believe that the mystery of your being and your coming
here is a great one, not lighdy to be put aside; that you walk a way that leads
on; that you have work to do . .."
"What work? Who can tell me?"
"What was kept from us and stolen from
you, the Shing will have. That you can be sure of."
There was an aching, scathing bitterness in
Zove's voice that Falk had never heard.
"Will those who speak no truth tell me
the truth for the asking? And how will I recognize what I seek when I find
it?"
Zove was silent a little while, and then said
with his usual ease and control, "I cling to the notion, my son, that in
you lies some hope for man. I do not like to give up that notion. But only you
can seek your own truth; and if it seems to you that your way ends here, then
that, perhaps, is the truth."
"If
I go," Falk said abruptly, "will you let Parth go with me?"
"No,
my son."
A child was singing down in the garden—Garra's four-ytar-old, turning
inept somersaults on the path and singing shrill, sweet nonsense. High up, in
the long wavering V of the great migrations, skein after skein of wild geese
went over southward.
"I
was to go with Metock and Thurro to fetch home Thurro's bride," Falk said.
"We planned to go soon, before the weather changes. If I go, 111 go on from Ransifel House."
"In
winter?"
"There
are Houses west of Ransifel, no doubt, where I can ask shelter if I need
it."
He
did not say and Zove did not ask why west was the direction
he would go.
"There may be; I don't know. I don't
know if they would give shelter to strangers as we do. If you go you will be
alone, and must be alone. Outside this House there is no safe place for you on
Earth."
He spoke, as always, absolutely truthfully .
. . and paid the cost of truth in self-control and pain. Falk said with quick
reassurance, "I know that, Master. It's not safety I'd regret-"
"I
will tell you what I believe about you. I think you came from a lost world; I
think you were not bom on Earth. I think you came here, the first Alien to
return in a thousand years or more, bringing us a message or a sign. The Shing
stopped your mouth, and turned you loose in the forests so that none might say
they had killed you. You came to us. If you go I will grieve and fear for you,
knowing how alone you go. But I will hope for you, and for ourselves!
If you had words to speak to men, youll remember them, in the end. There must
be a hope, a sign: we cannot go on like this forever."
"Perhaps
my race was never a friend of mankind," Falk said, looking at Zove with
his yellow eyes. "Who knows what I came here to do?"
"You'll find those who know. And then
you'll do it. I don't fear it. If you serve the 2nemy, so do we
all: all's lost and nothing's to lose. If not, then you have what we men have
lost: a destiny; and in following it you may bring hope to us all. . . ."
Zove
had lived sixty
years, Parth twenty; but she seemed, that cold afternoon in the Long Fields,
old in a way no man could be old, ageless. She had no comfort from ideas of
ultimate star-spanning triumph or the prevalence of truth. Her father's
prophetic gift in her was only lack of illusion. She knew Falk was going. She
said only, "You won't come back." "I will come back,
Parth."
She held him in her arms but she did not
listen to his promise.
He
tried to bespeak her, though he had little skill in telepathic communication.
The only Listener in the house was blind Kretyan; none of them was adept at the
nonverbal communication, mindspeech. The techniques of learning mindspeech had
not been lost, but they were little practiced. The great virtue of that most
intense and perfect form of communication had become its peril for men.
Mindspeech between two intelligences could be
incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it
could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention
can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought
and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the he.
In the late years of the League, the tales
and fragmentary records Falk had studied seemed to show, the use of mindspeech
had been widespread and the telepathic skills very highly developed. It was a
skill Earth had come to late, learning its techniques from some other race; the
Last Art, one book called it. There were hints of troubles and upheavals in
the government of the League of All Worlds, rising perhaps from that prevalence
of a form of communication that precluded lying. But all that was vague and
half-legendary, like all man's history. Certainly
since the coming of the Shing and the downfall of the League, the scattered
community of man had mistrusted trust and used the spoken word. A free man can
speak freely, but a slave or fugitive must be able to hide truth and he. So
Falk had learned in Zove's House, and so it was that he had had little practice
in the
21
attunement of minds. But he tried now to bespeak Parth
so she would know he was not lying: "Believe me, Parth,
I will come back to youl"
But
she wouldn't hear. "No, I won't mindspeak," she said aloud.
"Then you're keeping
your thoughts from me."
"Yes,
I am. Why should I give you my grief? What's the good of truth? If you had lied
to me yesterday, I'd still believe that you were only going to Ransifel and
would be back home in a tennight. Then I'd still have
ten days and nights. Now I have nothing left, not a day, not an hour. It's all
taken, all over. What good is truth?"
"Parth, will you wait
for me one year?"
"Only a year—"
"A
year and a day, and youl] return riding a silver steed to carry me to your
kingdom and make me its queen. No, I won't wait for you, Falk. Why must I wait
for a man who will be lying dead in the forest, or shot by Wanderers out on the
prairie, or brainless in the City of the Shing, or gone off a hundred years to
another star? What should I wait
for? You needn't think 111 take another man. I won't. I'll stay here in my
father's house. I'll dye black thread and weave black cloth to wear, black to
wear and black to die in. But I won't wait for anyone, or anything. Never."
"I
had no right to ask you," he said with the humility of pain—and she cried,
"O Falk, I don't reproach youl"
They
were sitting together on the slight slope above the Long Field. Goats and sheep
grazed over the mile of fenced pasture between them and the forest. Yearling
colts pranced and tagged- around the shaggy mares. A gray November wind blew.
Their hands lay together. Parth touched the
gold ring on his left hand. "A ring is a thing given," she said.
"Sometimes I've thought, have you? that you may
have had a wife. Think, if she was waiting for you. .
. ." She shivered.
"What
of it?" he said. "What do I care about what may have been, what I
wasp Why should I go from here? All that I am now is yours, Parth, came from
you, your gift—"
"It was freely given," the girl
said in tears. "Take it and go. Go on. . . ." They held each other,
and neither would break free.
The House lay far behind hoar black trunks
and inter-tangling leafless branches. The trees closed in behind the trail.
The day was gray and cool, silent except for
the drone of wind through branches, a meaningless whisper without locality
that never ceased. Metock led the way, setting a long easy pace. Falk followed
and young Thurro came last. They were all three dressed light and warm in
hooded shirt and breeches of an unwoven stuff called wintercloth, over which no
coat was needed even in snow. Each carried a light backpack of gifts and
tradegoods, sleeping-bag, enough dried concentrated food to see him through a
month's blizzard. Buckeye, who had never left the House of her birth, had a
great fear of perils and delays in the Forest and had supplied their packs
accordingly. Each wore a laser-beam gun; and Falk carried some extras—another
pound or two of food; medicines, compass, a second gun, a change of clothing, a
coil of rope; a little book given him two years ago by Zove— amounting in all
to about fifteen pounds of stuff, his earthly possessions. Easy and tireless
Metock loped on ahead, and ten yards or so behind he followed, and after him
came Thurro. They went lightly, with little sound, and behind them the trees
gathered motionless over the faint, leaf-strewn trail.
They would come to Ransifel on the third day. At evening of the second
day they were in country different from that around Zove's House. The forest
was more open, the ground broken. Gray glades lay along hillsides above
brush-choked streams. They made camp in one of these open places, on a
south-facing slope, for the north wind was blowing stronger with a hint of
winter in it. Thurro brought armloads of dry wood while the other two cleared
away the gray grass and piled up a rough hearth of stones. As they worked
Metock said, "We crossed a divide this afternoon. The stream down there
runs west. To the Inland River, finally."
Falk
straightened up and looked westward, but the low hills rose up soon and the low
sky closed down, leaving no distant view.
"Metock," he said, "I've been
thinking there's no point in my going on to Ransifel. I may as well be on my
way. There s«.emed to be a trail leading west along the big stream we crossed
this afternoon. Ill go back and follow it."
23
Metock glanced up; he did not mindspeak, but
his thought was plain enough: Are you thinking of running back home?
Falk did use mindspeech for his reply:
"No, damn it, I'm not!"
"I'm
sorry," the Elder Brother said aloud, in his grim, scrupulous way. He had
not tried to hide the fact that he was glad to see Falk go. To Metock nothing
mattered much but the safety of the House; any stranger was a threat, even the
stranger he had known for five years, his hunting-companion and his sister's
lover. But he went on, "They'll make you welcome at Ransifel. Why not
start from there?"
"Why not from here?"
"Your choice." Metock worked a last rock into place, and Falk began to build up the
fire. "If that was a trail we crossed, I don't know where it comes from or
goes. Early tomorrow we'll cross a real path, the old Hirand Road. Hirand House
was a long way west, a week on foot at least; nobody's gone there for sixty or
seventy years. I don't know why. But the trail was still plain last time I came
this way. The other might be an animal track, and lead you straying or leave
you in a swamp."
"All right, I'll try the Hirand Road."
There was a pause, then
Metock asked, "Why are you going west?"
"Because Es Toch is in the west."
The name seldom spoken sounded flat and strange out here under the sky. Thurro coming up with an armload of wood
glanced around uneasily. Metock asked nothing more.
That
night on the hillside by the campfire was Falk's last with those who were to
him his brothers, his own people. Next morning they were on the trail again a
little after sunrise, and long before noon they came to a wide, overgrown
trace leading to the left off the path to Ransifel. There was a kind of gateway
to it made by two great pines. It was dark and still under their boughs where
they stopped.
"Come back to us, guest and
brother," young Thurro said, troubled even in his bridegroom's
self-absorption by the look of that dark, vague way Falk would be taking.
Metock said only, "Give me your water-flask, will you," and in exchange
gave Falk his own flask of chased silver. Then they parted, they going north
and he west.
After he had walked a while
Falk stopped and looked
24
back. The others were out of sight; the Ransifel
trail was already hidden behind the young trees and brush that overgrew the
Hirand Road. The road looked as though it was used, if infrequently, but had
not been kept up or cleared for many years. Around Falk nothing was visible but
the forest, the wilderness. He stood alone under the shadows of the endless
trees. The ground was soft with the fall of a thousand years; the great trees,
pines and hemlocks, made the air dark and quiet. A fleck or two of sleet danced
on the dying wind.
Falk eased the strap of his pack a bit and
went on.
By nightfall it seemed to him that he had
been gone from the House for a long, long time, that it was immeasurably far
behind him, that he had always been alone.
His
days were all the same. Gray winter light; a wind blowing; forest-clad hills
and valleys, long slopes, brush-hidden streams, swampy lowlands. Though badly
overgrown the Hirand Road was easy to follow, for it led in long straight
shafts or long easy curves, avoiding the bogs and the heights. In the hills
Falk realized it followed the course of some great ancient highway, for its way
had been cut right through the hills, and two thousand years had not effaced it
wholly. But the trees grew on it and beside it and all about it, pine and
hemlock, vast holly-thickets on the slopes, endless stands of beech, oak,
hickory, alder, ash, elm, all overtopped and crowned by the lordly chestnuts
only now losing their last dark-yellow leaves, dropping their fat brown burrs
along the path. At night he cooked the squirrel or rabbit or wild hen he had
bagged from among the infinity of little game that scurried and flitted here in
the kingdom of the trees; he gathered beechnuts and walnuts, roasted the
chestnuts on his campfire coals. But the nights were bad. There were two evil
dreams that followed him each day and always caught up with him by midnight.
One was of being stealthily pursued in the darkness by a person he could never
see. The other was worse. He dreamed that he had forgotten to bring something
with him, something important, essential, without which he would be lost. From
this dream he woke and knew that it was true: he was lost; it was himself he
had forgotten. He would build up his fire then if it was not raining and would
crouch beside it, too sleepy and dream-bemused to take up the book he carried,
the Old
25
Canon, and seek comfort in the words which declared that when all ways
are lost the Way lies clear. A man all alone is a miserable thing. And he knew
he was not even a man but at best a kind of half-being, trying to find his
wholeness by setting out aimlessly to cross a continent under uninterested
stars. The days were all the same, but they were a relief after the nights.
He
was still keeping count of their number, and it was on the eleventh day from
the crossroads, the thirteenth of his journey, that he came to the end of the
Hirand Road. There had been a clearing, once. He found a way through great
tracts of wild bramble and second-growth birch thickets to four crumbling black
towers that stuck high up out of the brambles and vines and mummied thistles: the
chimneys of a fallen House. Hirand was nothing now, a name. The road ended at
the ruin.
He
stayed around the fallen place a couple of hours, kept there simply by the
bleak hint of human presence. He turned up a few fragments of rusted machinery,
bits of broken pottery which outlive even men's bones, a scrap of rotten cloth
which fell to dust in his hands. At last he pulled himself together and looked
for a trail leading west out of the clearing. He came across a strange thing, a
field a half-mile square covered perfectly level and smooth with some glassy
substance, dark violet colored, unflawed. Earth was creeping over its edges and
leaves and branches had scurfed it over, but it was unbroken, unscratched. It
was as if the great level space had been flooded with melted amethyst. What had
it been—a launching-field for some unimaginable vehicle, a mirror with which to
signal other worlds, the basis of a force-field? Whatever it was, it had
brought doom on Hirand. It had been a greater work than the Shing permitted
men to undertake.
Falk went on past it and entered the forest,
following no path now.
These were clean woods of stately, wide-aisled deciduous trees. He went
on at a good pace the rest of that day, and the next morning. The country was
growing hilly again, the ridges all running north-south across his way, and
around noon, heading for what looked from one ridge like the low point of the
next, he became embroiled in a marshy valley full of
streams. He searched for fords, floundered in boggy
26
watermeadows, all in a cold heavy rain. Finally as he
found a way up out of the gloomy valley the weather began to break up, and as he climbed the ridge the sun came out ahead of
him under the clouds and sent a wintry glory raying down among the naked
branches, brightening them and the great trunks and the ground with wet gold.
That cheered him; he went on sturdily, figuring to walk till day's end before
he camped. Everything was bright now and utterly silent except for the drip of
rain from twig-ends and the far-off wistful whistle of a chickadee. Then he
heard, as in his dream, the steps that followed behind him to his left.
A
fallen oak that had been an obstacle became in one startled moment a defense:
he dropped down behind it and with drawn gun spoke aloud: "Come on
out!"
For a long time nothing
moved.
"Come
outl" Falk said with the mindspeech, then closed
to reception, for he was afraid to receive. He had a sense of strangeness;
there was a faint, rank odor on the wind.
A wild boar walked out of the trees, crossed
his tracks, and slopped to snuff the ground. A grotesque,
magnificent pig, with powerful shoulders, razor back, trim, quick, filthy legs.
Over snout and tusk and bristie, little bright eyes looked up at Falk.
"Aah, aah, aah, man,
aah," the creature said, snuffling.
Falk's
tense muscles jumped, and his hand tightened on the grip of his laser-pistol.
He did not shoot. A wounded boar was hideously quick and dangerous. He crouched
there absolutely still.
"Man, man," said the wild pig, the
voice thick and flat from the scarred snout, "think to me. Think to me.
Words are hard for me."
Falk's hand on the pistol shook now. Suddenly
he spoke aloud: "Don't speak, then. I will not mindspeak. Go on, go your pig's way."
"Aah, aah, man,
bespeak me!"
"Go or I will shoot." Falk stood up, his gun pointing
steadily. The little bright hog-eyes watched the gun. "It is wrong to take
life," said the pig.
Falk had got his wits back and this time made
no answer, sure that the beast understood no words. He moved the gun a little,
recentered its aim, and said, "Go!" The boar dropped its head,
hesitated. Then with incredible swiftness,
27
as if released by a cord breaking, it turned and ran the way it had come.
Falk stood still a while, and when he turned and went on he kept his gun ready in his hand.
His hand shook again, a little. There were old tales of beasts that spoke, but
the people of Zove's House had thought them only tales. He felt a brief nausea
and an equally brief wish to laugh out loud. Tarth," he whispered, for he
had to talk to somebody, "I just had a lesson in ethics from a wild pig. .
. . Oh, Parth, will I ever get out of the forest? Does it ever end?"
He
worked his way on up the steepening, brushy slopes of the ridge. At the top the
woods thinned out and through the trees he saw sunlight and the sky. A few
paces more and he was out from under the branches, on the rim of a green slope
that dropped down to a sweep of orchards and plow-lands and at last to a wide,
clear river. On the far side of the river a herd of fifty or more cattle grazed
in a long fenced meadow, above which hayfields and orchards rose steepening
towards the tree-rimmed western ridge. A short way south of where Falk stood
the river turned a little around a low knoll, over the shoulder of which, gilt by the low, late sun, rose
the red chimneys of a house.
It looked like a piece of some other, golden
age caught in that valley and overlooked by the passing centuries, preserved
from the great wild disorder of the desolate forest. Haven, companionship, and
above all, order: the work of man. A kind of weakness of relief filled Falk, at
the sight of a wisp of smoke rising from those red chimneys. A hearthfire.
. . . He ran down the long hillside and through the lowest orchard to a
path that wandered along beside the river-bank among scrub alder and golden
willows. No living thing was to be seen except the redbrown cattle grazing
across the water. The silence of peace filled the wintry, sunlit valley.
Slowing his pace, he walked between kitchen-gardens to the nearest door of the
house. As he came around the knoll the place rose up before him, walls of ruddy
brick and stone reflecting in the quickened water where the river curved. He stopped,
a little daunted, thinking he had best hail the house aloud before he went any
farther. A movement in an open window just above the deep doorway caught his
eye. As he stood half hesitant, looking up, he felt a sudden deep, thin pain
sear through his chest just below
28
the breastbone: he staggered and then dropped,
doubling up like a swatted spider.
The pain had been only for an instant. He did
not lose consciousness, but he could not move or speak.
People were around him; he could see them, dimly, through waves of
non-seeing, but could not hear any voices. It was as if he had gone deaf, and
his body was entirely numb. He struggled to think through this deprivation of
the senses. He was being carried somewhere and could not feel the hands that carried
him; a horrible giddiness overwhelmed him, and when it passed he had lost all
control of his thoughts, which raced and babbled and chattered. Voices began to
gabble and drone inside his mind, though the world drifted and ebbed dim and
silent about him. Who are you are you where do you come from Falk going where
going are you I don't know are you a man west going I don't know where the way
eyes a man not a man. . . . Waves and echoes and flights of words like
sparrows, demands, replies, narrowing, overlapping, lapping, crying, dying away
to z gray silence.
A surface of darkness lay before bis eyes. An edge of light lay along it.
A table; the edge of a table. Lamp-lit, in a dark room.
He
began to see, to feel. He was in a chair, in a dark room, by a long table on
which a lamp stood. He was tied into the chair: he could feel the cord cut into
the muscles of his chest and arms as he moved a little. Movement: a man sprang
into existence at his left, another at his right. They were sitting like him,
drawn up to the table. They leaned forward and spoke to each other across him.
Their voices sounded as if they came from behind high walls
a great way off, and he could not understand the words.
He shivered with cold. With the sensation of
cold he came more closely in touch with the world and began to regain control
of his mind. His hearing was clearer, his tongue was loosed. He said something
which was meant to be, "What did you do to me?"
There
was no answer, but presently the man on his left stuck his face quite close to
Falk's and said loudly, "Why did >ou come here?"
Falk heard the words; after a moment he
understood them; after another moment he answered. "For
refuge. The night"
29
"Refuge from
what?" "Forest. Alone."
He was more and more penetrated with cold. He
managed to get his heavy, clumsy hands up a little, trying to button his shirt.
Below the straps that bound him in the chair, just below his breastbone was a
little painful spot.
"Keep
your hands down," the man on his right said out of the shadows. "It's
more than programming, Argerd. No hypnotic block could stand up to penton that
way."
The
one on his left, slab-faced and quick-eyed, a big man, ai.swered in a weak
sibilant voice: "You can't say that— what do we know about their tricks?
Anyhow, how can jou estimate his resistance—w hat is he? You, Falk, where is
this place you came from, Zove's House?"
"East. I left . . ." The number would not come
to mind. "Fourteen days ago, I think."
How
did they know the name of his House, his name? He was getting his wits back
now, and did not wonder very long. He had hunted deer with Metock using
hypodermic darts, which could make even a scratch-wound a kill. The dart that
had felled him, or a later injection when he was helpless, had been some drug
which must relax both the learned control and the primitive unconscious block
of the telepathic centers of the brain, leaving him open to para-verbal
questioning. They had ransacked his mind. At the idea, his feeling of coldness
and sickness increased, complicated by helpless outrage. Why this violation?
Why did they assume he would he to them before they even spoke to him?
"Did you think I was a Shing?" he
asked.
The face of the man on his right, lean,
long-haired, bearded, sprang suddenly into the lamplight, the lips drawn back,
and his open hand struck Falk across the mouth, jolting his head back and
blinding him a moment with the shock. His ears rang; he tasted blood. There was
a second blow and a third. The man kept hissing many times over. "You do
not say that name, don't say it, you do not say it, you don't say it—"
Falk
struggled helplessly to defend himself, to get free. The man on his left spoke
sharply. Then there was silence for some while.
"I meant no harm coming here," Falk
said at last, as steadily as he could through his anger, pain and fear.
30
"All right," said the one on the
left, Argerd, "go on and tell your little story. What did you mean in
coming here?"
"To ask for a night's shelter. And ask if there's any trail going
west."
"Why are you going west?"
"Why do you ask? I told you in
mindspeech, where there's no lying. You know my mind."
"You have a strange mind," Argerd
said in his weak voice. "And strange eyes. Nobody
comes here for a night's shelter or to ask the way or for anything else. Nobody
comes here. When the servants of the Others come here,
we kill them. We kill toolmen, and the speaking beasts, and Wanderers and pigs
and vermin. We don't obey the law that says it's wrong to take life—do we,
Drehnem?"
The bearded one grinned, showing brownish teeth.
"We
are men," Argerd said. "Men, free men, killers.
What are you, with your half-mind and your owl's eyes, and why shouldn't we
kill you? Are you a man?"
In the brief span of his memory, Falk had not
met directly with cruelty or hate. The few people he had known had been, if not
fearless, not ruled by fear; they had been generous and familiar. Between
these two men he knew he was defenseless as a child, and the knowledge both
bewildered and enraged him.
He
sought some defense or evasion and found none. All he could do was speak the
truth. "I don't know what I am or where I came from. I'm going to try to
find out."
"Going where?"
He
looked from Argerd to the other one, Drehnem. He knew they knew the answer, and
that Drehnam would strike again if he said it.
"Answer!" the bearded one muttered,
half rising and leaning forward.
"To
Es Toch," Falk said, and again Drehnem struck him across the face, and
again he took the blow with the silent humiliation of a child punished by
strangers.
"This is no good; he's not going to say
anything different from what we got from him under penton. Let him up."
"Then what?" said Drehnem.
"He came for a night's shelter; he can
have it. Get up!" The strap that held him into the chair was loosened. He
got shakily onto his feet. When he saw the low door and the
31
black down-pitch of stairs they forced him towards,
he tried to resist and break free, but his muscles would not yet obey him.
Drehnem arm-twisted him down into a crouch and pushed him through the doorway.
The door slammed shut as he turned staggering to keep his footing on the
stairs.
It was dark, black dark. The door was as if
sealed shut, no handle on this side, no mote or hint of light coming under it,
no sound. Falk sat down on the top step and put his head down on his arms.
Gradually the weakness of his body and the
confusion in his mind wore off. He raised his head, straining to see. His
night-vision was extraordinarily acute, a function, Ranna had long ago pointed
out, of his large-pupiled, large-irised eyes. But only flecks and blurs of
after-images tormented his eyes; he could see nothing, for there was no light.
He stood up and step by step felt his slow way down the narrow, unseen descent.
Twenty-one steps, two,
three—level. Dirt. Falk went slowly forward, one hand extended,
listening.
Though the darkness was a kind of physical
pressure, a constraint, deluding him constantly with the notion that if he only
looked hard enough he would see, he had no fear of it in itself. Methodically,
by pace and touch and hearing, he mapped out a part of the vast cellar he was
in, the first room of a series which, to judge by echoes, seemed to go on indefinitely.
He found his way directly back to the stairs, which because he had started from
them were home base. He sat down, on the lowest step this time, and sat still.
He was hungry and very thirsty. They had taken his pack, and left him nothing.
It's
your own fault, Falk
told himself bitterly, and a kind of dialogue began in his mind:
What did I do? Why did they
attack me?
Zove told you: trust nobody. They trust nobody, and they're right.
Even someone who comes
alone asking for help?
With your face—your eyes? When it's obvious even at a glance that you're not a normal human being?
All the same, they could have given me a
drink of water, said the perhaps childish, still fearless
part of his mind.
You're damned lucky they didn't kill you at sight, his intellect replied, and got no further
answer.
32
All the people of Zove's House had of course
got accustomed to Falk's looks, and guests were rare and circumspect, so that
he had never been forced into particular awareness of his physical difference
from the human norm. It had seemed so much less of a difference and barrier
than the amnesia and ignorance that had isolated him so long. Now for the first
time he realized that a stranger looking into his face would not see the face
of a man.
The
one called Drehnem had been afraid of him, and had struck him because he was
afraid and repelled by the alien, the monstrous, the
inexplicable.
It
was only what Zove had tried to tell him when he had said with such grave and
almost tender warning, "You must go alone, you can only go alone."
There was nothing for it, now, but sleep. He
curled up as well as he could on the bottom step, for the dirt floor was damp,
and closed his eyes on the darkness.
Some
time later in timelessness he was awakened by the mice. They ran about making a
faint tiny scrabble, a zigzag scratch of sound across the black, whispering in
very small voices very close to the ground, "It is wrong to take life it
is wrong to take life hello heeellllooo don't kill us don't kill."
"I will!" Falk roared and all the mice were still.
It
was hard to go to sleep again; or perhaps what was hard was to be sure whether
he was asleep or awake. He lay and wondered whether it was day or night; how
long they would leave him here and if they meant to kill him, or use that drug
again until his mind was destroyed, not merely violated; how long it took
thirst to change from discomfort to torment; how one might go about catching
mice in the dark without trap or bait; how long one could stay alive on a diet
of raw mouse.
Several times, to get a vacation from his
thoughts, he went exploring again. He found a great up-ended vat or tun and his
heart leaped with hope, but it rang hollow: splintered boards near the bottom
scratched his hands as he groped around it. He could find no other stairs or
doors in his blind explorations of the endless unseen walls.
He
lost his bearings finally and could not find the stairs again. He sat on the
ground in the darkness and imagined rain falling, out in the forest of his
lonely journeying, the gray light and the sound of rain. He spoke in his mind
all he
33
could remember of the Old Canon, beginning at the
beginning:
The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way. ...
His mouth was so dry after a while that he tried to lick the damp dirt
floor for its coolness; but to the tongue it was dry dust. The mice scuttled up
quite close to him sometimes, whispering.
Far away down long corridors of darkness
bolts clashed and metal clanged, a bright piercing clangor of light.
Light-Vague shapes and shadows, vaultings, arches, vats, beams, openings,
bulked and loomed into dim reality about him. He struggled to his feet and made
his way, unsteady but running, towards the light.
It
came from a low doorway, through which, when he got close, he could see an
upswell of ground, treetops, and the rosy sky of evening or morning, which
dazzled his eyes like a midsummer noon. He stopped inside the door because of
that dazzlement, and because a motionless figure stood just outside.
"Come out," said the weak, hoarse
voice of the big man, Argerd.
"Wait. I can't see
yet."
"Come
out. And keep going. Don't even turn your head, or I'll bum it off your
neck."
Falk
came into the doorway, then hesitated again. His
thoughts in the dark served some purpose now. If they did let him go, he had
thought, it would mean that they were afraid to kill him.
"Move!"
He took the chance. "Not without my pack," he said, his voice faint in his dry throat. "This is a
laser."
"You
might as well use it. I can't get across the continent without my own
gun."
Now it was Argerd who hesitated. At last, his
voice going up almost into a shriek, he yelled to someone: "Gretten!
Gretten! Bring the stranger's stuff down here!"
A long pause. Falk stood in the darkness just inside the
34
door,
Argerd, motionless, just outside it. A boy came running down the grassy slope
visible from the door, tossed Falk's pack down and disappeared.
"Pick it up," Argerd ordered; Falk
came out into the light and obeyed. "Now get going."
"Wait," Falk muttered, kneeling and
looking hastily through the disarrayed, unstrapped pack. "Where's my
book?"
"Book?"
"The Old Canon. A handbook, not electronic—"
"You think we'd let you leave here with that?"
Falk
stared. "Don't you people recognize the Canons of Man when you see them?
What did you take it for?"
"You
don't know and won't find out what we know, and if you don't get going 111 bum your hands off. Get up and go on, go straight on, get moving!"
The shrieking note was in Argerd's voice again, and Falk realized he had nearly
driven him too far. As he saw the look of hate and fear in Argerd's heavy,
intelligent face the contagion of it caught him, and hastily he closed and
shouldered his pack, walked past the big man and started up the grassy rise
from the door of the cellars. The light was that of evening, a little past
sunset. He walked towards it. A fine elastic strip of pure suspense seemed to
connect the back of his head to the nose of the laserpistol Argerd held,
stretching out, stretching out as he walked on. Across a
weedy lawn, across a bridge of loose planks over the river, up a path between
the pastures and then between orchards. He reached the top of the
ridge. There he glanced back for one moment, seeing the hidden valley as he had
first seen it, full of a golden evening light, sweet and
peaceful, high chimneys over the sky-reflecting river. He hastened on
into the gloom of the forest, where it was already night.
Thirsty and hungry, sore and downhearted,
Falk saw his aimless journey through the Eastern Forest stretching on ahead of
him with no vague hope, now, of a friendly hearth somewhere along the way to
break the hard, wild monotony. He must not seek a road but avoid all roads, and
hide from men and their dwellingplaces like any wild beast. Only one thing
cheered him up a bit, besides a creek to drink from and some travel-ration from
his pack, and that was the thought that though he had brought his trouble on
himself, he had not knuckled under. He had bluffed the moral boar and the
35
brutal man on their own ground, and got away with
it. That did hearten him; for he knew himself so little that all his acts were
also acts of self-discovery, like those of a boy, and knowing that he lacked so
much he was glad to learn that at least he was not without courage.
After
drinking and eating and drinking again he went on, in a broken moonlight that
sufficed his eyes, till he had put a mile or so of broken country between
himself and the house of Fear, as he thought of the place. Then, worn out, he
lay down to sleep at the edge of a little glade, building no fire or shelter,
lying gazing up at the moonwashed winter sky. Nothing broke the silence but now
and again the soft query of a hunting owl. And this desolation seemed to him
restful and blessed after the scurrying, voice-haunted, lightless prison-cellar
of the house of Fear.
As
he pushed on westward through the trees and the days, he kept no more count of
one than of the other. Time went on; and he went on.
The book was not the only thing he had lost;
they had kept Metock's silver water-flask, and a little box, also of silver, of
disinfectant salve. They could only have kept the book because they wanted it
badly, or because they took it for some kind of code or mystery. There was a
period when the loss of it weighed unreasonably on him, for it seemed to him it
had been his one true link with the people he had loved and trusted, and once
he told himself, sitting by his fire, that next day he would turn back and find
the house of Fear again and get his book. But he-went on, next day. He was able
to go west, with compass and sun for guides, but could never have refound a
certain place in the vastness of these endless hills and valleys of the Forest.
Not Argerd's hidden valley; not the Clearing where Parth might be weaving in
the winter sunlight, either. It was all behind him, lost.
Maybe it was just as well that the book was
gone. What would it have meant to him here, that shrewd and patient mysticism
of a very ancient civilization, that quiet voice speaking from amidst forgotten
wars and disasters? Mankind had outlived disaster; and he had outrun mankind.
He was too far away, too much alone. He lived entirely now by hunting; that
slowed his daily pace. Even when game is not gunshy and is very plentiful,
hunting is not a business one can hurry. Then one must clean and cook the game,
and sit and
36
suck the bones beside the fire, full-bellied for
a while and drowsy in the winter cold; and build up a shelter of boughs and
bark against the rain; and sleep; and next day go on. A book had no place here,
not even that old canon of Un-action. He would not have read it; he was
ceasing, really, to think. He hunted and ate and walked and slept, silent in
the forest silence, a gray shadow slipping westward through the cold
wilderness.
The
weather was more and more often bleak. Often lean feral cats, beautiful little
creatures with their pied or striped fur and green eyes, waited within sight of
his campfire for the leavings of his meat, and came forward with sly, shy
fierceness to carry off the bones he tossed them: their rodent prey was scarce
now, hibernating through the cold. No beasts since the house of Fear had spoken
to or bespoken him. The animals in the lovely, icy, lowland woods he was now
crossing had never been tampered with, had never seen or scented man, perhaps.
And as it fell farther and farther behind him he saw its
strangeness more clearly, that house hidden in its peaceful valley, its very
foundations alive with mice that squeaked in human speech, its people revealing
a great knowledge, the truth-drug, and a barbaric ignorance. The Enemy
had been there.
That the Enemy had ever been here was
doubtful. Nobody had ever been here. Nobody ever would be. Jays screamed in
the gray branches. Frost-rimed brown leaves crackled underfoot, the leaves of
hundreds of autumns. A tall stag looked at Falk across a little meadow,
motionless, questioning his right to be there.
"I won't shoot you. Bagged two hens this morning," Falk said.
The stag stared at him with the lordly
self-possession of the speechless, and walked slowly off. Nothing feared Falk,
here. Nothing spoke to him. He thought that in the end he might forget speech
again and become as he had been, dumb, wild, unhuman. He had gone too far away
from men and had come where the dumb creatures ruled and men had never come.
At
the meadow's edge he stumbled over a stone, and on hands and knees read
weatherworn letters carved in the half-buried block: CK O.
Men had come here; had lived here. Under his
feet, under
37
the icy, hummocky terrain of leaflesj bush and
naked tree, under the roots, there was a city. Only he had come to the city a
millennium or two too late.
Ill
The
days of which Falk kept no
count had grown very short, and had perhaps already passed Year's End, the
winter solstice. Though the weather was not so bad as it might have been in the
years when the city had stood aboveground, this being a warmer meteorological
cycle, still it was mostly bleak and gray. Snow fell often, not so thickly as
to make the going hard, but enough to make Falk know that if he had not had his
wintercloth clothing and sleeping-bag from Zove's House he would have suffered
more than mere discomfort from the cold. The north wind blew so unwearyingly
bitter that he tended always to be pushed a little southwards by it, picking
the way south of west when there was a choice, rather than face into the wind.
In the dark wretched afternoon of one day of
sleet and rain he came slogging down a south-trending stream-valley, struggling
through thick brambly undergrowth over rocky, muddy ground. All at once the
brush thinned out, and he was brought to a sudden halt. Before him lay a great
river, dully shining, peppered with rain. Rainy mist half obscured the low
farther bank. He was awed by the breadth, the majesty of this great silent
westward drive of dark water under the low sky. At first he thought it must be
the Inland River, one of the few landmarks of the inner continent known by
rumor to the eastern Forest Houses; but that was said to run south marking the
western edge of the kingdom of the trees. Surely it was a tributary of the
Inland River, then. He followed it, for that reason, and because it kept him
out of the high hills and provided both water and good hunting; moreover it was
pleasant to have, sometimes, a sandy shore for a path, with the open sky
overhead instead of the everlasting leafless darkness of branches. So
following the river he went west by south through a rolling land of woods, all
cold and still and colorless in the grip of winter.
One of these many mornings by the river he
shot a wild hen, so common here in their squawking, low-flying flocks
38
that they provided his staple meat. He had only
winged the hen and it was not dead when he picked it up. It beat its wings and
cried in its piercing bird-voice, "Take—life-take— life— take—" Then
he wrung its neck.
The
words rang in his mind and would not be silenced. Last time a beast had spoken
to him he had been on the threshold of the house of Fear. Somewhere in these
lonesome gray hills there were, or had been, men: a group in hiding like
Argerd's household, or savage Wanderers who would loll him when they saw his
alien eyes, or toolmen who would take him to their Lords as a prisoner or
slave. Though at the end of it all he might have to face those Lords, he would
find his own way to them, in his own time, and alone. Trust no one, avoid menl
He knew his lesson now. Very warily he went that day, alert, so quiet that
often the waterbirds that thronged the shores of the river rose up startled
almost under his feet.
He crossed no path and saw no sign at all
that any human beings dwelt or ever came near the river. But towards the end of
the short afternoon a flock of the bronze-green wild fowl rose up ahead of him
and flew out over the water all clucking and calling together in a gabble of
human words.
A little farther on he stopped, thinking he
had scented woodsmoke on the wind.
The wind was blowing upriver to him, from the
northwest. He went with double caution. Then as the night rose up among the
tree-trunks and blurred the dark reaches of the river, far ahead of him
along the brushy, willow-tangled shore a light
glimmered, and vanished, and shone again.
It
was not fear or even caution that stopped him now, standing in his tracks to
stare at that distant glimmer. Aside from his own solitary campfire this was
the first fight he had seen lit in the wilderness since he had left the
Clearing. It moved him very strangely, shining far off there across the dusk.
Patient in his fascination as any forest
animal, he waited till full night had come and then made his way slowly and
noiselessly along the riverbank, keeping in the shelter of the willows, until
he was close enough to see the square of a window yellow with firelight and the
peak of the roof above it, snow-rimmed, pine-overhung. Huge over black forest
and river Orion stood. The winter night was very cold and silent.
39
Now
and then a fleck of dry snow dislodged from a branch drifted down towards the
black water and caught the sparkle of the firelight as it fell.
Falk stood gazing at the light in the cabin.
He moved a little closer, then stood motionless for a
long time.
The door of the cabin creaked open, laying
down a fan of gold on the dark ground, stirring up powdery snow in puffs and
spangles. "Come on into the fight," said a man standing, vulnerable,
in the golden oblong of the doorway.
Falk in the darkness of the thickets put his
hand on his laser, and made no other movement.
"I mindheard you. I'm a Listener. Come on. Nothing to fear here.
Do you speak this tongue?"
Silence.
"I hope you do, because I'm not going to
use mindspeech. There's nobody here but me, and you," said the quiet
voice. "" hear without trying, as you hear
with your ears, and I still hear you out there in the dark. Come and knock if
you want to get under a roof for a while."
The door closed.
Falk stood still for some while. Then he
crossed the few dark yards to the door of the little cabin, and knocked.
"Come in!"
He opened the door and
entered into warmth and light.
An old man, gray hair braided long down his back, knelt at the hearth
building up the fire. He did not rum to look at the stranger, but laid his firewood
methodically. After a while he said aloud in a slow chant,
"I alone am confused confused desolate Oh, like the sea adrift
Oh, with no harbor to anchor in. . .."
The gray head turned at last. The old man was
smiling; his narrow, bright eyes looked sidelong at Falk.
In a voice that was hoarse and hesitant
because he had not
40
spoken any words for a long time, Falk replied with
the next verse of the Old Canon:
"Everyone is useful only I alone am inept outlandish.
I alone differ from others but I seek
the milk of
the Mother the Way. . . ."
"Ha ha ha!" said the old man. "Do you, Yellow-eyes? Come on, sit down, here by the hearth. Outlandish, yes yes, yes
indeed. You are outiandish. How far out the land?—who kncws? How long since you
washed ir± hot water? Who knows? Where's the damned kettle? Cold tonight in the
wide world, isn't it, cold as a traitor's kiss. Here we are; fill that from the
pail there by the door, will you, then I'll put it on
the fire, so. I'm a Thurro-dowist, you know what that
is I see, so you won't get much comfort here. But a hot bath's hot, whether the
kettle's boiled with hydrogen fusion or pine-knots, eh? Yes, you really are
outlandish, lad, and your clothes could use a bath too, weatherproof
though they may be. What's that?—rabbits? Good. We'll stew 'em tomorrow with a
vegetable or two. Vegetables are one thing you can't hunt down with a lasergun.
And you can't store cabbages in a backpack. I five alone
here, my lad, alone and all alonio. Because I am a great, a very great,
the greatest Listener, I live alone, and talk too much. I wasn't bom here, like
a mushroom in the woods; but with other men I never could shut out the minds,
all the buzz and grief and babble and worry and all the different ways they
went, as if I had to find my way through forty different forests all at once.
So I came to live alone in the real forest with only the beasts around me,
whose minds are brief and still. No death lies in their thoughts. And no lies he in their thoughts. Sit down; you've been a long time
coming here and your legs are tired."
Falk sat down on the wooden hearth-bench.
"I thank you for your hospitality," he said, and was about to name
himself when the old man spoke: "Never mind. I can give you plenty of
good names, good enough for this part of the
41
world. Yellow Eyes, Outlander, Guest, anything
will do. Remember I'm a Listener, not a paraverbalist. I get no words or
names. I don't want them. That there was a lonely soul out there in the dark, I
knew, and I know how my lighted window shone into your eyes. Isn't that enough,
more than enough? I don't need names. And my name is All-Alonio. Right? Now pull up to the fire, get warm." "I'm
getting warm," Falk said.
The old man's gray braid flipped across his shoulders as he moved about,
quick and frail, his soft voice running on; he never asked a real question,
never paused for an answer. He was fearless and it was impossible to fear him.
Now
all the days and nights of journeying through the forest drew together and were
behind Falk. He was not camping: he had come to a place. He need not think at
all about the weather, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit
stretching out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in company with another, could bathe in front of the fire in a wooden tub of hot
water. He did not know which was the greater pleasure, the warmth of that water
washing dirt and weariness away, or the warmth that washed his spirit here, the
absurd elusive vivid talk of the old man, the miraculous
complexity of human conversation after the long silence of the wilderness.
He took as true what the old man told him,
that he was able to sense Falk's emotions and perceptions,
that he was a mindhearer, an empath. Empathy was'to
telepathy somewhat as touch to sight, a vaguer, more primitive, and more intimate
sense. It was not subject to fine learned control to the degree that'
telepathic communication was; conversely, involuntary empathy was not uncommon
even among the untrained. Blind Kretyan had trained herself to mindhear, having
the gift by nature. But it was no such gift as this. It did not take Falk long
to make sure that the old man was in fact constantly aware to some degree of
what his visitor was feeling and sensing. For some reason this did not bother
Falk, whereas the knowledge that Argerd's drug had opened his mind to telepathic
search had enraged him. It was the difference in intent; and more.
"This
morning I killed a hen," he said, when for a little the old man was
silent, warming a rough towel for him by the leaping fire. "It spoke, in
this speech. Some words of . . .
42
of the Law. Does that mean anyone is near here,
who teaches language to the beasts and fowls?" He was not so relaxed, even
getting out of the hot bath, as to say the Enemy's name—not after his lesson in
the house of Fear.
By
way of answer the old man merely asked a question for the first time: "Did
you eat the hen?"
"No," said Falk, toweling himself
dry in the firelight that reddened his skin to the color of new bronze.
"Not after it talked. I shot the rabbits instead."
"Killed
it and didn't eat it? Shameful, shameful." The
old man cackled, then crowed like a wild cock.
"Have you no reverence for life? You must understand the Law. It says you
mustn't kill unless you must kill. And hardly even then.
Remember that in Es Toch. Are you dry? Clothe your nakedness, Adam of the
Yaweh Canon. Here, wrap this around you, it's no fine artifice like your own
clothes, it's only deer-hide tanned in piss, but at least it's clean."
"How
do you know I'm going to Es Toch?" Falk asked, wrapping the soft leather
robe about him like a toga.
"Because
you're not human," said the old man. "And remember, I am the
Listener. I know the compass of your mind, outlandish as it is, whether I will
or no. North and south are dim; far back in the east is a lost brightness; to
the west there lies darkness, a heavy darkness. I know that darkness. Listen.
Listen to me, because I don't want to listen to you, dear guest and blunderer.
If I wanted to listen to men talk I wouldn't live here among the wild pigs like
a wild pig. I have this to say before I go to sleep. Now listen: There
are not very many of the Shing. That's a great piece of news and wisdom and
advice. Remember it, when you walk in the awful darkness of the bright lights
of Es Toch. Odd scraps of information may always come in handy. Now forget the
east and west, and go to sleep. You take the bed. Though as a Thurro-dowist I
am opposed to ostentatious luxury, I applaud the simpler pleasures of
existence, such as a bed to sleep on. At least, every now and
then. And even the company of a fellow man, once a year or so. Though I
can't say I miss them as you do. Alone's not lonely. . . ." And as he made
himself a sort of pallet on the floor he quoted in an affectionate singsong
from the Younger Canon of his creed: " 'I am no more
lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the
south wind, or an April shower, or
43
a January
thaw, or the first spider in a new house. ...
I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that
laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself.
Then he said, "Good night!" and
said no more. Falk slept that night the first sound, long sleep he had had
since his journey had begun.
He stayed two more days and nights in the riverside cabin, for his host
made him very welcome and he found it hard to leave the little haven of warmth
and company. The old man seldom listened and never answered questions, but in
and out of his ever-running talk certain facts and hints glanced and vanished.
He knew the way west from here and what lay along it—for how far, Falk could
not make sure. Clear to Es Toch, it seemed; perhaps even beyond? What lay
beyond Es Toch? Falk himself had no idea, except that one would come eventually
to the Western Sea, and on beyond that to the Great Continent, and eventually
on around again to the Eastern Sea and the Forest. That the world was round,
men knew, but there were no maps left. Falk had a notion that the old man might
have been able to draw one; but where he got such a notion he scarcely knew, for his host never spoke directly of anything
he himself had done or seen beyond his little river-bank clearing.
"Look
out for the hens, downriver," said the old man, apropos of nothing, as
they breakfasted in the early morning before Falk set off again. "Some of
them can talk. Others can listen. Like us, eh? I talk and you listen. Because,
of course, I am the Listener and you are the Messenger. Logic be damned. Remember about the hens, and mistrust those that
sing. Roosters are less to be mistrusted; they're too busy crowing. Go alone.
It won't hurt you. Give my regards to any Princes or Wanderers you may meet,
particularly Henstrella. By the way, it occurred to me in between your dreams
and my own last night that you've walked quite enough for exercise and might
like to take my slider. I'd forgotten I had it. I'm not going to use it, since
I'm not going anywhere, except to die. I hope someone comes by to bury me, or
at least drag me outside for the rats and ants, once I'm dead. I don't like the
prospect of rotting around in here after all the years I've kept the place
tidy. You can't use a slider in the forest, of course, now there are no trails
left worth the name, but if you want to follow the river it'll take you along
nicely. And
44
across the
Inland River too, which isn't easy to cross in the thaws, unless you're a
catfish. It's in the lean-to if you want it. I don't."
The people of Kathol's House, the settlement nearest Zove's, were
Thurro-dowists; Falk knew that one of their principles was to get along, as
long as they could do so sanely and unfanatically, without mechanical devices
and artifices. That this old man, living much more primitively than they,
raising poultry and vegetables because he did not even own a gun to hunt with,
should possess a bit of fancy technology like a slider, was queer enough to
make Falk for the first time look up at him with a shadow of doubt.
The Listener sucked his teeth and cackled.
Tou never had any reason to trust me, outlandish laddie," he said. "Nor I you. After all, things can be hidden from even
the greatest Listener. Things can be hidden from a man's own mind, can't they,
so that he can't lay the hands of thought upon them.
Take the slider. My traveling days are done. It carries only one, but you'll be
going alone. And I think you've got a longer journey to make than you can ever
go by foot. Or by slider, for that matter."
Falk asked no question, but
the old man answered it:
"Maybe you have to go
back home," he said.
Parting from him in the icy, misty dawn under
the ice-furred pines, Falk in regret and gratitude offered his hand as to the
Master of a House; so he had been taught to do; but as he did so he said, "Tiokioi. . ."
"What name do you call
me, Messenger?"
"It means ... it means father, I
think. . . ." The word had come on his lips unbidden, incongruous. He was
not sure he knew its meaning, and had no idea what language it was in.
"Goodbye,
poor trusting fooll You will speak the truth and the
truth will set you free. Or not, as the case may be. Go all alonio, dear fool;
it's much the best way to go. I will miss your dreams. Goodbye, goodbye. Fish
and visitors stink after three days. Goodbye!"
Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little
machine, black paristolis inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum
wire. The ornamentation all but concealed the controls, but he had played with
a slider at Zove's House, and after studying the control-arcs a minute he
touched the left arc,
45
moved his finger along it till the slider had silently risen about two
feet, and then with the
right arc
sent the little
craft slipping over the
yard and the river-bank till it hovered above the scummy ice of the backwater below the cabin. He
looked back then to call goodbye, but the old man had already gone into the
cabin and shut the door. And as Falk steered his noiseless craft down the broad
dark avenue of the river, the enormous silence closed in around him again.
Icy
mist gathered on the wide curves of water ahead of him and behind him, and hung
among the gray trees on either bank. Ground and trees and sky were all gray
with ice and fog. Only the water sliding along a little slower than he slid
airborne above it was dark. When on the following day snow began to fall the
flakes were dark against the sky, white against the water before they vanished,
endlessly falling and vanishing in the endless current.
This
mode of travel was twice the speed of walking, and safer and easier—too easy
indeed, monotonous, hypnotic. Falk was glad to come ashore when he had to hunt
or to make camp. Waterbirds all but flew into his hands, and animals coming
down to the shore to drink glanced at him as if he on the slider were a crane or heron skimming past, and offered their defenseless flanks and
chests to his hunting gun. Then all he could do was skin, hack up, cook, eat,
and build himself a little shelter for the night against snow or rain with
boughs or bark and the up-ended slider as a roof; he slept, at dawn ate cold
meat left from last night, drank from the river, and went on. And on.
He played games with the slider to beguile
the eventless hours: taking her up above fifteen feet where wind and air-layers
made the aircushion unreliable and might tilt the slider right over unless he
compensated instantly with the controls and his own weight; or forcing her down
into the water in a wild commotion of foam and spray so she slapped and skipped
and skittered all over the river, bucking like a colt. A couple of falls did not deter Falk
from his amusements. The slider was set to hover at one foot if uncontrolled,
and all he had to do was clamber back on, get to shore and make a fire if he had got chilled, or if not, simply go on. His clothes were
weatherproof, and in any case the river could get him little wetter than the
rain. The winter-cloth kept him fairly warm; he was never really warm. His
46
little campflres were strictly cookingfires. There
was not enough dry wood in the whole Eastern Forest, probably, for a real fire,
after the long days of rain, wet snow, mist, and rain again.
He became adept at slapping the slider downriver in a series of long, loud fish-leaps, diagonal
bounces ending in a whack and a jet of spray. The noisiness of the process pleased him
sometimes as a break in the smooth silent monotony of sliding along above the
water between the trees and hills. He came whacking around a bend, banking his
curves with delicate flicks of the control-arcs, then
braked to a sudden soundless halt in mid-air. Far ahead down the steely-shining
reach of the river a boat was coming towards him.
Each craft was in full view of the other; there was no slipping past in
secret behind screening trees. Falk lay flat on the slider, gun in hand, and
steered down the right bank of the river, up at ten feet so he had height
advantage on the people in the boat.
They were coming along easily with one little
triangular sail set. As they drew nearer, though the wind was blowing
downriver, he could faintly hear the sound of their singing.
They came still nearer, paying no heed to
him, still singing.
As far back as his brief memory went, music had always both drawn him
and frightened him, filling him with a kind of anguished delight, a pleasure
too near torment. At the sound of a human voice singing he felt most intensely
that he was not human, that this game of pitch and time and tone wa: alien to
him, not a thing forgotten but a thing
new to him, beyond him. But by that strangeness it drew him, and now
unconsciously he slowed the slider to listen. Four or five voices sang, chiming
and parting and interweaving in a more artful harmony than any he had heard. He
did not understand the words. All the forest, the miles of gray water and gray
sky, seemed with him to listen in intense, uncomprehending silence.
The
song died away, chiming and fading into a little gust of laughter and talk. The
slider and the boat were nearly abreast now, separated by a hundred yards or more. A tall, very slender man erect in the stem hailed
Falk, a clear voice ringing easily across the water. Again he caught none of
the words. In the steely winter light the man's hair and the hair
47
of the four or five others in the boat shone
fulvent gold, all the same, as if they were all of one close kin, or one kind.
He could not see the faces clearly, only the red-gold hair, the slender figures
bending forward to laugh and beckon. He could not make sure how many there
were. For a second one face was distinct, a woman's face, watching him across
the moving water and the wind. He had slowed the slider to a hover, and the
boat too seemed to rest motionless on the river.
"Follow us," the man called again,
and this time, recognizing the language, Falk understood. It was the old
League tongue, Galaktika. Like all Foresters, Falk had learned it from tapes
and books, for the documents surviving from the Great Age were recorded in it,
and it served as a common speech among men of different tongues. The Forest dialect
was descended from Galaktika, but had grown far from it over a thousand years, and by now differed even from House to House. Travelers once had come to Zove's House from the coast of the
Eastern Sea, speaking a dialect so divergent that they had found it easier to
speak Galaktika with their hosts, and only then had Falk heard it used as a
living tongue; otherwise it had only been the voice of a soundbook, or the
murmur of the sleepteacher in his ear in the dark of a winter morning.
Dreamlike and archaic it ;i winded now
in the clear voice of the steersman. "Follow us, we go to the cityl"
"To what city?"
"Our own," the man called, and
laughed.
"The city that welcomes the
traveler," another called; and another, in the tenor that had rung so
sweetly in their singing, spoke more softly: "Those that mean no harm
find no harm among us." And a woman called as if she smiled as she spoke,
"Come out of the wilderness, traveler, and hear our music for a
night."
The name they called him meant traveler, or messenger.
"Who are your^ he asked.
Wind
blew and the broad river ran. The boat and the air-boat hovered motionless amid
the flow of air and water, together and apart, as if in an enchantment.
"We are men."
With
that reply the charm vanished, blown away like a sweet sound or fragrance in
the wind from the east. Falk felt again a maimed bird struggle in his hands
crying out human
48
words in its piercing unhuman voice: now as then a
chill went through him, and without hesitation, without decision, he touched
the silver arc and sent the slider forward at full speed.
No
sound came to him from the boat, though now the wind blew from them to him, and
after a few moments, when hesitation had had time to catch up with him, he
slowed his craft and looked back. The boat was gone. There was nothing on the
broad dark surface of the water, clear back to the distant bend.
After
that Falk played no more loud games, but went on as swiftly and silently as he
might; he lit no fire at all that night, and his sleep was uneasy. Yet
something of the charm remained. The sweet voices had spoken of a city, elonaae in the ancient tongue, and drifting downriver
alone in midair and mid-wilderness Falk whispered the word aloud. Elonaae, the
Place of Man: myriads of men gathered together, not one house but thousands of
houses, great dwelling-places, towers, walls, windows, streets and the open
places where streets met, the trading-houses told of in~lW6k"S where all
the ingenuities of men's hands were made and sold, the palaces of government
where the mighty met to speak together of the great works they did, the fields
from which ships shot out across the years to alien suns: had Earth ever borne
so wonderful a thing as the Places of Man?
They
were all gone now. There remained only Es Toch, the Place of the Lie. There was
no city in the Eastern Forest. No towers of stone and steel and crystal crowded
with souls rose up from among the swamps and alder-groves, the rabbit-warrens
and deer-trails, the lost roads, the broken, buried stones.
Yet the vision of a city remained with Falk almost like the dim memory
of something he had once known. By that he judged the strength of the lure, the
illusion which he had blundered safely through, and he wondered if there would
be more such tricks and lures as he went on always westward, towards their
source.
The
days and the river went on, flowing with him, until on one still gray afternoon
the world opened slowly out and out into an awesome breadth, an immense plain
of muddy waters under an immense sky: the confluence of the Forest River with
the Inland River. It was no wonder they had heard of
49 the
Inland River even in the deep ignorance of their isolation hundreds of miles
back east in the Houses: it was so huge even the Shing could not hide it. A
vast and shining desolation of yellow-gray waters spread from the last crowns
and islets of the flooded Forest on and on west to a far shore of hills. Falk
soared like one of the river's low-flying blue herons over the meetingplace of
the waters. He landed on the western bank and was, for the first time in his
memory, out of the Forest.
To
north, west, and south lay rolling land, clumped with many trees, full of brush
and thickets in the lowlands, but an open country, wide open. Falk with easy
self-delusion looked west, straining his eyes to see the mountains. This open
land, the Prairie, was believed to be very wide, a thousand miles perhaps; but
no one in Zove's House really knew.
He saw no mountains, but that night he saw the rim of the world
where it cut across the stars. He had never seen a honzdnTWtr'memory was all
encircled with a boundary of leaves, of branches. But out here nothing was
between him and the stars, which burned from the Earth's edge upwards in a huge
bowl, a dome built of black patterned with fire. And beneath his feet the
circle was completed; hour by hour the tilting horizon revealed the fiery
patterns that lay eastward and beneath the Earth. He spent half the long
winter night awake, and was awake again when that tilting eastern edge of the
world cut across the sun and daylight struck from outer space across the
plains.
That
day he went on due west by the compass, and the next day, and the next. No
longer led by the meanderings of the river, he went straight and fast. Running
the slider was no such dull game as it had been over the water; here above
uneven ground it bucked and tipped at each drop and rise unless he was very
alert every moment at the controls. He liked the vast openness of sky and
prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone
in. The weather was mild, a calm sunlit spell of late winter. Thinking back to
the Forest he felt as if he had come out of stifling, secret darkness into
light and air, as if the prairies were one enormous Clearing. Wild red cattle
in herds of tens of thousands darkened the far plains like cloud-shadows. The
ground was everywhere dark, but in places misted faintly
50
with green where the first tiny double-leaved
shoots of the hardiest grasses were opening; and above and below the ground was
a constant scurrying and burrowing of little beasts, rabbits, badgers, coneys,
mice, feral cats, moles, stripe-eyed arcturies, antelope, yellow yappers, the
pests and pets of fallen civilizations. The huge sky whirred with wings. At
dusk along the rivers flocks of white cranes settled, the water between the
reeds and leafless cottonwoods mirroring their long legs and long uplifted
wings.
Why
did men no longer journey forth to see their world? Falk wondered, sitting by
his campfire that burned like a tiny opal in the vast blue vault of the prairie
twilight. Why did such men as Zove and Metock hide in the woods, never once in
their lives coming out to see the wide splendor of the Earth? He now knew
something that they, who had taught him everything, did not know: that a man
could see his planet turn among the stars. . . .
Next day under a lowering sky and through a
cold wind from the north he went on, guiding the slider with a skill soon become habit. A herd of wild cattle covered half the plains
south of his course, every one of the thousands and thousands of them standing
facing the wind, white faces lowered in front of shaggy red shoulders. Between
him and the first ranks of the herd for a mile the long gray grass bowed under
the wind, and a gray bird flew towards him, gliding
with no motion of its wings. He watched it, wondering at its straight gliding
flight—not quite straight, for it turned without a wingbeat to intercept his
course. It was coming very fast, straight at him. Abruptly he was alarmed, and
waved his arm to frighten the creature away, then threw himself down flat and
veered the slider, too late. The instant before it struck he saw the blind
featureless head, the glitter of steel. Then the impact, a
shriek of exploding metal, a sickening backward fall. And
no end to the falling.
IV
"Kessnokaty's
old woman says it's going
to snow," his friend's voice murmured near him. "We should be ready,
if there comes a chance for us to run away."
Falk did not reply but sat listening with
sharpened hear-
51
ing to the noises of the camp: voices in a
foreign tongue, distance-softened; the dry sound of somebody nearby scraping a
hide; the thin bawl of a baby; the snapping of the tent-fire.
"Horressins!"
someone outside summoned him, and he got up promptly, then
stood still. In a moment his friend's hand was on his arm and she guided him to
where they wanted him, the communal fire in the center of the circle of tents,
where they were celebrating a successful hunt by roasting a whole bull. A shank
of beef was shoved into his hands. He sat down on the ground and began to eat.
Juices and melted fat ran down his jaws but he did not wipe them off. To do so
was beneath the dignity of a Hunter of the Mzurra Society of the Basnasska
Nation. Though a stranger, a captive, and blind, he was a Hunter, and was
learning to comport himself as such.
The more defensive a society, the more conformist. The people he was among walked a very narrow,
a tortuous and cramped Way, across the broad free plains. So long as he was
among them he must follow all the twistings of their ways exactly. The diet of
the Basnasska consisted of fresh half-raw beef, raw onions, and blood. Wild
herdsmen of the wild cattle, like wolves they culled
the lame, the lazy and unfit from the vast herds, a lifelong feast of meat, a
life with no rest. They hunted with hand-lasers and warded strangers from their
territory with bombirds like the one that had destroyed Falk's slider, tiny
impact-missiles programmed to home in on anything that contained a fusion
element. They aid not make or repair these weapons themselves, and handled them
only after purifications and incantations; where they obtained them Falk had
not found out, though there was occasional mention of a yearly pilgrimage,
which might be connected with the weapons. They had no agriculture and no
domestic animals; they were illiterate and did not know, except perhaps through
certain myths and hero-legends, any of the history of humankind. They informed
Falk that he had not come out of the Forest, because the Forest was inhabited
only by giant white snakes. They practiced a monotheistic religion whose
rituals involved mutilation, castration and human sacrifice.
It was one of the outgrowth-superstitions of
their complex creed that had induced them to take Falk alive and make
52
him a member of the tribe. Normally, since he
carried a laser and thus was above slave-status, they would have cut out his
stomach and liver to examine for auguries, and then let the women hack him up
as they pleased. However, a week or two before his capture an old man of the
Mzurra Society had died. There being no as-yet-unnamed infant in the tribe to
receive his name, it was given to the captive, who, blinded, disfigured, and
only conscious at intervals, still was better than nobody; for so long as Old
Horressins kept his name his ghost, evil like all ghosts, would return to
trouble the ease of the living. So the name was taken from the ghost and given
to Falk, along with the full initiations of a Hunter, a ceremony which included
whippings, emetics, dances, the recital of dreams, tattooing, antiphonal
free-association, feasting, sexual abuse of one woman by all the males in
turn, and finally nightlong incantations to The God to preserve the new
Horressins from harm. After this they left him on a horsehide nig in a cowhide
tent, delirious and unattended, to die or recover, while the ghost of Old
Horressins, nameless and powerless, went whining away on the wind across the
plains.
The woman, who, when he had first recovered
consciousness, had been busy bandaging his eyes and looking after his wounds,
also came whenever she could to care for him. He had
only seen her when for brief moments in the semi-privacy of his tent he could
lift the bandage which her quick wits had provided him
when he was first brought in. Had the Basnasska seen those eyes of his open,
they would have cut out his tongue so he could not name his own name, and then
burned him alive. She had told him this; and other matters he needed to know
about the Nation of the Basnasska; but not much about herself. Apparendy she
had not been with the tribe very much longer than himself; he gathered that
she had been lost on the prairie, and had joined the tribe rather than starve
to death. They were willing to accept another she-slave for the use of the men,
and she had proved skillful at doctoring, so they let her five. She had reddish
hair, her voice was very soft, her name was Estrel.
Beyond this he knew nothing about her; and she had not asked him anything at
all about himself, not even his name.
He had escaped lightly, all things
considered. Paristolis, the Noble Matter of ancient Cetian science, would not
ex-
53
plode nor take fire, so the slider had not blown
up under him, though its controls were wrecked. The bursting missile had chewed
the left side of his head and upper body with fine shrapnel, but Estrel was
there with the skill and a few of the materials of medicine. There was no
infection; he recuperated fast, and within a few days of his blood-christening
as Horressins he was planning escape with her.
But
the days went on and no chances came. A defensive society: a wary, jealous
people, all their actions rigidly scheduled by rite, custom, and tabu. Though
each Hunter had his tent, women were held in common and all a man's doings were
done with other men; they were less a community than a club or herd,
interdependent members of one entity. In this effort to attain security,
independence and privacy of course were suspect; Falk
and Estrel had to snatch at any chance to talk for a moment. She did not know
the Forest dialect, but they could use Galaktika, which the Basnasska spoke
only in a pidgin form.
"The
time to try," she said once, "might be during a snowstorm, when the
snow would hide us and our tracks. But how far could we get on foot in a
blizzard? You've got a compass; but the cold . . ."
Falk's
wintercloth clothing had been confiscated, along with everything else he
possessed, even the gold ring he had always worn, They
had left him one gun: that was integral with his being a Hunter and could not
be taken from him. But the clothes he had worn so long now covered the bony
ribs and shanks of the Old Hunter Kessnokaty, and he had his compass only
because Estrel had got it and hidden it before they went through his pack. He
and she were well enough clothed in Basnasska buckskin shirts and leggings,
with boots and parkas of red cowhide; but nothing was adequate shelter from one
of the prairie blizzards, with their hard subfreezing winds, except walls, roof
and a fire.
"If
we can get across into Samsit territory, just a few miles west of here, we
could hole up in an Old Place I know there and hide
till they give up looking. I thought of trying it before you came. But I had
no compass and was afraid of getting lost in the storm. With a compass, and a
gun, we might make it. . . . We might not."
"If it's our best
chance," Falk said, "we'll take it."
He was not quite so naive,
so hopeful and easily swayed,
54
as he had been before his capture. He was a
little more resistant and resolute. Though he had suffered at their hands he
had no special grudge against the Basnasska; they had branded him once and for
all down both his arms with the blue tattoo-slashes of their kinship, branding
him as a barbarian, but also as a man. That was all right. But they had their
business, and he had his. The hard individual will developed in him by his
training in the Forest House demanded that he get free, that he get on with
his journey, with what Zove had called man's work. These
people were not going anywhere, nor did they come from anywhere, for they had
cut their roots in the human past. It was not only the extreme precariousness
of his existence among the Basnasska that made him impatient to get out; it
was also a sense of suffocation, of being cramped and immobilized, which was
harder to endure than the bandage that blanked his vision.
That evening Estrel stopped by his tent to
tell him that it had begun to snow, and they were settling their plan in
whispers when a voice spoke at the flap of the tent. Estrel translated quietly:
"He says, 'Blind Hunter, do you want the Red Woman tonight?* " She added no explanation. Falk knew the rules and
etiquette of sharing the women around; his mind was busy with the matter of
their talk, and he replied with the most useful of his short list of Basnasska
words— "Miegl" —no.
The male voice said something more imperative. "If it goes on
snowing, tomorrow night, maybe," Estrel murmured in Calaktika. Still
thinking, Falk did not answer. Then he realized she had risen and gone, leaving
him alone in the tent. And after that he realized that she was the Red Woman,
and that the other man had wanted her to copulate with.
He could simply have said Yes
instead of No; and when he thought of her cleverness and gentleness towards
him, the softness of her touch and voice, and the utter silence in which she
hid her pride or shame, then he winced at his failure to spare her, and felt
himself humiliated as her fellow-man, and as a man.
"We'll
go tonight," he said to her next day in the drifted snow beside the
Women's Lodge. "Come to my tent. Let a good part of the night pass
first."
"Kokteky has told me to come to his tent tonight."
55
"Can you slip away?" "Maybe."
"Which tent is Kokteky's?"
"Behind
the Mzurra Society Lodge to the left. It has a patched place over the
flap."
"If
you don't come I'll come get you."
"Another
night there might be less danger—"
"And less snow. Winter's getting on; this may be the last big storm. We'll go tonight."
"I'll
come to your tent," she said with her unarguing, steady submissiveness.
He had left a slit in his bandage
through which he could dimly see his way about, and he tried to see her now;
but in the dull light she was only a gray shape in grayness.
In
the late dark of that night she came, quiet as the windblown snow against the
tent. They each had ready what they had to take. Neither spoke. Falk fastened
his oxhide coat, pulled up and tied the hood, and bent to unseal the door-flap.
He started aside as a man came pushing in from outside, bent double to clear
the low gap—Kokteky, a burly shaven-headed Hunter, jealous of his status and
his virility. "Horressinsl The Red Woman—"
he began, then saw her in the shadows across the embers of the fire. At the
same moment he saw how she and Falk were dressed, and their intent. He backed
up to close off the doorway or to escape from Falk's attack, and opened his
mouth to shout. Without thought, reflex-quick and certain, Falk fired his
laser at pointblank range, and the brief flick of mortal light stopped the
shout in the Basnasska's mouth, burnt away mouth and brain and life in one
moment, in perfect silence.
Falk reached across the embers, caught the
woman's hand, and led her over the body of the man he had killed into the dark.
Fine snow on a light wind sifted and whirled, taking their breaths with
cold. Estrel breathed in sobs. His left hand holding her wrist and his right
his gun, Falk set off west among the scattered tents, which were barely visible
as slits and webs of dim orange. Within a couple of minutes even these were
gone, and there was nothing at all in the world but night and snow.
Handlasers of Eastern Forest make had several settings and functions:
the handle served as a fighter, and the
56
weapon-tube converted to a not very efficient
flashlight. Falk set his gun to give a glow by which they could read the
compass and see the next few steps ahead, and they went on, guided by the
mortal light.
On
the long rise where the Basnasska winter-camp stood the wind had thinned the
snowcover, but as they went on, unable to pick their course ahead, the compass
West their one guideline in the confusion of the snowstorm that mixed air and
ground into one whirling mess, they got onto lower land. There were four- and
five-foot drifts through which Estrel struggled gasping like a spent swimmer in
high seas. Falk pulled out the rawhide drawstring of his hood and tied it
around his arm, giving her the end to hold, and then went ahead, making her a
path. Once she fell and the tug on the line nearly pulled him down; he turned
and had to seek for a moment with the light before he saw her crouching in his
tracks, almost at his feet. He knelt, and in the wan, snow-streaked sphere of
light saw her face for the first time clearly. She was whispering, "This
is more than I bargained for. . . ."
"Get your breath a while. We're out of
the wind in this hollow."
They crouched there together in a tiny bubble
of light, around which hundreds of miles of wind-driven snow hurtled in
darkness over the plains.
She
whispered something which at first he did not understand: "Why did you
kill the man?"
Relaxed,
his senses dulled, drawing up resources of strength for the next stage of their
slow, hard escape, Falk made no response. Finally with a kind of grin he
muttered, "What else . . . ?"
"I don't know. You had
to."
Her face was white and drawn with strain; he paid no attention to what
she said. She was too cold to rest there, and he got to his feet, pulling her
up with him. "Come on. It can't be much farther to the river."
But
it was much farther. She had come to his tent after some hours of darkness, as
he thought of it—there was a word for hours in
the Forest tongue, though its meaning was imprecise and qualitative, since a
people without business and communication across time and space have no use for
timepieces—and the winter night had still a long time to run. They went on, and the night went on.
57
As the first gray began to leaven the whirling black snow-rubble of the
storm they struggled down a slope of frozen tangled grass and shrubs. A mighty
groaning bulk rose up straight in front of Falk and plunged off into the snow.
Somewhere nearby they heard the snorting of another cow or bull, and then for
a minute the great creatures were all about them, white muzzles and wild liquid
eyes catching the light, the driven snow hillocky and bulking with flanks and
shaggy shoulders. Then they were through the herd, and came down to the bank of
the little river that separated Basnasska from Samsit territory. It was fast,
shallow, unfrozen. They had to wade, the current tugging at their feet over
loose stones, pulling at their knees, icily rising till they struggled
waist-deep through burning cold. Estrel's legs gave way under her before they were
clear across. Falk hauled her up out of the water and through the ice-crusted
reedbeds of the west bank, and then again crouched down by her in blank exhaustion
among the snowmounded bushes of the overhanging shore. He switched off his
lightgun. Very faint, but very large, a stormy day was gaining on the dark.
"We have to go on, we've got to have a fire."
She did not reply.
He held her in his arms against him. Their
boots and leggings and parkas from the shoulders down were frozen stiff
already. The woman's face, bowed against his arm, was deathly white.
He spoke her name, trying to rouse her.
"Estrell Estrel, come on. We can't stay here. We can get on a little
farther. It won't be so hard. Come on, wake up, little one, little hawk,
wake-up. . . ." In his great weariness he spoke to her as he had used to
speak to Parth, at daybreak, a long time ago.
She obeyed him at last, struggling to her
feet with his help, getting the line into her frozen gloves, and step by step
following him across the shore, up the low bluffs, and on through the tireless,
relentless, driving snow.
They
kept along the rivercourse, going south, as she had told him they would do when
they had planned their run. He had no real hope they could find anything in
this spinning whiteness, as featureless as the night storm had been. But
before long they came to a creek tributary to the river they had crossed, and turned
up it, rough going for the land was broken. They struggled on. It seemed to
Falk that by far the best thing to do would be to lie down and fall asleep, and
he was only unable to do this because there was someone who was counting on
him, someone a long way off, a long
time ago, who had sent him on a journey; he could not lie down, for he was
accountable to someone. . . .
There
was a croaking whisper in his ear, Estrel's voice. Ahead of them a clump of
high cottonwood boles loomed like starving wraiths in the snow, and Estrel was
tugging at his arm. They began to stumble up and down the north side of the
snow-choked creek just beyond the cottonwoods, searching for something. "A
stone," she kept saying, "a stone," and though he did not know
why they needed a stone, he searched and scrabbled in the snow with her. They
were both crawling on hands and knees when at last she came on the landmark she
was after, a snowmounded block of stone a couple of feet high.
With her frozen gloves she pushed away the
dry drifts from the east side of the block. Incurious, listless with fatigue,
Falk helped her. Their scraping bared a metal rectangle, level with the
curiously level ground. Estrel tried to open it. A hidden handle clicked, but
the edges of the rectangle were frozen shut. Falk spent his last strength
straining to lift the thing, till finally he came to his wits and unsealed the
frozen metal with the heatbeam in the handle of his gun. Then they lifted up
the door and looked down a neat steep set of stairs, weirdly geometric amidst
this howling wilderness, to a shut door.
"It's
all right," his companion muttered, and going down the stairs—crawling
backwards, as on a ladder, because she could not trust her legs—she pushed the
door open, and then looked up at Falk. "Come on!" she said.
He came down, pulling the trapdoor to above him as she directed. It was
abruptly utterly dark, and crouching on the steps Falk hastily pressed the stud
of his handgun for fight. Below him Estrel's white face glimmered. He came down
and followed her in the door, into a place that was very dark and very big, so
big his light could only hint at the ceiling and the nearer walls. It was
silent, and the air was dead, flowing past them in a faint unchanging draft.
"There should be wood over here,"
Estrel's soft, strain-
59
hoarsened voice said somewhere to his left.
"Here. We need a fire; help me with this. . . ."
Dry
wood was stacked in high piles in a corner near the entrance. While he got a
blaze going, building it up inside a circle of blackened stones nearer the
center of the cavern, Estrel crept off into some farther comer and returned
dragging a couple of heavy blankets. They stripped and rubbed down, then
huddled on the blankets, inside their Basnasska sleep-rolls, up close to the
fire. It burned hot as if in a chimney, drawn up by a high draft that also
carried off the smoke. There was no warming the great room or cave, but the
firelight and heat relaxed and cheered them. Estrel got dried meat out of her
bag, and they munched as they sat, though their lips were sore with frostbite
and they were too tired to be hungry. Gradually the warmth of the fire began to
soak into their bones.
"Who else has used
this place?"
"Anyone that knows of
it, I suppose."
"There
was a mighty House here once, if this was the cellar," Falk said, looking
into the shadows that flickered and thickened into impenetrable black at a
distance from the fire, and thinking of the great basements under the house of
Fear.
"They
say there was a whole city here. It goes on a long way from the door, they say.
I don't know."
"How did you know of it—are you a Samsit woman?"
"No."
He
asked no further, recalling the code; but presently she said in her submissive
way, "I am a Wanderer. We know many places like this, hiding places. ... I suppose you've heard of the
Wanderers."
"A
little," said Falk, stretching out and looking across the fire at his
companion. Tawny hair curled about her face as she sat huddled in the shapeless
bag, and a pale jade amulet at her throat caught the firelight.
"They know little of
us in the Forest."
"No Wanderers came as far east as my House. What was told of them
there fits the Basnasska better—savages, hunters, nomads." He spoke
sleepily, laying his head down on his arm.
"Some
Wanderers might be called savages. Others not. The
Cattle-Hunters are all savages and know nothing be-
60
yond their own territories, these Basnasska and
Samsit and Arksa. We go far. We go east to the Forest,
and south to the mouth of the Inland River, and west over the Great Mountains
and the Western Mountains even to the sea. I myself have seen the sun set in
the sea, behind the chain of blue isles that lies far off the coast, beyond the
drowned valleys of California, earthquake-whelmed. . . ." Her soft voice
had slipped into the cadence of some archaic chant or plaint. "Go
on," Falk murmured, but she was still, and before long he was fast
asleep. For a while she watched his sleeping face. At last she pushed the
embers together, whispered a few words as if in prayer to the amulet chained
around her neck, and curled down to sleep across the fire from him.
When
he woke she was making a stand of bricks over the fire to support a kettle
filled with snow. "It looks like late afternoon outside," she said,
"but it could be morning, or noon for that matter. The storm's as thick as
ever. They can't track us. And if they did, still they couldn't get in this
place. . . . This kettle was in the cache with the blankets. And there's a bag
of dried peas. We'll do well enough here." The hard, delicate face turned
to him with a faint smile. "It's dark, though. I don't like the thick
walls and the dark."
"It's
better than bandaged eyes. Though you saved my life with that
bandage. Blind Horressins was better off than dead Falk." He
hesitated and then asked, "What moved you to save me?"
She shrugged, still with the faint, reluctant smile. "Fellow
prisoners. . . . They always say Wanderers are clever at ruses and disguises.
Did you not hear them call me Fox Woman? Let me look at those hurts of yours. I
brought my bag of tricks."
"Are Wanderers all
good healers, too?"
"We have certain
skills."
"And you know the Old Tongue; you have
not forgotten man's old way, like the Basnasska."
"Yes, we all know Galaktika. Look there,
the rim of your ear was frostbitten yesterday. Because you
took the tie from your hood for me to hold."
"I can't look at it," Falk said
amiably, submitting to her doctoring. "I don't need to, usually."
As she dressed the still unhealed cut on his
left temple she
61
glanced once or twice sidelong at his face, and at
last she ventured: "There are many Foresters with such eyes as yours, no
doubt." "None."
Evidently
the code prevailed. She asked nothing, and he, having resolved to confide in no
one, volunteered nothing. But his own curiosity got the better of him and he
said, "They don't frighten you, then, these cat-eyes?"
"No,"
she answered in her quiet way. "You frightened me only once. When you
shot—so fast—"
"He would have raised
the whole camp."
"I
know, I know. But we carry no guns. You shot so quick, I was frightened—it was like a terrible thing I saw once, when I was a child. A man who killed another with a gun,
quicker than thought, like that. He was one of the Razes."
"Razes?"
"Oh, one meets with then, in the Mountains sometimes." "I
know very little of the Mountains."
She
explained, though as if unwillingly. "You know the Law of the Lords. They
do not kill—you know. When there is a murderer in their city, they cannot kill
him to stop him, so they make him into a Raze. It is something they do to the
mind. They can turn him loose and he starts to five anew, innocent. This man I
spoke of was older than you, but had a mind like a little child. But he got a
gun in his hands, and his hands knew how to use it, and he—shot a man very
close up, like you did—"
Falk
was silent. He glanced across the fire at his handgun, lying atop his pack, the
marvelous little tool that had started his fires, provided his meat, and
lighted his darkness all his long way. There had been no knowledge in his hands
of how to use the thing—had there? Metock had taught him how to shoot. He had
learned from Metock, and grown skillful by hunting. He was sure of it. He could
not be a mere freak and criminal given a second chance by the arrogant charity
of the Lords of Es Toch. . . .
Yet was that not more plausible than his own
vague dreams and notions of his origin?
"How do they do this
to a man's mind?"
"I do not know."
"They might do it," he said
harshly, "not only to criminals, but to—to rebels."
"What are
rebels?"
She
spoke Galaktika much more fluently than he, but she had never heard that word.
She
had finished dressing his hurt and was carefully tucking her few medicaments
away in their pouch. He turned around to her so abruptly that she looked up
startled, drawing back i. little.
"Have you ever seen eyes like mine, Estrel?" "No."
"You-know—the City?" "Es Toch? Yes, I have been
there." "Then you hav'e seen the Shing?" "You are no Shing."
"No.
But I am going among them." He spoke fiercely. "But I dread—" He
stopped.
Estrel
closed the medicine-pouch and put it in her pack. "Es Toch is strange to
men from the Lonely Houses and the far lands," she said at last in her
soft, careful voice. "But I have walked its streets with no harm; many
people live there, in no fear of the Lords. You need not go in dread. The Lords
are very powerful, but much is told of Es Toch that is not true. . . ."
Her eyes met his. With sudden decision,
summoning what paraverbal skill he had, he bespoke her for the first time:
"Then tell me what is true of Es Toch!"
She
shook her head, answering aloud, "I have saved your life and you mine, and
wc are companions, and fellow-Wanderers perhaps for a
while. But I will not bespeak you or any person met by chance; not now, nor
ever."
"Do
you think me a Shing after all?" he asked ironically, a little humiliated,
knowing she was right.
"Who
can be sure?" she said, and then added with her faint smile, "Though
I would find it hard to believe of you. . . . There, the snow in the kettle has
melted down. I'll go up and get more. It takes so much to make a litde water, and we are both thirsty. You . . . you are
called Falk?"
He nodded, watching her.
"Don't
mistrust me, Falk," she said. "Let me prove myself to you. Mindspeech
proves nothing; and trust is a thing that must grow, from actions, across the
days."
"Water it, then,"
said Falk, "and I hope it grows."
Later, in the long night and silence of the
cavern, he
63
roused from sleep
to see her sitting hunched by the embers, her tawny head bowed on her knees. He spoke her name.
"I'm cold," she said. "There's no warmth left . .
."
"Come
over to me." He spoke sleepily, smiling. She did not answer, but presently
she came to him across the red-lit darkness, naked except for the pale jade
stone between her breasts. She was slight, and shaking with the cold. In his
mind which was in certain aspects that of a very young
man he had resolved not to touch her, who had endured so much from the savages;
but she murmured to him, "Make me warm, let me have solace." And he blazed up like fire in the wind, all resolution swept away by her presence and her utter compliance. She lay
all night in his arms, by the ashes of the fire.
Three
more days and nights in the cavern, while the blizzard renewed and spent itself overhead, Falk and Estrel
passed in sleep and lovemaking. She was always the same, yielding, acquiescent.
He, having only the memory of the pleasant and joyful love he had shared with
Parth, was bewildered by the
insatiability and violence of the desire Estrel roused in him. Often the
thought of Parth came to him accompanied by a vivid image, the memory of a
spring of clear, quick
water that rose among rocks
in a shadowy place in the forest near the Clearing. But no memory
quenched this thirst,
and again he would seek
satisfaction in Estrel's fathomless submissiveness and find, at least,
exhaustion. Once it all turned to uncomprehended anger. He accused her:
"You only
take me because you think
you have to, that I'd have raped you
otherwise."
"And you would
not?"
"Nol"
he said, believing it. "I don't want you to serve me, to obey me— Isn't it warmth, human warmth, we both want?"
"Yes," she
whispered.
He would not come near her for a while; he resolved he would not touch
her again. He went off by himself with his lightgun to explore the strange
place they were in. After several hundred paces the cavern narrowed, becoming a high, wide, level tunnel. Black and still, it led him on perfectly Straight for a long time, then turned without narrowing or branching and around
the dark turning went on and on. His steps echoed dully. Nothing caught any brightness
or
64
cast any shadow from his light. He walked till he
was weary and hungry, then turned. It was all the
same, leading nowhere. He came back to Estrel, to the endless promise and
unfnlfillment of her embrace.
The
storm was over. A night's rain had laid the black earth bare, and the last
hollowed drifts of snow dripped and sparkled. Falk stood at the top of the
stairway, sunlight on his hair, wind fresh on his face and in his lungs. He
felt like a mole done hibernating, like a rat come out of a hole. "Let's
go," he called to EstreL and went back down to the cavern only to help her
pack up quickly and clear out.
He had asked her if she knew where her people
were, and she had answered, "Probably far ahead in the west, by now."
"Did they know you were crossing Basnasska territory alone?"
"Alone? It's only in fairytales from the Time of the Cities that
women ever go anywhere alone. A man was with me. The Basnasska killed
hinx" Her delicate face was set, unex-pressive.
Falk
began to explain to himself, then, her curious passivity, the want of response
that had seemed almost a betrayal of his strong feeling. She had borne too much
and could no longer respond. Who was the companion the Basnasska had killed? It
was none of Falk's business to know, until she wanted to tell him. But his
anger was gone and from that time on he treated Estrel with confidence and with
tenderness.
"Can I help you look
for your people?"
She said softly, "You are a kind man, Falk. But they will be far
ahead, and I cannot comb all the Western Plains . . ."
The lost, patient note in her voice moved
him. "Come west with me, then, till you get news of them. You know what
way I take."
It was still hard for him to say the name "Es Toch," which in
the tongue of the Forest was an obscenity, abominable. He was not yet used to
the way Estrel spoke of the Shing city as a mere place among other places.
She hesitated, but when he pressed her she agreed to come with him. That
pleased him, because of his desire for her and his pity for her, because of the
loneliness he had known and did not wish to know again. They set off to-
65 gether through the cold sunshine and the wind. Falk's heart was light at being outside, at
being free, at going on. Today the end of the journey did not matter. The day
was bright, the broad bright clouds sailed overhead, the
way itself was its end. He went on, the gentle, docile, unwearying woman
walking by his side.
V
They
crossed the
Great Plains on foot—which is soon said, but was not soon or easily done. The
days were longer than the nights and the winds of spring were softening and
growing mild when they first saw, even from afar, their goal: the barrier,
paled by snow and distance, the wall across the continent from north to south.
Falk stood still then, gazing at the Mountains.
"High in the mountains lies Es Toch," Estrel said, gazing with him.
"There I hope we each shall find what we seek."
"I often fear it more than I hope it . .
. Yet I'm glad to have seen the mountains."
"We should go on from here."
"Ill
ask the Prince if he is willing that we go
tomorrow." But before leaving her he turned and looked eastward at the
desert land beyond the Prince's gardens a while, as if looking back across all
the way he and she had come together.
He
knew still better now how empty and mysterious a world men inhabited in these later days of their
history. For days on end he and his companion had gone and never seen one trace
of human presence.
Early
in their journey they had gone cautiously, through the territories of the
Samsit and other Cattle-Hunter nations, which Estrel knew to be as predatory as
the Basnasska. Then, coming to more arid country, they were forced to keep to
ways which others had used before, in order to find water; still, when there
were signs of people having recently passed, or living nearby, Estrel kept a
sharp lookout, and sometimes changed their course to avoid even the risk of
being seen. She had a general, and in places a remarkably specific, knowledge
of the vast area they were crossing; and sometimes when the terrain worsened
and they were in doubt
66
which direction
to take,
she would
say, "Wait till dawn," and going a little away
would pray a minute to
her amulet,
then come back, roll up in
her sleepingbag
and sleep
serenely: and the way she chose
at dawn
was always
the right
one. "Wanderer's instinct," she said when Falk
admired her guessing. "Anyway, so long as we
keep near water and far
from human beings, we are safe."
But once, many days west of
the cavem,
following the curve of a deep
stream-valley they came so abrupdy
upon a settlement that the guards
of the
place were around them before they could run. Heavy
rain had hidden any sight
or sound of the
place before they reached it.
When the people offered no violence
and proved
willing to take them in for
a day
or two,
Falk was glad of it,
for walking
and camping in that rain had
been a miserable business.
This tribe or people called themselves
the Bee-Keepers.
A strange lot, literate and laser-armed,
all clothed
alike, men and women, in long
shifts of yellow wintercloth marked with a brown cross
on the
breast, they were hospitable and uncommunicative. They
gave the travelers beds in
their barrack-houses, long, low,
flimsy buildings of wood and
clay, and plentiful food at their
common table; but they spoke
so little, to the strangers and
among themselves, that they seemed almost a community of
the dumb.
"They're swom to silence. They have
vows and oaths and rites,
no one
knows what it's all about," Estrel said, with the
calm uninterested disdain which
she seemed
to feel
for most
kinds of men. The Wanderers must be proud people,
Falk thought But
the Bee-Keepers
went her scorn one better:
they never spoke to her
at all. They would
talk to Falk, "Does your she
want a pair of our shoes?"
—as if
she were
his horse
and they
had noticed
she wanted shoeing. Their
own women
used male names, and were addressed
and referred
to as
men. Grave girls, with clear eyes and silent lips,
they lived and worked as
men among the equally grave and
sober youths and men. Few
of the Bee-Keepers were over forty
and none
were under twelve. It was a
strange community, like the winter
barracks of some army encamped here
in the
midst of utter solitude in the truce of some
unexplained war; strange, sad, and
achnirable. The order and
frugality of their living reminded
Falk of his Forest
home, and the sense of
a hidden
but flawless, integral dedication was curiously
restful to him.
67
They were so sure, these beautiful sexless
warriors, though what they were so sure of they never told the stranger.
"They
recruit by breeding captured savage women like sows, and bringing up the brats
in groups. They worship something called the Dead Cod, and placate him with
sacrifice—murder. They are nothing but the vestige of some ancient
superstition," Estrel said, when Falk had said something in favor of the
Bee-Keepers to her. For all her sub-missiveness she apparently resented being
treated as a creature of a lower species. Arrogance in one so passive both
touched and entertained Falk, and he teased her a little:
"Well, I've seen you at nightfall
mumbling to your amulet. Religions differ. . . ."
"Indeed they do,"
she said, but she looked subdued.
"Who are they armed
against, I wonder?"
"Their Enemy, no doubt. As if they could fight the Shing. As if the
Shing need bother to fight theml"
"You want to go on,
don't you?"
"Yes. I don't trust these people. They
keep too much hidden."
That evening he went to take his leave of the head of the community, a
gray-eyed man called Hiardan, younger perhaps than himself. Hiardan received
his thanks laconically, and then said in the plain, measured way the
Bee-Keepers had, "I think you have spoken only truth to us. For this I thank you. We would have welcomed you more
freely and spoken to you of things known to us, if you had come alone."
Falk hesitated before he answered. "I am
sorry for that But I would not have got this far but
for my guide and friend. And . . . you live here all together, Master Hiardan.
Have you ever been alone?"
"Seldom,"
said the other. "Solitude is soul's death: man is mankind. So our saying
goes. But also we say, do not put your trust in any but brother and hive-twin,
known since infancy. That is our rule. It is the only safe one."
"But I have no kinsmen, and no safety,
Master," Falk said, and bowing soldierly in the Bee-Keepers' fashion, he
took his leave, and next morning at daybreak went on westward with Estrel.
From
time to time as they went they saw other settlements or encampments, none
large, all wide-scattered—five or six of them perhaps in three or four hundred
miles. At
68
some of these Falk left to himself would have
stopped. He was armed, and they looked harmless: a couple of nomad tents by an
ice-rimmed creek, or a little solitary herdboy on a great hillside watching the
half-wild red oxen, or, away off across the rolling land, a mere feather of
bluish smoke beneath the illimitable gray sky. He had left the Forest to seek,
as it were, some news of himself, some hint of what he was or guide towards
what he had been in the years he could not remember; how was he to learn if he
dared not risk asking? But Estrel was afraid to stop even at the tiniest and
poorest of these prairie settlements. "They do not like Wanderers," she said, "nor any strangers. Those
that live so much alone are full of fear. In their fear they would take us in
and give us food and shelter. But then in the night they would come and bind
and kill us. You cannot go to them, Falk"— and she glanced at his
eyes—"and tell them I am your fellow-man. . . . They know we are here; they watch. If they see us move on tomorrow
they won't trouble us. But if we don't move on, or if we try to go to them,
they'll fear us. It is fear that kills."
Windburned and travelweary, his hood pushed
back so the keen, glowing wind from the red west stirred his hair, Falk sat,
arms across his knees, near their campfire in the lee of a knobbed hilL
"True enough," he said, though he spoke wistfully, his gaze on that
far-off wisp of smoke.
"Perhaps that's the reason why the Shing loll no one." Estrel
knew his mood and was trying to hearten him, to change his thoughts.
"Why's that?" he asked, aware of
her intent, but unresponsive.
"Because they are not
afraid."
"Maybe." She had got him to thinking, though not very
cheerfully. Eventually he said, "Well, since it seems I must go straight
to them to ask my questions, if they kill me I'll have the satisfaction of
knowing that I frightened them. . . ."
Estrel shook her head.
"They will not They do not kill."
"Not even cockroaches?" he
inquired, venting the ill-temper of his weariness on her. "What do they do
with cockroaches, in their City—disinfect them and set them free
again, like the Razes you told me about?"
"I don't know," Estrel said; she
always took his questions
69
seriously. "But their law is reverence for life,
and they do keep the law."
"They don't revere human life. Why
should they?—they're not human."
"But that is why their rule is reverence for all life—isn't it? And
I was taught that there have been no wars on Earth or among the worlds since
the Shing came. It is humans that murder one another!"
"There
are no humans that could do to me what the Shing did. I honor life, I honor it
because it's a much more difficult and uncertain matter than death; and the
most difficult and uncertain quality of all is intelligence. The Shing kept
their law and let me live, but they killed my intelligence. Is that not murder?
They killed the man I was, the child I had been. To play with a man's mind so,
is that reverence? Their law is a lie, and their reverence is mockery."
Abashed
by his anger, Estrel knelt by the fire cutting up and skewering a rabbit he had
shot. The dusty reddish hair curled close to her bowed head; her face was
patient and remote. As ever, she drew him to her by compunction and desire.
Close as .they were, yet he never understood her; were
all women so? She was like a lost room in a great house, like a carven box to
which he did not have the key. She kept nothing from him and yet her secrecy
remained, untouched.
Enormous
evening darkened over rain-drenched miles of earth and grass. The little flames
of their fire burned red-gold in the clear blue dusk.
"It's ready, Falk," said the soft voice.
He
rose and came to her beside the fire. "My friend, my love," he said,
taking her hand a moment. They sat down side by side and shared their meat, and
later their sleep.
As they went farther west the prairies began to grow dryer, the air
clearer. Estrel guided them southward for several days in order to avoid an
area which she said was, or had been, the territory of
a very wild nomad people, the Horsemen. Falk trusted her judgment, having no
wish to repeat his experience with the Basnasska. On the fifth and sixth day of
this southward course they crossed through a hilly region and came into dry,
high terrain, flat and treeless, forever windswept. The gullies filled with
torrents during
70
the rain, and next day were dry again. In summer
this must be semidesert; even in spring it was very dreary.
As they went on they twice passed ancient ruins, mere mounds and
hummocks, but aligned in the spacious geometry of streets and squares.
Fragments of pottery, flecks of colored glass and plastic were thick in the
spongy ground around these places. It had been two or three thousand years,
perhaps, since they had been inhabited. This vast steppe-land, good only for
cattle-grazing, had never been resettled after the diaspora to the stars, the
date of which in the fragmentary and falsified records left to men was not
definitely known.
"Strange
to think," Falk said as they skirted the second of these long-buried
towns, "that there were children playing here and . . . women hanging out
the washing ... so long ago. In another age. Farther away from us than
the worlds around a distant star."
"The Age of Cities," Estrel said,
"the Age of War. ... I never heard tell of these places, from any of my people. We may
have come too far south, and be heading for the Deserts of the South."
So
they changed course, going west and a little north, and the next morning came
to a big river, orange and turbulent, not deep but dangerous to cross, though
they spent the whole day seeking a ford.
On the western side, the country was more arid than ever. They had
filled their flasks at the river, and as water had been a problem by excess
rather than default, Falk thought little about it. The sky was clear now, and
the sun shone all day; for the first time in hundreds of miles they did not
have to resist the cold wind as they walked, and could sleep dry and warm. Spring
came quick and radiant to the dry land; the morning star burned above the dawn
and wild-flowers bloomed under their steps. But they did not come to any stream
or spring for three days after crossing the river.
In their struggle through the flood Estrel had taken some kind of chill.
She said nothing about it, but she did not keep up her untiring pace, and her
face began to look wan. Then dysentery attacked her. They made camp early. As
she lay beside their brushwood fire in the evening she began to cry, a couple
of dry sobs only, but that was much for one who kept emotion so locked within
herself.
71
Uneasy, Falk tried to comfort her, taking her hands; she was hot with
fever.
"Don't
touch me," she said. "Don't, don't. I lost it, I lost it, what shall I do?"
And
he saw then that the cord and amulet of pale jade were gone from her neck.
"I must have lost it crossing the
river," she said controlling herself, letting him take her hand.
"Why didn't you tell
me—"
"What good?"
He
had no answer to that. She was quiet again, but he felt her repressed, feverish
anxiety. She grew worse in the night and by morning was very ill. She could not
eat, and though tormented by thirst could not stomach the rabbit-blood which
was all he could offer her to drink. He made her as comfortable as he could and
then taking their empty flasks set off to find water.
Mile
after mile of wiry, flower-speckled grass and clumped scrub stretched off,
slightly rolling, to the bright hazy edge of the sky. The sun shone very warm;
desert larks went up singing from the earth. Falk went at a fast steady pace,
confident at first, then dogged, quartering out a long sweep north and east of
their camp. Last week's rains had already soaked deep into this soil, and there
were no streams. There was no water. He must go on and seek west of the camp.
Circling back from the east he was looking out anxiously for the camp when,
from a long low rise, he saw something miles off to westward, a smudge, a dark
blur that might be trees. A moment later he spotted the nearer smoke of the
campfire, and set off towards it at a jogging run, though he was tired, and the
low sun hammered its light in his eyes, and his mouth was dry as chalk.
Estrel had kept the fire smoldering to guide
him back. She lay by it in her worn-out sleepingbag. She did not lift her head
when he came to her.
"There are trees not too far to the west
of here; there may be water. I went the wrong way this morning," he said,
getting their things together and slipping on his pack. He had to help Estrel
get to her feet; he took her arm and they set off. Bent, with a blind look on
her face, she struggled along beside him for a mile and then for another mile.
They came
72
up one of the long swells of land.
"Therel" Falk said; "there —see it? It's
trees, all right—there must be water there."
But Estrel had dropped to her knees, then lain down on her side in the grass, doubled up on her
pain, her eyes shut. She could not walk farther.
"It's
two or three miles at most, I think. Ill make a
smudge-fire here, and you can rest; 111 go
fill the flasks and come back— I'm sure there's water there, and it won't take
long." She lay still while he gathered all the scrub-wood he could and
made a little fire and heaped up more of the green wood where she could put it
on the fire. "Ill be back soon," he said,
and started away. At that she sat up, white and shivering, and cried out,
"Nol don't leave mel You mustn't leave me
alone—you mustn't go—"
There
was no reasoning with her. She was sick and frightened beyond the reach of
reason. Falk could not leave her there, with the night coming; he might have,
but it did not seem to him that he could. He pulled her up, her arm over his
shoulder, half pulling and half carrying her, and went on.
On
the next rise he came in sight of the trees again, seeming no nearer. The sun
was setting away off ahead of them in a golden haze over the ocean of land. He
was carrying Estrel now, and every few minutes he had to stop and lay his
burden down and drop down beside her to get breath and strength. It seemed to
him that if he only had a little water, just enough to wet his mouth, it would
not be so hard.
"There's
a house," he whispered to her, his voice dry and whistling. Then again,
"It's a house, among the trees. Not much farther. . . ." This time
she heard him, and twisted her body feebly and struggled against him, moaning, "Don't go there. No, don't go there. Not to the houses.
Ramarren mustn't go to the houses. Falk—" She took to crying out weakly in
a tongue he did not know, as if crying for help. He plodded on, bent down under
her weight.
Through
the late dusk fight shone out sudden and golden in his eyes: light shining
through high windows, behind high dark trees.
A harsh, howling noise rose up, in the
direction of the light, and grew louder, coming closer to him. He struggled on,
then stopped, seeing shadows running at him out of the
dusk, making that howling, coughing clamor. Heavy shadow-shapes as high as his
waist encircled him, lunging and snap-
73
ping at him where he stood supporting Estrel's
unconscious weight. He could not draw his gun and dared not move. The lights of
the high windows shone serenely, only a few hundred yards away. He shouted,
"Help usl Help!" but his voice was only a croaking whisper.
Other voices spoke aloud, calling sharply from a distance. The dark
shadow-beasts withdrew, waiting. People came to him where, still holding Estrel
against him, he had dropped to his knees. "Take the woman," a man's voice said; another said clearly, "What have we here?—a new
pair of toolmen?" They commanded him to get up, but he resisted,
whispering, "Don't hurt her—she's sick—"
"Come
on, then!" Rough and expeditious hands forced him to obey. He let them
take Estrel from him. He was so dizzy with fatigue that he made no sense of
what happened to him and where he was until a good while had passed. They gave
him his fill of
cool water, that was all he knew, all that mattered.
He was sitting down. Somebody whose speech he could not understand was
trying to get him to drink a glassful of some liquid. He took the glass and
drank. It was stinging stuff, strongly scented with juniper. A glass—a litde glass of slightly clouded green: he saw that clearly,
first. He had not drunk from a glass since be bad left Zove's House. He shook
his head, feeling the volatile liquor clear his throat and brain, and looked
up.
He was in a room, a very large room. A long
expanse of polished stone floor vaguely mirrored the farther wall on which or
in which a great disk of light glowed soft yellow.
Radiant warmth from the disk was palpable on his lifted face. Halfway between
him and the sunlike circle of light a tall,
massive chair stood on the bare floor; beside it, un-moving, silhouetted, a dark beast crouched.
"What are you?"
He saw the angle of nose and jaw, the black hand
on the arm of the chair. The voice was deep, and hard
as stone. The words were not in the Galaktika he had now spoken for so long but
in his own tongue, the Forest speech, though a different dialect of it. He
answered slowly with the truth.
"I do not know what I am. My
self-knowledge was taken from me six years ago. In a Forest House I learned the
way of man. I go to Es Toch to try to learn my name and nature."
74
"You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth? Tools and
fools run over weary Earth on many errands, but that beats all for folly or a lie. What brought you to my Kingdom?"
"My companion—"
"Will
you tell me that she brought you here?" "She fell sick; I was seeking
water. Is she—" "Hold your tongue. I am glad you did not say she
brought you here. Do you know this place?" "No."
"This is the Kansas Enclave. I am its
master. I am its lord, its Prince and God. I am in charge of what happens here.
Here we play one of the great games. King of the Castie it's called. The rules
are very old, and are the only laws that bind me. I make the rest."
The soft tame sun glowed from floor to
ceiling and from wall to wall behind the speaker as he rose from his chair.
Overhead, far up, dark vaults and beams held the unflicker-ing golden fight
reflected among shadows. The radiance silhouetted a hawk nose, a high slanting
forehead, a tall, powerful, thin frame, majestic in
posture, abrupt in motion. As Falk moved a little the mythological beast beside
the throne stretched and snarled. The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized
his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call
himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad.
"You have not learned
your name, then?"
"They called me Falk,
those who took me in."
"To
go in search of his true name: what better way has a man ever gone? No wonder it brought you past
my gate. I take you as a Player of the Game," said the Prince of Kansas.
"Not every night does a man with eyes like yellow jewels come begging at
my door. To refuse him would be cautious and ungracious, and what is royalty
but risk and grace? They called you Falk, but I do not. In the game you are the
Opalstone. You are free to move. Griffon, be stull"
"Prince, my
companion—"
"—is
a Shing or a tool or a woman: what do you keep her for? Be still, man; don't be
so quick to answer kings. I know what you keep her for. But she has no name and
does not play in the game. My cowboys' women are looking after her, and I will
not speak of her again." The Prince was approach-
75
ing him, striding slowly across the bare floor
as he spoke. "My companion's name is Griffon. Did you ever hear in the old
Canons and Legends of the animal called dog? Griffon is a dog. As you see, he
has little in common with the yellow yappers that run the plains, though they
are kin. His breed is extinct, like royalty. Opalstone, what do you most wish
for?"
The Prince asked this with shrewd, abrupt
geniality, looking into Falk's face. Tired and confused and bent on speaking
truth, Falk answered: "To go home."
"To
go home. . . ." The Prince of Kansas was black as his silhouette or his
shadow, an old, jetblack man seven feet tall with a face like a swordblade. "To go
home. ..." He had moved
away a little to study the long table near Falk's chair. All the top of the
table, Falk now saw, was sunk several inches into a frame, and contained a network of gold and silver wires upon which beads were strung, so
pierced that they could slip from wire to wire and, at certain points, from
level to level. There were hundreds of beads, from the size of a baby's fist to
the size of an apple seed, made of clay and rock and wood and metal and bone
and plastic and glass and amethyst, agate, topaz, turquoise, opal, amber,
beryl, crystal, garnet, emerald, diamond. It was a patterning-frame, such as Zove and Buckeye and others of the House possessed.
Thought to have come originally from the great culture of Davenant, though it
was now very ancient on Earth, the thing was a fortune-teller, a computer, an implement of mystical discipline, a toy. In Falk's short second life he had not had time to learn much about
patterning-frames. Buckeye had once remarked that it took forty or fifty years
to get handy with one; and hers, handed down from old in her family, had been
only ten inches square, with twenty or thirty beads....
A crystal prism struck an iron sphere with a clear, tiny clink.
Turquoise shot to the left and a double link of polished bone set with garnets
looped off to the right and down, while a fire-opal blazed for a moment
in the dead center of the frame. Black, lean, strong hands flashed over the
wires, playing with the jewels of life and death. "So," said the Prince,
"you want to go home. But lookl Can you read the frame? Vastness.
Ebony and diamond and crystal, all the jewels of fire: and the Opalstone among
them, going on, going out.
76
Farther than the King's House, farther than the Wall-window Prison,
farther than the hills and hollows of Kopemik, the stone flies among the stars.
Will you break the frame, time's frame? See there!"
The slide and flicker of the bright beads
blurred in Falk's eyes. He held to the edge of the great patteming-frame and
whispered, "I cannot read it. . . ."
"This
is the game you play, Opalstone, whether you can read it or not. Good, very
good. My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of
starlight. Opal-stone, when I come asking water from your wells and shelter
within your walls, will you let me in? It will be a colder night than this. . .
. And a long time from now! You come from very, very long ago. I am old but you
are much older; you should have died a century ago. Will you remember a century
from now that in the desert you met a King? Go on, go
on, I told you you are free to move here. There are people to serve you if you
need them."
Falk
found his way across the long room to a curtained portal. Outside it in an
anteroom a boy waited; he summoned others. Without surprise or servility,
deferent only in that they waited for Falk to speak first, they provided him a
bath, a change of clothing, supper, and a clean bed in a quiet room.
Thirteen days in all he lived in the Great House of the Enclave of
Kansas, while the last light snow and the scattered rains of spring drove
across the desert lands beyond the Prince's gardens. Estrel, recovering, was
kept in one of the many lesser houses that clustered behind the great one. He
was free to be with her when he chose . . . free to do anything he chose. The
Prince ruled his domain absolutely, but in no way was his rule enforced: rather
it was accepted as an honor; his people chose to serve him, perhaps because
they found, in thus affirming the innate and essential grandeur of one person,
that they reaffirmed their own quality as men. There were not more than two
hundred of them, cowboys, gardeners, makers and menders, their wives and
children. It was a very little kingdom. Yet to Falk, after a few days, there
was no doubt that had there been no subjects at all, had he lived there quite
alone, the Prince of Kansas would have been no more and no less a prince. It
was, again, a matter of quality.
77
This curious reality, this singular validity of the Prince's domain, so
fascinated and absorbed him that for days he scarcely thought of the world
outside, that scattered, violent, incoherent world he had been traveling
through so long. But talking on the thirteenth day with Estrel and having
spoken of going, he began to wonder at the relation of the Enclave with all the
rest, and said, "I thought the Shing suffered no lordship among men. Why
should they let him guard his boundaries here, calling himself Prince and
King?"
"Why
should they not let him rave? This Enclave of Kansas is a great territory, but
barren and without people. Why should the Lords of Es Toch interfere with him?
I suppose to them he is like a silly child, boasting and babbling.
"Is he that to
you?"
"Well—did you see when the ship came
over, yester-day?"
"Yes, I saw."
An aircar—the first Falk had ever seen, though he had recognized its
throbbing drone—had crossed directly over the house, up very high so that it
was in sight for some minutes. The people of the Prince's household had run out
into the gardens beating pans and clappers, the dogs and children had howled,
the Prince on an upper balcony had solemnly fired off a series of deafening
firecrackers, until the ship had vanished in the murky west.
"They are as foolish as the Basnasska,
and the old man is mad."
Though the Prince would not see her, his people had been very kind to
her; the undertone of bitterness in her soft voice surprised Falk. "The
Basnasska have forgotten the old way of man," he said; "these people
maybe remember it too well." He laughed. "Anyway, the ship did go on
over."
"Not because they scared it away with
firecrackers, Falk," she said seriously, as if trying to warn him of
something.
He
looked at her a moment. She evidently saw nothing of the lunatic, poetic
dignity of those firecrackers, which ennobled even a Shing aircar with the
quality of a solar eclipse. In the shadow of total calamity why not set off a
firecracker? But since her illness and the loss of her jade talis-
78
man she had been anxious and joyless, and the
sojourn here which pleased Falk so was a trial to her. It was time they left.
"I shall go speak to the Prince of our going," he told her gendy, and
leaving her there under the willows, now beaded yellowgreen with leaf-buds, he
walked up through the gardens to the great house. Five of the long-legged,
heavy-shouldered black dogs trotted along with him, an honor guard he would
miss when he left this place.
The
Prince of Kansas was in his throne-room, reading. The disk that covered the
east wall of the room by day shone cool mottled silver, a domestic moon; only
at night did it glow with soft solar warmth and light. The throne, of polished
petrified wood from the southern deserts, stood in front of it. Only on the
first night had Falk seen the Prince seated on the throne. He sat now in one of
the chairs near the patterning-frame, and at his back the twenty-foot-high
windows looking to the west were uncurtained. There the far, dark mountains
stood, tipped with ice.
The
Prince raised his swordblade face and heard what Falk had to say. Instead of
answering he touched the book he had been reading, not one of the beautiful
decorated projector-scrolls of bis extraordinary
library but a little handwritten book of bound paper. "Do you know this
Canon?"
Falk looked where he
pointed and saw the verse,
What men fear
must be feared.
O desolationl
It has not yet
not yet reached its limit!
"I
know it, Prince. I set out on this journey of mine with it in my pack. But I
cannot read the page to the left, in your copy."
"Those are the symbols it was first written in, five or six
thousand years ago: the tongue of the Yellow Emperor— my ancestor. You lost
yours along the way? Take this one, then. But you'll lose it too, I expect; in
following the Way the way is lost. O desolationl Why
do you always speak the truth, Opalstone?"
"I'm not sure." In fact, though
Falk had gradually deter-
79
mined that
he would
not lie
no matter
whom he spoke to or how
chancy the truth might seem,
he did
not know
why he had come to this
decision. To—to use the enemy's
weapon is to play
the enemy's
game...."
"Oh, they won their game long
ago. —So you're off? Go
on, then; no doubt
it's time. But I shall
keep your companion here a while."
"I told
her I
would help her find her
people, Prince." "Her people?" The
hard, shadowy face turned to
him. "What do you
take her for?" "She
is a
Wanderer."
"And I am a green walnut,
and you
a fish,
and those
mountains are made of
roasted sheepshit! Have it your
way. Speak the truth
and hear
the truth.
Gather the fruits of my flowery
orchards as you walk westward,
Opalstone, and drink the
milk of my thousand wells
in the
shade of giant femtrees. Do I
not rule
a pleasant
kingdom? Mirages and dust straight west to
the dark.
Is it
lust or loyalty that makes you hold to her?"
"We have
come a long
way together."
"Mistrust herl"
"She has
given me help, and hope;
we are
companions. There is trust
between us—how can I break
it?"
"Oh fool, oh desolationr said the
Prince of Kansas. "ITl give you ten
women to accompany you to the Place of
the Lie, with lutes and flutes
and tambourines
and contraceptive
pills. Ill give
you five
good friends armed with firecrackers.
I'll give you a dog—in
truth I will, a living
extinct dog, to be your true
companion. Do you know why
dogs died out? Because
they were loyaL because they
were trusting. Go alone, man!"
"I cannot."
"Go as
you please.
The game
here's done." The Prince rose, went to the throne
beneath the moon-circle, and seated
himself. He
never turned his head when
Falk tried to say farewell.
VI
With his lone memory
of a
lone peak to embody the
word "mountain," Falk had
imagined that as soon as
they reached
80
the mountains
they would have reached Es
Toch; he had not realized they
would have to clamber over
the roof-tree
of a continent. Range behind range
the mountains
rose; day after day the two
crept upward into the world
of the
heights, and still their
goal lay farther up and
farther on to the southwest. Among the forests and
torrents and the cloud-conversant slopes of snow and
granite there was every now
and then a little
camp or village along the
way. Often they could not avoid
these as there was but
one path
to take. They rode past on
their mules, the Prince's princely
gift at their going,
and were
not hindered.
Estrel said that the mountain people,
living here on the doorstep
of the
Shing, were a wary
lot who
would neither molest nor welcome
a stranger,
and were
best left alone.
Camping was a cold business, in April
in the
mountains, and the once
they stopped at a village was a welcome relief. It was
a tiny
place, four wooden houses by
a noisy
stream in a canyon
shadowed by great storm-wreathed peaks; but it had a
name, Besdio, and Estrel had
stayed there once years ago, she
told him, when she had
been a girl. The people of
Besdio, a couple of whom were light-skinned and tawny-haired like Estrel herself, spoke
with her briefly. They talked in
the language
which the Wanderers used; Falk had always spoken Calaktika
with Estrel and had not
learned this Western tongue.
Estrel explained, pointing east and west;
the mountain
people nodded coolly, studying Estrel carefully, glancing at Falk
only out of the corner
of their eyes. They asked few
questions, and gave food and
a night's shelter
ungrudgingly but with a cool, incurious manner that made
Falk vaguely uneasy.
The cowshed where they
were to sleep was warm,
however, with the live heat
of the
cattle and goats and poultry
crowded there in sighing,
odorous, peaceable companionship.
While Estrel talked a little longer with their
hosts in the main hut, Falk
betook himself to the cowshed
and made
himself at home. In
the hayloft
above the stalls he made
a luxurious double bed of hay
and spread
their bedrolls on it When Estrel
came he was already half
asleep, but he roused himself enough
to remark,
"I'm glad you came .
. .
I smell something kept
hidden here, but I don't
know what."
"It's not
all I
smell."
This was
as close
as Estrel
had ever
come to making a
81
joke,
and Falk looked at her with a bit of surprise. "You are happy to be
getting close to the City, aren't you?" he asked. "I wish I
were."
"Why
shouldn't I be? There I hope to find my kinsfolk; if I do not, the Lords will
help me. And there you will find what you seek too, and be restored into your
heritage."
"My
heritage? I
thought you thought me a Raze."
"You? Never! Surely you don't believe, Falk, that
it was the Shing that meddled with your mind? You said that once, down on the
plains, and I did not understand you then. How could you think yourself a Raze,
or any common man? You are not Earthbom!"
Seldom had she spoken so positively. What she
said heartened him, concurring with his own hope, but her saying it puzzled him
a little, for she had been silent and troubled for a long time now. Then he saw
something swing from a leather cord around her neck: "They gave you an
amulet." That was the source of her hopefulness.
"Yes,"
she said, looking down at the pendant with satisfaction. "We are of the
same faith. Now all will go well for us."
He smiled a little at her superstition, but was glad it gave her comfort. As he went
to sleep he knew she was awake, lying looking into the darkness full of the
stink and the gende breath and presence of the animals. When the cock crowed
before daylight he half-roused and heard her whispering prayers to her amulet
in the tongue he did not know.
They went on, taking a path
that wound south of the stormy peaks. One great mountain bulwark remained to
cross, and for four days they climbed, till the air grew thin and icy, the sky
dark blue, and the sun of April shone dazzling on the fleecy backs of clouds
that grazed the meadows far beneath their way. Then, the summit of the pass
attained, the sky darkened and snow fell on the naked rocks and blanked out the
great bare slopes of red and gray. There was a hut for wayfarers in the pass,
and they and their mules huddled in it till the snow stopped and they could
begin the descent.
"Now the way is easy," Estrel said, turning to look at Falk
over her mule's jogging rump and his mule's nodding
82
ears; and
he smiled,
but there
was a
dread in him that only
grew as they went
on and
down, towards Es Toch.
Closer and closer they came, and
the path
widened into a road; they saw
huts, farms, houses. They saw
few people,
for it was cold and rainy,
keeping people indoors under a
roof. The two wayfarers
jogged on down the lonely
road through the rain. The third
morning from the summit dawned bright, and after they
had ridden
a couple
of hours Falk halted his mule,
looking questioningly at Estrel.
"What is
it, Falk?"
"We have
come-this is Es Toch, isn't
it?"
The land had leveled out all
about them, though distant peaks
closed the horizon all around,
and the
pastures and plowlands they had been
riding through had given way
to houses, houses and
still more houses. There were
huts, cabins, shanties, tenements, inns, shops
where goods were made and bartered
for, children everywhere, people on
the highway, people on side-roads, people afoot, on horses
and mules and sliders, coming and
going: it was crowded yet
scanty, slack and busy,
dirty, dreary and vivid under
the bright dark sky of morning
in the
mountains.
"It is
a mile
or more
yet to
Es Toch."
"Then what
is this
city?"
"This is
the outskirts
of the
city."
Falk stared about him, dismayed and excited. The
road he had followed so far
from the house in the
Eastern Forest had become a street,
leading only too quickly to
its end.
As they sat their
mules in the middle of
the street
people glanced at them,
but none
stayed and none spoke. The
women kept their faces
averted. Only some of the
ragged children stared, or
pointed shouting and then ran,
vanishing up a filth-encumbered alley or
behind a shack. It was
not what Falk had expected; yet
what had he expected? "I
did not know there were so
many people in the world,"
he said at last "They swarm about the Shing
like flies on dung."
"Fly-maggots flourish
in dung,"
Estrel said dryly. Then, glancing at him, she reached
across and put her hand
lightly on his. "These are the
outcasts and the hangers-on, the rabble outside the walls.
Let us
go on
to the
city, the true City. We have
come a long way to
see it.
. .
."
They rode
on; and
soon they saw, jutting up
over the
83 shanty roofs, the walls of windowless green towers, bright in the
sunlight.
Falk's heart beat hard; and he noticed that
Estrel spoke a moment to the amulet she had been given in Besdio.
"We
cannot ride the mules inside the city," she said. "We can leave them
here." They stopped at a ramshackle public stable; Estrel talked
persuasively a while in the Western tongue with the man who kept the place, and
when Falk asked what she had been asking him she said, "To keep our mules
as surety."
"Surety?"
"If we don't pay for their keep, he will
keep them. You have no money, have you?"
"No,"
Falk said humbly. Not only did he have no money, he had never seen money; and
though Calaktika had a word
for the thing, his Forest dialect did not.
The stable was the last building on the edge
of a field of nibble and refuse which separated the shantytown from a high,
long wall of granite blocks. There was one entrance to Es Toch for people on
foot. Great conical pillars marked the gate. On the left-hand pillar an
inscription in Galaktika was carved: Reverence
for Life. On the right was a longer sentence in
characters Falk had never seen. There was no traffic through the gate, and no
guard.
"The pillar of the Lie and the pillar of
the Secret," he said aloud as he walked between them, refusing to let himself be overawed; but then he entered Es Toch, and saw
it, and stood still saying nothing.
The
City of the Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon, a tremendous
cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls striped with
green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel strip of a river in the shadowy depths. On the very
edges of the facing cliffs the towers of the city jutted up, hardly based on
earth at all, linked across the chasm by delicate bridge-spans. Towers,
roadways and bridges ceased and the wall closed the city off again just before a vertiginous bend of the canyon. Helicopters with diaphanous vanes
skimmed the abyss, and sliders flickered along the half-glimpsed streets and
slender bridges. The sun, still not far above the massive peaks to eastward,
seemed scarcely to cast shadows
84
here; the
great green towers shone as
if translucent
to the
light.
"Come," Estrel
said, a pace ahead of
him, her eyes shining. "There's nothing to fear here,
Falk."
He followed her. There
was no
one on
the street,
which descended between lower
buildings toward the cliff-edge towers. Once he glanced back
at the
gate, but he could no longer
see the
opening between the pillars.
"Where do
we go?"
"There's a place I know, a house where my people
come." She took his
arm, the first time she
had ever
done so in all the way
they had walked together, and
clinging to him kept her eyes
lowered as they came down
the long
zigzag street. Now to their
right the buildings loomed up
high as they neared
the city's
heart, and to the left,
without wall or parapet, the dizzy
gorge dropped away full of
shadows, a black gap
between the luminous perching towers.
"But if
we need
money here—"
"They'll look
after us."
People brightly and strangely
dressed passed them on sliders; the landing-ledges high up
the sheer-walled
buildings flickered with helicopters.
High over the gorge an
aircar droned, going up.
"Are these
all... Shing?"
"Some."
Unconsciously he
was keeping
his free
hand on his laser. Estrel without looking at him,
but smiling
a little,
said, "Do not use
your hghtgun here, Falk. You
came here to gain your memory,
not to
lose it."
"Where are
we going,
Estrel?"
"Here."
This? This
is a
palace.'*
The luminous
greenish wall towered up windowless,
featureless, into the sky. Before
them a square doorway stood
open.
They know
me here.
Don't be afraid. Come on
with me.
She clung to his arm. He
hesitated. Looking back up the street
he saw
several men, the first he
had seen
on foot, loitering towards them, watching
them. That scared him, and with
Estrel he entered the building,
passing through inner automatic portals
that slid apart at their
approach.
85
Just inside, possessed by a sense of
misjudgment, having made a hideous error, he stopped. "What is this place?
Estrel-"
It
was a high hall, full of a thick greenish light, dim as an underwater cave;
there were doorways and corridors, down which men approached,
hurrying towards him. Estrel had broken away from him. In panic he turned to
the doors behind him: they were shut now. They had no handles. Dim figures of
men broke into the halL running at him and shouting. He backed up against the
shut doors and reached for his laser. It was gone. It was in Estrel's hands. She stood behind the men as they surrounded Falk, and as he tried to break through them and was seized,
and fought and was beaten, he heard for a moment a sound he had never heard
before: her laugh.
A disagreeable sound rang in Falk's ears; a metallic taste filled his
mouth. His head swam when he raised it, and his eyes would not focus, and he
could not seem to move freely. Presendy he realized that he was waking from unconsciousness,
and thought he could not move because he had been hurt or drugged. Then he made
out that his wrists were shackled together on a short chain, his ankles
likewise. But the swimming in his head grew worse. There was a great voice
booming in his ears now, repeating the same thing over and over: ramarren-TamarTen-ramarren.
He struggled and cried out,
trying to get away from the booming voice which filled him with terror. Lights
flashed in his eyes, and through the sound roaring in his head he heard someone scream in his own voice, "I am not—"
When
he came to again everything was utterly still. His head ached, and still he
could not see very clearly; but there were no shackles on his arms and legs
now, if there ever had been any, and he knew he was being protected, sheltered,
looked after. They knew who he was and he was welcome. His own people were
coming for him, he was safe here, cherished, beloved, and all he need do now was rest and sleep, rest and sleep, while the soft, deep stillness
murmured tenderly in his head, marren-marren-marren. . . ,
He woke. It took a while, but he woke, and
managed to sit up. He had to bury his acutely aching head in his arms for a
while to get over the vertigo the movement
86
caused, and at first was aware only that he was
sitting on the floor of some room, a floor which seemed to be warm and
yielding, almost soft, like the flank of some great beast. Then he lifted his
head, and got his eyes into focus, and looked about him.
He
was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his dizziness for
a while. There was no furniture. Walls floor and "ceiling were all of the
same translucent stuff, which appeared soft and undulant like many thicknesses
of pale green veiling, but was tough and slick to the touch. Queer carvings and
crimpings and ridges forming ornate patterns all over the floor were, to the
exploring hand, nonexistent; they were eye-deceiving paintings, or lay beneath
a smooth transparent surface. The angles where walls met were thrown out of
true by optical-illusion devices of crosshatching and pseudo-parallels used as
decoration; to pull the comers into right angles took an effort of will, which
was perhaps an effort of self-deception, since they might, after all, not be
right angles. But none of this teasing subtlety of
decoration so disoriented Falk as the fact that the entire room was
translucent. Vaguely, with the effect of looking into a depth of very green
pond-water, underneath him another room was visible. Overhead was a patch of
light that might be the moon, blurred and greened by one or more intervening
ceilings. Through one wall of the room strings and patches of brightness were
fairly distinct, and he could make out the motion of the lights of helicopters
or aircars. Through the other three walls these outdoor lights were much
dimmer, blurred by the veilings of further walls, corridors, rooms. Shapes
moved in those other rooms. He could see them but there was no identifying
them: features, dress, color, size, all was blurred
away. A blot of shadow somewhere in the green depths suddenly rose and grew
less, greener, dimmer, fading into the maze of vagueness. Visibility
without discrimination, solitude without privacy. It was extraordinarily
beautiful, this masked shimmer of lights and shapes through inchoate planes of
green, and extraordinarily disturbing.
All
at once in a brighter patch on the near wall Falk caught a glimpse of movement.
He turned quickly and with a shock of fear saw something at last vivid,
distinct: a face,
87
a seamed, savage, staring face set with two
inhuman yellow eyes.
"A Shing," he whispered in blank
dread. The face mocked him, the terrible hps mouthing soundlessly A Shing, and he saw that it was the reflection of his
own face.
He got up stiffly and went to the mirror and passed his hand over it to
make sure. It was a mirror, half concealed by a molded frame painted to appear
flatter than it actually was.
He
turned from it at the sound of a voice. Across the room from him, not too clear
in the dim, even light from hidden sources, but solid enough, a figure stood.
There was no doorway visible, but a man had entered, and stood looking at him:
a very tall man, a white cape or cloak dropping from wide shoulders, white
hair, clear, dark, penetrating eyes. The man spoke; his voice was deep and
very gentle. "You are welcome here, Falk. We have long awaited you, long
guided and guarded you." The light was growing brighter in the room, a
clear, swelling radiance. The deep voice held a note of exaltation. "Put
away fear and be welcome among us, O Messenger. The dark road is behind you and
your feet are set upon the way that leads you home!" The brilliance grew
till it dazzled Falk's eyes; he had to blink and blink again, and when he looked
up, squinting, the man was gone.
There came unbidden into his mind words
spoken months ago by an old man in the Forest: The awful darkness of the bright lights of Es
Toch.
He would not be played with, drugged, deluded any longer. A fool he had
been to come here, and he would never get away alive; but he would not be
played with. He started forward to find the hidden doorway to follow the man. A
voice from the mirror said, "Wait a moment more, Falk. Illusions are not
always lies. You seek truth."
A
seam in the wall split and opened into a door; two figures entered. One, slight
and small, strode in; he wore breeches fitted with an ostentatious codpiece, a
jerkin, a close-fitting cap. The second, taller, was heavily robed and moved
mincingly, posing like a dancer; long, purplish-black hair streamed down to her
waist—his waist, it must be for the voice though very soft was deep. "We
axe being filmed, you know, Strella."
"I know," said the little man in
Estrel's voice. Neither of them so much as glanced at Falk; they behaved as if
they were alone. "Go on with what you were about to say, Kradgy."
"I was about to ask you why it took you so long."
"So long? You are unjust, my Lord. How could I track
him in the Forest east of Shorg?—it is utter wilderness. The stupid animals
were no help; all they do these days is babble the Law. When you finally
dropped me the man-finder I was two hundred miles north of him. When I finally
caught up he was heading straight into Basnasska territory. You know the
Council has them furnished with bom-birds and such so that they can thin out
the Wanderers and the Solia-pachim. So I had to join the filthy tribe. Have you
not heard my reports? I sent them in all along, till I lost my sender crossing
a river south of Kansas Enclave. And my mother in Besdio gave me another.
Surely they kept my reports on tape?"
"I
never listen to reports. In any case, it was all time and risk wasted, since
you did not in all these weeks succeed in teaching him not to fear us."
"Estrel," Falk said. "Estrell"
Grotesque and frail in her transvestite
clothes, Estrel did not turn, did not hear. She went on speaking to the robed
man. Choked with shame and anger Falk shouted her name,
then strode forward and seized her shoulder—and there was nothing there, a blur
of lights in the air, a flicker of color, fading.
The
door-slit in the wall still stood open, and through it Falk could see into the
next room. There stood the robed man and Estrel, their backs to him. He said
her name in a whisper, and she turned and looked at him. She looked into his
eyes without triumph and without shame, calmly, passively, detached and
uncaring, as she had looked at him all along.
"Why—why did you lie to me?" he said. "Why did you bring
me here?" He knew why; he knew what he was and always had been in Estrel's
eyes. It was not his intelligence that spoke, but his self-respect and his
loyalty, which could not endure or admit the truth in this first moment.
"I was sent to bring you here. You
wanted to come here."
89
He tried to pull himself together. Standing rigid, not moving towards
her, he asked, "Are you a Shing?"
"I
am," said the robed man, affably smiling. "I am a Shing. All Shing
are liars. Am I, then, a Shing lying to you, in which case of course I am not a
Shing, but a non-Shing, lying? Or is it a lie that all Shing lie? But I am a
Shing, truly; and truly I lie. Terrans and other animals have been known to tell lies also;
lizards change color, bugs mimic sticks and flounders lie by lying still,
looking pebbly or sandy depending on the bottom which underlies them. Strel-la,
this one is even stupider than the child."
"No, my Lord Kraidgy, he is very
intelligent," Estrel replied, in her soft, passive way. She spoke of Falk
as a human being speaks of an animal.
She had walked beside Falk, eaten with him,
slept with him. She had slept in his arms. . . . Falk stood watching her,
silent; and she and the tall one also stood silent, un-moving, as if awaiting a
signal from him to go on with their performance.
He could not feel rancor towards her. He felt
nothing towards her. She had turned to air, to a blur and flicker of light. His
feeling was all towards himself: he was sick, physically sick, with
humiliation.
Go alone, Opalstone, said the Prince of Kansas. Go alone, said Hiardan
the Bee-Keeper. Go alone, said the old Listener in the forest. Go alone, my
son, said Zove. How many others would have guided him aright, helped him on his
quest, armed him with knowledge, if he had come across
the prairies alone? How much might he have learned, if he had not trusted
Estrel's guidance and good faith?
Now
he knew nothing, except that he had been measure-lessly stupid, and that she
had lied. She had lied to him from the start, steadily, from the moment she
told him she was a Wanderer—no, from before that: from the mom-ment she had
first seen him and had pretended not to know who or what he was. She had known
all along, and had been sent to make sure he got to Es Toch; and to counteract,
perhaps, the influence those who hated the Shing had had and might have upon
his mind. But then why, he thought painfully, standing there in one room gazing
at her in another, why had she stopped lying, now?
90
"It does not matter what I say to you now," she said, as if
she had read his thoughts.
Possibly
she had. They had never used mindspeech; but if she was a Shing and had the
mental powers of the Shing, the extent of which was only a matter of rumor and
speculation among men, she might have been attuned to his thoughts all along,
all the weeks of their traveling. How could he tell? There was no use asking
her....
There
was a sound behind him. He turned, and saw two people standing at the other end
of the room, near the mirror. They wore black gowns and white hoods, and were
twice the height of ordinary men.
"You are too easily
fooled," said one giant.
"You must know you
have been fooled," said the other.
"You are half a man
only."
"Half a man cannot
know the whole truth."
"He who hates is
mocked and fooled."
"He who kills is razed
and tooled."
"Where do you come
from, Falk?"
"What are you, Falkr
"Where are you,
Falk?"
"Who are you,
Falk?"
Both giants raised their hoods, showing that
there was nothing inside but shadow, and backed into the wall, and through it,
and vanished.
Estrel
ran to him from the other room, flung her arms about him, pressing herself
against him, kissing him hungrily, desperately. "I love you,
I have loved you since I first saw you. Trust me, Falk, trust mel" Then
she was torn from him, wailing, "Trust mel" and was drawn away as if
pulled by some mighty, invisible force, as if blown by a great wind, whirled
about, blown through a slit doorway that closed silendy behind her, like a
mouth closing.
"You
realize," said the tall male in the other room, "that you are under
the influence of hallucinatory drugs." His whispering, precise voice held
an undertone of sarcasm and ennui. "Trust yourself least of all. Eh?"
He then lifted his long robes and urinated copiously; after which he wandered
out, rearranging his robes and smoothing his long flowing hair.
Falk stood watching the greenish floor of the
other room gradually absorb the urine till it was quite gone.
91
The sides of the door were very slowly
drawing together, closing the slit. It was the only way out of the room in
which he was trapped. He broke from his lethargy and ran through the slit
before it shut. The room in which Es-trel and the other one had stood was
exactly the same as the one he had left, perhaps a trifle smaller and dimmer. A
slit-door stood open in its far wall, but was closing very slowly. He hurried
across the room and through it, and into a third room which was exactly like
the others, perhaps a trifle smaller and dimmer. The slit in its far wall was
closing very slowly, and he hurried through it into another room, smaller and
dimmer than the last, and from it squeezed through
into another small, dim room, and from it crawled into a small dim mirror
ancTfell upwards, screaming in sick terror, towards the white, seamed, staring
moon.
He woke, feeling rested, vigorous, and
confused, in a comfortable
bed in a bright, windowless room. He sat up, and as if that had given a signal
two men came hurrying from behind a partition, big men with a staring, bovine
look to them. "Greetings Lord Agadl Greetings Lord Agadl" they said
one after the other, and then, "Come with us, please, come with us, please."
Falk stood up, stark naked, ready to fight—the only thing clear in his mind at
the moment was his fight and defeat in the entrance hall of the palace—but they
offered no violence. "Come on, please," they repeated antiphonally,
until he came with them. They led him, still naked, out of the room, up a long
blank corridor, through a mirror-walled hall, up a staircase that turned out
to be a ramp painted to look like stairs, through another corridor and up more
ramps, and finally into a spacious, furnished room with bluish-green walls,
one of which was glowing with sunlight. One of the men stopped outside the
room; the other entered with Falk. "There's clothes,
there's food, there's drink. Now you—now you eat, drink. Now you—now you ask
for need. All right?" He stared persistently but
without any particular interest at Falk.
There was a pitcher of water on the table,
and the first thing Falk did was drink his fill, for he was very thirsty. He
looked around the strange, pleasant room with its furniture of heavy,
glass-clear plastic and its windowless, translucent walls, and then studied
his guard or attendant with
92
curiosity. A big, blank-faced
man, with a gun strapped
to his belt. "What is the
Law?" he asked on impulse.
Obediendy and with no surprise the
big, staring fellow answered,
"Do not take life."
"But you
carry a gun."
"Oh, this gun, it makes you
all stiff,
not dead,"
said the guard, and laughed. The
modulations of his voice were
arbitrary, not connected with
the meaning
of the
words, and there was a slight
pause between the words and
the laugh. "Now you eat, drink,
get clean.
Here's good clothes. See, here's
clothes."
"Are you
a Raze?"
"No. I am a Captain of
the Bodyguard
of the
True Lords, and I key in
to the
Number Eight computer. Now you eat,
drink, get clean."
"I will
if you
leave the room."
A slight
pause. "Oh
yes, very well, Lord Agad,"
said the big man, and again
laughed as if he had
been tickled. Perhaps it tickled when
the computer
spoke through his brain. He withdrew.
Falk could see the vague
hulking shapes of the
two guards
through the inner wall of
the room; they waited one on
either side of the door
in the
corridor. He found the
washroom and washed up. Clean
clothes were laid out
on the
great soft bed that filled
one end of the room; they
were loose long robes patterned
wildly with red, magenta and
violet, and he examined them
with distaste, but put
them on. His battered backpack
lay on
the table of gold-mounted glassy plastic,
its contents
seemingly untouched, but his
clothes and guns were not
in evidence.
A meal was laid out, and
he was
hungry. How long had it
been since he had
entered the doors that closed
behind him? He had no idea,
but his
hunger told him it had
been some while, and he fell
to. The
food was queer stuff, highly flavored, mixed, sauced, and
disguised, but he ate it all
and looked
for more.
There being no more, and
since he had done
what he had been asked
to do,
he examined the room more carefully.
He could
not see
the vague shadows of the guards
on the
other side of the semi-transparent,
bluish-green wall any longer, and
was going
to investigate when he
stopped short The
barely visible vertical slit of the
door was widening, and a
shadow moved
93
behind it. It opened to a tall oval, through which
a person stepped into the room.
A girl, Falk thought at first, then saw it
was a boy of sixteen or so, dressed in loose robes like those he wore himself.
The boy did not come close to Falk, but stopped, holding out his hands palm
upwards, and spouted a whole rush of gibberish.
"Who are you?"
"Crry,"
said the young man, "Orryl" and more gibberish. He looked frail and
excited; his voice shook with emotion. He then dropped down on both knees and
bowed his head low, a bodily gesture that Falk had never seen, though its
meaning was unmistakable: it was the full and original gesture, of which, among
the Bee-Keepers and the subjects of the Prince of Kansas, he had seen certain
vestigial remnants.
"Speak in Galaktika," Falk said
fiercely, shocked and uneasy. "Who are you?"
"I am Har-Orry-Prech-Ramarren," the boy whispered.
"Get up. Get off your knees. I don't— Do
you know me?"
"Prech Ramarren, do you not remember me?
I am Orry, Har Weden's son—"
"What is my name?"
The
boy raised his head, and Falk stared at him—at his eyes, which looked straight
into his own. They were of a gray-amber color, except for the large dark pupil:
all iris, without visible white, like the eyes of a
cat or a stag, like no eyes Falk had ever seen, except in the mirror last
night.
"Your name is Agad Ramarren," the
boy said, frightened and subdued.
"How do you know
it?"
"I—I have always known it, prech Ramarren.*'
"Are you of my race?
Are we of the same people?"
"I am Har Weden's son, prech Ramarren! I
swear to you I am!"
There were tears in the gray-gold eyes for a
moment. Falk himself had always tended to react to stress with a brief blinding
of tears; Buckeye had once reproved him for being embarrassed by this trait,
saying it appeared to be a purely physiological reaction, probably racial.
The confusion, bewilderment, disorientation
Falk had undergone since he had entered Es Toch now left him unequipped
94
to question
and judge
this latest apparition. Part of
his mind said, That
is exactly what they want: they want you confused to the point of total
credulity. At this point he did not know
whether Estrel—Estrel whom he knew
so well
and loved so loyally—was a friend
or a
Shing or a tool of
the Shing, whether she had ever
told him the truth or
ever lied to him, whether she
had been
trapped here with him or
had lured him here
into a trap. He remembered
a laugh;
he also remembered a desperate embrace, a
whisper. . . . What then
was he
to make
of this
boy, this boy looking at
him in awe and pain with
unearthly eyes like his own:
would he turn if
touched to a blur of
lights? Would he answer questions with lies, or truth?
Amidst all illusions, errors and deceptions
there remained, it seemed to Falk,
only one way to take:
the way
he had
followed all along, from
Zove's House on. He looked
at the boy again and told
him the
truth.
"I do not know you. If
I should
remember you, I do not,
because I remember nothing
longer ago than four or
five years." He cleared
his throat,
turned away again, sat down
on one of the tall spindly
chairs, motioned for the boy to
do the same.
"You ...
do not
remember Werel?"
^Who is
Werel?"
"Our home. Our world."
That hurt.
Falk said nothing.
"Do you remember the—the journey here,
prech Ramar-ren?" the boy asked,
stammering. There was incredulity in his voice; he seemed
not to
have taken in what Falk
had told him. There was also
a shaken,
yearning note, checked by respect or
fear.
Falk shook
his head.
Orry repeated
his question
with a slight change: "You
do remember our journey
to Earth,
prech Ramarren?" "No. When
was the
journey?"
"Six Terr an years
ago. —Forgive me, please, prech Ramarren.
I did
not know—I
was over
by the
California Sea and they sent an
aircar for me, an automatic;
it did
not say what I was wanted
for. Then Lord Kradgy told
me one of the Expedition had been found, and
I thought—
But he did not tell me
this about your memory— You
remember ... only ...
only the Earth, then?"
95
He seemed to be pleading for a denial. "I remember only the
Earth," Falk said, determined not to be swayed by the boy's emotion, or
his naivete, or the childish candor of his face and voice. He must assume that
this Orry was not what he seemed to be.
But
if he was?
1 will not be fooled again, Falk thought bitterly.
Yes
you will, another
part of his mind retorted; you will be fooled if they want to fool you, and there is no way you can
prevent it. If you ask no questions of this boy lest the answer be a lie, then
the lie prevails entirely, and nothing comes of all your journey here but
silence and mockery and disgust. You came to learn your name. He gives you a
name: accept it.
"Will you tell me who ... who we are?"
The
boy eagerly began again in his gibberish, then checked
himself at Falk's uncomprehending gaze. "You don't remember how to speak
Kelshak, prech Ramarren?" He was almost plaintive.
Falk shook his head.
"Kelshak is your native language?"
The boy said, "Yes," adding
timidly, "And yours, prech Ramarren."
"What is the word for
'father' in Kelshak?"
"Hiowech. Or wawa—for babies." A flicker of an ingenuous grin passed over
Orry's face.
"What would you call
an old man whom you respected?"
"There
are a lot of words like that—kinship words—Prev-wa, kioinap, ska n-gehoy ... Let me think, prechna. I haven't spoken
Kelshak for so long. ... A
prechnoweg—a higher-level non-relative could be tioldoi, or previotio—"
"Tiokioi. I said the word once, not . . . knowing
where I learned it...."
It was no real test. There was no test here.
He had never told Estrel much about bis stay with the old Listener in the
Forest, but they might have learned every memory in his brain, everything he
had ever said or done or thought, while he was drugged in their hands this past
night or nights. There was no knowing what they had done; there was no knowing
what they could do, or would. Least of all could he know what
they wanted. All he could do was go ahead tfying to get at what he
wanted,
"Are you free to come
and go here?"
96
"Oh, yes, prech Ramarren. The Lords have been very kind. They have
long been seeking for any . . . other survivors of the Expedition. Do you know,
prechna, if any of the others . . ."
"I do not know."
"All
that Kradgy had time to tell me, when I got here a few minutes ago, was that
you had been living in the forest in the eastern part of this continent, with
some wild tribe."
"I'D tell you of that if you want to
know. But tell me some things first. I do not know who I am, who you are, what
the Expedition was, what Werel is."
"We
are Kelshy," the boy said with constraint, evidently embarrassed at
explaining on so low a level to one he considered his superior, in age of
course, but also in more than age. "Of the Kelshak Nation, on Werel—we
came here on the ship Alterra—"
"Why did we come
here?" Falk asked, leaning forward.
And
slowly, with digressions and backtrackings and a thousand
question-interruptions, Orry went on, till he was worn out with talking and
Falk with hearing, and the veil-like walls of the room
were glowing with evening light; then they were silent for a while, and dumb
servants brought in food and drink for them. And all the time he ate and drank
Falk kept gazing in his mind at the jewel that might be false and might be
priceless, the story, the pattern, the glimpse—true vision or not—of the world
he had lost.
VII
A sun like a dragon's eye, orange-yellow, like a
fire-opal with seven glittering pendants swinging slowly through their long
ellipses. The
green third planet took sixty of Earth's years to complete its year: Lucky the man who sees his second spring, Orry translated a proverb of that world. The
winters of the northern hemisphere, tilted by the angle of the ecliptic away
from the sun while the planet was at its farthest from the sun, were cold,
dark, terrible: the vast summers, half a lifetime long, were measurelessly
opulent. Giant tides of the planet's deep seas obeyed a giant moon
97
that took four hundred days to wax and wane; the
world was rife with earthquakes, volcanoes, plants that walked, animals that
sang, men who spoke and built cities: a catalogue of wonders. To this miraculous though not unusual world had come, twenty years
ago, a ship from outer space. Twenty of its great years, Orry meant:
something over twelve hundred Terran years.
Colonists
and hilfers of the League of All Worlds, the people on that ship were
committing their work and lives to the new-found planet, remote from the
ancient central worlds of the League, in the hope of bringing its native
intelligent species eventuafly into the League, a new ally in the War To Come. Such had been the policy of the League ever since,
generations before, warnings had come from beyond the Hyades of a great wave of
conquerors that moved from world to world, from century to century, closer
toward the farming cluster of eighty planets that so proudly called itself the
League of All Worlds. Terra, near the edge of the League heart-zone and the
nearest League planet to the new-found planet Werel, had supplied all the
colonists on this first ship. There were to have been other ships from other
worlds of the League, but none ever came: the War came first.
The
colonists' only communications with Earth, with the Prime World Davenant, and
the rest of the League, was by the ansible, the instantaneous transmitter,
aboard their ship. No ship, said Orry, had ever flown faster than light—here
Falk corrected him. Warships had indeed been built on the ansible principle,
but they had been only automatic death-machines, incredibly costly and carrying
no living creatures. Lightspeed, with its foreshortening of time for the
voyager, was the limit of human voyaging, then and now. So the colonists of
Werel were a very long way from home and wholly dependent on their ansible for
news. They had only been on Werel five years when they were informed that the
Enemy had come, and immediately after that the communications grew confused,
contradictory, intermittent, and soon ceased altogether. About a third of the
colonists chose to take the ship and fly back across the great gap of years to
Earth, to rejoin their people. The rest stayed on Werel, self-marooned. In
their lifetimes they could never know what had become of their home world and
the League they
98
served, or who the Enemy was, and whether he ruled
the League or had been vanquished. Without ship or communicator, isolated,
they stayed, a small colony surrounded by curious and hostile High Intelligence
Life Forms of a culture inferior, but an intelligence equal, to their own. And
they waited, and their sons' sons waited, while the stars stayed silent over
them. No ship ever came, no word. Their own ship must have been destroyed, the
records of the new planet lost. Among all the stars the little orange-yellow
opal was forgotten.
The
colony thrived, spreading up a pleasant sea-coast land from its first town,
which was named Alterra. Then after several years—Orry stopped and corrected
himself, "Nearly six centuries, Earth-style, I mean. It was the Tenth Year
of the Colony, I think.
I was just beginning to learn history; but Father and . . . and you, prech
Ramarren, used to tell me these things, before we made the Voyage, to explain
it all to me . . ." After several centuries, then, the colony had come
onto hard days. Few children were conceived, still fewer bom alive. Here again
the boy paused, explaining finally, "I remember your telling me that the
Alterrans didn't know what was happening to them, they thought it was some bad
effect of inbreeding, but actually it was a sort of selection. The Lords, here,
say it couldn't have been that, that no matter how long an alien colony is
established on a planet they remain alien. With gene-manipulation they can
breed with natives, but the children will always be sterile. So I don't know
what it was that happened to the Alterrans—I was only a child when you and
Father were trying to tell me the story—I do remember you spoke of selection
towards a . . . viable type . . . Anyhow, the colonists were getting near
extinction when what was left of them finally managed to make an alliance with
a native Werelian nation, Tevar. They wintered-through together, and when the Spring breeding season came, they found that Tevarans and
Alterrans could reproduce. Enough of them, at least, to found
a hybrid race. The Lords say that is not possible. But I remember you
telling it to me." The boy looked worried and a little vague.
"Are we descendants of
that race?"
"You
are descended from the Alterra Agat, who led the colony through the Winter of the Tenth Yearl We learned
99
about Agat even in boy-school. That is your name,
prech Ramarren—Agad of Charen. I am of no such lineage, but my
great-grandmother was of the family Esmy of Kiow— that is an Alterran name. Of
course, in a democratic society as Earth's, these distinctions are meaningless,
aren't they . . . ?" Again Orry looked worried, as if some vague conflict
was occurring in his mind. Falk steered him back to the history of Werel,
filling out with guesses and extrapolation the childish narrative that was all
Orry could supply.
The new mixed stock and mixed culture of the
Tevar-Alterran nation flourished in the years after that perilous Tenth Winter.
The little cities grew; a mercantile culture was established on the single
north-hemisphere continent. Within a few generations it was spreading to the
primitive peoples of the southern continents, where the problem of keeping
alive through the winter was more easily solved. Population went up; science
and technology began their exponential climb, guided and aided always by the
Books of Alterra, the ship's library, the mysteries of which grew explicable as
the colonists' remote descendants releamed lost knowledge.
They had kept and copied those books, generation after generation, and learned
the tongue they were written in—Galaktika, of course. Finally, the moon and
sister-planets all explored, the sprawl of cities and the rivalries of nations
controlled and balanced by the powerful Kelshak Empire in the old Northland, at
the height of an age of peace and vigor the Empire had built and sent forth a
lightspeed ship.
That
ship, the Alterra,
left Werel eighteen and a
half years after the ship of the Colony from Earth landed: twelve hundred
years, Earth style. Its crew had no idea what they would find on Earth. Werel
had not yet been able to reconstruct the principles of the ansible transmitter,
and had hesitated to broadcast radio-signals that would betray their location
to a possible hostile world ruled by the Enemy the League had feared. To get
information living men must go, and return, crossing the long night to the
ancient home of the Alterrans.
"How
long was that voyage?"
"Over two Werelian years—maybe a hundred and thirty or forty
light-years— I was only a boy, a child, prech
100
Ramarren, and some things I didn't understand, and much wasn't told
me—"
Falk
did not see why this ignorance should embarrass the lad; he was much more
struck by the fact that Orry, who looked fifteen or sixteen, had been alive for
perhaps a hundred and fifty years. And
himself?
The Alterra, Orry went on, had left from a base near the
old coast-town Tevar, her coordinates set for Terra. She had carried nineteen
people, men, women and children, Kelshak for the most part and claiming
Colonist descent: the adults selected by the Harmonious Council of the Empire
for training, intelligence, courage, generosity, and arlesh.
"I
don't know a word for it in Galaktika. It's just arlesh." Orry smiled his
ingenuous smile. "Rale is . . . the right thing to do, like learning
things at school, or like a river following its course, and arlesh derives from
rale, I guess."
"Tao?" asked Falk; but Orry had
never heard of the Old Canon of Man.
"What happened to the ship? What
happened to the other seventeen people?"
"We
were attacked at the Barrier. The Shing got there only after the Alterra was destroyed and the attackers were
dispersing. They were rebels, in planetary cars. The Shing rescued me off one.
They didn't know whether the rest of us had been killed or carried off by the
rebels. They kept searching, over the whole planet, and about a year ago they
heard a rumor about a man living in the Eastern
Forest —that sounded like it might be one of us ..."
"What do you remember of all this—the
attack and so on?"
"Nothing. You know how lightspeed flight affects
you—" "I know that for those in the ship, no time passes. But I have
no idea how that feels."
"Well,
I don't really remember it very clearly. I was just a boy—nine years old, Earth
style. And I'm not sure anybody could remember it clearly. You can't tell
how—how things relate. You see and hear, but it doesn't hang together—nothing means anything—I can't explain it. It's horrible,
but only like a dream. But then coming down into planetary space again, you go
through what the Lords call the Barrier, and that blacks
out the passengers, unless they're prepared for it. Our ship wasn't. None of us
had
101
come to when we were attacked, and so I don't
remember it, any—any more than you, prech Ramarren. When I came to I was aboard
a Shing vessel."
"Why were you brought
along as a boy?"
"My
father was the captain of the expedition. My mother was on the ship too. You
know, otherwise, prech Ramarren —well, if one came back one's people would all
have been dead, long long ago. Not that it mattered—my parents are dead, now,
anyhow. Or maybe they were treated like you, and . . . and wouldn't recognize
me if we met. . . ."
"What was my part in
the expedition?"
"You were our
navigator."
The
irony of that made Falk wince, but Orry went on in his respectful, naive
fashion, "Of course, that means you set the ship's course, the
coordinates—you were the greatest prosteny, a mathematician-astronomer, in all
Kelshy. You were prechnowa to all of us aboard except my father, Har Weden. You
are of the Eighth Order, prech Ramarren I You —you remember something of
that—?"
Falk shook his head.
The boy subsided, saying at last, sadly, "I can't really believe
that you don't remember, except when you do that." "Shake my
head?"
"On Werel we shrug for
no. This way."
Orry's
simplicity was irresistible. FaDc tried the shrug; and it seemed to him that he
found a certain lightness in it, a propriety, that
could persuade him that it was indeed an old habit. He smiled, and Orry at
once cheered up. "You are so like yourself, prech Ramarren, and so
different! Forgive me. But what did they do, what did they do to make you
forget so much?"
"They destroyed me. Surely I'm like myself. I am myself. I'm Falk. . . ." He put his head in his hands. Orry,
abashed, was silent. The quiet, cool air of the room glowed like a blue-green
jewel around them; the western wall was lambent with late sunlight.
"How closely do they
watch you here?"
"The Lords like me to carry a
communicator if I go off by aircar." Orry touched the bracelet on his left
wrist, which appeared to be simple gold links. "It can be dangerous,
after all, among the natives."
"But you're free to go
where you like?"
102
"Yes,
of course. This room of yours is just like mine, across the canyon." Orry
looked puzzled again. "We have no enemies here, you know, prech
Ramarren," he ventured.
"No? Where are our
enemies, then?"
"Well—outside—where
you came from—"
They stared at each other
in mutual miscomprehension.
"You think men are our enemies—Terrans,
human beings? You think it was they that destroyed my mind?"
"Who
else?"
Orry said, frightened, gaping.
"The
aliens—the Enemy—the Shing!"
"But," the boy said with timid
gendeness, as if realizing at last how utterly his former lord and teacher was ignorant and astray, "there never was an Enemy.
There never was a War."
The room trembled softly like a tapped gong to an almost sub-aural
vibration, and a moment afterward a voice, disembodied, spoke: The Council meets. The slit-door parted and a tall figure
entered, stately in white robes and an ornate black wig. The eyebrows were
shaven and repainted high; the face, masked by makeup to a matte smoothness,
was that of a husky man of middle age. Orry rose quickly from the table and
bowed, whispering, "Lord Abundibot."
"Har
Orry," the man acknowledged, his voice also damped to a creaking whisper, then turned to Falk. "Agad Ramarren. Be welcome. The
Council of Earth meets, to answer your questions and consider your requests.
Behold now . . ." He had glanced at Falk only for a second, and did not
approach either Werelian closely. There was a queer air about him of power and
also of utter self-containment, self-absorption. He was apart, unapproachable.
All three of them stood motionless a moment; and Falk, following the others'
gaze, saw that the inner wall of the room had blurred and changed, seeming to
be now a depth of clear grayish jelly in which lines and forms twitched and
flickered. Then the image came clear, and Falk caught his breath. It was Estrel's
face, ten times lifesize. The eyes gazed at him with the remote composure of a
painting.
"I
am Strella Siobelbel." The lips of the image moved, but the voice had no
locality, a cold, abstract whisper trembling in the air of the room. "I
was sent to bring to the City in safety the member of the Werel Expetition said
103
to be living in the East of Continent One. I believe this to be the man."
And her face, fading, was
replaced by Falk's own.
A
disembodied voice, sibilant, mquired, "Does Har Orry recognize this
person?"
As Orry answered, his face appeared on the
screen. "This is Agad Ramarren, Lords, the
Navigator of the Alterra."
The boy's face faded and the screen remained blank, quivering, while
many voices whispered and rustled in the air, like a brief multitudinous
discussion among spirits, speaking an unknown tongue. This was how the Shing
held their Council: each in his own room, apart, with only the presence of
whispering voices. As the incomprehensible questioning and replying went on,
Falk murmured to Orry, "Do you know this tongue?"
"No, prech Ramarren. They always speak Galaktika to me."
"Why do they talk this
way, instead of face to face?"
"There
are so many of them—thousands and thousands meet in the Council of Earth, Lord
Abundibot told me. And they are scattered over the planet in many places,
though Es Toch is the only city. That is Ken Kenyek, now."
The
buzz of disembodied voices had died away and a new face had appeared on the screen,
a man's face, with dead white skin, black hair, pale eyes. "Agad Ramarren,
we are met in Council, and you have been brought into our Council, that you may
complete your mission to Earth and, if you desire, return to your home. The
Lord Pelleu Abundibot will bespeak you."
The wall abrupdy blanked, returned to its normal translucent green. The
tall man across the room was gazing steadily at Falk. His hps did not move, but
Falk heard him speak, not in a whisper now but clearly—singularly clearly. He could
not believe it was mindspeech, yet it could be nothing else. Stripped of the
character and timbre, the in-camateness of voice, this was comprehensibility
pure and simple, reason addressing reason.
"We mindspeak so that you may hear only truth. For it is not true that we who call
ourselves Shing, or any other man, can pervert or conceal truth in paraverbal
speech. The Lie that men ascribe to us is itself a lie. But if you choose to
use voicespeech do so, and we will do likewise."
104
"I have
no skill at bespeaking," Falk said aloud after a pause. His living voice
sounded loud and coarse after the brilliant, silent mind-contact. "But I
hear you well enough. I do
not ask for the truth. Who am I to demand the truth? But I should like to hear
what you choose to tell me."
Young
Orry looked shocked. Abundibot's face registered nothing at all. Evidentiy he
was attuned to both Falk and Orry—a rare feat in itself, in Falk's
experience—for Orry was quite plainly listening as the telepathic speech began
again.
"Men razed your mind and then taught you what they wished you to
know—what they wish to believe. So taught, you distrust us. We feared it would
be so. But ask what you will, Agad Ramarren of Werel; we will answer with the
truth."
"How long have I been here?"
"Six days."
"Why was I drugged and
befooled at first?"
"We were attempting to restore your
memory. We failed."
Do
not believe him, do not believe him, Falk told himself so urgently that no doubt the Shing, if he had any
empathic skill at all, received the message clearly. That did not matter. The
game must be played, and played their way, though they made all the rules and
had all the skill. His ineptitude did not matter. His honesty did. He was
staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that
truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.
"Tell me why I should
trust you," he said.
The
mindspeech, pure and clear as an electronically produced musical note, began
again, while the sender Abundibot, and he and Orry, stood motionless as pieces
on a chessboard.
"We whom you know as Shing are men. We are Terrans, born on Earth
of human stock, as was your ancestor Jacob Agat of the First Colony on Werel.
Men have taught you what they believe about the history of Earth in the twelve
centuries since the Colony on Werel was founded. Now we— men also—will teach
you what we know.
"No Enemy ever came from distant stars
to attack the League of All Worlds. The League was destroyed by revolution,
civil war, by its own corruption, militarism, des-
105
potism. On all the worlds there were revolts,
rebellions, usurpations; from the Prime World came reprisals that scorched
planets to black sand. No more lightspeed ships went out into so risky a
future: only the FTLs, the missile-ships, the world-busters. Earth was not
destroyed, but half its people were, its cities, its
ships and ansibles, its records, its culture—all in two terrible years of
civil war between the Loyalists and the Rebels, both armed with the unspeakable
weapons developed by the League to fight an alien enemy.
"Some
desperate men on Earth, dominating the struggle for a moment but knowing
further counter-revolt and wreckage and ruin was
inevitable, employed a new weapon. They lied. They invented a name for
themselves, and a language, and some vague tales of the remote home-world they
came from, and then they went spreading the rumor over Earth, in their own
ranks and the Loyalist camps as well, that the Enemy had come. The civil war
was all due to the Enemy. The Enemy had infiltrated everywhere, had wrecked the
League and was running Earth, was in power now and was going to stop the war.
And they had achieved all this by their one unexpectable, sinister, alien
power: the power to mindlie.
"Men
believed the tale. It suited their panic, their dismay, their weariness. Their
world in ruins around them, they submitted to an Enemy whom they were glad to
believe supernatural, invincible. They swallowed the bait of peace.
"And they have lived since then in
peace.
"We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning
the Creator told a great he. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator
spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that
the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist. . ..
"If human peace depended on a he, there were those willing to
maintain the lie. Since men insisted that the Enemy had come and ruled the
Earth, we called ourselves the Enemy, and ruled. None came to dispute our he or
wreck our peace; the worlds of the League are all sundered, the age of
interstellar flight is past; once in a century, perhaps, some ship from a far
world blunders here, like yours. There are rebels against our rule, such as
those who attacked your ship at the Barrier. We try to control such rebels,
for, rightly or wrongly, we beat and have bome
106
for a millennium the burden of human peace. For
having told a great he, we must now uphold a great law. You know the law that
we—men among men—enforce: the one Law, learned in humanity's most terrible
hour."
The
brilliant toneless mindspeech ceased; it was like the switching off of a light.
In the silence like darkness which followed, young Orry whispered aloud,
"Reverence for Life."
Silence
again. Falk stood motionless, trying not to betray in his face or in his
perhaps overheard thoughts the confusion and irresolution he felt. Was all he
had learned false? Had mankind indeed no Enemy?
"If
this history is the true one," he said at last, "why do you not tell
it and prove it to men?"
"We
are men," came the telepathic answer. "There
are thousands upon thousands of us who know the truth. We are those who have
power and knowledge, and use them for peace. There come dark ages, and this is
one of them, all through man's history, when people will have it that the world
is ruled by demons. We play the part of demons in their mythologies. When they
begin to replace mythology with reason, we help them; and they learn the
truth."
"Why do you tell me
these things?''
"For truth's sake, and for your own."
"Who am I to deserve the truth?"
Falk repeated coldly, looking across the room into Abundibot's masklike face.
"You were a messenger from a lost world, a colony of which all
record was lost in the Years of Trouble. You came to Earth, and we, the Lords
of Earth, failed to protect you. This is a shame and a grief to us. It was men
of Earth who attacked you, killed or mindrazed all your company —men of Earth,
of the planet to which, after so many centuries, you were returning. They were
rebels from Continent Three, which is neither so primitive nor so sparsely inhabited as this Continent One; they were using
stolen interplanetary cars; they assumed that any light-speed ship must belong
to the 'Shing,' and so attacked it without warning. This we could have
prevented, had we been more alert. We owe to you any reparation we can
make."
"They have sought for you and the others
all these years," Orry put in, earnest and a httle pleading; obviously
107
he very much wantecT Falk to believe it all, to
accept it, and to—to do what?
"You tried to restore
my memory," Falk said. "Why?"
"Is that not what you
came seeking here: your lost self?"
"Yes.
It is. But I . . ." He did not even know what questions to ask; he could
neither believe nor disbelieve all he had been told. There seemed to be no
standard to judge it all by. That Zove and the others had lied to him was
inconceivable, but that they themselves were deceived and ignorant was
certainly possible. He was incredulous of everything Abundibot affirmed, and
yet it had been mindsent, in clear immediate mindspeech where lying was impossible—or
was it possible? If a liar says he is not lying— Falk gave it all up again. Looking once more at Abundibot he said, "Please do not bespeak
me. I—I would rather hear your voice. You found, I think you said, that you could not restore my memory?"
Abundibot's muted,
creaking whisper in Galaktika came strangely after the fluency of his sending.
"Not by the means we used."
"By
other means?"
"Possibly. We thought you had been given a parahypnotic block. Instead, you were
mindrazed. We do not know where the rebels learned that technique, which we
keep a close secret. An even closer secret is the fact that a razed mind can be
restored." A smile appeared for a moment on the heavy, mask-like face, then disappeared completely. "With our psycho-computer
techniques, we think we can effect the restoration in your case. However, this
incurs the permanent total blocking of the replacement-personality; and this
being so we did not wish to proceed without your consent."
The replacement-personality. ...
It meant nothing particular. What did it mean?
Falk felt a little cold creep over him, and
he said carefully, "Do you mean that, in order to remember what I was, I
must... forget what I am?"
"Unfortunately
that is the case. We regret it very much. The loss, however, of a
replacement-personality of a few years' growth is, though regrettable, perhaps
not too high a price to pay for the repossession of a mind such as yours
obviously was, and, of course, for the chance of completing
108
your great mission across the stars and returning
at last to your home with the knowledge you so gallantly came to seek."
Despite
his rusty, unused-sounding whisper, Abundibot was as fluent in speaking as in
mindspeaking; his words poured out and Falk caught the meaning, if he caught
it, only on the third or fourth bounce. . . . "The chance—of completing—?"
he repeated, feeling a fool, and glancing at Orry as if for support. "You
mean, you would send me—us —back to . . . this planet I am supposed to have
come from?"
"We would consider it an honor and a
beginning of the reparation due you to give you a lightspeed ship for the
voyage home to Werel."
"Earth
is my home," Falk said with sudden violence. Abundibot was silent. After a
minute the boy spoke: "Werel is mine, prech Ramarren," he said
wistfully. "And I can never go back to it without you."
"Why
not?"
"I don't know where it is. I was a
child. Our ship was destroyed, the course-computers
and all were blown up when we were attacked. I can't recalculate the
coursel"
"But these people have lightspeed ships
and course-computers! What do you mean? What star does Werel circle, that's
all you need to know."
"But I don't know
it."
"This
is nonsense," Falk began, pushed by mounting incredulity into anger.
Abundibot held up his hand in a curiously potent gesture. "Let the boy
explain, Agad Ramarren," he whispered.
"Explain that he doesn't know the name
of his planet's sun?"
"It's true, prech Ramarren," Orry said shakily, his face
crimson. "If—if you were only yourself, you'd know it
without being told. I was in my ninth moonphase—I was still First Level.
The Levels . . . Well, our civilization, at home, it's different from anything
here, I guess. Now that I see it by the light of what the Lords here try to do,
and democratic ideals, I realize it's very backward in some ways. But anyhow,
there are the Levels, that cut across all the Orders
and ranks, and make up the Basic Harmony of— prechnoye. ... I don't know how to say it in Calaktika.
109
Knowledge, I guess. Anyway I was on the First Level, being a child, and
you were Eighth Level and Order. And each Level has—things you don't leam, and
things you aren't told, and can't be told or understand, until you enter into
it. And below the Seventh Level, I think, you don't leam the True Name of the
World or the True Name of the Sun—they're just the world, Werel, and the sun,
prahan. The True Names are the old ones—they're in the Eighth Analect of the
Books of Alterra, the books of the Colony. They're in Calaktika, so that they'd
mean something to the Lords here. But I couldn't tell them, because I didn't
know; all I know is 'sun' and 'world,' and that wouldn't get me home—nor you,
if you can't remember what you knew! Which sun? Which world? Oh, you'vs got to
let them give you your memory back, prech Ramarren I Do you see?"
"As through a
glass," Falk said, "darkly."
And
with the .words from the Yaweh Canon he remembered all at once, certain and
vivid amidst his bewilderment, the sun shining above the Clearing, bright on
the windy, branch-embowered balconies of the Forest House. Then it was not his
name he had come here to leam, but the sun's, the true
name of the sun.
VIII
The
strange unseen Council
of the Lords of Earth was over. In parting Abundibot had said to Falk,
"The choice is yours: to remain Falk, our guest on Earth, or to regain
your heritage and complete your destiny as Agad Ramarren of Werel. We wish that
your choice be made knowingly and in your own time. We await your decision and
will abide by it." Then to Orry: "Make your kinsman free of the City,
Har Orry, and let all he and you desire be known to us." The slit-door
opened behind Abundibot and he withdrew, his tall bulky figure vanishing so
abruptly outside the doorway that it seemed to have been flicked off. Had he in
fact been there in substance, or only as some kind of projection? Falk was not
sure. He wondered if he had yet seen a Shing, or only the shadows and images of
the Shing.
"Is
there anywhere we can walk—out of doors?" he asked the boy abruptly, sick
of the indirect and insubstantial ways
110
and walls of this place, and also wondering how
far their freedom actually extended.
"Anywhere, prech Ramarren. Out in the streets—or shall we take a
slider? Or there is a garden here in the Palace."
"A garden will
do."
Orry
led him down a great, empty, glowing corridor and through a valve-door into a
small room. "The Garden," he said aloud, and the valve shut; there
was no sense of motion but when it opened they stepped out into a garden. It
was scarcely out of doors: the translucent walls glimmered with the lights of
the City, far below; the moon, near full, shone hazy and distorted through the
glassy roof. The place was full of soft moving lights and shadows, crowded with
tropical shrubs and vines that twined about trellises and hung from arbors,
their masses of cream and crimson flowers sweetening the steamy air, their leafage closing off vision within a few feet on every side.
Falk turned suddenly to make sure that the path to the exit still lay clear
behind him. The hot, heavy, perfumed silence was uncanny; it seemed to him for
a moment that the ambiguous depths of the garden held a hint of something alien
and enormously remote, the hues, the mood, the complexity of a lost world, a
planet of perfumes and illusions, of swamps and transformations. . . .
On
the path among the shadowy flowers Orry paused to take a small white tube from
a case and insert it endwise between his lips, sucking on it eagerly. Falk was
too absorbed in other impressions to pay much heed, but as if slightly
embarrassed the boy explained, "It's pariitha, a tranquillant —the Lords
all use it; it has a very stimulating effect on the mind. If you'd care
to—"
"No, thanks. There are some more things I want to ask
you." He hesitated, however. His new questions could not be entirely
direct. Throughout the "Council" and Abun-dibot's explanations he had
felt, recurrently and uncomfortably, that the whole thing was a performance—a play, such as he had seen on ancient telescrolls in
the library of the Prince of Kansas, the Dreamplay of Hain, the mad old king
Lir raving on a stormswept heath. But the curious thing was his distinct
impression that the play was not being acted for his benefit, but for Orry's.
He did not under-Ill stand why, but again and again he had felt that all Abundibot
said to him was said to prove something to the boy.
And
the boy believed it. It was no play to him; or else he was an actor in it.
"One
thing puzzles me," Falk said, cautiously. "You told me that Werel is
a hundred and thirty or forty light-years from Earth. There cannot be very many
stars at just that distance.
"The
Lords say there are four stars with planets that might be our system, between a
hundred and fifteen and a hundred and fifty light-years away. But they are in
four different directions, and if the Shing sent out a ship to search it could
spend up to thirteen hundred years realtime going to and among those four to
find the right one."
"Though you were a child, it seems a
little strange that you didn't know how long the voyage was to take—how old you
would be when you got home, as it were."
"It
was spoken of as 'two years* prech Ramarren—that is, roughly a hundred and
twenty Earth years—but it was clear to me that that was not the exact figure,
and that I was not to ask the exact figure." For a moment, harking back
thus to Werel, the boy spoke with a touch of sober resoluteness that he did
not show at other times. "I think that perhaps, not knowing who or what
they were going to find on Earth, the adults of the Expedition wanted to be
sure that we children, with no mindguard technique, could not give away Werel's
location to an enemy. It was safest for us to be ignorant, perhaps."
"Do
you remember how the stars looked from Werel— the constellations?"
Orry
shrugged for no, and smiled. "The Lords asked that too. I was Winter-bom,
prech Ramarren. Spring was just beginning when we left. I scarcely ever saw a
cloudless sky."
If
all this was true, then it would seem that in fact only he—his suppressed self,
Ramarren—could say where he and Orry came from. Would that then explain what
seemed almost the central puzzle, the interest the Shing took in him, their
bringing him here under Estrel's tutelage, their offer to restore his memory?
There was a world not under their control; it had re-invented lightspeed
flight; they would want to know where it was. And if they restored his memory,
112
he could tell them. If they
could restore his memory. If anything at all of what they had told him was true.
He
sighed. He was weary of this turmoil of suspicions, this plethora of
unsubstantiated marvels. At moments he wondered if he was still under the
influence of some drug. He felt wholly inadequate to judge what he should do.
He, and probably this boy, were like toys in the hands
of strange faithless players.
"Was
he—the one called Abundibot—was he in the room just now, or was it a
projection, an illusion?"
"I
don't know, prech Ramarren," Orry replied. The stuff he was breathing in
from the tube seemed to cheer and soothe him; always rather childlike, he spoke
now with blithe ease. "I expect he was there. But they never come close. I
tell you—this is strange—in this long time I've been here, six years, I have
never touched one of them. They keep very much apart, each one alone. I don't
mean that they are unkind," he added hastily, looking with his clear eyes
at Falk to make sure he had not given the wrong impression. "They are very
kind. I am very fond of Lord Abundibot, and Ken Kenyek, and Parla. But they are
so far—beyond me— They know so much. They bear so
much. They keep knowledge alive, and keep the peace, and bear the burdens, and
so they have done for a thousand years, while the rest of the people of Earth
take no responsibility and live in brutish freedom. Their fellow men hate them
and will not learn the truth they offer. And so they must always hold
themselves apart, stay alone, in order to preserve the peace and the skills and
knowledge that would be lost, without them, in a few years, among these warrior
tribes and Houses and Wanderers and roving cannibals."
"They
are not all cannibals," Falk said dryly.
Orry's well-leamt lesson seemed to have run
out. "No," he agreed, "I suppose not."
"Some
of them say that they have sunk so low because the Shing keep them low; that if
they seek knowledge the Shing prevent them, if they seek to form a City of
their own the Shing destroy it, and them."
There
was a pause. Orry finished sucking on his tube of pariitha and carefully buried
it around the roots of a shrub with long, hanging, flesh-red flowers. Falk
waited for his answer and only gradually realized that there was not going
113
to be one. What he had said simply had not
penetrated, had not made sense to the boy.
They walked on a fittle among the shifting
lights and damp fragrances of the garden, the moon blurred above them.
"The
one whose image appeared first, just now ...
do you know her?"
"Strella Siobelbel," the boy answered readily. "Yes, I have seen her at Council Meetings before." "Is she a
Shing?"
"No,
she's not one of the Lords; I think her people are mountain natives, but she
was brought up in Es Toch. Many people bring or send their children here to be
brought up in the service of the Lords. And children with subnormal minds are
brought here and keyed into the psychocom-puters, so that even they can share
in the great work. Those are the ones the ignorant call toolmen. You came here
with Strella Siobelbel, prech Ramarren?"
"Came
with her; walked with her, ate with her, slept with her. She called herself
Estrel, a Wanderer."
"You could have known she was not a
Shing—" the boy said, then went red, and got out another of his
tranquillant-tubes and began sucking on it.
"A
Shing would not have slept with me?" Falk inquired. The boy shrugged his
Werelian "No," still blushing; the drug finally encouraged him to
speak and he said, "They do not touch common men, prech Ramarren—they are
like gods, cold and kind and wise—they hold themselves apart—"
He
was.fluent, incoherent, childish. Did he know his own loneliness, orphaned and
alien, living out his childhood and entering adolescence among these people who
held themselves apart, who would not touch him, who stuffed him with words but
left him so empty of reality that, at fifteen, he sought contentment from a
drug? He certainly did not know his isolation as such—he did not seem to have
clear ideas on anything much—but it looked from his eyes sometimes, yearning,
at Falk. Yearning and feebly hoping, the look of one perishing of thirst in a
dry salt desert who looks up at a mirage. There was
much more Falk wanted to ask him, but little use in asking. Pitying him, Falk
put his hand on Orry's slender shoulder. The boy started
114
at the touch, smiled timidly and vaguely, and
sucked again at his tranquillant.
Back
in his room, where everything was so luxuriously arranged for his comfort—and
to impress Orry?—Falk paced a while like a caged bear, and finally lay down to
sleep. In his dreams he was in a house, like the Forest House, but the people
in the dream house had eyes the color of agate and amber. He tried to tell them
he was one of them, their own kinsman, but they did not understand his speech
and watched him strangely while he stammered and sought for the right words,
the true words, the true name.
Toolmen waited to serve him when he woke. He dismissed them, and they
left. He went out into the hall. No one barred his way; he met no one as he
went on. It all seemed deserted, no one stirring in the long misty corridors
or on the ramps or inside the half-seen, dim-walled rooms whose doors he could
not find. Yet all the time he felt he was being watched, that every move he
made was seen.
When he found his way back to his room Orry was waiting for him, wanting
to show him about the city. All afternoon they explored, on foot and on a paristolis
slider, the streets- and terraced gardens, the bridges and palaces and
dwellings of Es Toch. Orry was liberally provided with the slips of iridium
that served as money, and when Falk remarked that he did not like the
fancy-dress his hosts had provided him, Orry insisted they go to a clothier's
shop and outfit him as he wished. He stood among racks and tables of gorgeous
cloth, woven and plastiformed, dazzling with bright patterned colors; he
thought of Parth weaving at her small loom in the sunlight, a pattern of white
cranes on gray. "I
will weave black cloth to
wear," she had said, and remembering that he chose, from all the lovely
rainbow of robes and gowns and clothing, black breeches and dark shirt and a
short black cloak of wintercloth.
"Those
are a little like our clothes at home—on Werel," Orry said, looking
doubtfully for a moment at his own flame-red tunic. "Only we had no
wintercloth there. Oh, there would be so much we could take back from Earth to
Werel, to tell them and teach them, if we could go!"
They went on to an eating-place built out on a transparent
115
shelf over the gorge. As the cold, bright evening
of the high mountains darkened the abyss under them, the buildings that sprang
up from its edges glowed iridescent and the streets and hanging bridges blazed
with lights. Music undulated in the air about them as they ate the spice-disguised
foods and watched the crowds of they city come and go.
Some
of the people who walked in Es Toch were dressed poorly, some lavishly, many in
the transvestite, gaudy apparel that Falk vaguely remembered seeing Estrel
wear. There were many physical types, some different from any Falk had ever
seen. One group was whitish-skinned, with blue eyes and hair like straw. Falk
thought they had bleached themselves somehow, but Orry explained they were
tribesmen from an area on Continent Two, whose culture was being encouraged by
the Shing, who brought their leaders and young people here by aircar toisee Es Toch and learn its ways. "You
see, prech Ramarreni it is not true that the Lords refuse to teach the
natives-lit is the natives who refuse to leam. These white
ones fare sharing the Lords* knowledge."
"And
what have they forgotten, to earn that prize?" Falk asked, but the
question meant nothing to Orry. He knew almost nothing of any of the
"natives," how they lived or what they knew. Shopkeepers and waiters
he treated with condescension, pleasantly, as a man among inferiors. This arrogance
he might have brought from Werel; he described Kelshak society as hierarchic,
intensely conscious of each person's place on a scale or in an order, though
what established the order, what values it was founded on, Falk did not
understand. It was not mere birth-ranking, but Orry's childish memories did not
suffice to give a clear picture. However that might be, Falk disliked the tone
of the word "natives" in Orry's mouth, and he finally asked with a
trace of irony, "How do you know which you should bow to and which should
bow to you? I can't tell Lords from Natives. The Lords are natives—aren't they?"
"Oh, yes. The natives call themselves
that, because they insist the Lords are alien conquerors. I can't always tell
them apart either," the boy said with his vague, engaging, ingenuous
smile.
"Most of these people
in the streets are Shing?"
"I suppose so. Of
course I only know a few by sight."
"I
don't understand what keeps the Lords, the Shing, apart from the natives, if
they are all Terran men together."
"Why, knowledge, power—the Lords have
been ruling Earth for longer than the achinowao have been ruling Kel-shy!"
"But
they keep themselves a caste apart? You said the Lords believe in
democracy." It was an antique word and had struck him when Orry used it;
he was not sure of its meaning but knew it had to do with general participation
in government.
'Tes, certainly, prech Ramarren. The Council rules democratically for the
good of all, and there is no king or dictator. Shall we go to a paxiitha-hall?
They have stimulants, if you don't care for pariitha, and dancers and
teanb-play-ers—"
"Do you like
music?"
"No,"
the boy said with apologetic candor. "It makes me want to weep or scream.
Of course on Werel only animals and little children sing. It is—it seems wrong
to hear grown men do it. But the Lords like to encourage the native arts. And
the dancing, sometimes that's very pretty . . ."
"No." A
restlessness was rising strong in Falk, a will to see the thing through
and be done with it. "I have a question for that one called Abundibot, if
he will see us."
"Surely. He was my teacher for a long time; I can call him with this." Orry
raised toward his mouth the gold-link bracelet on his wrist. While he spoke
into it Falk sat remembering Estrel's muttered prayers to her amulet and
marveling at his own vast obtuseness. Any fool might have guessed the thing was
a transmitter; any fool but this one. . . . "Lord Abundibot says to come as
soon as we please. He is in the East Palace," Orry announced, and they
left, Orry tossing a slip of money to the bowing waiter who saw them out.
Spring
thunderclouds had hidden stars and moon, but the streets blazed with light.
Falk went through them with a heavy heart. Despite all his fears he had longed
to see the city, elonaae,
the Place of Men; but it
only worried and wearied him. It was not the crowds that bothered him, though
he had never in his memory seen more than ten houses or a hundred people
together. It was not the
117
reality of the city that was overwhelming, but its
unreality. This was not a Place of Men. Es Toch gave no sense of history, of
reaching back in time and out in space, though it had ruled the world for a
millennium. There were none of the libraries, schools, museums which ancient
telescrolls in Zove's House had led him to look for; there
were no monuments or reminders of the Great fige of Man; there was no flow of learning or of goods. The money used was a
mere largesse of the Shing, for there was no economy to give the place a true
vitality of its own. Though there were said to be so many of the Lords, yet on
Earth they kept only this one city, held apart, as Earth itself was held apart
from the other worlds that once had formed the League. Es Toch was
self-contained, self-nourished, rootless; all its brilliance and transcience of
lights and macli^pes and faces, its multiplicity of strangers, its luxurious complexity was built across a chasm in the ground, a hollowNplace. It was the Place of the Lie. Yet it was
wonderful, like a carved jewel fallen in the vast wilderness of the EartM:
wonderful, timeless, alien.
Their slider bore them over one of the swooping railless bridges towards
a luminous tower. The river far below ran invisible in darkness; the mountains
were hidden by night and storm and the city's glare. Toolmen met Falk and Orry
at the entrance to the tower, ushered them into a valve-elevator and thence
into a room whose walls, windowless and translucent as always, seemed made of
bluish, sparkling mist. They were asked to be seated, and were served tall
silver cups of some drink. Falk tasted it gingerly and was surprised to find it
the same juniper-flavored liquor he had once been given in the Enclave of
Kansas. He knew it was a strong intoxicant and drank no more;
but Orry swigged his down with relish. Abundibot entered, tall, white-robed,
mask-faced, dismissing the toolmen with a slight gesture. He stopped at some
distance from Falk and Orry. The toolmen had left a third silver cup on the
little stand. He raised it as if in salute, drank it right off, and then said
in his dry whispering voice, "You do not drink, Lord Ramarren. There is an old, old saying on Earth: In wine is truth." He smiled and
ceased smiling. "But your thirst is for the truth, not for the wine,
perhaps."
"There is a question I wish to ask
you."
"Only one?" The note of mockery seemed clear to FaDc, so
clear that he glanced at Orry to see if he had caught it. But the boy, sucking
on another tube of pariitha, his gray-gold eyes lowered, had caught nothing.
"I
should prefer to speak to you alone, for a moment," Falk said abrubdy.
At
that Orry looked up, puzzled; the Shing said, "You may, of course. It will
make no difference, however, to my answer, if Har Orry is here or not here.
There is nothing we keep from him that we might tell you, as there is nothing
we might tell him and keep from you. If you prefer that he leave, however, it
shall be so."
"Wait
for me in the hall, Orry," Falk said; docile, the boy went out. When the
vertical hps of the door had closed behind him, Falk said—whispered, rather,
because everyone whispered here— "I wished to repeat what I asked you
before. I am not sure I understood. You can restore my earlier memory only at
the cost of my present memory—is that true?"
"Why do you ask me
what is true? Will you believe it?"
"Why—why should I not believe it?"
Falk replied, but his heart sank, for he felt the Shing was playing with him,
as with a creature totally incompetent and powerless.
"Are we not the Liars? You must not
believe anything we say. That is what you were taught in Zove's House, that is what you think. We know what you think."
"Tell
me what I ask," Falk said, knowing the futility of his stubbornness.
"I
will tell you what I told you before, and as best I can, though it is Ken Kenyek who knows these matters best. He is our
most skilled mindhandler. Do you wish me to call him?—no doubt he will be
willing to project to us here. No? It does not matter, of course. Crudely
expressed, the answer to your question is this: Your mind was, as we say,
razed. Mindrazing is an operation, not a surgical one of course, but a paramental one involving psychoelectric equipment, the
effects of which are much more absolute than those of any mere hypnotic block.
The restoration of a razed mind is possible, but is a much more drastic matter,
accordingly, than the removal of a hypnotic block. What is in question, to you,
at this moment, is a secondary, superadded, partial memory and
personahty-structure, which you
119
now call your 'self.' This is, of course, not
the case. Looked at impartially, this second-growth self of yours is a mere
rudiment, emotionally stunted and intellectually incompetent, compared to the
true self which lies so deeply hidden. As we cannot and do not expect you to
be able to look at it impartially, however, we wish we could assure you that
the restoration of Raman-en will include the continuity of Falk. And we have
been tempted to he to you about this, to spare you
fear and doubt and make your decision easy. But it is best that you know the
truth; we would not have it otherwise, nor, I think, would you. The truth is
this: when we restore to its normal condition and function the synaptic
totality of your original mind, if I may so simplify the incredibly complex
operation which Ken Kenyek and his psychocomputers are ready to perform, this
restoration will entail the total blocking of the secondary synaptic totality
which you now consider to be your mind and self. This secondary totality will
be irrecoverably suppressed: razed in its turn."
"To revive Ramarren you must kill Falk,
then."
"We do not kill," the Shing said in
his harsh whisper, then repeated it with blazing intensity in mindspeech— "We do not kill!"
There was a pause.
"To gain the great you must give up the
less. It is always the rule," the Shing whispered.
"To
live one must agree to die," Falk said, and saw the mask-face wince. "Very well. I agree. I consent to let you kill me. My
consent does not really matter, does it?—yet you want it."
"We will not kill you." The whisper was louder. "We do
not kill. We do not take life. We are restoring you to your true life and
being. Only you must forget. That is the price; there is not any choice or doubt:
to be Ramarren you must forget Falk. To this you must consent, indeed, but it
is all we ask." v~>-.
"Give me oneMay more," Falk said, and then rose, ending the
conversation. He had lost; he was powerless. And yet he had made the mask
wince, he had touched, for a moment, the very quick of the he; and in that
moment he had sensed that, had he the wits or strength to reach it, the truth
lay very close-at-hand.
Falk left the building with Orry, and when they were in the street he
said, "Come with me a minute. I want to speak with you outside those
walls." They crossed the bright street to the edge of the cliff and stood
side by side there in the cold night-wind of spring, the lights of the bridge
shooting on out past them, over the black chasm that dropped sheer away from
the street's edge.
"When
I was Ramarren," Falk said slowly, "had I the right to ask a service
of you?"
"Any service," the boy answered
with the sober promptness that seemed to hark back to his early training on
Werel.
Falk
looked straight at him, holding his gaze a moment. He pointed to the bracelet
of gold links on Orry's wrist, and with a gesture indicated that he should slip
it off and toss it into the gorge.
Orry began to speak: Falk
put his finger to his lips.
The
boy's gaze flickered; he hesitated, then slipped the chain off and cast it down
into the dark. Then he turned again to Falk his face in which fear, confusion,
and the longing for approval were clear to see.
For
the first time, Falk bespoke him in mindspeech: "Do you wear any other
device or ornament, Orry?"
At
first the boy did not understand. Falk's sending was inept and weak compared to
that of the Shing. When he did at last understand, he replied paraverbally,
with great clarity, "No, only the communicator. Why did you bid me throw
it away?"
"I wish to speak with
no listener but you, Orry."
The
boy looked awed and scared. "The Lords can hear," he whispered aloud.
"They can hear mindspeech anywhere, prech Ramarren—and I had only begun my
training in mindguarding—"
"Then
we'll speak aloud," Falk said, though he doubted that the Shing could
overhear mindspeech "anywhere," without mechanical aid of some kind.
"This is what I wish to ask you. These Lords of Es Toch brought me here, it seems, to restore my memory as Ramarren. But they
can do it, or will do it, only at the cost of my memory of myself as I am now,
and all I have learned on Earth. This they insist upon. I do not wish it to be
so. I do not wish to forget what I know and guess, and be an ignorant
121
tool in their hands. I do not wish to die again
before my deathl I don't think I can withstand them, but I will try, and the
service I ask of you is this—" He stopped, hesitant among choices, for he
had not worked out his plan at all.
Orry's
face, which had been excited, now dulled with confusion again, and finally he
said, "But why . . ."
"Well?"
Falk said, seeing the authority he had briefly exerted over the boy evaporate.
Still, he had shocked Orry into asking "Why?" and if he was ever to
get through to the boy, it would be right now.
"Why
do you mistrust the Lords? Why should they want to suppress your memory of
Earth?"
"Because Ramarren does not know what I
know. Nor do you. And our ignorance may betray the world that sent us
here."
"But you . . . you
don't even remember our world . . ."
"No.
But I will not serve the Liars who rule this one. Listen to me. This is all I
can guess of what they want. They will restore my former mind in order to learn
the true name, the location of our home world. If they learn it while they are
working on my mind, then I think they'll kill me then and there, and tell you
that the operation was fatal; or raze my mind once more and tell you that the
operation was a failure. If not, they'll let me live, at least until I tell
them what they want to know. And I won't know enough, as Ramarren, not to tell
them. Then they'll send us back to Werel—sole survivors of the great journey,
returning after centuries to tell Werel how, on dark barbaric Earth, the Shing
bravely hold the torch of civilization alight. The Shing who
are no man's Enemy, the self-sacrificing Lords, the wise Lords who are really
men of Earth, not aliens or conquerors. We will tell Werel all about the
friendly Shing. And they'll believe us. They will believe the lies we believe.
And so they will fear no attack from the Shing; and they will not send help to
the men of Earth, the true men who await deliverance from the lie."
"But prech Ramarren,
those are not lies," Orry said.
Falk looked at him a minute in the diffuse,
bright, shifting light. His heart sank, but he said finally, "Will you do
the service I asked of you?"
"Yes," the boy
whispered.
"Without telling any
other living being what it is?"
122
"Yes."
"It is simply this. When you first see
me as Ramarren— if you ever do—then say to me these words: Read the first page
of the book."
" Head the first page of the book,' " Orry
repeated, docile.
There
was a pause. Falk stood feeling himself encompassed by futility, like a fly
bundled in spider-silk.
"Is that all the service, prech
Ramarren?"
"That's all."
The
boy bowed his head and muttered a sentence in his native tongue, evidently some
formula of promising. Then he asked, "What should I tell them about the
bracelet communicator, prech Ramarren?"
"The
truth—it doesn't matter, if you keep the other secret," Falk said. It
seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to he.
But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.
Orry
took him back across the bridge on his slider, and he re-entered the shining,
mist-walled palace where Estrel had first brought him. Once alone in his room
he gave way to fear and rage, knowing how he was utterly fooled and made
helpless; and when he had controlled his anger still he walked the room like a
bear in a cage, contending with the fear of death.
If he besought them, might they not let him
five on as Falk, who was useless to them, but harmless?
No.'
They would not. That was clear, and only cowardice
made him turn to the notion. There was no hope there.
Could he escape?
Maybe. The
seeming emptiness of this great building might be a sham, or a trap, or like so
much else here, an illusion. He felt and guessed that he was constantly spied
upon, aurally or visually, by hidden presences or devices. All doors were
guarded by toolmen or electronic monitors. But if he did escape from Es Toch,
what then?
Could
he make his way back across the mountains, across the plains, through the
forest, and come at last to the Clearing, where Parth . . . Nol He stopped
himself in anger. He could not go back. This far he had come following his way,
and he must follow on to the end: through death if it must be, to rebirth—the
rebirth of a stranger, of an alien souL
But there was no one here to tell that stranger and alien the truth.
There was no one here that Falk could trust, except himself, and therefore not
only must Falk die, but his dying must serve the will of the Enemy. That was
what he could not bear; that was unendurable. He paced up and down the still,
greenish dusk of his room. Blurred inaudible lightning flashed across the
ceiling. He would not serve the Liars; he would not tell them what they wanted
to know. It was not Werel he cared for—for all he knew, his guesses were all
astray and Werel itself was a lie, Orry a more elaborate Estrel; there was no
telling. But he loved Earth, though he was alien upon it. And Earth to him
meant the house in the Forest, the sunlight on the Clearing, Parth. These he
would not betray. He must believe that there was a way to keep himself, against all force and trickery, from betraying
them.
Again and again he tried to imagine some way in which he as Falk could
leave a message for himself as Ramarren: a problem in itself so grotesque it
beggared his imagination, and beyond that, insoluble. If the Shing did not
watch him write such a message, certainly they would find it when it was
written. He had thought at first to use Orry as the go-between, ordering him to
tell Raffiaren, "Do not answer the Shing's questions," but he
Ba3fhot\been able to trust Orry to obey, or to keep the oiperJ secret. The
Shing had so mindhandled the boy that he wjs by) now, essentially, their
instrument; and even the meaningless message that Falk had given him might
already bfe known to his Lords.
There
was no device or trick, no tjmeans or way to get around or get out. There was
onhi one\ hope, and that very small: that he could
hold onj thai through whatever they did to him he could keejpf holdr of
himself and refuse to forget, refuse to die. The) onlyfthing that gave him
grounds for hoping that this knight! |be possible was that the Shing had said
it was impossible, n
They wanted him to believe thai itj^vas impossible.
The
delusions and apparitions and (hallucinations of his first hours or days in Es
Toch haA n«en wvorked on him, then, only to confuse him and wffil&li Ms self-trust: for that was what they were after. TBfeyjwafied him to distrust himself, his beliefs, his knowledge, yjks strength.
AH the explanations about mind-razing were then equally a
124
scare, a bogey, to convince him that he could not
possibly withstand their parahypnotic operations. Ramarren had not withstood
them....
But
Ramarren had had no suspicion or warning of their powers or what they would try
to do to him, whereas Falk did. That might make a difference. Even so,
Ramar-ren's memory had not been destroyed beyond recall, as they insisted
Falk's would be: the proof of that was that they intended to recall it.
A hope; a very small hope. All he could do was say I will survive in
the hope it might be true; and with luck, it would be. And without luck ... ?
Hope
is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless,
vague hghtning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad
season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: they are the mind's
indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time.
Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When
there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void
and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed. Between men the only link left is
that of owner to slave, or murderer to victim.
Laws
are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do not kill was the String's vaunted single Law. All else
was permitted: which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted
to do. . . . Fearing their own profound attraction towards death, they preached
Reverence for Life, fooling themselves at last with their own He.
Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one
quality no Bar can cope with, integrity. Perhaps it would not occur to them
that a man could so will to be himself, to live his life, that he might resist
them even when helpless in their hands.
Perhaps, perhaps.
Deliberately
stilling his thoughts at last, he took up the book that the Prince of Kansas
had given him and which, belying the Prince's prediction, he had not yet lost
again, and read in it for a while, very intently, before he slept.
Next morning—his last, perhaps, of this
life—Orry suggested that they sightsee by aircar, and Falk assented, say-
125
ing that he wished to see the Western Ocean.
With elaborate courtesy two of the Shing, Abundibot and Ken Kenyek, asked if
they might accompany their honored guest, and answer any further questions he
might wish to ask about the Dominion of Earth, or about the operation planned
for tomorrow. Falk had had some vague hopes in fact of learning more details of
what they planned to do to his mind, so as to be able to put up a stronger
resistance to it. It was no good. Ken Kenyek poured out endless verbiage
concerning neurons and synapses, salvaging, blocking, releasing, drugs,
hypnosis, parahypnosis, brain-linked computers . . . none of which was
meaningful, all of which was frightening. Falk soon ceased to try to
understand.
The
aircar, piloted by a speechless toolman who seemed little more than an
extension of the controls, cleared the mountains and shot west over the
deserts, bright with the brief flower of their spring. Within a few minutes
they were nearing the granite face of the Western Range. Still sheered and smashed
and raw from the cataclysms of two thousand years ago, the Sierras stood,
jagged pinnacles upthrust from chasms of snow. Over the crests lay the ocean,
bright in the sunlight; dark beneath the waves lay the
drowned lands.
There were cities there, obliterated—as there were in his own mind forgotten cities, lost places, lost names. As
the aircar circled to return eastward he said, "Tomorrow the earthquake;
and Falk goes under. . . ."
"A
pity it must be so, Lord Ramarren," Abundibot said with satisfaction. Or
it seemed to Falk that he spoke with satisfaction. Whenever Abundibot expressed
any emotion in words, the expression rang so false that it seemed to imply an
opposite emotion; but perhaps what it implied actually was a total lack of any
affect or feeling whatsoever. Ken Kenyek, white-faced and pale-eyed, with
regular, ageless features, neither showed nor pretended any emotion when he
spoke or when, as now, he sat motionless and expressionless, neither serene
nor stolid but utterly closed, self-sufficient, remote.
The
aircar flashed back across the desert miles between Es Toch and the sea; there
was no sign of human habitation in all that great
expanse. They landed on the roof of the building in which Falk's room was.
After a couple of hours
126
spent in the cold, heavy presence of the Shing he
craved even that illusory solitude. They permitted him to have it; the rest of
the afternoon and the evening he spent alone in the mist-walled room. He had
feared the Shing might drug him again or send illusions to distract and weaken
him, but apparently they felt they need take no more precautions with him. He
was left undisturbed, to pace the translucent floor, to sit still, and to read
in his book. What, after all, could he do against their will?
Again
and again through the long hours he returned to the book, the Old Canon. He did
not dare mark it even with his fingernail; he only read it, well as he knew it,
with total absorption, page after page, yielding himself to the words,
repeating them to himself as he paced or sat or lay, and returning again and
again and yet again to the beginning, the first words of the first page:
The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way. The name that can be
named is not the eternal Name.
And far into the night, under the pressure of weariness and of hunger,
of the thoughts he would not allow himself to think and the terror of death
that he would not allow himself to feel, his mind entered at last the state he
had sought. The walls fell away; his self fell away from him, and he was
nothing. He was the words: he was the word, the word spoken in darkness with
none to hear at the beginning, the first page of time. His self had fallen from
him and he was utterly, everlastingly himself: nameless, single, one.
Gradually
the moment returned, and things had names, and the walls arose. He read the
first page of the book once again, and then lay down and slept.
The
east wall of his room was emerald-bright with early sunlight when a couple of
toolmen came for him and took him down through the misty hall and levels of the
building to the street, and by slider through the shadowy streets and across
the chasm to another tower. These two were not the servants who had waited on
him, but a pair of big, speechless guards. Remembering the methodical brutality
of the beating he had got when he had first entered Es Toch,
127
the first lesson in self-distrust the Shing had
given him, he guessed that they had been afraid he might try to escape at this
last minute, and had provided these guards to discourage any such impulse.
He
was taken into a maze of rooms that ended in brightly lit,
underground cubicles all walled in by and dominated by the screens and banks of
an immense computer complex. In one of these Ken Kenyek came forward to meet
him, alone. It was curious how he had seen the Shing only one or two at a time,
and very few of them in all. But there was no time to puzzle over that now,
though on the fringes of his mind a vague memory, an explanation, danced for a
moment, until Ken Kenyek spoke.
"You
did not try to commit suicide last night," the Shing said in his toneless
whisper.
That
was in fact the one way out that had never occurred to Falk.
"I thought I would let
you handle that," he said.
Ken
Kenyek paid no heed to his words, though he had an air of listening closely.
"Everything is set up," he said. "These are the same banks and
precisely the same connections which were used to block your primary
mental-para-mental structure six years ago. The removal of the block should be
without difficulty or trauma, given your consent. Consent is essential to
restoration, though not to repression. Are you ready now?" Almost
simultaneously with his spoken words he bespoke Falk in that dazzlingly clear mindspeech:
"Are you ready?"
He listened closely as Falk
answered in kind, "I am."
As
if satisfied by the answer or its empathic overtones, the Shing nodded once and
said in his monotonous whisper, "I shall start out then without drugs.
Drugs befog the clarity of the parahypnotic processes; it is easier to work
without them. Sit down there."
Falk obeyed, silent, trying
to keep his mind silent as well.
An
assistant entered at some unspoken signal, and came over to Falk while Ken
Kenyek sat down in front of one of the computer-banks, as a musician sits down
to an instrument. For a moment Falk remembered the great pat-terning-frame in
the Throneroom of Kansas, the swift dark hands that had hovered over it,
forming and unforming the certain, changeful patterns of stones, stars,
thoughts. ... A
128
blackness came down like a curtain over his eyes and
over his mind. He was aware that something was being fitted over his head, a
hood or cap; then he was aware of nothing, only blackness, infinite blackness, the dark. In the dark a voice was speaking a word in his
mind, a word he almost understood. Over and over the same word, the word, the
word, the name . . . Like the flaring up of a fight his will to survive flared
up, and he declared it with terrible effort, against all odds, in silence: 1 am Falkl Then
darkness.
IX
This
was a quiet place, and
dim, like a deep
forest. Weak, he lay a long time between sleep and waking. Often he dreamed or
remembered fragments of a dream
from earlier, deeper sleep. Then again he slept, and woke again to the dim
verdant fight and the quietness.
There was a movement near him. Turning his
head, he saw a young man, a stranger.
"Who are your"
"Har Orry."
The name dropped like a stone into the dreamy tranquillity of his mind
and vanished. Only the circles from it widened out and widened out softly,
slowly, until at last the outermost circle touched shore, and broke. Orry, Har Weden's son, one of the Voyagers ... a boy, a child, winterbom.
The still surface of the pool of sleep was
crisscrossed with a little disturbance. He closed his eyes again and willed to
go under.
"I dreamed," he murmured with his
eyes closed. "I had a lot
of dreams. . .
But he was awake again, and looking into that frightened, irresolute, boyish
face. It was Orry, Weden's son: Orry as he would look five or six moonphases
from now, if they survived the Voyage.
What was it he had forgotten?
"What is this place?"
"Please he still, prech Ramarren—don't
talk yet; please fie still."
"What happened to me?" Dizziness forced him to obey the boy
and lie back. His body, even the muscles of his lips and tongue as he spoke,
did not obey him properly. It was not weakness but a queer lack of control. To
raise his hand he had to use conscious volition, as if it were someone else's
hand he was picking up.
Someone
else's hand. . . . He stared at his arm and hand for a good while. The skin was
curiously darkened to the color of tanned hann-hide. Down the forearm to the
wrist ran a series of parallel bluish scars, slightly stippled, as if made by
repeated jabs of a needle. Even the skin of the palm was toughened and
weathered as if he had been out in the open for a long time, instead of in the
laboratories and computer-rooms of Voyage Center and the Halls of Council and
Places of Silence in Wegest. ...
He looked around suddenly. The room he was in
was windowless; but, weirdly, he could see the sunlight in and through its
greenish walls.
"There
was an accident," he said at last. "In the launching, or when . . .
But we made the Voyage. We made it. Did I dream it?"
"No,
prech Ramarren. We
made the Voyage."
Silence
again. He said after a while, "I can only remember the Voyage as if it
were one night, one long night, last night. . . . But it aged you from a child
almost to a man. We were wrong about that, then."
"No—the Voyage did not
age me—" Orry stopped.
"Where are the
others?"
^Lost." • :
"Dead? Speak entirely, vesprech Orry." ]
"Probably dead, prech Ramarren." ■
"What is this place?" "Please, rest now—"
"Answer."
"This is a room in a city called Es Toch on the planet Earth,"
the boy answered with due entirety, and then broke out in a kind of wail,
"You don't know it?—you don't remember it, any of it? This is worse than
before—"
"How should I remember Earth?"
Ramarren whispered.
"I—I was to say to you, Read the first page of the
book."
Ramarren
paid no need to the boy's stammering. He knew now that all had gone amiss, and
that a time had passed
130
that he knew nothing of. But until he could
master this strange weakness of his body he could do nothing, and so he was
quiet until all dizziness had passed. Then with closed mind he told over
certain of the Fifth Level Soliloquies; and when they had quieted his mind as
well, he summoned sleep.
The
dreams rose up about him once more, complex and frightening yet shot through
with sweetness like the sunlight breaking through the dark of an old forest With deeper sleep these fantasies dispersed, and his dream
became a simple, vivid memory: He was waiting beside the airfoil to accompany
his father to the city. Up on the foothills of Cham the forests were half
leafless in their long dying, but the air was warm and clear and still. His
father Agad Karsen, a lithe spare old man in his ceremonial garb and helmet
holding his office-stone, came leisurely across the lawn with his daughter, and
both were laughing as he teased her about her first suitor, "Look out for
that lad, Parth, hell woo without mercy if you let him." Words lightly
spoken long ago, in the sunlight of the long, golden autumn of his youth, be
heard them again now, and the girl's laugh in response. Sister, little sister,
beloved Aman. . . . What had his father called her?—not by her right name but
something else, another name—
Ramarren
woke. He sat up, with a definite effort taking command of his body—yes, his,
still hesitant and shaky but certainly his own. For a moment in waking he had
felt he was a ghost in alien flesh, displaced, lost.
He
was all right. He was Agad Ramarren, bom in the silverstone house among broad
lawns under the white peak of Cham, the Single Mountain; Agad's heir, fallborn,
so that all his life had been lived in autumn and winter. Spring he had never seen, might never see, for the ship Alterra had begun her Voyage to Earth on the first
day of spring. But the long winter and the fall, the length of his manhood, boyhood,
childhood stretched back behind him vivid and unbroken, remembered, the river
reaching upward to the source.
The
boy Orry was no longer in the room. "Orryl" he said aloud; for he was
able and determined now to Ieam what had happened to him, to his companions, to
the Alterra and its mission. There was no reply or
signal. The room seemed to be not only windowless but doorless. He
131
checked his impulse to mindcall the boy; he did not know whether Orry
was still tuned with him, and also since his own mind had evidently suffered
either damage or interference, he had better go carefully and keep out of
phase with any other mind, until he learned if he was threatened by volitional
control or antichrony.
He stood up, dismissing vertigo and a brief, sharp occipital pain, and
walked back and forth across the room a few times, getting himself into
muscular harmony while he studied the outlandish clothes he was wearing and the
queer room he was in. There was a lot of furniture, bed, tables, and
sitting-places, all set up on long thin legs. The translucent, murky green
walls were covered with explicitiy deceptive and disjunctive patterns, one of
which disguised an iris-door, another a half-length
mirror. He stopped and looked at himself a moment. He looked thin, and
weather-beaten, and perhaps older; he hardly knew. He felt curiously
self-conscious, looking at himself. What was this uneasiness, this lack of
concentration? What had happened, what had been lost? He turned away and set
himself to study the room again. There were various enigmatic objects about, and two of familiar type though foreign in detail: a
drinldng-cup on one table, and a leafed book beside it. He picked up the book.
Something Orry had said flickered in his mind and went out again. The title was
meaningless, though the characters were clearly related to the alphabet of
the Tongue of the Books. He opened the thing and glanced through it. The
left-hand pages were written— handwritten, it appeared—with columns of
marvelously complicated patterns that might be holistic symbols, ideographs,
technological shorthand. The right-hand pages were also handwritten, but in the
letters that resembled the letters of the Books, Calaktika. A
code-book? But he had not yet puzzled out more than a word of two when
the doorslit silently irised open and a person entered the room: a woman.
Ramarren
looked at her with intense curiosity, unguardedly and without fear; only
perhaps, feeling himself vulnerable, he intensified a little the straight,
authoritative gaze to which his birth, earned Level and arlesh entitled him. Unabashed,
she returned his gaze. They stood there a moment in silence.
She was handsome and delicate, fantastically
dressed, 132
her hair bleached or reddish-pigmented. Her eyes
were a dark circle set in a white oval. Eyes like the eyes of painted faces in
the Lighall of the Old City, frescoes of dark-skinned, tall people building a
town, warring with the Migrators, watching the stars: the Colonists, the
Terrans of Alterra. . . .
Now Ramarren knew past doubt that he was
indeed on Earth, that he had made his Voyage. He set pride and self-defense aside, and
knelt down to her. To him, to all the people who had sent him on the mission
across eight hundred and twenty-five trillion miles of nothingness, she was of
a race that time and memory and forgetting had imbued with the quality of the
divine. Single, individual as she stood before him, yet she was of the Race of
Man and looked at him with the eyes of that Race, and he did honor to history
and myth and the long exile of his ancestors, bowing his head to her as he
knelt.
He rose and held out his open hands in the Kelshak gesture of reception,
and she began to speak to him. Her speaking was strange, very strange, for
though he had never seen her before her voice was infinitely familiar to his
ear, and though he did not know the tongue she spoke he understood a word of
it, then another. For a second this frightened him by its uncanniness and made
him fear she was using some form of mindspeech that could penetrate even his
outphase barrier; in the next second, he realized that he understood her
because she was speaking the Tongue of the Books, Calaktika. Only her accent
and her fluency in speaking it had kept him from recognizing it at once.
She
had already said several sentences to him, speaking in a curiously cold, quick,
lifeless way; ". . . not know I am here," she was saying. "Now
tell me which of us is the fiar, the faithless one. I
walked with you all that endless way, I lay with you a hundred nights, and now
you don't even know my name. Do you, Falk? Do you know my name? Do you know
your own?"
"I
am Agad Ramarren," he said, and his own name in his own voice sounded
strange to him.
"Who
told you so? You're Falk. Don't you know a man named Falk?—he used to wear your
flesh. Ken Kenyek and Kradgy forbade me to say his name to you, but I'm sick of
playing their games and never my own. I like to play my
133
own games. Don't you remember your name,
Falk?—Falk— Falk—don't you remember your name? Ah, you're still as stupid as
you ever were, staring like a stranded
fish I"
At
once he dropped his gaze. The matter of looking directly into another person's
eyes was a sensitive
one among Werelians, and was strictly controlled by tabu and manners. That was
his only response at first to her words, though his inward reactions were
immediate and various. For one thing, she was lightly drugged, with something
on the stimulant-hallucinogenic order: his trained perceptions reported this to
him as a certainty, whether he liked its implications concerning the Race of
Man or not. For another thing, he was not sure he had understood all she'd said
and certainly had no idea what she was talking about, but her intent was
aggressive, destructive. And the aggression was effective. For all his lack of
comprehension, her weird jeers and the name she kept repeating moved and
distressed him, shook him, shocked him.
He turned away a littie
to signify he would not cross her gaze again unless she wished, and said at
last, sofdy, in the archaic tongue his people knew only from the ancient books
of the Colony, "Are you of the Race of Man, or of the Enemy?"
She laughed in a forced,
gibing way. "Both, Falk. There is no Enemy, and I work for them. Listen, tell Abundibot your name
is Falk. Tell Ken Kenyek. Tell all the Lords your name is Falk—that'll give
them something to worry about! Falk-"
"Enough."
His voice was as soft as before, but he had spoken with his full
authority: she stopped with her mouth open, gaping. When she spoke again it was
only to repeat that name she called him by, in a voice gone shaky and almost supplicating. She was pitiful, but he made
no reply. She was in a temporary or permanent psychotic state, and he felt
himself too vulnerable and too unsure, in these circumstances, to allow her
further communication. He felt pretty shaky himself,
and moving away from her he indrew, becoming only secondarily aware of her
presence and voice. He needed to collect himself; there was something very
strange the matter with him, not drugs, at least no drug he knew, but a profound
displacement and imbalance, worse than any of the
134
induced insanities of Seventh Level mental
discipline. But he was given little time. The voice behind him rose in shrill
rancor, and then he caught the shift to violence and along with it the sense of
a second presence. He turned very quickly: she had begun to draw from her
bizarre clothing what was obviously a weapon, but was standing frozen staring
not at him but at a tall man in the doorway.
No
word was spoken, but the newcomer directed at the woman a telepathic command of
such shattering coercive force that it made Ramarren wince. The weapon dropped
to the floor and the woman, making a thin keening sound, ran stooped from the
room, trying to escape the destroying insistence of that mental order. Her
blurred shadow wavered a moment in the wall, vanished.
The tall man turned his white-rimmed eyes to
Ramarren and bespoke him with normal power: "Who are you?"
Ramarren answered in kind, "Agad Ramarren,"
but no more, nor did he bow. Things had gone even more wrong than he had first
imagined. Who were these people? In the confrontation he had just witnessed
there had been insanity, cruelty and terror, and nothing else; certainly
nothing that disposed him either to reverence or trust.
But
the tall man came forward a littie, a smile on his heavy, rigid face, and spoke
aloud courteously in the Tongue of the Books. "I am Pelleu Abundibot, and
I welcome you heartily to Earth, kinsman, son of the long exile, messenger of
the Lost Colony!"
Ramarren, at that, made a very brief bow and stood a moment in silence.
"It appears," he said, "that I have been on Earth some while,
and made an enemy of that woman, and earned certain scars. Will you tell me how
this was, and how my shipmates perished? Bespeak me if you will: I do not speak
Galaktika so well as you."
"Prech Ramarren," the other said—he had evidently picked that
up from Orry as if it were a mere honorific, and had no notion of what
constituted the relationship of prechnoye—"forgive me first that I speak
aloud. It is not our custom to use mindspeech except in urgent need, or to our
inferiors. And forgive next the intrusion of that creature, a servant whose
madness has driven her outside the Law. We will attend to her mind. She will
not trouble you again. As for your questions, all will be answered. In brief,
how-
135
ever, here is the unhappy tale which now at last
draws to a happy ending. Your ship Alterra was
attacked as it entered Earthspace by our enemies, rebels outside the Law. They
took two or more of you off the Alterra into
their small planetary cars before our guardship came. When it came, they
destroyed the Alterra
with all left aboard her,
and scattered in their small ships. We caught the one on which Har Orry was
prisoner, but you were carried off— I do not know for what purpose. They did
not kill you, but erased your memory back to the pre-lingual stage, and then
turned you loose in a wild forest to find your death. You survived, and were
given shelter by barbarians of the forest; finally our searchers found you,
brought you here, and by parahypnotic techniques we have succeeded in restoring
your memory. It was all we could do—little indeed, but all."
Ramarren
listened intently. The story shook him, and he made no effort to hide his
feelings; but he felt also a certain uneasiness or suspicion, which he did
conceal. The tall man had addressed him, though very briefly, in mindspeech,
and thus given him a degree of attunement. Then Abundibot had ceased all
telepathic sending and had put up an empathic guard, but not a perfect one;
Ramarren, highly sensitive and finely trained, received vague empathic
impressions so much at discrepancy with what the man said as to hint at
dementia, or at lying. Or was he himself so out of tune with himself—as he
might well be after parahypnosis—that his empathic
receptions were simply not reliable?
"How
long . . . P" he asked at last, looking up for a moment into those alien
eyes.
"Six years ago Terran
style, prech Ramarren."
The
Terran year was nearly the length of a moonphase. "So long," he said.
He could not take it in. His friends, his fellow-Voyagers had been dead then
for a long time, and he had been alone on Earth . . . "Six years?"
"You remember nothing
of those years?"
"Nothing."
"We were forced to wipe out what rudimentary memory you may have
had of that time, in order to restore your true memory and personality. We very
much regret that loss of six years of your life. But they would not have been
136
sane or
pleasant memories. The outlaw brutes had made of you a creature more brutish
than themselves. I am glad you do not remember it, prech Ramarren."
Not only glad, but gleeful. This man must
have very little empathic ability or training, or he would be putting up a
better guard; his telepathic guard was flawless. More and more distracted by
these mindheard overtones that implied falsity or unclarity in what Abundibot
said, and by the continuing lack of coherence in his own mind, even in his
physical reactions, which remained slow and uncertain, Ramarren had to pull himself together to make any response at all. Memories—how
could six years have passed without his remembering one moment from them? But a
hundred and forty years had passed while his lightspeed ship had crossed from
Werel to Earth and of that he remembered only a moment, indeed, one terrible,
eternal moment. . . . What had the madwoman called him, screaming a name at him
with crazy, grieving rancor?
"What was I called, these past six years?"
"Called?
Among the natives, do you mean, prech Ramarren? I am
not sure what name they gave you, if they bothered to give you any. . . ."
Falk,
she had called him, Falk. "Fellowman," he said abruDtly, translating
the Kelshak form of address into Gal-aktika, "I will learn more of you
later, if you will. What you tell me troubles me. Let me be alone with it a
while."
"Surely, surely, prech Ramarren. Your young friend Orry is eager to be with
you—shall I send him to you?" But Ramarren, having made his request and
heard it accepted, had in the way of one of his Level dismissed the other, tuned him out, hearing whatever else he said simply as
noise.
"We too have much to learn of you, and
are eager to leam it, once you feel quite recovered." Silence.
Then the noise again: "Our servants wait to serve you; if you desire
refreshment or company you have only to go to the door and speak." Silence
again, and at last the unmannerly presence withdrew.
Ramarren sent no speculations after it. He
was too preoccupied with himself to worry about these strange hosts of his.
The turmoil within his mind was increasing sharply, coming to some land of
crisis. He felt as if he were being
137
dragged to face something that he could not endure
to face, and at the same time craved to face, to find. The bitterest days of
his Seventh Level training had only been a hint of this disintegration of his
emotions and identity, for that had been an induced psychosis, carefully controlled,
and this was not under his control. Or was it?— was he
leading himself into this, compelling himself towards the crisis? But who was
"he" who compelled and was compelled? He had been killed, and
brought back to life. What was death, then, the death he could not remember?
To escape the utter panic welling up in him
he looked around for any object to fix on, reverting to early
trance-discipline, the Outcome technique of fixing on
one concrete thing to build up the world from once more. But everything about
him was alien, deceptive, unfamiliar; the very floor
under him was a dull sheet of mist. There was the book he had been looking at
when the woman entered calling him by that name he would not remember. He would
not remember it. The book: he had held it in his hands, it was real, it was there. He picked it up very carefully and stared at
the page that it opened to. Columns of beautiful meaningless patterns, lines of
half-comprehensible script, changed from the letters he had learned long ago in
the First Analect, deviant, bewildering. He stared at them and could not read
them, and a word of which he did not know the meaning rose up from them, the
first word:
The way ...
He looked from the book to his own hand that held it Whose
hand, darkened and scarred beneath an alien sun? Whose hand?
The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way. The name
...
He could not remember the
name; he would not read it. In a dream
he had read these words, in a long sleep, a death, a dream.
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
And with that the dream rose up overwhelming
him like a wave rising, and broke.
He was Falk, and he was Ramarren. He was the
fool and the wise man: one man twice bom.
In those first fearful hours, he begged and prayed to be delivered
sometimes from one self, sometimes from the other. Once when he cried out in
anguish in his own native tongue, he did not understand the words he had
spoken, and this was so terrible that in utter misery he wept; it was Falk who
did not understand, but Ramarren who wept.
In that same moment of misery he touched for
the first time, for a moment only, the balance-pole, the center, and for a
moment was himself: then lost again, but with just enough
strength to hope for the next moment of harmony. Harmony: when he was Ramarren
he clung to that idea and discipline, and it was perhaps his mastery of that
central Kelshak doctrine that kept hun from going right over the edge into
madness. But there was no integrating or balancing the two minds and
personalities that shared his skull, not yet; he must swing between them,
blanking one out for the other's sake, then drawn at once back the other way.
He was scarcely able to move, being plagued by the hallucination of having two
bodies, of being actually physically two different men. He did not dare sleep,
though he was worn out: he feared the waking too much.
It was night, and he was left to himself. To myselves, Falk commented. Falk was at first the
stronger, having had some preparation for this ordeal. It was Falk who got the
first dialogue going: I
have got to get some sleep, Ramarren, he said, and Ramarren received the words as if in mindspeech and without
premeditation replied in kind: I'm afraid to sleep. Then he kept watch for a little while, and knew Falk's dreams like
shadows and echoes in his mind.
He got through this first, worst time, and by
the time morning shone dim through the green veilwalls of his room, he had lost
his fear and was beginning to gain real control over both thought and action.
139
There was of course no actual overlap of his
two sets of memories. Falk had come to conscious being in the vast number of
neurons that in a highly intelligent brain remain unused—the fallow fields of
Ramarren's mind. The basic motor and sensory paths has never been blocked off
and so in a sense had been shared all along, though difficulties arose there
caused by the doubling of the sets of motor habits and modes of perception. An
object looked different to him depending on whether he looked at it as Falk or
as Ramarren, and though in the long run this reduplication might prove an
augmentation of his intelligence and perceptive power, at the moment it was
confusing to the point of vertigo. There was considerable emotional
intershading, so that his feelings on some points quite literally conflicted.
And, since Falk's memories covered his "lifetime" just as did
Ramarren's, the two series tended to appear simultaneously instead of in proper
sequence. It was hard for Ramarren to allow for the gap of time during which he
had not consciously existed. Ten days ago where had he been? He had been on
muleback among the snowy mountains of Earth; Falk knew that; but Ramarren knew
that he had been taking leave of his wife in a house on the high green plains
of Werel ....
Also, what Ramarren guessed about Terra was often contradicted by what Falk
knew, while Falk's ignorance of Werel cast a strange glamor of legend over
Ramarren's own past. Yet even in this bewilderment there was the germ of
interaction, of the coherence toward which he strove. For the fact remained,
he was, bodily and chronologically, one man: his problem - was not really that
of creating a unity, only of comprehending it.
Coherence was far from being gained. One or
the other of the two memory-structures still had to dominate, if he was to
think and act with any competence. Most often, now, it was Ramarren who took
over, for the Navigator of the Alterra was
a decisive and potent person. Falk, in comparison, felt himself childish,
tentative; he could offer what knowledge he had, but relied upon Ramarren's
strength and experience. Both were needed, for the two-minded man was in a very
obscure and hazardous situation.
One
question was basic to all the others. It was simplyput: whether or not the
Shing could be trusted. For if Falk had merely been inculcated with a
groundless fear of the Lords
140
of Earth, then the hazards and obscurities
would themselves prove groundless. At first Ramarren thought this might
well be the case; but he did not think it for long.
There
were open lies and discrepancies which already his double memory had caught.
Abundibot had refused to mind-speak to Ramarren, saying the Shing avoided
paraverbal communication: that Falk knew to be a lie. Why had Abundibot told
it? Evidently because he wanted to tell a he—the Shing story of what had
happened to the Alterra
and its crew—and could not
or dared not tell it to Ramarren in mindspeech.
But he had told Falk very much the same
story, in mindspeech.
If it was a false story, then, the Shing could
and did mind-he. Was it false?
Ramarren
called upon Falk's memory. At first that effort of combination was beyond bim,
but it became easier as he struggled, pacing up and down the silent room, and
suddenly it came clear; he could recall the brilliant silence of Abundibot's
words: "We whom you know as Shing are men. . . And hearing it even in
memory, Ramarren knew it for a he. It was incredible, and indubitable. The
Shing could lie telepathically—that guess and dread of subjected humanity was right.
The Shing were, in truth, the Enemy.
They were not men but aliens, gifted with an
alien power; and no doubt they had broken the League and gained power over
Earth by the use of that power. And it was they who had attacked the Alterra as she had come into Earthspace; all the talk
of rebels was mere fiction. They had killed or brainrazed all the crew but the
child Orry. Ramarren could guess why: because they had discovered, testing him
or one of the other highly trained paraverbalists of the crew, that a Werelian
could tell when they were mindlying. That had frightened the Shing, and they
had done away with the adults, saving out only the harmless child as an
informant.
To
Ramarren it was only yesterday that his fellow-Voyagers had perished, and,
struggling against that blow, he tried to think that like him they might have
survived somewhere on Earth. But if they had—and he had been very lucky— where
were they now? The Shing had had a hard time locating even one,
it appeared, when they had discovered that they needed him.
What did they need him for? Why had they sought him, brought him here,
restored the memory that they had destroyed?
No explanation could be got from the facts at
his disposal except the one he had arrived at as Falk: The Shing needed him to
tell them where he came from.
That
gave Falk-Ramarren his first amount of amusement. If it really was that simple,
it was funny. They had saved out Orry because he was so young; untrained,
unformed, vulnerable, amenable, a perfect instrument and informant. He
certainly had been all of that. But did not know where he came from. . . . And
by the time they discovered that, they had wiped the information they wanted
clean out of the minds that knew it, and scattered their victims over the wild,
ruined Earth to die of accident or starvation or the attack of wild beasts or
men.
He could assume that Ken Kenyek, while
manipulating his mind through the psychocomputer yesterday, had tried to get
him to divulge the Calaktika name of Werel's sun. And he could assume that if
he had divulged it, he would be dead or mindless now. They did not want him,
Ramarren; they wanted only his knowledge. And they had not got it.
That
in itself must have them worried, and well it might.
The Kelshak code of secrecy concerning the Books of the Lost Colony had evolved
along with a whole technique of mindguarding. That mystique of secrecy—or more
precisely of restraint—had grown over the long years from the rigorous control
of scientific-technical knowledge exercised by the original Colonists, itself
an outgrowth from the League's Law of Cultural Embargo, which forbade cultural
importation to colonial planets. The whole concept of restraint was fundamental
in Werelian culture by now, and the stratification of Werelian society was
directed by the conviction that knowledge and technique must remain under
intelligent control. Such details as the True Name of the Sun were formal and
symbolical, but the formalism was taken seriously—with ultimate seriousness,
for in Kelshy knowledge was religion, religion knowledge. To guard the
intangible holy places in the minds of men, intangible and invulnerable
defenses had been devised. Unless he was in one of the Places of Silence, and
addressed in a certain form by an associate of his own Level,
142
Ramarren was absolutely unable to
communicate, in words or writing or mindspeech, the True Name of his world's
sun.
He possessed, of course, equivalent
knowledge: the complex of astronomical facts that had enabled him to plot the Alterra's coordinates from Werel to Earth; his
knowledge of the exact distance between the two planets' suns; his clear,
astronomer's memory of the stars as seen from Werel. They had not got this information
from him yet, probably because his mind had been in too chaotic a state when
first restored by Ken Kenyek's manipulations, or because even then his
parahypnotically strengthened mindguards and specific barriers had been
functioning. Knowing there might still be an Enemy on Earth, the crewmen of the
Alterra had not set off unprepared. Unless Shing
mindscience was much stronger than Werelian, they would not now be able to
force him to tell them anything. They hoped to induce him, to persuade him.
Therefore, for the present, he was at least physically safe.
—So long as they did not know that he
remembered his existence as Falk.
That
came over him with a chill. It had not occurred to him before. As Falk he had
been useless to them, but harmless. As Ramarren he was useful to them, and
harmless. But as Falk-Ramarren, he was a threat. And they did not tolerate
threats: they could not afford to.
And
there was the answer to the last question: Why did they want so badly to know
where Werel was—what did Werel matter to them?
Again Falk's memory spoke to Ramarren's
intelligence, this time recalling a calm, blithe, ironic voice. The old
Listener in the deep forest spoke, the old man lonelier on Earth than even Falk
had been: "There are not very many of the Shing. ..."
A great piece of news and wisdom and advice,
he had called it; and it must be the literal truth. The old histories Falk had
learned in Zove's House held the Shing to be aliens from a very distant region
of the galaxy, out beyond the Hyades, a matter perhaps of thousands of
light-years. If that was so, probably no vast numbers of them had crossed so
immense a length of spacetime. There had been enough to infiltrate the League
and break it, given their powers of mindlying and other skills or weapons they
might possess or
143
have possessed; but had there been enough of them
to rule over all the worlds they had divided and conquered? Planets were very
large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. The Shing
must have had to spread themselves thin, and take
much care to keep the subject planets from re-allying and joining to rebel.
Orry had told Falk that the Shing did not seem to travel or trade much by
lightspeed; he had never even seen a lightspeed ship of theirs. Was that because
they feared their own kin on other worlds, grown away from them over the
centuries of their dominion? Or conceivably was Earth the only planet they
still ruled, defending it from all explorations from other worlds? No telling;
but it did seem likely that on Earth there were indeed not very many of them.
They had refused to believe Orry's tale of
how the Terrans on Werel had mutated toward the local biological norm and so
finally blended stocks with the native hominids. They had said that was
impossible: which meant that it had not happened to them; they were unable to
mate with Terrans. They were still alien, then, after twelve hundred years;
still isolated on Earth. And did they in fact rule mankind, from this single
City? Once again Ramarren turned to Falk for the answer, and saw it as No. They
controlled men by habit, ruse, fear, and weaponry, by being quick to prevent
the rise of any strong tribe or the pooling of knowledge that might threaten
them. They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves.
They did not rule, they only blighted.
It
was clear, then, why Werel posed a deadly threat to thorn. They had so far kept
up their tenuous, ruinous hold on the culture which long ago they had wrecked
and redirected; but a strong, numerous, technologically advanced race, with a
mythos of blood-kinship with the Terrans, and a mind-science and weaponry equal
to their own, might crush them at a blow. And deliver men from them.
If they learned from him where Werel was,
would they send out a lightspeed bomb-ship, like a long fuse burning across the
light-years, to destroy the dangerous world before it ever learned of their
existence?
That
seemed only too possible. Yet two things told against it: their careful
preparation of young Orry, as if they wanted him to act as a messenger; and
their singular Law.
Falk-Ramarren was unable to decide whether
that rule of
144
Reverence for Life was the String's one
genuine belief, their one plank across the abyss of self-destruction that
underlay their behavior as the black canyon gaped beneath their city, or
instead was simply the biggest lie of all their lies. They did in fact seem to
avoid killing sentient beings. They had left him alive, and perhaps the others;
their elaborately disguised foods were all vegetable; in order to control
populations they evidendy pitted tribe against tribe, starting the war but
letting humans do the lolling; and the histories told that in the early days of
their rule, they had used eugenics and resettlement to consolidate their
empire, rather than genocide. It might be trua, then, that they obeyed their
Law, in their own fashion.
In that case, their grooming of young Orry indicated that he was to be
their messenger. Sole survivor of the Voyage, he wsis to return across the
gulfs of time and space to Werel and tell them all the Shing had told him
about Earth-quack, quack, like the birds that quacked It is wrong to take life, the moral boar, the squeaking mice in the
foundations of the house of Man. . . . Mindless, honest, disastrous, Orry would
carry the Lie to Werel.
Honor
and the memory of the Colony were strong forces on Werel, and a call for help
from Earth might bring help from them; but if they were told there was not and
never had been an Enemy, that Earth was an ancient happy garden-spot, they
were not likely to make that long journey just to see it. And if they did they
would come unarmed, as Ramarren and his companions had come.
Another
voice spoke in his memory, longer ago yet, deeper in the forest: "We
cannot go on like this forever. There must be a hope, a sign. ..."
He had not been sent with a message to
mankind, as Zove had dreamed. The hope was a stranger one even than that, the
sign more obscure. He was to carry mankind's message, to utter their cry for
help, for deliverance.
I must go home; I must tell them the truth, he thought, knowing that the Shing would at
all costs prevent this, that Orry would be sent, and he would be kept here or
killed.
In
the great weariness of his long effort to think coherently, his will relaxed
all at once, his chancy control over his racked and worried double mind broke.
He dropped down exhausted on the couch and put his head in his hands. If I
145
could only go home, he thought; if I could walk once more with Parth down in
the Long Field. . . .
That
was the dream-self grieving, the dreamer Falk. Ra-marren tried to evade that
hopeless yearning by thinking of his wife, dark-haired, golden-eyed, in a gown
sewn with a thousand tiny chains of silver, his wife Adrise. But his wedding-ring
was gone. And Adrise was dead. She had been dead a long, long time. She had
married Ramarren knowing that they would have little more than a moonphase
together, for he was going on the Voyage to Terra. And during that one,
terrible moment of his Voyage, she had lived out her life, grown old, died; she
had been dead for a hundred of Earth's years, perhaps. Across the years between
the stars, which now was the dreamer, which the dream?
"You
should have died a century ago," the Prince of Kansas had told
uncomprehending Falk, seeing or sensing or knowing of the man that lay lost
within him, the man born so long ago. And now if Ramarren were to return to
Werel it would be yet farther into his own future. Nearly three centuries,
nearly five of Werel's great Years would then have elapsed since he had left;
all would be changed; he would be as strange on Werel as he had been on Earth.
There
was only one place to which he could truly go home, to the welcome of those who
had loved him: Zove's House. And he would never see it again. If his way led
anywhere, it was out, away from Earth. He was on his own, and had only one job
to do: to try to follow that way through to the end.
X
It
was broad daylight now, and
realizing that he was very hungry Ramarren went to the concealed door and asked
aloud, in Calaktika, for food. There was no reply, but presently a toolman
brought and served him food; and as he was finishing it a little signal sounded
outside the door. "Come in!" Ramarren said in Kelshak, and Har Orry
entered, then the tall Shing Abundibot, and two others whom Ramarren had never
seen. Yet their names were in his mind: Ken Ken-yek and Kradgy. They were
introduced to him; politenesses were uttered. Ramarren found that he could
handle himself
146
pretty well; the necessity of keeping Falk
completely hidden and suppressed was actually a convenience, freeing him to
behave spontaneously. He was aware that the mentalist Ken Kenyek was trying to mindprobe, and with considerable skill and force, but that
did not worry him. If his barriers had held good even under the
p&rahypnotic hood, they certainly would not falter now.
None of the Shing bespoke him. They stood about in their strange stiff
fashion as if afraid of being touched, and whispered all they said. Ramarren
managed to ask some of the questions which as Ramarren he might be expected to
ask concerning Earth, mankind, the Shing, and listened gravely to the answers.
Once he tried to get into phase with young Orry, but failed. The boy had no
real guard up, but perhaps had been subjected to some mental treatment which
nullified the little skill in phase-catching he had learned as a child, and
also was under the influence of the drug he had been habituated to. Even as
Ramarren sent him the slight, fami-iar signal of their relationship in
prechnoye, Orry began sucking on a tube of pariitha. In the vivid distracting
world of semi-hallucination it provided him, his perceptions were dulled, and
he received nothing.
"You
have seen nothing of Earth as yet but this one room," the one dressed as a
woman, Kradgy, said to Ramarren in a harsh whisper. Ramarren was wary of them
all but Kradgy roused an instinctive fear or aversion in him; there was a hint
of nightmare in the bulky body under flowing robes, the long purplish-black
hair, the harsh, precise whisper.
"I should like to see
more."
"We shall show you whatever you wish to
see. The Earth is open to its honored visitor."
"I
do not remember seeing Earth from the Alterra when
we came into orbit," Ramarren said in stiff, Werelian-ac-cented Calaktika.
"Nor do I remember the attack on the ship. Can you tell me why this is
so?"
The question might be risky, but he was
genuinely curious for the answer; it was the one blank still left in his double
memory.
"You were in the condition we term
achronia," Ken Kenyek replied. "You came out of lightspeed all
at^once at the Barrier, since your ship had no retemporalizer. You were at
147
that moment, and for some minutes or hours after,
either unconscious or insane."
"We had not run into the problem in our
short runs at lightspeed."
"The longer the flight, the stronger the
Barrier."
"It
was a gallant thing," Abundibot said in his creaky whisper and with his
usual floridity, "a journey of a hundred and twenty-five light-years in a
scarcely tested ship!"
Ramarren accepted the compliment without
correcting the number.
"Come, my Lords, let us show our guest the City of Earth."
Simultaneously with Abundibot's words, Ramarren caught the passage of
mindspeech between Kradgy and Ken Kenyek, but did not get the sense of it; he
was too intent on maintaining his own guard to be able to mindhear or even to
receive much empathic impression.
"The ship in which you return to
Werel," Ken Kenyek said, "will of course be furnished with a
retemporalizer, and you will suffer no derangement at re-entering planetary
space."
Ramarren had risen, rather awkwardly—Falk was
used to chairs but Ramarren was not, and had felt most uncomfortable perched
up in mid-air—but he stood still now and after a moment asked, "The ship
in which we return—?"
Orry
looked up with blurry hopefulness. Kradgy yawned, showing strong yellow teeth.
Abundibot said, "When you have seen all you wish to see of Earth and have
learned all you wish to learn, we have a lightspeed ship ready for you to go
home to Werel in—you, Lord Agad, and Har Orry. We ourselves travel little.
There are no more wars; we have no need for trade with other worlds; and we do
not wish to bankrupt poor Earth again with the immense cost of lightspeed
ships merely to assuage our curiosity. We Men of Earth are an old race now; we
stay home, tend our garden, and do not meddle and explore abroad. But your
Voyage must be completed, your mission fulfilled. The New Alterra awaits you at our spaceport, and Werel awaits
your return. It is a great pity that your civilization had not rediscovered the
an-sible principle, so that we could be in communication with them now. By now,
of course, they may have the instantaneous transmitter; but we cannot signal
them, having no coordinates."
"Indeed," Ramarren said politely, '~*
There was a slight, tense pause.
"I do not think I understand," he said.
"The ansible—"
"I understand what the ansible
transmitter did, though not how it did it. As you say, sir, we had not when I
left Werel rediscovered the principles of instantaneous transmission. But I do
not understand what prevented you from attempting to signal Werel."
Dangerous ground. He was all alert now, in control, a player in the game not a piece to be
moved: and he sensed the electric tension behind the three rigid faces.
"Prech
Ramarren,"' Abundibot said, "as Har Orry was too young to have
learned the precise distances involved, we have never had the honor of knowing
exactiy where Werel is located, though of course we have a general idea. As he
had learned very little Galaktika, Har Orry was unable to tell us the Galaktika
name for Werel's sun, which of course would be meaningful to us, who share the
language with you as a heritage from the days of the League. Therefore we have
been forced to wait for your assistance, before we could attempt ansible
contact with Werel, or prepare the coordinates on the ship we have ready for
you."
"You do not know the uame of the star Werel circles?"
"That unfortunately is the case. H you care to tell us—"
"I cannot tell you."
The
Shing could not be surprised; they were too self-absorbed, too egocentric. Abundibot
and Ken Kenyek registered nothing at all. Kraigy said in his strange, dreary,
precise whisper, "You mean you don't know either?"
"I
cannot tell you the True Name of the Sun," Ramarren said serenely.
This
time he caught the flicker of mindspeech, Ken Kenyek to Abundibot: I told you so.
"I
apologize, prech Ramarren, for my ignorance in inquiring after a forbidden
matter. Will-you forgive me? We do not know your ways, and though ignorance is
a poor excuse it is all I can plead." Abundibot was creaking on when all
at once the boy Orry interrupted him, scared into wakefulness:
"Prech Ramarren, you—you will be able to
set the ship's coordinates? You do remember what—what you knew as
Navigator?"
Ramarren turned to him and asked quietiy,
"Do you want to go home, vesprechna?'
"Yes!"
"In
twenty or thirty days, if it pleases these Lords who offer us so great a gift,
we shall return in their ship to Werel. I am sorry," he went on, turning
back to the Shing, "that my mouth and mind are closed to your question. My
silence is a mean return for your generous frankness." Had they been using
mindspeech, he thought, the exchange would have been a great deal less polite;
for he, unlike the Shing, was unable to mindlie, and therefore probably could
not have said one word of his last speech.
"No matter, Lord Agad! It is your safe return, not our questions,
that is important! So long as you can program the ship—and all our records and
course-computers are at your service when you may require them—then the
question is as good as answered." And indeed it was, for if they wanted to
know where Werel was they would only have to examine the course he programmed
into their ship. After that, if they still distrusted him, they could re-erase
his mind, explaining to Orry that the restoration of his memory had caused him
finally to break down. They would then send Orry off to deliver their message
to WereL They did still distrust him, because they knew he could detect their
mindlying. If there was any way out of the trap he had not found it yet.
They all went together through the misty halls, down the ramps and
elevators, out of the palace into daylight. Falk's element of the double mind
was almost entirely repressed now, and Ramarren moved and thought and spoke
quite freely as Ramarren. He sensed the constant, sharp readiness of the Shing
minds, particularly that of Ken Kenyek, waiting to penetrate the least flaw or
catch the slightest slip. The very pressure kept lum doubly alert. So it was as
Ramarren, the alien, that he looked up into the sky of late morning and saw
Earth's yellow sun.
He stopped, caught by sudden joy. For it was
something, no matter what had gone before and what might follow after —it was
something to have seen the light, in one lifetime, of two sims.
The orange gold of Werel's sun, the white gold of Earth's: he could hold them
now side by side as a man might hold two jewels, comparing their beauty for the
sake of heightening their praise.
The boy was standing beside him; and Ramarren
murmured aloud the greeting that Kelshak babies and little children were
taught to say to the sun seen at dawn or after the long storms of winter,
"Welcome the star of life, the center of the year ..." Orry picked it up midway and spoke it with him. It was
the first harmony between them, and Ramarren was glad of it, for he would need
Orry before this game was done.
A slider was summoned and they went about the city, Ramarren asking
appropriate questions and the Shing replying as they saw fit. Abundibot
described elaborately how all of Es Toch, towers, bridges, streets and palaces,
had been built overnight a thousand years ago, on a river-isle on the other
side of the planet, and how from century to century whenever they felt inclined
the Lords of Earth summoned their wondrous machines and instruments to move the
whole city to a new site suiting their whim. It was a pretty tale; and Orry was
too benumbed with drugs and persuasions to disbelieve anything, while if
Ramarren believed or not was little matter. Abundibot evidently told lies for
the mere pleasure of it. Perhaps it was the only pleasure he knew. There were
elaborate descriptions also of how Earth was governed, how most of the Shing
spent their fives among common men, disguised as mere "natives" but
working for the master plan emanating from Es Toch, how carefree and content
most of humanity was in their knowledge that the Shing would keep the peace and
bear the burdens, how arts and learning were gently encouraged and rebellious
and destructive elements as gently repressed. A planet of humble people, in
their humble litde cottages and peaceful tribes and townlets; no warring, no
killing, no crowding; the old achievements and ambitions forgotten; almost a
race of children, protected by the firm kindly guidance and the invulnerable
technological strength of the Shing caste. . . .
The
story went on and on, always the same with variations, soothing and reassuring.
It was no wonder the poor waif Orry believed it; Ramarren would have believed
most of it, if he had not had Falk's memories of the Forest and the Plains to
show the rather subtle but total falseness of it Falk had not lived on Earth
among children, but among men, brutalized, suffering, and impassioned.
That day they showed Ramarren all over Es Toch, which 151 seemed to him
who had lived among the old streets of We-gest and in the great Winterhouses of
Kaspool a sham city, vapid and artificial, impressive only by its fantastic
natural setting. Then they began to take him and Orry about the world by aircar
and planetary car, all-day tours under the guidance of Abundibot or Ken Kenyek,
jaunts to each of Earth's continents and even out to the desolate and
long-abandoned Moon. The days went on; they went on playing the play for
Orry's benefit, wooing Ramarren till they got from him what they wanted to
know. Though he was di-recdy or electronically watched at every moment,
visually and telepathically, he was in no way restrained; evidendy they felt
they had nothing to fear from him now.
Perhaps they would let him go home with Orry,
then. Perhaps they thought him harmless enough, in his ignorance, to be
allowed to leave Earth with his readjusted mind intact.
But he could buy his escape from Earth only
with the information they wanted, the location of Werel. So far he had told
them nothing and they had asked nothing more.
Did
it so much matter, after all, if the Shing knew where Werel was?
It
did. Though they might not be planning any immediate attack on this potential
enemy, they might well be planning to send a robot monitor out after the New Alterra, with an ansible transmitter aboard to make
instantaneous report to them of any preparation for interstellar flight on
Werel. The ansible would give them a hundred and forty year start on the
Werelians; they could stop an expedition to Terra before it started. The one
advantage that Werel possessed tactically over the Shing was the fact that the
Shing did not know where it was and might have to spend several centuries
looking for it. Ramarren could buy a chance of escape only at the price of
certain peril for the world to which he was responsible.
So
he played for time, trying to devise a way out of his dilemma, flying with Orry
and one or another of the Shing here and there over the Earth, which stretched
out under their flight like a great lovely garden gone all to weeds and
wilderness. He sought with all his trained intelligence some way in which he
could turn his situation about and become the controller instead of the one
controlled: for so his Kelshak mentality presented his case to him. Seen
righdy, any situa-
152
tion, even a chaos or a trap, would come clear and lead of itself to its
one proper outcome: for there is in the long run no disharmony, only
misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye. So
Ramarren thought, and the second soul within him, Falk, took no issue with this
view, but spent no time trying to think it all out, either. For Falk had seen
the dull and bright stones slip across the wires of the patteming-frame, and
had lived with men in their fallen estate, kings in exile on their own domain
the Earth, and to him it seemed that no man could make his fate or control the
game, but only wait for the bright jewel luck to slip by on the wire of time.
Harmony exists, but there is no understanding it; the Way cannot be gone. So
while Ramarren racked his mind, Falk lay low and waited. And when the chance
came he caught it.
Or rather, as it turned out, he was caught by it. There was nothing
special about the moment. They were with Ken Kenyek in a fleet little
auto-pilot aircar, one of the beautiful, clever machines that allowed the Shing
to control and police the world so effectively. They were returning toward Es
Toch from a long flight out over the islands of the Western Ocean, on one of
which they had made a stop of several hours at a human settlement. The natives
of the island-chain they had visited were handsome, contented people entirely
absorbed in sailing, swimming, and sex-afloat in the azure amniotic sea:
perfect specimens of human happiness and backwardness to show the Werehans. Nothing to worry about there, nothing to fear.
Orry was dozing, with a pariitha-tube between his fingers. Ken Kenyek
had put the ship on automatic, and with Ramarren—three or feet away from him,
as always, for the Shing never got physically close to anyone—was looking out
the glass side of the aircar at the five-hundred-mile circle of fair weather
and blue sea that surrounded them. Ramarren was tired, and let himself relax a
little in this pleasant moment of suspension, aloft in a glass bubble in the
center of the great blue and golden sphere. "It is a lovely world,"
the Shing said. It is.
"The jewel of all
worlds. ... Is Werel as beautiful?" "No.
It is harsher."
"Yes, the long year would make it so.
How long?—sixty Earthyears?" "Yes."
"You were bom in the fall, you said.
That would mean you had never seen your world in summer when you left it."
"Once, when I flew to the Southern hemisphere. But their summers are cooler, as their
winters are warmer, than in Kelshy. I have not seen the Great Summer of the
north."
"You may yet. If you return within a few
months, what wiL1 the season be on
Werel?"
Ramarren computed for a couple of seconds and replied, "Late
summer; about the twentieth moonphase of summer, perhaps."
"I made it to be fall—how long does the
journey take?"
"A hundred and forty-two
Earthyears," Ramarren said, and as he said it a little gust of panic blew
across his mind and died away. He sensed the presence of the Shing's mind in
his own; while talking, Ken Kenyek had reached out mentally, found his defenses
down, and taken whole-phase control of his mind. That was all right. It showed
incredible patience and telepathic skill on the Shing's part. He had been
afraid of it, but now that it had happened it was perfecdy all right.
Ken Kenyek was bespeaking him now, not in the creaky oral whisper of the
Shing but in clear, comfortable mind-speech: "Now, that's all right,
that's right, that's good. Isn't it pleasant that we're attuned at last?"
"Very pleasant,"
Ramarren agreed.
"Yes
indeed. Now we can remain attuned and all our worries are over. Well then, a
hundred and forty-two light-years distant—that means that your sun must be the
one in the Dragon constellation. What is its name in Galaktika? No, that's right, you can't say it or bespeak it here. Eltanin, is that
it, the name of your sun?"
Ramarren made no response
of any kind.
"Eltanin,
the Dragon's Eye, yes, that's very nice. The others we had picked as
possibilities are somewhat closer in. Now this saves a great deal of time. We
had almost—"
The
quick, clear, mocking, soothing mindspeech stopped abruptly and Ken Kenyek gave
a convulsive start; so did Ramarren at the identical moment. The Shing turned
jerkily toward the controls of the aircar, then away. He leaned over in
154
a strange fashion, too far over, like a puppet on strings carelessly managed, then all at once slid to the floor
of the car and lay there with his white, handsome face upturned, rigid.
Orry,
shaken from his euphoric drowse, was staring. "What's wrong? What
happened?"
He
got no answer. Ramarren was standing as rigidly as the Shing lay, and his eyes
were locked with the Shing's in a double unseeing stare. When at last he moved, he spoke in a language Orry did not know. Then,
laboriously, he spoke in Calaktika. Tut the ship in hover," he said.
The boy gaped. "What's wrong with Lord
Ken, prech Ramarren?"
"Get up. Put the ship
in hover!"
He
was speaking Galaktika now not with his Werelian accent but in the debased
form used by Earth natives. But though the language was wrong the urgency and
authority were powerful. Orry obeyed him. The little glass bubble hung
motionless in the center of the bowl of ocean, eastward of the sun.
"Prechna, is the—"
"Be still!"
Silence. Ken Kenyek lay still. Very gradually
Ramarren's visible tension and intensity relaxed.
What
had happened on the mental plane between him and Ken Kenyek was a matter of
ambush and re-ambush. In physical terms, the Shing had jumped Ramarren,
thinking he was capturing one man, and had in turn been surprised by a second man—the mind in ambush, Falk. Only for a second had Falk been
able to take control and only by sheer force of surprise, but that had been
long enough to free Ramarren from the Shing's phase-control. The instant he was
free, while Ken Kenyek's mind was still in phase with his and vulnerable,
Ramarren had taken control. It took all his skill and all his strength to keep
Ken Kenyek's mind phased with his, helpless and assenting, as his own had been
a moment before. But his advantage still remained: he was still double-minded,
and while Ramarren held the Shing helpless, Falk was free to think and act.
This was the chance, the moment; there would be no other.
Falk asked aloud, "Where is there a
lightspeed ship ready for flight?"
It
was curious to hear the Shing answer in his whispering voice and know, for once
to know certainly and absolutely, that he was not lying. "In
the desert northwest of Es Toch."
"Is it guarded?"
Tfes."
"By live guards?" "No."
"You will guide us
there."
"I will guide you
there."
"Take the car where he
tells you, Orry."
"I don't understand,
prech Ramarren; are we—"
"We are going to leave
Earth. Now. Take the controls."
"Take the
controls," Ken Kenyek repeated softly.
Orry
obeyed, following the Shing's instructions as to course. At full speed the
aircar shot eastward, yet seemed still to hang in the changeless center of the
sea-sphere, towards the circumference of which the sun, behind them, dropped
visibly. Then the Western Isles appeared, seeming to float towards them over
the wrinkled glittering curve of the sea; then behind these the sharp white
peaks of the coast appeared, and approached, and ran by beneath the aircar. Now
they were over the dun desert broken by arid, fluted ranges casting long
shadows to the east. Still following Ken Kenyek's murmured instructions, Orry
slowed the ship, circled one of these ranges, set the controls to catch the
landing-beacon and let the car be homed in. The high lifeless mountains rose
up about them, walling them in, as the aircar settled down on a pale, shadowy
plain.
No spaceport or airfield was visible, no roads, no buildings, but
certain vague, very large shapes trembled miragelike over the sand and
sagebrush under the dark slopes of the mountains. Falk stared at them and could
not focus his eyes on them, and it was Orry who said with a catch of his
breath, "Starships."
They
were the interstellar ships of the Shing, their fleet or part of it,
camouflaged with hght-dispeller nets. Those Falk had first seen were smaller
ones; there were others, which he had taken for foothills. . . .
The aircar had intangibly settled itself down
beside a
156
tiny, ruined, roofless shack, its boards bleached
and split by the desert wind.
"What is that
shack?"
"The entrance to the underground rooms is to one side of it."
"Are there ground-computers down
there?" "Yes."
"Are any of the small
ships ready to go?"
"They
are all ready to go. They are mostly robot-controlled defense ships."
"Is there one with
pilot-control?"
"Yes. The one intended
for Har Orry."
Ramarren
kept close telepathic hold on the Shing's mind while Falk ordered him to take
them to the ship and show them the onboard computers. Ken Kenyek at once
obeyed. Falk-Ramarren had not entirely expected him to: there were limits to
mind-control just as there were to normal hypnotic suggestion. The drive to
self-preservation often resisted even the strongest control, and sometimes
shattered the whole at-tunement when infringed upon. But the treason he was
being forced to commit apparently aroused no instinctive resistance in Ken
Kenyek; he took them into the starship and replied obediently to all
Falk-Ramarren's questions, then led them back to the decrepit hut and at
command unlocked, with physical and mental signals, the trapdoor in the sand
near the door. They entered the tunnel that was revealed. At each of the underground
doors and defenses and shields Ken Kenyek gave the proper signal or response,
and so brought them at last to attack-proof, cataclysm-proof, thief-proof rooms
far underground, where the automatic control guides and the course computers
were.
Over
an hour had now passed since the moment in the aircar. Ken Kenyek, assenting
and submissive, reminding Falk at moments of poor Estrel, stood harmlessly
by—harmless so long as Ramarren kept total control over his brain. The instant
that control was relaxed, Ken Kenyek would send a mindcall to Es Toch if he had
the power, or trip some alarm, and the other Shing and their toolmen would be
here within a couple of minutes. But Ramarren must relax that control: for he
needed his mind to tliink with. Falk did not know how to program a computer for
the lightspeed
157
course to Werel, satellite of the sun Eltanin. Only
Ramarren could do that.
Falk had his own resources, however.
"Give me your gun."
Ken Kenyek at once handed over a little weapon kept concealed under his
elaborate robes. At this Orry stared in horror. Falk did not try to allay the
boy's shock; in fact, he rubbed it in. "Reverence for Life?" he
inquired coldly, examining the weapon. Actually, as he had expected, it was
not a gun or laser but a lowlevel stunner without kill capacity. He turned it
on Ken Kenyek, pitiful in his utter lack of resistance, and fired. At that Orry
screamed and lunged forward, and Falk turned the stunner on him. Then he turned
away from the two sprawled, paralyzed figures, his hands shaking, and let
Ramarren take over as he pleased. He had done his share for the time being.
Ramarren
had no time to spend on compunction or anxiety. He went straight to the
computers and set to work. He already knew from his examination of the onboard
controls that the mathematics involved in some of the ship's operations was
not the familiar Cetian-based mathematics which Terrans still used and from
which Werel's mathematics, via the Colony, also derived. Some of the processes
the Shing used and built into their computers were entirely alien to Cetian
mathematical process and logic; and nothing else could have so firmly persuaded
Ramarren that the Shing were, indeed, alien to Earth, alien to all the old
League worlds, conquerors from some very distant world. He had never been quite
sure that Earth's old histories and tales were correct on that point, but now
he was convinced. He was, after all, essentially a mathematician.
It
was just as well that he was, or certain of those processes would have stopped
him cold in his effort to set up the coordinates for Werel on the Shing
computers. As it was, the job took him five hours. All this time he had to
keep, literally, half his mind on Ken Kenyek and Orry. It was simpler to keep
Orry unconscious than to explain to him or order him about; it was absolutely
vital that Ken Kenyek stay completely unconscious. Fortunately the stunner was
an effective little device, and once he discovered the proper setting Falk only
had to use it once more. Then he was free
158
to coexist, as it were, while Ramarren plugged
away at his computations.
Falk
looked at nothing while Ramarren worked, but listened for any noise, and was
conscious always of the two motionless, senseless figures sprawled out nearby.
And he thought; he thought about EstreL wondering where she was now and what
she was now. Had they retrained her, razed her mind, killed
her? No, they did not kill. They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and
called their fear Reverence for Life. The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars. . . .
Did they in truth lie? Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the
essence of their lying was a profound, irremediable lack of understanding. They
could not get into touch with men. They had used that and profited by it,
making it into a great weapon, the mindlie; but had it been worth their while,
after all? Twelve centuries of lying, ever since they had first come here,
exiles or pirates or empire-builders from some distant star, determined to
rule over these races whose minds made no sense to them and whose flesh was to
them forever sterile. Alone, isolated, deaf-mutes ruling
deafmutes in a world of delusions. Oh desolation. ...
Ramarren was done. After his five hours of driving labor, and eight
seconds of work for the computer, the little iridium output slip was in his
hand, ready to program into the ship's course-control.
He
turned and stared foggily at Orry and Ken Kenyek. What to do with them? They
had to come along, evidently. Erase the records on the computers, said a voice inside his mind, a familiar
voice, his own—Falk's. Ramarren was dizzy with fatigue, but gradually he saw
the point of this request, and obeyed. Then he could not think what to do next.
And so, finally, for the first time, he gave up, made no effort to dominate,
let himself fuse into . . . himself.
Falk-Ramarren
got to work at once. He dragged Ken Kenyek laboriously up to ground level and
across the starlit sand to the ship that trembled.half-visible, opalescent in
the desert night; he loaded the inert body into a contourseat, gave it an extra
dose of the stunner, and then came back for Orry.
Orry began to revive partway, and managed to
climb feebly into the ship himself. "Prech Ramarren," he said
159
hoarsely, clutching at Falk-Ramarren's arm,
"where are we going?"
"To
Werel."
"He's coming too—Ken Kenyek?"
"Yes.
He can tell Werel his tale about Earth, and you can
tell yours, and I mine. . . . There's always more than one way towards the
truth. Strap yourself in. That's it."
Falk-Ramarren fed the little metal strip into
the course-controller. It was accepted, and he set the ship to act within three
minutes. With a last glance at the desert and the stars, he shut the ports and
came hurriedly, shaky with fatigue and strain, to strap himself in beside Orry
and the Shing.
Lift-off was fusionpowered: the lightspeed
drive would go into effect only at the outer edge of Earthspace. They took off
very sofdy and were out of the atmosphere in a few seconds. The visual screens
opened automatically, and Falk-Ramarren saw the Earth falling away, a great
dusky bluish curve, bright-rimmed. Then the ship came out into the unending
sunlight.
Was he leaving home, or
going home?
On the screen dawn coming over the Eastern
Ocean shone in a golden crescent for a moment against the dust of stars, like a
jewel on a great patterning frame. Then frame and pattern shattered, the
barrier was passed, and the little ship broke free of time and took them out
across the darkness.
CITY OF ILLUSIONS
He was a fully grown man, alone in dense
forest, with no trail to show where he had come from and no memory to tell who
— or what — he was.
His eyes were not the eyes
of a' human.
The forest people took him in and raised him
almost as a child, teaching him to speak, training him in forest lore, giving
him all the knowledge they had. But they could not solve the riddle of his
past, and at last he had to set out on a perilous quest to Es Toch, the City of
the Shing,
the Liars
of Earth,
the Enemy of Mankind.
There he would find his true self... and a universe of danger.