Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World, Planet of Exile, City of Illusions

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  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 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 the 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 to see Es Toch and learn its ways. “You see, prech Ramarren, it is not true that the Lords refuse to teach the natives—it is the natives who refuse to learn. These white ones are 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 Kelshy!”

  “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.

  “Yes, certainly, prech Ramarren. The Council rules democratically for the good of all, and there is no king or dictator. Shall we go to a pariitha-hall? They have stimulants, if you don’t care for pariitha, and dancers and tëanb-players—”

  “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 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 Age 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 transience of lights and machines and faces, its multiplicity of strangers, its luxurious complexity was built across a chasm in the ground, a hollow place. It was the Place of the Lie. Yet it was wonderful, like a carved jewel fallen in the vast wilderness of the Earth: 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 Falk, so clear tha
t 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 abruptly.

  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 lips 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, super-added, partial memory and personality-structure, which you 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 Ramarren will include the continuity of Falk. And we have been tempted to lie 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.”

  “Give me one day 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 lie; 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 tool in their hands. I do not wish to die again before my death! 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 believ
e 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?”

  “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.”

  “‘Read 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 lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

  Orry took him back across the bridge on his slider, and he reentered 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 live 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?