Three Hainish Novels

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “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 to 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 ansible 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 exactly 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 name of the star Werel circles?”

  “That unfortunately is the case. If 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. Kradgy 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 quietly, “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 mind-lie, 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 mind-lying. 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 him 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 suns. 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, lives 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 little 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 seemed to him who had lived among the old streets of Wegest 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 Or
ry 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 directly or electronically watched at every moment, visually and telepathically, he was in no way restrained; evidently 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 Ms 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 Ms 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 rightly, any situation, 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 patterning 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 Werelians. 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 four 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 Earth-years?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were born 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 will 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 Earth-years,” 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 perfectly all right.

  Ken Kenyek was bespeaking him now, not in the creaky oral whisper of the Shing but in clear, comfortable mindspeech: “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 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 Galaktika. “Put 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 b
een 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?”

  “Yes.”

  “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 mirage-like 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.”