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 are 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 manfinder 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 bombirds 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. “Estrel!”
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.”
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. Strella, this one is even stupider than the child.”
“No, my Lord Kradgy, 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, unmoving, 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 measurelessly 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 moment 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?
“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, Falk?”
“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 me!” Then she was tom from him, wailing, “Trust me!” 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 silently 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.
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 Estrel 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 and fell upwards, screaming in sick terror, towards the white, seamed, staring moon.
He woke, feeling rested, vigorous, and confused, in a comfortab
le 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 Agad! Greetings Lord Agad!” 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 curiosity. A big, blank-faced man, with a gun strapped to his belt. “What is the Law?” he asked on impulse.
Obediently 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 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?”
“Orry,” said the young man, “Orry!” 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 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 Ramarren?” 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 Terran 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?”
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 naiveté, 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?
I 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 test the answer be a lie, then the lie prevails enti
rely, 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—Prevwa, 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 tiokioi, 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 his 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 trying to get at what he wanted.
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