Three Hainish Novels

by Ursula Le Guin

  “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 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 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?

  Could he make his way back across the mountains, across the plains, through the forest, and come at last to the Clearing, where Parth…No! 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 Ramarren, “Do not answer the Shing’s questions,” but he had not been able to trust Orry to obey, or to keep the order secret. The Shing had so mindhandled the boy that he was by now, essentially, their instrument; and even the meaningless message that Falk had given him might already be known to his Lords.

  There was no device or trick, no means or way to get around or get out. There was only one hope, and that very small: that he could hold on; that through whatever they did to him he could keep hold of himself and refuse to forget, refuse to die. The only thing that gave him grounds for hoping that this might be possible was that the Shing had said it was impossible.

  They wanted him to believe that it was impossible.

  The delusions and apparitions and hallucinations of his first hours or days in Es Toch had been worked on him, then, only to confuse him and weaken his self-trust: for that was what they were after. They wanted him to distrust himself, his beliefs, his knowledge, his strength. All the explanations about mindrazing were then equally a 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, Ramarren’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 lightning 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 Shing’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 lie.

  Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one quality no liar 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, saying 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…”

&
nbsp; “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 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, 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-paramental 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 emphatic 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 patterning 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 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 light his will to survive flared up, and he declared it with terrible effort, against all odds, in silence: I am Falk!

  Then darkness.

  9

  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 light and the quietness.

  There was a movement near him. Turning his head, he saw a young man, a stranger.

  “Who are you?”

  “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, winterborn.

  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 lie still, prech Ramarren—don’t talk yet; please lie 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 heed to the boy’s stammering. He knew now that all had gone amiss, and that a time had passed 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, he’ll woo without mercy if you let him.” Words lightly spoken long ago, in the sunlight of the long, golden autumn of his youth, he heard them again now, and the girl’s laugh in response. Sister, little sister, beloved Arnan…What had his father called her?—not by her right name but something else, another name—