City of Illusions

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."

"I'll 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 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 cavern, following the curve of a deep stream-valley they came so abruptly 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 sworn 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 admirable. 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. 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 God, 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 submissiveness 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 them!"

"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 tune 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 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 kill 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 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 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 wildflowers 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.

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 up one of the long swells of land. "There!" 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. I'll make a smudge-fire here, and you can rest; I'll 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. "I'll be back soon," he said, and started away. At that she sat up, white and shivering, and cried out, "No! don't leave me! 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 light 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 snapping 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 us! 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 little glass of slightly clouded green: he saw that clearly, first. He had not drunk from a glass since he had 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, unmoving, 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."

"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 Castle 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 unflickering golden light 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 still!"

"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 approaching 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 look! Can you read the frame? Vastness. Ebony and diamond and crystal, all the jewels of fire: and the Opal-stone among them, going on, going out. Farther than the King's House, farther than the Wallwindow Prison, farther than the hills and hollows of Kopernik, 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 patterning-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. Opalstone, 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.

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, yesterday?"

"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 talisman 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 gently, 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 his extraordinary library but a little handwritten book of bound paper. "Do you know this Canon?"

Falk looked where he pointed and saw the verse,

"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 desolation! Why do you always speak the truth, Opalstone?"

"I'm not sure." In fact, though Falk had gradually determined 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 ferntrees. 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 her!"

"She has given me help, and hope; we are companions. There is trust between us—how can I break it?"

"Oh fool, oh desolation!" said the Prince of Kansas. "Ill give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I'll 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.