City of Illusions

VIII

THE STRANGE UNSEEN Council of the Lords of Earth was over. In parting Abundibot had said to Falk, "The choice is yours: to remain Falk, our guest on Earth, or to regain your heritage and complete your destiny as Agad Ramarren of Werel. We wish that your choice be made knowingly and in your own time. We await your decision and will abide by it." Then to Orry: "Make your kinsman free of the City, Har Orry, and let all he and you desire be known to us." The slit-door opened behind Abundibot and he withdrew, his tall bulky figure vanishing so abruptly outside the doorway that it seemed to have been flicked off. Had he in fact been there in substance, or only as some kind of projection? Falk was not sure. He wondered if he had yet seen a Shing or only the shadows and images of the Shing.

"Is there anywhere we can walk—out of doors?" he asked the boy abruptly, sick of the indirect and insubstantial ways and walls of this place, and also, wondering how far their freedom actually extended.

"Anywhere, prech Ramarren. Out in the streets—or shall we take a slider? Or there is a garden here in the Palace."

"A garden will do."

Orry led him down a great, empty, glowing corridor and through a valve-door into a small room. "The Garden," he said aloud, and the valve shut; there was no sense of motion but when it opened they stepped out into a garden. It was scarcely out of doors: the translucent walls glimmered with the lights of the City, far below; the moon, near full, shone hazy and distorted through the glassy roof. The place was full of soft moving lights and shadows, crowded with tropical shrubs and vines that twined about trellises and hung from arbors, their masses of cream and crimson flowers sweetening the steamy air, their leafage closing off vision within a few feet on every side. Falk turned suddenly to make sure that the path to the exit still lay clear behind him. The hot, heavy, perfumed silence was uncanny; it seemed to him for a moment that the ambiguous depths of the garden held a hint of something alien and enormously remote, the hues, the mood, the complexity of a lost world, a planet of perfumes and illusions, of swamps and transformations…

On the path among the shadowy flowers Orry paused to take a small white tube from a case and insert it endwise between his lips, sucking on it eagerly. Falk was too absorbed in other impressions to pay much heed, but as if slightly embarrassed the boy explained, "It's parьtha, a tranquillant—the Lords all use it; it has a very stimulating effect on the mind. If you'd care to—"

"No, thanks. There are some more things I want to ask you." He hesitated, however. His new questions could not be entirely direct. Throughout the "Council" and Abundibot's explanations he had felt, recurrently and uncomfortably, that the whole thing was a performance—a play, such as he had seen on ancient telescrolls in the library of the Prince of Kansas, the Dreamplay of Hain, the mad old king Lir raving on a stormswept heath. But the curious thing was his distinct impression that the play was not being acted for his benefit, but for Orry's. He did not understand why, but again and again he had felt that all Abundibot said to him was said to prove something to the boy.

And the boy believed it. It was no play to him; or else he was an actor in it.

"One thing puzzles me," Falk said, cautiously. "You told me that Werel is a hundred and thirty or forty light-years from Earth. There cannot be very many stars at just that distance.

"The Lords say there are four stars with planets that might be our system, between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and fifty light-years away. But they are in four different directions, and if the Shing sent out a ship to search it could spend up to thirteen hundred years realtime going to and among those four to find the right one."

"Though you were a child, it seems a little strange that you didn't know how long the voyage was to take—how old you would be when you got home, as it were."

"It was spoken of as'two years', prech Ramarren—that is, roughly a hundred and twenty Earth years—but it was clear to me that that was not the exact figure, and that I was not to ask the exact figure." For a moment, harking back thus to Werel, the boy spoke with a touch of sober resoluteness that he did not show at other times. "I think that perhaps, not knowing who or what they were going to find on Earth, the adults of the Expedition wanted to be sure that we children, with no mindguard technique, could not give away Werel's location to an enemy. It was safest for us to be ignorant, perhaps."

"Do you remember how the stars looked from Werel—the constellations?"

Orry shrugged for no, and smiled. "The Lords asked that too. I was Winter-born, prech Ramarren. Spring was just beginning when we left. I scarcely ever saw a cloudless sky."

If all this was true, then it would seem that in fact only he—his suppressed self, Ramarren—could say where he and Orry came from. Would that then explain what seemed almost the central puzzle, the interest the Shing took in him, their bringing him here under Estrel's tutelage, their offer to restore his memory? There was a world not under their control; it had re-invented light-speed flight; they would want to know where it was. And if they restored his memory, he could tell them. If they could restore his memory. If anything at all of what they had told him was true.

He sighed. He was weary of this turmoil of suspicions, this plethora of unsubstantiated marvels. At moments he wondered if he was still under the influence of some drug. He felt wholly inadequate to judge what he should do. He, and probably this boy, were like toys in the hands of strange faithless players.

"Was he—the one called Abundibot—was he in the room just now, or was it a projection, an illusion?"

"I don't know, prech Ramarren," Orry replied. The stuff he was breathing in from the tube seemed to cheer and soothe him; always rather childlike, he spoke now with blithe ease. "I expect he was there. But they never come close. I tell you—this is strange—in this long time I've been here, six years, I have never touched one of them. They keep very much apart, each one alone. I don't mean that they are unkind," he added hastily, looking with his clear eyes at Falk to make sure he had not given the wrong impression. "They are very kind. I am very fond of Lord Abundibot, and Ken Kenyek, and Parla. But they are so far—beyond me—They know so much. They bear so much. They keep knowledge alive, and keep the peace, and bear the burdens, and so they have done for a thousand years, while the rest of the people of Earth take no responsibility and live in brutish freedom. Their fellow men hate them and will not learn the truth they offer. And so they must always hold themselves apart, stay alone, in order to preserve the peace and the skills and knowledge that would be lost, without them, in a few years, among these warrior tribes and Houses and Wanderers and roving cannibals."

"They are not all cannibals," Falk said dryly.

Orry's well-learnt lesson seemed to have run out. "No," he agreed, "I suppose not."

"Some of them say that they have sunk so low because the Shing keep them low; that if they seek knowledge the Shing prevent them, if they seek to form a City of their own the Shing destroy it, and them."

There was a pause. Orry finished sucking on his tube of parьtha and carefully buried it around the roots of a shrub with long, hanging, flesh-red flowers. Falk waited for his answer and only gradually realized that there was not going to be one. What he had said simply had not penetrated, had not made sense to the boy.

They walked on a little among the shifting lights and damp fragrances of the garden, the moon blurred above them.

"The one whose image appeared first, just now…do you know her?"

"Strella Siobelbel," the boy answered readily. "Yes, I have seen her at Council Meetings before."

"Is she a Shing?"

"No, she's not one of the Lords; I think her people are mountain natives, but she was brought up in Es Toch. Many people bring or send their children here to be brought up in the service of the Lords. And children with subnormal minds are brought here and keyed into the psychocomputers, so that even they can share in the great work. Those are the ones the ignorant call toolmen. You came here with Strella Siobelbel, prech Ramarren?"

"Came with her; walked with her, ate with her, slept with her. She called herself Estrel, a Wanderer."

"You could have known she was not a Shing—" the boy said, then went red, and got out another of his tranquillant-tubes and began sucking on it.

"A Shing would not have slept with me?" Falk inquired. The boy shrugged his Werelian "No," still blushing; the drug finally encouraged him to speak and he said, "They do not touch common men, prech Ramarren—they are like gods, cold and kind and wise—they hold themselves apart—"

He was fluent, incoherent, childish. Did he know his own loneliness, orphaned and alien, living out his childhood and entering adolescence among these people who held themselves apart, who would not touch him, who stuffed him with words but left him so empty of reality that, at fifteen, he sought contentment from a drug? He certainly did not know his isolation as such—he did not seem to have clear ideas on anything much—but it looked from his eyes sometimes, yearning, at Falk. Yearning and feebly hoping, the look of one perishing of thirst in a dry salt desert who looks up at a mirage. There was much more Falk wanted to ask him, but little use in asking. Pitying him, Falk put his hand on Orry's slender shoulder. The boy started at the touch, smiled timidly and vaguely, and sucked again at his tranquillant.

Back in his room, where everything was so luxuriously arranged for his comfort—and to impress Orry?—Falk paced a while like a caged bear, and finally lay down to sleep. In his dreams he was in a house, like the Forest House, but the people in the dream house had eyes the color of agate and amber. He tried to tell them he was one of them, their own kinsman, but they did not understand his speech and watched him strangely while he stammered and sought for the right words, the true words, the true name.

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 air-car 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 parьtha-hall? They have stimulants, if you don't care for parьtha, and dancers and teanb-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 transcience 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 rail-less 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 that he glanced at Orry to see if he had caught it. But the boy, sucking on another tube of parьtha, 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 land. "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 believe 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 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 Folk 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 mind-razing 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…"

"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:

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 empathic 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 un-forming 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!В Then darkness.