City of Illusions

IX

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, Wedens 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 be 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 need 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 Charn 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—

Ramarren woke. He sat up, with a definite effort taking command of his body—yes, his, still hesitant and shaky but certainly his own. For a moment in waking he had felt he was a ghost in alien flesh, displaced, lost.

He was all right. He was Agad Ramarren, born in the silverstone house among broad lawns under the white peak of Charn, the Single Mountain; Agad's heir, fall-born, so that all his Me had been lived in autumn and winter. Spring he had never seen, might never see, for the ship Alterra had begun her Voyage to Earth on the first day of spring. But the long winter and the fall, the length of his manhood, boyhood, childhood stretched back behind him vivid and unbroken, remembered, the river reaching upward to the source.

The boy Orry was no longer in the room. "Orry!" he said aloud; for he was able and determined now to learn what had happened to him, to his companions, to the Alterra and its mission. There was no reply or signal. The room seemed to be not only windowless but doorless. He checked his impulse to mindcall the boy; he did not know whether Orry was still tuned with him, and also since his own mind had evidently suffered either damage or interference, he had better go carefully and keep out of phase with any other mind, until he learned if he was threatened by volitional control or antichrony.

He stood up, dismissing vertigo and a brief, sharp occipital pain, and walked back and forth across the room a few times, getting himself into muscular harmony while he studied the outlandish clothes he was wearing and the queer room he was in. There was a lot of furniture, bed, tables, and sitting-places, all set up on long thin legs. The translucent, murky green walls were covered with explicitly deceptive and disjunctive patterns, one of which disguised an iris-door, another a half-length mirror. He stopped and looked at himself a moment. He looked thin, and weatherbeaten, and perhaps older; he hardly knew. He felt curiously self-conscious, looking at himself. What was this uneasiness, this lack of concentration? What had happened, what had been lost? He turned away and set himself to study the room again. There were various enigmatic objects about, and two of familiar type though foreign in detail: a drinking-cup on one table, and a leafed book beside it. He picked up the book. Something Orry had said flickered in his mind and went out again. The title was meaningless, though the characters were clearly related to the alphabet of the Tongue of the Books. He opened the thing and glanced through it. The left-hand pages were written—handwritten, it appeared—with columns of marvelously complicated patterns that might be holistic symbols, ideographs, technological shorthand. The right-hand pages were also handwritten, but in the letters that resembled the letters of the Books, Galaktika. A code-book? But he had not yet puzzled out more than a word or two when the doorslit silently irised open and a person entered the room: a woman.

Ramarren looked at her with intense curiosity, unguardedly and without fear; only perhaps, feeling himself vulnerable, he intensified a little the straight, authoritative gaze to which his birth, earned Level and arlesh entitled him. Unabashed, she returned his gaze. They stood there a moment in silence.

She was handsome and delicate, fantastically dressed, her hair bleached or reddish-pigmented. Her eyes were a dark circle set in a white oval. Eyes like the eyes of painted faces in the Lighall of the Old City, frescoes of dark-skinned, tall people building a town, warring with the Migrators, watching the stars: the Colonists, the Terrans of Alterra…

Now Ramarren knew past doubt that he was indeed on Earth, that he had made his Voyage. He set pride and self-defense aside, and knelt down to her. To him, to all the people who had sent him on the mission across eight hundred and twenty-five trillion miles of nothingness, she was of a race that time and memory and forgetting had imbued with the quality of the divine. Single, individual as she stood before him, yet she was of the Race of Man and looked at him with the eyes of that Race, and he did honor to history and myth and the long exile of his ancestors, bowing his head to her as he knelt.

He rose and held out his open hands in the Kelshak gesture of reception, and she began to speak to him. Her speaking was strange, very strange, for though he had never seen her before her voice was infinitely familiar to his ear, and though he did not know the tongue she spoke he understood a word of it, then another. For a second this frightened him by its uncanniness and made him fear she was using some form of mindspeech that could penetrate even his outphase barrier; in the next second, he realized that he understood her because she was speaking the Tongue of the Books, Galaktika. Only her accent and her fluency in speaking it had kept him from recognizing it at once.

She had already said several sentences to him, speaking in a curiously cold, quick, lifeless way; "…not know I am here," she was saying. "Now tell me which of us is the liar, the faithless one. I walked with you all that endless way, I lay with you a hundred nights, and now you don't even know my name. Do you, Falk? Do you know my name? Do you know your own?"

"I am Agad Ramarren," he said, and his own name in his own voice sounded strange to him.

"Who told you so? You're Falk. Don't you know a man named Falk?—he used to wear your flesh. Ken Kenyek and Rradgy forbade me to say his name to you, but I'm sick of playing their games and never my own. I like to play my own games. Don't you remember your name, Falk?—Falk—Falk—don't you remember your name? Ah, you're still as stupid as you ever were, staring like a stranded fish!"

At once he dropped his gaze. The matter of looking directly into another person's eyes was a sensitive one among Werelians, and was strictly controlled by tabu and manners. That was his only response at first to her words, though his inward reactions were immediate and various. For one thing, she was lightly drugged, with something on the stimulant-hallucinogenic order: his trained perceptions reported this to him as a certainty, whether he liked its implications concerning the Race of Man or not. For another thing, he was not sure he had understood all she'd said and certainly had no idea what she was talking about, but her intent was aggressive, destructive. And the aggression was effective. For all his lack of comprehension, her weird jeers and the name she kept repeating moved and distressed him, shook him, shocked him.

He turned away a little to signify he would not cross her gaze again unless she wished, and said at last, softly, in the archaic tongue his people knew only from the ancient books of the Colony, "Are you of the Race of Man, or of the Enemy?"

She laughed in a forced, gibing way. "Both, Falk. There is no Enemy, and I work for them. Listen, tell Abundibot your name is Falk. Tell Ken Kenyek. Tell all the Lords your name is Falk—that'll give them something to worry about! Falk—"

"Enough."

His voice was as soft as before, but he had spoken with his full authority: she stopped with her mouth open, gaping. When she spoke again it was only to repeat that name she called him by, in a voice gone shaky and almost supplicating. She was pitiful, but he made no reply. She was in a temporary or permanent psychotic state, and he felt himself too vulnerable and too unsure, in these circumstances, to allow her further communication. He felt pretty shaky himself, and moving away from her he in-drew, becoming only secondarily aware of her presence and voice. He needed to collect himself; there was something very strange the matter with him, not drugs, at least no drug he knew, but a profound displacement and imbalance, worse than any of the induced insanities of Seventh Level mental discipline. But he was given little time. The voice behind him rose in shrill rancor, and then he caught the shift to violence and along with it the sense of a second presence. He turned very quickly: she had begun to draw from her bizarre clothing what was obviously a weapon, but was standing frozen staring not at him but at a tall man in the doorway.

No word was spoken, but the newcomer directed at the woman a telepathic command of such shattering coercive force that it made Ramarren wince. The weapon dropped to the floor and the woman, making a thin keening sound, ran stooped from the room, trying to escape the destroying insistence of that mental order. Her blurred shadow wavered a moment in the wall, vanished.

The tall man turned his white-rimmed eyes to Ramarren and bespoke him with normal power: "Who are you?"

Ramarren answered in kind, "Agad Ramarren," but no more, nor did he bow. Things had gone even more wrong than he had first imagined. Who were these people? In the confrontation he had just witnessed there had been insanity, cruelty and terror, and nothing else; certainly nothing that disposed him either to reverence or trust.

But the tall man came forward a little, a smile on his heavy, rigid face, and spoke aloud courteously in the Tongue of the Books. "I am Pelleu Abundibot, and I welcome you heartily to Earth, kinsman, son of the long exile, messenger of the Lost Colony!"

Ramarren, at that, made a very brief bow and stood a moment in silence. "It appears," he said, "that I have been on Earth some while, and made an enemy of that woman, and earned certain scars. Will you tell me how this was, and how my shipmates perished? Bespeak me if you will: I do not speak Galaktika so well as you."

Trech Ramarren," the other said—he had evidently picked that up from Orry as if it were a mere honorific, and had no notion of what constituted the relationship of prechnoye—"forgive me first that I speak aloud. It is not our custom to use mindspeech except in urgent need, or to our inferiors. And forgive next the intrusion of that creature, a servant whose madness has driven her outside the Law. We will attend to her mind. She will not trouble you again. As for your questions, all will be answered. In brief, however, here is the unhappy tale which now at last draws to a happy ending. Your ship Alterra was attacked as it entered Earthspace by our enemies, rebels outside the Law. They took two or more of you off the Alterra into their small planetary cars before our guard-ship came. When it came, they destroyed the Alterra with all left aboard her, and scattered in their small ships. We caught the one on which Har Orry was prisoner, but you were carried off—I do not know for what purpose. They did not kill you, but erased your memory back to the pre-lingual stage, and then turned you loose in a wild forest to find your death. You survived, and were given shelter by barbarians of the forest; finally our searchers found you, brought you here, and by parahypnotic techniques we have succeeded in restoring your memory. It was all we could do—little indeed, but all."

Ramarren listened intently. The story shook him, and he made no effort to hide his feelings; but he felt also a certain uneasiness or suspicion, which he did conceal. The tall man had addressed him, though very briefly, in mindspeech, and thus given him a degree of attunement. Then Abundibot had ceased all telepathic sending and had put up an empathic guard, but not a perfect one; Ramarren, highly sensitive and finely trained, received vague empathic impressions so much at discrepancy with what the man said as to hint at dementia, or at lying. Or was he himself so out of tune with himself—as he might well be after parahypnosis—that his empathic receptions were simply not reliable?

"How long…?" he asked at last, looking up for a moment into those alien eyes.

"Six years ago Terran style, prech Ramarren."

The Terran year was nearly the length of a moonphase. "So long," he said. He could not take it in. His friends, his fellow-Voyagers had been dead then for a long time, and he had been alone on Earth…"Six years?"

"You remember nothing of those years?"

"Nothing."

"We were forced to wipe out what rudimentary memory you may have had of that time, in order to restore your true memory and personality. We very much regret that loss of six years of your life. But they would not have been sane or pleasant memories. The outlaw brutes had made of you a creature more brutish than themselves. I am glad you do not remember it, prech Ramarren."

Not only glad, but gleeful. This man must have very little empathic ability or training, or he would be putting up a better guard; his telepathic guard was flawless. More and more distracted by these mindheard overtones that implied falsity or unclarity in what Abundibot said, and by the continuing lack of coherence in his own mind, even in his physical reactions, which remained slow and uncertain, Ramarren had to pull himself together to make any response at all. Memories—how could six years have passed without his remembering one moment from them? But a hundred and forty years had passed while his light-speed ship had crossed from Werel to Earth and of that he remembered only a moment, indeed, one terrible, eternal moment…What had the madwoman called him, screaming a name at him with crazy, grieving rancor?

"What was I called, these past six years?"

"Called? Among the natives, do you mean, prech Ramarren? I am not sure what name they gave you, if they bothered to give you any…"

Falk, she had called him, Falk. "Fellowman," he said abruptly, translating the Kelshak form of address into Galaktika, "I will learn more of you later, if you will. What you tell me troubles me. Let me be alone with it a while."

"Surely, surely, prech Ramarren. Your young friend Orry is eager to be with you—shall I send him to you?" But Ramarren, having made his request and heard it accepted, had in the way of one of his Level dismissed the other, tuned him out, hearing whatever else he said simply as noise.

"We too have much to learn of you, and are eager to learn it, once you feel quite recovered." Silence. Then the noise again: "Our servants wait to serve you; if you desire refreshment or company you have only to go to the door and speak." Silence again, and at last the unmannerly presence withdrew.

Ramarren sent no speculations after it. He was too preoccupied with himself to worry about these strange hosts of his. The turmoil within his mind was increasing sharply, coming to some kind of crisis. He felt as if he were being dragged to face something that he could not endure to face, and at the same time craved to face, to find. The bitterest days of his Seventh Level training had only been a hint of this disintegration of his emotions and identity, for that had been an induced psychosis, carefully controlled, and this was not under his control. Or was it?—was he leading himself into this, compelling himself towards the crisis? But who was "he" who compelled and was compelled? He had been killed, and brought back to life. What was death, then, the death he could not remember?

To escape the utter panic welling up in him he looked around for any object to fix on, reverting to early trance-discipline, the Outcome technique of fixing on one concrete thing to build up the world from once more. But everything about him was alien, deceptive, unfamiliar; the very floor under him was a dull sheet of mist. There was the book he had been looking at when the woman entered calling him by that name he would not remember. He would not remember it. The book: he had held it in his hands, it was real, it was there. He picked it up very carefully and stared at the page that it opened to. Columns of beautiful meaningless patterns, lines of half-comprehensible script, changed from the letters he had learned long ago in the First Analect, deviant, bewildering. He stared at them and could not read them, and a word of which he did not know the meaning rose up from them, the first word:

He looked from the book to his own hand that held it. Whose hand, darkened and scarred beneath an alien sun? Whose hand?

He could not remember the name; he would not read it. In a dream he had read these words, in a long sleep, a death, a dream.

And with that the dream rose up overwhelming him like a wave rising, and broke.

He was Falk, and he was Ramarren. He was the fool and the wise man: one man twice born.

In those first fearful hours, he begged and prayed to be delivered sometimes from one self, sometimes from the other. Once when he cried out in anguish in his own native tongue, he did not understand the words he had spoken, and this was so terrible that in utter misery he wept; it was Falk who did not understand, but Ramarren who wept.

In that same moment of misery he touched for the first time, for a moment only, the balance-pole, the center, and for a moment was himself: then lost again, but with just enough strength to hope for the next moment of harmony. Harmony: when he was Ramarren he clung to that idea and discipline, and it was perhaps his mastery of that central Kelshak doctrine that kept him from going right over the edge into madness. But there was no integrating or balancing the two minds and personalities that shared his skull, not yet; he must swing between them, blanking one out for the other's sake, then drawn at once back the other way. He was scarcely able to move, being plagued by the hallucination of having two bodies, of being actually physically two different men.

He did not dare sleep, though he was worn out: he feared the waking too much.

It was night, and he was left to himself. To myselves, Falk commented. Falk was at first the stronger, having had some preparation for this ordeal. It was Falk who got the first dialogue going: I have got to get some sleep, Ramarren, he said, and Ramarren received the words as if in mindspeech and without premeditation replied in kind: I'm afraid to sleep. Then he kept watch for a little while, and knew Falk's dreams like shadows and echoes in his mind.

He got through this first, worst time, and by the time morning shone dim through the green veilwalls of his room, he had lost his fear and was beginning to gain real control over both thought and action.

There was of course no actual overlap of his two sets of memories. Falk had come to conscious being in the vast number of neurons that in a highly intelligent brain remain unused—the fallow fields of Ramarren's mind. The basic motor and sensory paths has never been blocked off and so in a sense had been shared all along, though difficulties arose there caused by the doubling of the sets of motor habits and modes of perception. An object looked different to him depending on whether he looked at it as Falk or as Ramarren, and though in the long run this reduplication might prove an augmentation of his intelligence and perceptive power, at the moment it was confusing to the point of vertigo. There was considerable emotional intershading, so that his feelings on some points quite literally conflicted. And, since Falk's memories covered his "lifetime" just as did Ramarren's, the two series tended to appear simultaneously instead of in proper sequence. It was hard for Ramarren to allow for the gap of time during which he had not consciously existed. Ten days ago where had he been? He had been on muleback among the snowy mountains of Earth; Falk knew that; but Ramarren knew that he had been taking leave of his wife in a house on the high green plains of Werel…Also, what Ramarren guessed about Terra was often contradicted by what Falk knew, while Falk's ignorance of Werel cast a strange glamor of legend over Ramarren's own past. Yet even in this bewilderment there was the germ of interaction, of the coherence toward which he strove. For the fact remained, he was, bodily and chronologically, one man: his problem was not really that of creating a unity, only of comprehending it.

Coherence was far from being gained. One or the other of the two memory-structures still had to dominate, if he was to think and act with any competence. Most often, now, it was Ramarren who took over, for the Navigator of the Alterra was a decisive and potent person. Falk, in comparison, felt himself childish, tentative; he could offer what knowledge he had, but relied upon Ramarren's strength and experience. Both were needed, for the two-minded man was in a very obscure and hazardous situation.

One question was basic to all the others. It was simply put: whether or not the Shing could be trusted. For if Falk had merely been inculcated with a groundless fear of the Lords of Earth, then the hazards and obscurities would themselves prove groundless. At first Ramarren thought this might well be the case; but he did not think it for long.

There were open lies and discrepancies which already his double memory had caught. Abundibot had refused to mindspeak to Ramarren, saying the Shing avoided paraverbal communication: that Falk knew to be a lie. Why had Abundibot told it? Evidently because he wanted to tell a lie—the Shing story of what had happened to the Alterra and its crew—and could not or dared not tell it to Ramarren in mindspeech.

But he had told Falk very much the same story, in mindspeech.

If it was a false story, then, the Shing could and did mindlie. Was it false?

Ramarren called upon Falk's memory. At first that effort of combination was beyond him, but it became easier as he struggled, pacing up and down the silent room, and suddenly it came clear; he could recall the brilliant silence of Abundibot's words: "We whom you know as Shing are men…" And hearing it even in memory, Ramarren knew it for a lie. It was incredible, and indubitable. The Shing could lie telepathically—that guess and dread of subjected humanity was right. The Shing were, in truth, the Enemy.

They were not men but aliens, gifted with an alien power; and no doubt they had broken the League and gained power over Earth by the use of that power. And it was they who had attacked the Alterra as she had come into Earthspace; all the talk of rebels was mere fiction. They had killed or brainrazed all the crew but the child Orry. Ramarren could guess why: because they had discovered, testing him or one of the other highly trained paraverbalists of the crew, that a Werelian could tell when they were mindlying. That had frightened the Shing, and they had done away with the adults, saving out only the harmless child as an informant.

To Ramarren it was only yesterday that his fellow-Voyagers had perished, and, struggling against that blow, he tried to think that like him they might have survived somewhere on Earth. But if they had—and he had been very lucky—where were they now? The Shing had had a hard time locating even one, it appeared, when they had discovered that they needed him.

What did they need him for? Why had they sought him, brought him here, restored the memory that they had destroyed?

No explanation could be got from the facts at his disposal except the one he had arrived at as Falk: The Shing needed him to tell them where he came from.

That gave Falk-Ramarren his first amount of amusement. If it really was that simple, it was funny. They had saved out Orry because he was so young; untrained, unformed, vulnerable, amenable, a perfect instrument and informant. He certainly had been all of that. But did not know where he came from…And by the time they discovered that, they had wiped the information they wanted clean out of the minds that knew it, and scattered their victims over the wild, ruined Earth to die of accident or starvation or the attack of wild beasts or men.

He could assume that Ken Kenyek, while manipulating his mind through the psychocomputer yesterday, had tried to get him to divulge the Galaktika name of Werel's sun. And he could assume that if he had divulged it, he would be dead or mindless now. They did not want him, Ramarren; they wanted only his knowledge. And they had not got it.

That in itself must have them worried, and well it might. The Kelshak code of secrecy concerning the Books of the Lost Colony had evolved along with a whole technique of mindguarding. That mystique of secrecy—or more precisely of restraint—had grown over the long years from the rigorous control of scientific-technical knowledge exercised by the original Colonists, itself an outgrowth from the League's Law of Cultural Embargo, which forbade cultural importation to colonial planets. The whole concept of restraint was fundamental in Werelian culture by now, and the stratification of Werlian society was directed by the conviction that knowledge and technique must remain under intelligent control. Such details as the True Name of the Sun were formal and symbolical, but the formalism was taken seriously—with ultimate seriousness, for in Kelshy knowledge was religion, religion knowledge. To guard the intangible holy places in the minds of men, intangible and invulnerable defenses had been devised. Unless he was in one of the Places of Silence, and addressed in a certain form by an associate of his own Level, Ramarren was absolutely unable to communicate, in words or writing or mindspeech, the True Name of his world's sun.

He possessed, of course, equivalent knowledge: the complex of astronomical facts that had enabled him to plot the Alterra's coordinates from Werel to Earth; his knowledge of the exact distance between the two planets' suns; his clear, astronomer's memory of the stars as seen from Werel. They had not got this information from him yet, probably because his mind had been in too chaotic a state when first restored by Ken Kenyek's manipulations, or because even then his parahypnotically strengthened mindguards and specific barriers had been functioning. Knowing there might still be an Enemy on Earth, the crewmen of the Alterra had not set off unprepared. Unless Shing mindscience was much stronger than Werelian, they would not now be able to force him to tell them anything. They hoped to induce him, to persuade him. Therefore, for the present, he was at least physically safe.

—So long as they did not know that he remembered his existence as Falk.

That came over him with a chill. It had not occurred to him before. As Falk he had been useless to them, but harmless. As Ramarren he was useful to them, and harmless. But as Falk-Ramarren, he was a threat. And they did not tolerate threats: they could not afford to.

And there was the answer to the last question: Why did they want so badly to know where Werel was—what did Werel matter to them?

Again Falk's memory spoke to Ramarren's intelligence, this time recalling a cabin, blithe, ironic voice. The old Listener in the deep forest spoke, the old man lonelier on Earth than even Falk had been: "There are not very many of the Shing…"

A great piece of news and wisdom and advice, he had called it; and it must be the literal truth. The old histories Falk had learned in Zove's House held the Shing to be aliens from a very distant region of the galaxy, out beyond the Hyades, a matter perhaps of thousands of light-years. If that was so, probably no vast numbers of them had crossed so immense a length of spacetime. There had been enough to infiltrate the League and break it, given their powers of mindlying and other skills or weapons they might possess or have possessed; but had there been enough of them to rule over all the worlds they had divided and conquered? Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. The Shing must have had to spread themselves thin, and take much care to keep the subject planets from re-allying and joining to rebel. Orry had told Falk that the Shing did not seem to travel or trade much by lightspeed; he had never even seen a lightspeed ship of theirs. Was that because they feared their own kin on other worlds, grown away from them over the centuries of their dominion? Or conceivably was Earth the only planet they still ruled, defending it from all explorations from other worlds? No telling; but it did seem likely that on Earth there were indeed not very many of them.

They had refused to believe Orry's tale of how the Terrans on Werel had mutated toward the local biological norm and so finally blended stocks with the native hominids. They had said that was impossible: which meant that it had not happened to them; they were unable to mate with Terrans. They were still alien, then, after twelve hundred years; still isolated on Earth. And did they in fact rule mankind, from this single City? Once again Ramarren turned to Falk for the answer, and saw it as No. They controlled men by habit, ruse, fear, and weaponry, by being quick to prevent the rise of any strong tribe or the pooling of knowledge that might threaten them. They prevented men from doing anything. But they did nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.

It was clear, then, why Werel posed a deadly threat to them. They had so far kept up their tenuous, ruinous hold on the culture which long ago they had wrecked and redirected; but a strong, numerous, technologically advanced race, with a mythos of blood-kinship with the Terrans, and a mindscience and weaponry equal to their own, might crush them at a blow. And deliver men from them.

If they learned from him where Werel was, would they send out a lightspeed bomb-ship, like a long fuse burning across the light-years, to destroy the dangerous world before it ever learned of their existence?

That seemed only too possible. Yet two things told against it: their careful preparation of young Orry, as if they wanted him to act as a messenger; and their singular Law..

Falk-Ramarren was unable to decide whether that rule of Reverence for Life was the Shing's one genuine belief, their one plank across the abyss of self-destruction that underlay their behavior as the black canyon gaped beneath their city, or instead was simply the biggest lie of all their lies. They did in fact seem to avoid killing sentient beings. They had left him alive, and perhaps the others; their elaborately disguised foods were all vegetable; in order to control populations they evidently pitted tribe against tribe, starting the war but letting humans do the killing; and the histories told that in the early days of their rule, they had used eugenics and resettlement to consolidate their empire, rather than genocide. It might be true, then, that they obeyed their Law, in their own fashion.

In that case, their grooming of young Orry indicated that he was to be their messenger. Sole survivor of the Voyage, he was to return across the gulfs of time and space to Werel and tell them all the Shing had told him about Earth—quack, quack, like the birds that quacked It is wrong to take life, the moral boar, the squeaking mice in the foundations of the house of Man…Mindless, honest, disastrous, Orry would carry the Lie to Werel.

Honor and the memory of the Colony were strong forces on Werel, and a call for help from Earth might bring help from them; but if they were told there was not and never had been an Enemy, that Earth was an ancient happy garden-spot, they were not likely to make that long journey just to see it. And if they did they would come unarmed, as Ramarren and his companions had come.

Another voice spoke in his memory, longer ago yet, deeper in the forest: "We cannot go on like this forever. There must be a hope, a sign…"

He had not been sent with a message to mankind, as Zove had dreamed. The hope was a stranger one even than that, the sign more obscure. He was to carry mankind's message, to utter their cry for help, for deliverance.

I must go home; I must tell them, the truth, he thought, knowing that the Shing would at all costs prevent this, that Orry would be sent, and he would be kept here or killed.

In the great weariness of his long effort to think coherently, his will relaxed all at once, his chancy control over his racked and worried double mind broke. He dropped down exhausted on the couch and put his head in his hands. If I could only go home, he thought; if I could walk once more with Parth down in the Long Field…

That was the dream-self grieving, the dreamer Falk. Ramarren tried to evade that hopeless yearning by thinking of his wife, dark-haired, golden-eyed, in a gown sewn with a thousand tiny chains of silver, his wife Adrise. But his wedding-ring was gone. And Adrise was dead. She had been dead a long, long time. She had married Ramarren knowing that they would have little more than a moonphase together, for he was going on the Voyage to Terra. And during that one, terrible moment of his Voyage, she had lived out her Me, grown old, died; she had been dead for a hundred of Earth's years, perhaps. Across the years between the stars, which now was the dreamer, which the dream?

"You should have died a century ago," the Prince of Kansas had told uncomprehending Falk, seeing or sensing or knowing of the man that lay lost within him, the man born so long ago. And now if Ramarren were to return to Werel it would be yet farther into his own future. Nearly three centuries, nearly five of Werel's great Years would then have elapsed since he had left; all would be changed; he would be as strange on Werel as he had been on Earth.

There was only one place to which he could truly go home, to the welcome of those who had loved him: Zove's House. And he would never see it again. If his way led anywhere, it was out, away from Earth. He was on his own, and had only one job to do: to try to follow that way through to the end.