Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions (Hainish Cycle, #1-3)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Nothing whatever results and nothing whatever is changed.… I have been changed. You change me. Do not take me for granite.1

I’m awed by the stately grace of Le Guin’s prose, that feels both spoken from a great height and rumbled up through the earth; the physicality of her writing, the weight and dance of it, sounding a deep, pure love for the human body in a landscape.

“Most of my stories,” Le Guin writes in her own introduction to City of Illusions, “are excuses for a journey. I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B—or, more often, from A to A—by the most difficult and circuitous route.”

To treat her, and her work, not as a mountain to scale or a sun to see by, but as a journey to begin; to take her, not for granite or granted, but as a cheerfully muddy road, fragrant and yielding and winding through the ferny brae, over the hills and far away, beyond the worlds we know and through those we mistakenly think we know well. To have come to her work, not early or late, but in my own time—and to greet you here, fellow traveler, on the cusp of new adventure, whether or not you’ve passed through this work before, and to say to you, as we set out together:

That was her own way, to speak and laugh.

When he raised his head he smelled the sweet musty fragrance of grass tapestries hung on the walls and the sweet fresh fragrance of night in the forests outside.

For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.

the jailer is the prisoner’s prisoner.

Here in the south the trees, all conifers, were coming into bloom, and the forests were dusty and sweet with drifting pollen. All flowers here gave their pollen to the wind, grasses and conifers: there were no insects, no petaled flowers. Spring on the unnamed world was all in green, dark green and pale green, with great drifts of golden pollen.

Understanding must be mutual, when loyalty was, and love.

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man’s fate is not important. “If it is not, what is?”

They did well by now merely to preserve, to endure.

She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant.

She had lost all her lightness, her aimless, endearing insolence; she was urgent and gentle. All at once he recalled her vividly as a little child,

Starlight and the presence of trees and the sound of the brook all entered into the dimly lit room, so that between each person and the next, and between the words they said, there was a certain space for shadows, night-wind, and silence.

Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie.

Why did men no longer journey forth to see their world? Falk wondered, sitting by his campfire that burned like a tiny opal in the vast blue vault of the prairie twilight. Why did such men as Zove and Metock hide in the woods, never once in their lives coming out to see the wide splendor of the Earth? He now knew something that they, who had taught him everything, did not know: that a man could see his planet turn among the stars.…

I myself have seen the sun set in the sea, behind the chain of blue isles that lies far off the coast, beyond the drowned valleys of California, earthquake-whelmed.…” Her soft voice had slipped into the cadence of some archaic chant or plaint.

“Don’t mistrust me, Falk,” she said. “Let me prove myself to you. Mindspeech proves nothing; and trust is a thing that must grow, from actions, across the days.” “Water it, then,” said Falk, “and I hope it grows.”

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.

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.

In the shadow of total calamity why not set off a firecracker?

“Do you mean that, in order to remember what I was, I must … forget what I am?”

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust,

Across the years between the stars, which now was the dreamer, which the dream?

The little glass bubble hung motionless in the center of the bowl of ocean, eastward of the sun.