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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Agat, gazing into the tiny cup in his hand, saw in its clear, pure translucency, the perfect skill of its making and the fragility of its substance, a ki...

The old terror of his childhood came over Agat, the terror which, as he became adult, he had reasoned thus: this world on which he had been born, on which his father and forefathers for twenty-three generations had been born, was not his home. His kind was alien. Profoundly, they were always aware of it. They were the farborn. And little by little, with the majestic slowness, the vegetable obstinacy of the process of evolution, this world was killing them—rejecting the graft. They were perhaps too submissive to this process, too willing to die out. But a kind of submission—their iron adherence to the League Laws—had been their strength from the very beginning; and they were still strong, each one of them. But they had not the knowledge or the skill to combat the sterility and early abortion that reduced their generations. For not all wisdom was written in the League Books, and from day to day and Year to Year a little knowledge would always be lost, supplanted by some more immediately useful bit of information concerning daily existence here and now. And in the end, they could not even understand much of what the books told them. What truly remained of their Heritage, by now? If ever the ship, as in the old hopes and tales, soared down in fire from the stars, would the men who stepped from it know them to be men?

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens. You could not tell.

He sat crouched on his stiff hams by his fire, staring into the yellow flames as if into the heart of a lost brightness, Summer’s irrecoverable warmth.

“What’s a hilf?” “What we call you.” “What do you call yourselves?” “Men.”

She noticed how differently he moved and sat than a man of her race; the schooling of his body, the sum of his gestures, was very slightly, but completely, unfamiliar.

“Your people could learn mindspeech if they wanted to. But they never have, they call it witchcraft, I think.… Our books say that we ourselves learned it from another race, long ago, on a world called Rokanan. It’s a skill as well as a gift.”

“What does hilf mean?” “It’s a word from our old language. It means ‘Highly intelligent life-form.’”

“Where is another world?” “Well—there are a lot of them. Out there. Beyond sun and moon.” “Then you did fall out of the sky? What for? How did you get from behind the sun to the seacoast here?”

The books were written for men who knew more than we know.…”

He was always using words that sounded like words, but meant nothing; Rolery wondered what a ship was, what a book was. But the grave, yearning tone in which he told his story worked on her and she listened fascinated.

Rolery’s head spun with these gulfs of time and space and incomprehension. “This is hard to live with,” she said after a while. Agat laughed, as if startled. “No—it gives us our pride. What is hard is to keep alive on a world you don’t belong to. Five Years ago we were a great people. Look at us now.”

nodded. Apparently that meant what a shrug meant to her.

“If you were one of us—” “But I’m not one of you,” he said. Silence ensued.

“What was the other world like—your home?” “There are songs that tell what it was like,” he said, but when she asked timidly what a song was, he did not reply.

There was no one among her people who had ever broken her fearless, careless solitude of mind; having no age-mates, and by choice also, she had always been quite alone, going her own way and caring little for any person. But now as the world had turned gray and nothing held any promise beyond death, now as she first felt fear, she had met him, the dark figure near the tower-rock over the sea, and had heard a voice that spoke in her blood.

“Rolery, I leave for the north two nights from now.” “I know that.” “When I come back—” “But when you don’t come back!” the girl cried out, under the pressure of the terror that had entered her with Autumn’s end, the fear of coldness, of death. He held her against him telling her quietly that he would come back. As he spoke she felt the beating of his heart and the beating of her own. “I want to stay with you,” she said, and he was saying, “I want to stay with you.”

He seemed to have lost his bearings and did not understand what was happening, though he had an impression that it had happened before, and also that it was not actually happening.

Jakob, it was a very little hope at best. You did what you could. Man and unman can’t work together. Six hundred home-years of failure should tell you that. Your folly was only their pretext. If they hadn’t turned on us over it, they would have found something else very soon. They’re our enemies as much as the Gaal. Or the Winter. Or the rest of this planet that doesn’t want us. We can make no alliances but among ourselves. We’re on our own. Never hold your hand out to any creature that belongs to this world.

At first Wold felt sick; then he took heart, and said presently, “This is a wonderful thing.…” And it was, this migration of all the nations of the north. He was glad to have seen it. The man next to him, an Elder, Anweld of Siokman’s Kin, shrugged and answered quietly, “But it’s the end of us.”

Its somber, silvery, unnerving complexity affected her somewhat as Agat’s presence did; and when he was with her, she feared him, but nothing else. Nothing, no one.

She spoke softly, but said exactly what she meant.

She shared nothing at all with him, but had met him and joined with him wholly and immediately across the gulf of their great difference: as if it were that difference, the alienness between them, that let them meet, and that in joining them together, freed them.

About Tevar he was not always clear. Sometimes he remembered the yells, the burning roofs, the hacked and disemboweled corpses of his sons and grandsons. Sometimes he did not. The will to survive was very strong in him.

But to Wold the collapse of the Tevaran world was only part of the collapse of his own life. Knowing that he was very far along the way to death, he looked with great benevolence on each day and on all younger men, human or farborn: they were the ones who had to keep fighting.

What likeness between us?” “At least no grudge, no hate,” Agat said, still unmoving. Wold looked about him and at last, slowly, shrugged assent. “Good, then we can die well together,” the farborn said with his surprising laugh. You never knew when a farborn was going to laugh.

His deference to Wold was courteous pretense, of course—what reason had he to defer to a dying man who even among his own defeated tribe was no longer a chief?—but he stuck with it no matter how foolishly Wold replied. He was truly a rock. There were not many men like that.

That was it, that was what he had meant to tell Agat. It was going to snow. Not a shake of salt like last time, but snow, winter snow. The blizzard … The word he had not heard or said for so long made him feel strange. To die, then, he must return across the bleak, changeless landscape of his boyhood, he must reenter the white world of the storms.

He had tried to explain to her why he must; he said he was not the chief of the city or the Council, that ten Alterrans were chosen and ruled together, but it all made no sense to Rolery. Either he was their leader or he was not; and if he was not, they were lost.

Against the high, unshuttered windows of the library the snow streaked and whispered. It was noon; it seemed dusk. Beneath the windows lay the Square with its well-guarded barricades. Beyond those lay the abandoned houses, the defenseless walls, the city of snow and shadows.

Once—it seemed far back in time, twelve days ago maybe—he had said in this same room that he could not get on without her; and now he had no time day or night even to think of her. Then let me think of her now, at least think of her, he said ragefully to the silence; but all he could think was that she and he had been born at the wrong time. In the wrong season. You cannot begin a love in the beginning of the season of death.

He had a conviction of his invulnerability with which it would be bad luck to argue.

Five thousand nights of Winter, five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of their lives.

Agat stood by Ro-lery in front of the sinking death-fire, in the high sea-beleaguered fort, and it seemed to him then that the old man’s death and the young man’s victory were the same thing. Neither grief nor pride had so much truth in them as did joy, the joy that trembled in the cold wind between sky and sea, bright and brief as fire. This was his fort, his city, his world; these were his people. He was no exile here. “Come,” he said to Rolery as the fire sank down to ashes, “come, let’s go home.”

Imagine darkness. In the darkness that faces outward from the sun a mute spirit woke. Wholly involved in chaos, he knew no pattern. He had no language, and did not know the darkness to be night.

Beyond the sound of wind in trees beyond the storm-enshadowed seas, on stairs of sunlit stone the fair daughter of Airek stands … She lost the tune, then found it again: … stands, silent, with empty hands.

A great part of all he knew had come straight from her, for she had always been the one who could teach him. The remaking of his life had been an effect and a part of the growth of her own. Their minds were very closely interwoven.

red and gold of the endless trees. Fresh, still, sweet, the morning was as it had been when the first people on this land had waked in their frail, pointed houses and stepped outside to see the sun rise free of the dark forest. Mornings are all one, and autumn always autumn, but the years men count are many. There had been a first race on this land … and a second, the conquerors; both were lost, conquered and conquerors, millions of lives, all drawn together to a vague point on the horizon of past time. The stars had been gained, and lost again. Still the years went on, so many years that the forest of archaic times, destroyed utterly during the era when men had made and kept their history, had grown up again. Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun’s first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumerable wind-stirred branches.…

There was no shutting out the inhuman here, no narrowing man’s life, as in the cities of earlier ages, to within man’s scope.

We could help you become a man again, but we could not give you a true childhood. That, one has only once.…” “I feel childish enough, among you,” Falk said with a somber ruefulness. “You’re not childish. You are an inexperienced man. You are a cripple, because there is no child in you, Falk; you are cut off from your roots, from your source.

“Consider the worlds, the various men and beasts on them, the constellations of their skies, the cities they built, their songs and ways. All that is lost, lost to us, as utterly as your childhood is lost to you. What do we really know of the time of our greatness? A few names of worlds and heroes, a ragtag of facts we’ve tried to patch into a history. The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what was left. They slipped in the Lie, as always. We aren’t sure of anything concerning the Age of the League; how many of the documents are forged? You must remember, you see, wherein the Shing are our Enemy. It’s easy enough to live one’s whole life without ever seeing one of them—knowingly; at most one hears an aircar passing by far away. Here in the forest they let us be, and it may be the same now all over the Earth, though we don’t know. They let us be so long as we stay here, in the cage of our ignorance and the wilderness, bowing when they pass by above our heads.

If you serve the Enemy, so do we all: all’s lost and nothing’s to lose. If not, then you have what we men have lost: a destiny; and in following it you may bring hope to us all.…”

Her father’s prophetic gift in her was only lack of illusion. She knew Falk was going. She said only, “You won’t come back.”

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.

“Parth, will you wait for me one year?” “No.” “Only a year—” “A year and a day, and you’ll return riding a silver steed to carry me to your kingdom and make me its queen. No, I won’t wait for you, Falk. Why must I wait for a man who will be lying dead in the forest, or shot by Wanderers out on the prairie, or brainless in the City of the Shing, or gone off a hundred years to another star? What should I wait for? You needn’t think I’ll take another man. I won’t. I’ll stay here in my father’s house. I’ll dye black thread and weave black cloth to wear, black to wear and black to die in. But I won’t wait for anyone, or anything. Never.”

He dreamed that he had forgotten to bring something with him, something important, essential, without which he would be lost. From this dream he woke and knew that it was true: he was lost; it was himself he had forgotten.

Listen. Listen to me, because I don’t want to listen to you, dear guest and blunderer. If I wanted to listen to men talk I wouldn’t live here among the wild pigs like a wild pig.

As far back as his brief memory went, music had always both drawn him and frightened him, filling him with a kind of anguished delight, a pleasure too near torment. At the sound of a human voice singing he felt most intensely that he was not human, that this game of pitch and time and tone was alien to him, not a thing forgotten but a thing new to him, beyond him.

had Earth ever borne so wonderful a thing as the Places of Man?

He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.