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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The ground was everywhere dark, but in places misted faintly with green where the first tiny double-leaved shoots of the hardiest grasses were opening; and above and below the ground was a constant scurrying and burrowing of little beasts, rabbits, badgers, coneys, mice, feral cats, moles, stripe-eyed arcturies, antelope, yellow yappers, the pests and pets of fallen civilizations. The huge sky whirred with wings. At dusk along the rivers flocks of white cranes settled, the water between the reeds and leafless cottonwoods mirroring their long legs and long uplifted wings.

The more defensive a society, the more conformist. The people he was among walked a very narrow, a tortuous and cramped Way, across the broad free plains. So long as he was among them he must follow all the twistings of their ways exactly.

The hard individual will developed in him by his training in the Forest House demanded that he get free, that he get on with his journey, with what Zove had called man’s work. These people were not going anywhere, nor did they come from anywhere, for they had cut their roots in the human past. It was not only the extreme precariousness of his existence among the Basnasska that made him impatient to get out; it was also a sense of suffocation, of being cramped and immobilized, which was harder to endure than the bandage that blanked his vision.

And … you live here all together, Master Hiardan. Have you ever been alone?” “Seldom,” said the other. “Solitude is soul’s death: man is mankind. So our saying goes. But also we say, do not put your trust in any but brother and hive-twin, known since infancy. That is our rule. It is the only safe one.” “But I have no kinsmen, and no safety, Master,” Falk said, and bowing soldierly in the Bee-Keepers’ fashion, he took his leave, and next morning at daybreak went on westward with Estrel.

“They do not like Wanderers,” she said, “nor any strangers. Those that live so much alone are full of fear. In their fear they would take us in and give us food and shelter. But then in the night they would come and bind and kill us. You cannot go to them, Falk”—and she glanced at his eyes—“and tell them I am your fellow-man.… They know we are here; they watch. If they see us move on tomorrow they won’t trouble us. But if we don’t move on, or if we try to go to them, they’ll fear us. It is fear that kills.”

“There are no humans that could do to me what the Shing did. I honor life, I honor it because it’s a much more difficult and uncertain matter than death; and the most difficult and uncertain quality of all is intelligence. The Shing kept their law and let me live, but they killed my intelligence. Is that not murder? They killed the man I was, the child I had been. To play with a man’s mind so, is that reverence? Their law is a lie, and their reverence is mockery.”

Close as they were, yet he never understood her; were all women so? She was like a lost room in a great house, like a carven box to which he did not have the key. She kept nothing from him and yet her secrecy remained, untouched.

“To go in search of his true name: what better way has a man ever gone?

“Not every night does a man with eyes like yellow jewels come begging at my door. To refuse him would be cautious and ungracious, and what is royalty but risk and grace?

My dogs have barked at a beggar tonight and he proves a prince of starlight.

The Prince ruled his domain absolutely, but in no way was his rule enforced: rather it was accepted as an honor; his people chose to serve him, perhaps because they found, in thus affirming the innate and essential grandeur of one person, that they reaffirmed their own quality as men.

Yet to Falk, after a few days, there was no doubt that had there been no subjects at all, had he lived there quite alone, the Prince of Kansas would have been no more and no less a prince. It was, again, a matter of quality.

“Do you know this Canon?” Falk looked where he pointed and saw the verse, What men fear must be feared. O desolation! It has not yet not yet reached its limit! “I know it, Prince. I set out on this journey of mine with it in my pack. But I cannot read the page to the left, in your copy.” “Those are the symbols it was first written in, five or six thousand years ago: the tongue of the Yellow Emperor—my ancestor. You lost yours along the way? Take this one, then. But you’ll lose it too, I expect; in following the Way the way is lost. O desolation!

Why do you always speak the truth, Opalstone?” “I’m not sure.” In fact, though Falk had gradually determined that he would not lie no matter whom he spoke to or how chancy the truth might seem, he did not know why he had come to this decision. “To—to use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game.…” “Oh, they won their game long ago.

Is it lust or loyalty that makes you hold to her?” “We have come a long way together.” “Mistrust her!” “She has given me help, and hope; we are companions. There is trust between us—how can I break it?” “Oh fool, oh desolation!” said the Prince of Kansas. “I’ll give you ten women to accompany you to the Place of the Lie, with lutes and flutes and tambourines and contraceptive pills. I’ll give you five good friends armed with firecrackers. I’ll give you a dog—in truth I will, a living extinct dog, to be your true companion. Do you know why dogs died out? Because they were loyal, because they were trusting. Go alone, man!” “I cannot.” “Go as you please. The game here’s done.” The Prince rose, went to the throne beneath the moon-circle, and seated himself. He never turned his head when Falk tried to say farewell.

He must assume that this Orry was not what he seemed to be. But if he was? I will not be fooled again, Falk thought bitterly. Yes you will, another part of his mind retorted; you will be fooled if they want to fool you, and there is no way you can prevent it. If you ask no questions of this boy lest the answer be a lie, then the lie prevails entirely, and nothing comes of all your journey here but silence and mockery and disgust. You came to learn your name. He gives you a name: accept it.

A sun like a dragon’s eye, orange-yellow, like a fire-opal with seven glittering pendants swinging slowly through their long ellipses.

“We have no enemies here, you know, prech Ramarren,” he ventured. “No? Where are our enemies, then?” “Well—outside—where you came from—” They stared at each other in mutual miscomprehension. “You think men are our enemies—Terrans, human beings? You think it was they that destroyed my mind?” “Who else?” Orry said, frightened, gaping. “The aliens—the Enemy—the Shing!” “But,” the boy said with timid gentleness, as if realizing at last how utterly his former lord and teacher was ignorant and astray, “there never was an Enemy. There never was a War.”

I do not ask for the truth. Who am I to demand the truth? But I should like to hear what you choose to tell me.”

He was staked now totally on one belief: that an honest man cannot be cheated, that truth, if the game be played through right to the end, will lead to truth.

“No Enemy ever came from distant stars to attack the League of All Worlds. The League was destroyed by revolution, civil war, by its own corruption, mililtarism, despotism. On all the worlds there were revolts, rebellions, usurpations; from the Prime World came reprisals that scorched planets to black sand. No more lightspeed ships went out into so risky a future: only the FTLs, the missile-ships, the world-busters. Earth was not destroyed, but half its people were, its cities, its ships and ansibles, its records, its culture—all in two terrible years of civil war between the Loyalists and the Rebels, both armed with the unspeakable weapons developed by the League to fight an alien enemy.

“We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.…

“If human peace depended on a lie, there were those willing to maintain the lie. Since men insisted that the Enemy had come and ruled the Earth, we called ourselves the Enemy, and ruled.

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

Do you see?” “As through a glass,” Falk said, “darkly.” And with the words from the Yaweh Canon he remembered all at once, certain and vivid amidst his bewilderment, the sun shining above the Clearing, bright on the windy, branch-embowered balconies of the Forest House. Then it was not his name he had come here to learn, but the sun’s, the true name of the sun.

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 transience 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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

It seemed, at least, that they had not taught the boy to lie. But they had not taught him to know truth from lies.

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 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.

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.

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 pre...

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 resi...

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.…”

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.

“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.

“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.

He looked from the book to his own hand that held it. Whose hand, darkened and scarred beneath an alien sun? Whose hand? The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way. The name … 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. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. 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.

Yet even in his 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.

Both were needed, for the two-minded man was in a very obscure and hazardous situation.

Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between 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.

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.

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.

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