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December 28, 2024 - January 9, 2025
I mistook as derivative work that was foundational.
And now they were dead. And their work—all their notes, pictures, tapes, all that would have justified their death to them—that was all gone too, blown to dust with them, wasted with them.
who had not lived on nine different exotic planets without learning the value of good manners.
the machine I showed you in the ship, which can speak instantly to other worlds, with no loss of years—it was that that they were after, I expect.
There are enemies here, on this world, now.”
Whoever these people were that had bombed an unarmed Survey ship at sight, they evidently meant to survey this planet and take it over for colonization or for some military use.
But Rocannon the hilfer, whose job was learning, not teaching, and who had lived on quite a few backward worlds, doubted the wisdom of staking everything on weapons and the uses of machines. Dominated by the aggressive, tool-making humanoid species of Centaurus, Earth, and the Cetians, the League had slighted certain skills and powers and potentialities of intelligent life, and judged by too narrow a standard.
What if the weapons of the Enemy were things of the mind? Would it not be well to learn a little of the different shapes minds come in, and their powers?
“I think he meant that his people feel that we—the League—betrayed them. First we encourage them, then suddenly for forty-five years we drop them, send them no messages, discourage their coming, tell them to look after themselves.
An attack, however bloody, on one of their own castles fit into their warrior outlook; but an attack on the Fiia was desecration.
They were a boastful race, the Angyar: vengeful, overweening, obstinate, illiterate, and lacking any first-person forms for the verb “to be unable.” There were no gods in their legends, only heroes.
And craft, not strength, is my only hope against their strength.”
The world itself has become a grain of sand on the shore of night.
But my part of the darkness is to rule a failing domain alone, to live and live and outlive them all.…”
While he had been a student of the species instead of its ally, he had kept seeking for their religion; they seemed to have no creeds at all. Yet they were quite credulous.
The lord of Plenot is an Errant.” This meant, in the complex code of relationships among Angyar domains, a lord banned by the rest, an outlaw, not bound by the rules of hospitality, reprisal, or restitution.
but poor as it was, Mogien’s confidence that six men could subdue it seemed excessive.
This was no place for an ethnologist of forty-three.
Now Rocannon saw why they had joined in the duel: the guard had broken its rules and struck at the steed instead of the rider.
glancing back after Yahan and ahead at Mogien, wondering at the strange being, his friend, who one moment would have killed a man in cold wrath and the next moment spoke with simple kindness. Arrogant and loyal, ruthless and kind, in his very disharmony Mogien was lordly.
Mogien, whom he had come to love as a friend and somewhat as a son.
Nothing came to him from all his earlier life, though he had lived many years on many worlds, learned much, done much. It was all burnt away.
Rocannon knew the man would have given half his flocks and wives to be rid of his unearthly guest, but was trapped in his own cruelty: the jailer is the prisoner’s prisoner.
The lawless man is a slave, and the cruel man is a slave, and the stupid man is a slave. You are my slave, and I drive you like a beast.
to my Lord I give the hours of my life and the use of my death.” “I accept them. And with them my own life which you gave back to me.”
almost a marriage
They slogged along, for there was nothing else to do.
There’s no man dwelling between the sound and the great mountains, that ever I heard of, unless it’s the Ones not talked of.
“But I’d rather be a man serving men than a beast hunting beasts, like these.”
It went on and on, and still sometimes he struggled to wake up from this monotony of fear, the soft hissing voices about him, the multiple laboring wing-beats jolting him endlessly on.
At the thought of going back in there among the tall angelic figures whose noble heads held brains degenerated or specialized to the level of insects, he felt a cold prickling at the back of his neck; but he had to do it.
He had wanted to think them intelligent because they looked so angelically human.
I can’t shell something that might speak to me,”
“The Fiia have no memory for fear, Olhor. How should we? We chose. Night and caves and swords of metal we left to the Clayfolk, when our way parted from theirs, and we chose the green valleys, the sunlight, the bowl of wood. And therefore we are the Half-People. And we have forgotten, we have forgotten much!”
I ride into the tales that my people learn as little children, in the valleys of Angien.
I am only a half-person. I cannot go farther than the hills. I cannot go into the high places with you, Olhor!”
still. So between him and Kyo a pattern had come to its end, leaving quietness.
He had forgotten why he wanted to cross these mountains, remembering only that he had to, that he must go south.
He had learned to listen to the minds of one race, one kind of creature, among all the voices of all the worlds one voice: that of his enemy.
Understanding must be mutual, when loyalty was, and love. But those who had killed his friends and broken the bond of peace he spied upon, he overheard.
Rocannon’s head spun with the impingement of alien thoughts and feelings, a thousand strangers crowded in his skull.
Someone was coming toward him: a man whose mind had sensed his own. With this certainty came lesser impressions of speed, of confinement; of curiosity and fear.
“There is … there is a … an airship,” he muttered thickly, like a sleeptalker. “There!” There was nothing where he pointed; air, cloud. “There,” Rocannon whispered.
Rocannon saw it less clearly than he sensed the man inside it, the uncomprehending touch of mind on mind, the intense defiant fear. He whispered to Yahan, “Take cover!” but could not move himself.
But Rocannon they treated as a lord above lords, one set apart.
there was tactile sensation and perception of space and spatial relationships, of time, motion, and position.
He wondered no longer why the League delayed their attack so long. They were not coming. They had thought his message a trick, a trap.
But he could not shut it out—not the light but the darkness, the darkness that blinded his mind, the knowledge in his own flesh of the death of a thousand men all in one moment. Death, death, death over and over and yet all at once in one moment in his one body and brain. And after it, silence. He lifted his head and listened, and heard silence.
Who are my people? I am not what I was. I have changed; I have drunk from the well in the mountains. And I wish never to be again where I might hear the voices of my enemies.”
now looking at that black place on the sands she saw that it was strange—the first thing truly strange to her that she had ever seen: built in a timepast that had nothing to do with her, by hands that were not kindred flesh and blood, imagined by alien minds.
“I want to see that black rock on the sands.”
