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December 28, 2024 - January 9, 2025
a way implies a beginning and an end.
“All your beads end up in Vastness,” her brother said. “An effect of your suppressed mysticism. You’ll end up like our mother, see if you don’t, able to see the patterns on an empty frame.”
“Death is a false mercy,” the Oldest Woman said bitterly.
“And you want me to go along with Metock to Kathol’s house and trade my heron-tapestry for a husband. I know,”
gripped by the same unease, the sense of a remote, uncomprehended, evil presence passing off there in the north through the edge of daylight.
Mornings are all one, and autumn always autumn, but the years men count are many.
Life in the house had the drab levelness of communal existence, a clean, serene frugality.
To keep anything at all of a complex civilization intact here among so few was a singular and very perilous achievement, though to most of them it seemed quite natural: it was the way one did; no other way was known.
These don’t fit into my memories of my life here with you. But they make no whole, they have no meaning.”
I differ from the human genetic norm. It’s only a twist or two of a helix … a very small difference. Like the difference between wei and o.” Zove looked up with a smile at the reference to the Canon which fascinated Falk, but the younger man was not smiling. “However, I am unmistakably not human. So I may be a freak; or a mutant, accidental or intentionally produced; or an alien. I suppose most likely I am an unsuccessful genetic experiment, discarded by the experimenters.… There’s no telling. I’d prefer to think I’m an alien, from some other world. It would mean that at least I’m not the only
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We could help you become a man again, but we could not give you a true childhood. That, one has only once.…”
“We hide from the Shing. Also we hide from what we were.
We live well in the houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear.
We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos.
“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?
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.
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. But they don’t trust us. How could they, even after twelve hundred years? There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them.
It was the Lie that defeated all the races of the League and left us subject to the Shing. Remember that, Falk. Never believe the truth of anything the Enemy has said.”
“Will those who speak no truth tell me the truth for the asking? And how will I recognize what I seek when I find it?”
Outside this house there is no safe place for you on Earth.”
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.…”
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.
since the coming of the Shing and the downfall of the League, the scattered community of man had mistrusted trust and used the spoken word. A free man can speak freely, but a slave or fugitive must be able to hide truth and lie.
There were two evil dreams that followed him each day and always caught up with him by midnight. One was of being stealthily pursued in the darkness by a person he could never see. The other was worse. 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.
The days were all the same, but they were a relief after the nights.
What had it been—a launching-field for some unimaginable vehicle, a mirror with which to signal other worlds, the basis of a forcefield? Whatever it was, it had brought doom on Hirand. It had been a greater work than the Shing permitted men to undertake.
In the brief span of his memory, Falk had not met directly with cruelty or hate. The few people he had known had been, if not fearless, not ruled by fear; they had been generous and familiar.
The one called Drehnem had been afraid of him, and had struck him because he was afraid and repelled by the alien, the monstrous, the inexplicable.
he knew himself so little that all his acts were also acts of self-discovery, like those of a boy, and knowing that he lacked so much he was glad to learn that at least he was not without courage.
Under his feet, under the icy, hummocky terrain of leafless bush and naked tree, under the roots, there was a city. Only he had come to the city a millennium or two too late.
He was fearless and it was impossible to fear him.
It did not take Falk long to make sure that the old man was in fact constantly aware to some degree of what his visitor was feeling and sensing. For some reason this did not bother Falk, whereas the knowledge that Argerd’s drug had opened his mind to telepathic search had enraged him. It was the difference in intent; and more.
You must understand the Law. It says you mustn’t kill unless you must kill.
I am the Listener and you are the Messenger.
Fish and visitors stink after three days.
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.
He saw no mountains, but that night he saw the rim of the world where it cut across the stars.
The more defensive a society, the more conformist.
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.
It seemed to Falk that by far the best thing to do would be to lie down and fall asleep, and he was only unable to do this because there was someone who was counting on him, someone a long way off, a long time ago, who had sent him on a journey; he could not lie down, for he was accountable to someone.…
But no memory quenched his thirst, and again he would seek satisfaction in Estrel’s fathomless submissiveness and find, at least, exhaustion.
It was none of Falk’s business to know, until she wanted to tell him.
Their own women used male names, and were addressed and referred to as men. Grave girls, with clear eyes and silent lips, they lived and worked as men among the equally grave and sober youths and men.
“Solitude is soul’s death: man is mankind.
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.
“Perhaps that’s the reason why the Shing kill no one.” Estrel knew his mood and was trying to hearten him, to change his thoughts. “Why’s that?” he asked, aware of her intent, but unresponsive. “Because they are not afraid.”
did. I honor life, I honor it because it’s a much more difficult and uncertain matter than death;
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.”
“The Basnasska have forgotten the old way of man,” he said; “these people maybe remember it too well.”
in following the Way the way is lost.
