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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

“To—to use the enemy’s weapon is to play the enemy’s game.…”

Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy.

The awful darkness of the bright lights of Es Toch.

fool he had been to come here, and he would never get away alive; but he would not be played with.

He could not feel rancor towards her. He felt nothing towards her. She had turned to air, to a blur and flicker of light. His feeling was all towards himself: he was sick, physically sick, with humiliation.

How many others would have guided him aright, helped him on his quest, armed him with knowledge, if he had come across the prairies alone? How much might he have learned, if he had not trusted Estrel’s guidance and good faith?

You came to learn your name. He gives you a name: accept it.

Falk kept gazing in his mind at the jewel that might be false and might be priceless, the story, the pattern, the glimpse—true vision or not—of the world he had lost.

“You are so like yourself, prech Ramarren, and so different!

There was a queer air about him of power and also of utter self-containment, self-absorption.

It was Estrel’s face, ten times lifesize.

This was how the Shing held their Council: each in his own room, apart, with only the presence of whispering voices. As the incomprehensible questioning and replying went on, Falk murmured to Orry, “Do you know this tongue?”

“We mindspeak so that you may hear only truth. For it is not true that we who call ourselves Shing, or any other man, can pervert or conceal truth in paraverbal speech. The Lie that men ascribe to us is itself a lie. But if you choose to use voicespeech do so, and we will do likewise.”

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.

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.

“Some desperate men on Earth, dominating the struggle for a moment but knowing further counter-revolt and wreckage and ruin was inevitable, employed a new weapon. They lied.

The Enemy had infiltrated everywhere, had wrecked the League and was running Earth, was in power now and was going to stop the war. And they had achieved all this by their one unexpectable, sinister, alien power: the power to mind-lie.

“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.…

having told a great lie, we must now uphold a great law.

“There are thousands upon thousands of us who know the truth. We are those who have power and knowledge, and use them for peace. There come dark ages, and this is one of them, all through man’s history, when people will have it that the world is ruled by demons. We play the part of demons in their mythologies. When they begin to replace mythology with reason, we help them; and they learn the truth.”

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

Then it was not his name he had come here to learn, but the sun’s, the true name of the sun.

He wondered if he had yet seen a Shing, or only the shadows and images of the Shing.

But the curious thing was his distinct impression that the play was not being acted for his benefit, but for Orry’s. He did not understand why, but again and again he had felt that all Abundibot said to him was said to prove something to the boy.

Would that then explain what seemed almost the central puzzle, the interest the Shing took in him, their bringing him here under Estrel’s tutelage, their offer to restore his memory? There was a world not under their control; it had re-invented lightspeed flight; they would want to know where it was. And if they restored his memory, he could tell them. If they could restore his memory. If anything at all of what they had told him was true.

He, and probably this boy, were like toys in the hands of strange faithless players.

children with subnormal minds are brought here and keyed into the psychocomputers, so that even they can share in the great work. Those are the ones the ignorant call toolmen. You came here with Strella Siobelbel, prech Ramarren?”

He certainly did not know his isolation as such—he did not seem to have clear ideas on anything much—but it looked from his eyes sometimes, yearning, at Falk.

Falk disliked the tone of the word “natives” in Orry’s mouth, and he finally asked with a trace of irony, “How do you know which you should bow to and which should bow to you? I can’t tell Lords from natives.

“I don’t understand what keeps the Lords, the Shing, apart from the natives, if they are all Terran men together.”

The Council rules democratically for the good of all, and there is no king or dictator.

wow

Any fool might have guessed the thing was a transmitter;

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.

Though there were said to be so many of the Lords, yet on Earth they kept only this one city, held apart,

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.

He knew it was a strong intoxicant and drank no more; but Orry swigged his down with relish.

“There is a question I wish to ask you.” “Only one?” The note of mockery seemed clear to Falk, so clear that he glanced at Orry to see if he had caught it. But the boy, sucking on another tube of pariitha, his gray-gold eyes lowered, had caught nothing.

he felt the Shing was playing with him, as with a creature totally incompetent and powerless.

Looked at impartially, this second-growth self of yours is a mere rudiment, emotionally stunted and intellectually incompetent, compared to the true self which lies so deeply hidden.

“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,

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.

These Lords of Es Toch brought me here, it seems, to restore my memory as Ramarren. But they can do it, or will do it, only at the cost of my memory of myself as I am now, and all I have learned on Earth. This they insist upon. I do not wish it to be so. I do not wish to forget what I know and guess, and be an ignorant tool in their hands. I do not wish to die again before my death!

We will tell Werel all about the friendly Shing. And they’ll believe us. They will believe the lies we believe. And so they will fear no attack from the Shing;

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

The seeming emptiness of this great building might be a sham, or a trap, or like so much else here, an illusion. He felt and guessed that he was constantly spied upon, aurally or visually, by hidden presences or devices. All doors were guarded by toolmen or electronic monitors.

There was no one here that Falk could trust, except himself, and therefore not only must Falk die, but his dying must serve the will of the Enemy.

know. It was not Werel he cared for—for all he knew, his guesses were all astray and Werel itself was a lie, Orry a more elaborate Estrel; there was no telling. 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.

he had not been able to trust Orry to obey, or to keep the order secret. The Shing had so mindhandled the boy that he was by now, essentially, their instrument;

They wanted him to distrust himself, his beliefs, his knowledge, his strength. All the explanations about mindrazing were then equally a scare, a bogey, to convince him that he could not possibly withstand their parahypnotic operations.

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 preached Reverence for Life, fooling themselves at last with their own lie.