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December 28, 2024 - January 9, 2025
Whenever Abundibot expressed any emotion in words, the expression rang so false that it seemed to imply an opposite emotion; but perhaps what it implied actually was a total lack of any affect or feeling whatsoever.
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.
Who were these people? In the confrontation he had just witnessed there had been insanity, cruelty and terror, and nothing else; certainly nothing that disposed him either to reverence or trust.
“Fellowman,” he said abruptly, translating the Kelshak form of address into Galaktika, “I will learn more of you later, if you will. What you tell me troubles me. Let me be alone with it a while.”
Ramarren, having made his request and heard it accepted, had in the way of one of his Level dismissed the other, tuned him out, hearing whatever else he said simply as noise.
He had been killed, and brought back to life. What was death, then, the death he could not remember?
He was Falk, and he was Ramarren. He was the fool and the wise man: one man twice born.
there was no integrating or balancing the two minds and personalities that shared his skull, not yet; he must swing between them, blanking one out for the other’s sake, then drawn at once back the other way. He was scarcely able to move, being plagued by the hallucination of having two bodies, of being actually physically two different men.
He got through this first, worst time, and by the time morning shone dim through the green veilwalls of his room, he had lost his fear and was beginning to gain real control over both thought and action.
what Ramarren guessed about Terra was often contradicted by what Falk knew, while Falk’s ignorance of Werel cast a strange glamor of legend over Ramarren’s own past.
Most often, now, it was Ramarren who took over, for the Navigator of the Alterra was a decisive and potent person.
One question was basic to all the others. It was simply put: whether or not the Shing could be trusted.
There were open lies and discrepancies which already his double memory had caught.
If it was a false story, then, the Shing could and did mind-lie. Was it false?
Ramarren knew it for a lie. It was incredible, and indubitable. The Shing could lie telepathically—that guess and dread of subjected humanity was right. The Shing were, in truth, the Enemy.
What did they need him for? Why had they sought him, brought him here, restored the memory that they had destroyed? No explanation could be got from the facts at his disposal except the one he had arrived at as Falk: The Shing needed him to tell them where he came from.
They did not want him, Ramarren; they wanted only his knowledge. And they had not got it.
Unless he was in one of the Places of Silence, and addressed in a certain form by an associate of his own Level, Ramarren was absolutely unable to communicate, in words or writing or mindspeech, the True Name of his world’s sun.
Knowing there might still be an Enemy on Earth, the crewmen of the Alterra had not set off unprepared.
for the present, he was at least physically safe. —So long as they did not know that he remembered his existence as Falk.
The Shing must have had to spread themselves thin, and take much care to keep the subject planets from re-allying and joining to rebel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
their grooming of young Orry indicated that he was to be their messenger. Sole survivor of the Voyage, he was to return across the gulfs of time and space to Werel and tell them all the Shing had told him about Earth—quack, quack, like the birds that quacked It is wrong to take life, the moral boar, the squeaking mice in the foundations of the house of Man.… Mindless, honest, disastrous, Orry would carry the Lie to Werel.
I must go home; I must tell them the truth, he thought, knowing that the Shing would at all costs prevent this, that Orry would be sent, and he would be kept here or killed.
again. If his way led anywhere, it was out, away from Earth. He was on his own, and had only one job to do: to try to follow that way through to the end.
it was something to have seen the light, in one lifetime, of two suns. The orange gold of Werel’s sun, the white gold of Earth’s: he could hold them now side by side as a man might hold two jewels, comparing their beauty for the sake of heightening their praise.
how from century to century whenever they felt inclined the Lords of Earth summoned their wondrous machines and instruments to move the whole city to a new site suiting their whim.
Orry was too benumbed with drugs and persuasions to disbelieve anything, while if Ramarren believed or not was little matter. Abundibot evidently told lies for the mere pleasure of it.
how arts and learning were gently encouraged and rebellious and destructive elements as gently repressed.
almost a race of children, protected by the firm kindly guidance and the invulnerable technological strength of the Shing caste.…
Ramarren would have believed most of it, if he had not had Falk’s memories of the forest and the plains to show the rather subtle but total falseness of it. Falk had not lived on Earth among children, but among men, brutalized, suffering, and impassioned.
Though he was directly or electronically watched at every moment, visually and telepathically, he was in no way restrained; evidently they felt they had nothing to fear from him now.
he could buy his escape from Earth only with the information they wanted, the location of Werel. So far he had told them nothing and they had asked nothing more.
The one advantage that Werel possessed tactically over the Shing was the fact that the Shing did not know where it was and might have to spend several centuries looking for it.
Seen rightly, any situation, even a chaos or a trap, would come clear and lead of itself to its one proper outcome; for there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye.
So while Ramarren racked his mind, Falk lay low and waited. And when the chance came he caught it.
They were afraid to kill and afraid to die, and called their fear Reverence for Life. The Shing, the Enemy, the Liars.… Did they in truth lie? Perhaps that was not quite the way of it; perhaps the essence of their lying was a profound, irremediable lack of understanding.
He can tell Werel his tale about Earth, and you can tell yours, and I mine.… There’s always more than one way towards the truth.
