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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way.…

He lost his bearings finally and could not find the stairs again. He sat on the ground in the darkness and imagined rain falling, out in the forest of his lonely journeying, the gray light and the sound of rain. He spoke in his mind all he could remember of the Old Canon, beginning at the beginning: The way that can be gone is not the eternal Way.…

“Wait,” Falk muttered, kneeling and looking hastily through the disarrayed, unstrapped pack. “Where’s my book?”

“You don’t know and won’t find out what we know, and if you don’t get going I’ll burn your hands off.

He had bluffed the moral boar and the brutal man on their own ground, and got away with it.

he knew himself so little that all his acts were also acts of self-discovery,

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.

Men had come here; had lived here. 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.

One of these mornings by the river he shot a wild hen, so common here in their squawking, low-flying flocks that they provided his staple meat. He had only winged the hen and it was not dead when he picked it up. It beat its wings and cried in its piercing bird-voice, “Take—life—take—life—take—” Then he wrung its neck.

Last time a beast had spoken to him he had been on the threshold of the house of Fear.

Falk stood gazing at the light in the cabin. He moved a little closer, then stood motionless for a long time.

“I alone am confused confused desolate Oh, like the sea adrift Oh, with no harbor to anchor in.…”

Falk stood still for some while. Then he crossed the few dark yards to the door of the little cabin, and knocked. N“Come in!” He opened the door and entered into warmth and light. An old man, gray hair braided long down his back, knelt at the hearth building up the fire. He did not turn to look at the stranger, but laid his firewood methodically. After a while he said aloud in a slow chant, “I alone am confused confused desolate Oh, like the sea adrift Oh, with no harbor to anchor in.…” The gray head turned at last. The old man was smiling; his narrow, bright eyes looked sidelong at Falk.

“Everyone is useful only I alone am inept outlandish. I alone differ from others but I seek the milk of the Mother the Way.…”

In a voice that was hoarse and hesitant because he had not spoken any words for a long time, Falk replied with the next verse of the Old Canon: “Everyone is useful only I alone am inept outlandish. I alone differ from others but I seek the milk of the Mother the Way.…” “Ha ha ha!” said the old man. “Do you, Yellow Eyes? Come on, sit down, here by the hearth. Outlandish, yes yes, yes indeed. You are outlandish. How far out the land?—who knows?

I live alone here, my lad, alone and all alonio. Because I am a great, a very great, the greatest Listener, I live alone, and talk too much. I wasn’t born here, like a mushroom in the woods; but with other men I never could shut out the minds, all the buzz and grief and babble and worry and all the different ways they went, as if I had to find my way through forty different forests all at once. So I came to live alone in the real forest with only the beasts around me, whose minds are brief and still. No death lies in their thoughts. And no lies lie in their thoughts.

Remember I’m a Listener, not a paraverbalist. I get no words or names. I don’t want them. That there was a lonely soul out there in the dark, I knew, and I know how my lighted window shone into your eyes. Isn’t that enough, more than enough? I don’t need names. And my name is All-Alonio. Right?

Empathy was to telepathy somewhat as touch to sight, a vaguer, more primitive, and more intimate sense.

“Have you no reverence for life? You must understand the Law. It says you mustn’t kill unless you must kill.

Alone’s not lonely.…”

“How do you know I’m going to Es Toch?” Falk asked, wrapping the soft leather robe about him like a toga. “Because you’re not human,” said the old man. “And remember, I am the Listener. I know the compass of your mind, outlandish as it is, whether I will or no. North and south are dim; far back in the east is a lost brightness; to the west there lies darkness, a heavy darkness. I know that darkness. Listen. Listen to me, because I don’t want to listen to you, dear guest and blunderer. If I wanted to listen to men talk I wouldn’t live here among the wild pigs like a wild pig. I have this to say before I go to sleep. Now listen: There are not very many of the Shing. That’s a great piece of news and wisdom and advice. Remember it, when you walk in the awful darkness of the bright lights of Es Toch. Odd scraps of information may always come in handy. Now forget the east and west, and go to sleep. You take the bed. Though as a Thurro-dowist I am opposed to ostentatious luxury, I applaud the simpler pleasures of existence, such as a bed to sleep on. At least, every now and then. And even the company of a fellow man, once a year or so. Though I can’t say I miss them as you do. Alone’s not lonely.…” And as he made himself a sort of pallet on the floor he quoted in an affectionate singsong from the Younger Canon of his creed: “‘I am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.… I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself.…’”

“Look out for the hens, downriver,” said the old man, apropos of nothing, as they breakfasted in the early morning before Falk set off again. “Some of them can talk. Others can listen. Like us, eh? I talk and you listen. Because, of course, I am the Listener and you are the Messenger. Logic be damned. Remember about the hens, and mistrust those that sing. Roosters are less to be mistrusted; they’re too busy crowing.

things can be hidden from even the greatest Listener. Things can be hidden from a man’s own mind, can’t they, so that he can’t lay the hands of thought upon them.

The Listener sucked his teeth and cackled. “You never had any reason to trust me, outlandish laddie,” he said. “Nor I you. After all, things can be hidden from even the greatest Listener. Things can be hidden from a man’s own mind, can’t they, so that he can’t lay the hands of thought upon them. Take the slider. My traveling days are done. It carries only one, but you’ll be going alone. And I think you’ve got a longer journey to make than you can ever go by foot. Or by slider, for that matter.”

Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little machine, black paristolis inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum wire.

Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little machine, black paristolis inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum wire. The ornamentation all but concealed the controls, but he had played with a slider at Zove’s House, and after studying the control-arcs a minute he touched the left arc, moved his finger along it till the slider had silently risen about two feet, and then with the right arc sent the little craft slipping over the yard and the riverbank till it hovered above the scummy ice of the backwater below the cabin. He looked back then to call goodbye, but the old man had already gone into the cabin and shut the door. And as Falk steered his noiseless craft down the broad dark avenue of the river, the enormous silence closed in around him again.

He played games with the slider to beguile the eventless hours:

His little campfires were strictly cookingfires. There was not enough dry wood in the whole Eastern Forest, probably, for a real fire, after the long days of rain, wet snow, mist, and rain again.

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.

It was the old League tongue, Galaktika. Like all Foresters, Falk had learned it from tapes and books, for the documents surviving from the Great Age were recorded in it, and it served as a common speech among men of different tongues.

“Those that mean no harm find no harm among us.”

He now knew something that they, who had taught him everything, did not know: that a man could see his planet turn among the stars.…

“Some Wanderers might be called savages. Others not. The Cattle-Hunters are all savages and know nothing beyond their own territories, these Basnasska and Samsit and Arksa. We go far. We go east to the forest, and south to the mouth of the Inland River, and west over the Great Mountains and the Western Mountains even to the sea. I myself have seen the sun set in the sea, behind the chain of blue isles that lies far off the coast, beyond the drowned valleys of California, earthquake-whelmed.…” Her soft voice had slipped into the cadence of some archaic chant or plaint. “Go on,” Falk murmured, but she was still, and before long he was fast asleep. For a while she watched his sleeping face. At last she pushed the embers together, whispered a few words as if in prayer to the amulet chained around her neck, and curled down to sleep across the fire from him.

“Did they know you were crossing Basnasska territory alone?” “Alone? It’s only in fairytales from the Time of the Cities that women ever go anywhere alone. A man was with me. The Basnasska killed him.” Her delicate face was set, unexpressive.

She hesitated, but when he pressed her she agreed to come with him. That pleased him, because of his desire for her and his pity for her, because of the loneliness he had known and did not wish to know again.

“I think you have spoken only truth to us. For this I thank you. We would have welcomed you more freely and spoken to you of things known to us, if you had come alone.” Falk hesitated before he answered. “I am sorry for that. But I would not have got this far but for my guide and friend. And … you live here all together, Master Hiardan. Have you ever been alone?”

Those that live so much alone are full of fear.

“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.”

Estrel had kept the fire smoldering to guide him back. She lay by it in her worn-out sleeping-bag. She did not lift her head when he came to her. “There are trees not too far to the west of here; there may be water. I went the wrong way this morning,” he said, getting their things together and slipping on his pack. He had to help Estrel get to her feet; he took her arm and they set off. Bent, with a blind look on her face, she struggled along beside him for a mile and then for another mile. They came up one of the long swells of land. “There!” Falk said; “there—see it? It’s trees, all right—there must be water there.” But Estrel had dropped to her knees, then lain down on her side in the grass, doubled up on her pain, her eyes shut. She could not walk farther. “It’s two or three miles at most, I think. I’ll make a smudge-fire here, and you can rest; I’ll go fill the flasks and come back—I’m sure there’s water there, and it won’t take long.” She lay still while he gathered all the scrub-wood he could and made a little fire and heaped up more of the green wood where she could put it on the fire. “I’ll be back soon,” he said, and started away. At that she sat up, white and shivering, and cried out, “No! don’t leave me! You mustn’t leave me alone—you mustn’t go—”

Through the late dusk light shone out sudden and golden in his eyes: light shining through high windows, behind high dark trees.

Other voices spoke aloud, calling sharply from a distance. The dark shadow-beasts withdrew, waiting.

“You go to the Place of the Lie to find out the truth?

“This is the Kansas Enclave. I am its Master. I am its Lord, its Prince and God.

“This is the Kansas Enclave. I am its Master. I am its Lord, its Prince and God. I am in charge of what happens here. Here we play one of the great games. King of the Castle it’s called. The rules are very old, and are the only laws that bind me. I make the rest.”

“They are as foolish as the Basnasska, and the old man is mad.”

What men fear must be feared. O desolation! It has not yet not yet reached its limit!

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.”

in following the Way the way is lost.

“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.

WITH HIS LONE MEMORY of a lone peak to embody the word “mountain,” Falk had imagined that as soon as they reached the mountains they would have reached Es Toch; he had not realized they would have to clamber over the roof-tree of a continent.

“You are happy to be getting close to the City, aren’t you?” he asked. “I wish I were.” “Why shouldn’t I be? There I hope to find my kinsfolk; if I do not, the Lords will help me. And there you will find what you seek too, and be restored into your heritage.” “My heritage? I thought you thought me a Raze.” “You? Never! Surely you don’t believe, Falk, that it was the Shing that meddled with your mind? You said that once, down on the plains, and I did not understand you then. How could you think yourself a Raze, or any common man? You are not Earth-born!”

The third morning from the summit dawned bright, and after they had ridden a couple of hours Falk halted his mule, looking questioningly at Estrel.

The City of the Lords of Earth was built on the two rims of a canyon, a tremendous cleft through the mountains, narrow, fantastic, its black walls striped with green plunging terrifically down half a mile to the silver tinsel strip of a river in the shadowy depths. On the very edges of the facing cliffs the towers of the city jutted up, hardly based on earth at all, linked across the chasm by delicate bridge-spans. Towers, roadways and bridges ceased and the wall closed the city off again just before a vertiginous bend of the canyon. Helicopters with diaphanous vanes skimmed the abyss, the sliders flickered along the half-glimpsed streets and slender bridges. The sun, still not far above the massive peaks to eastward, seemed scarcely to cast shadows here; the great green towers shone as if translucent to the light.

He was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his dizziness for a while.

He was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his dizziness for a while. There was no furniture. Walls, floor and ceiling were all of the same translucent stuff, which appeared soft and undulant like many thicknesses of pale green veiling, but was tough and slick to the touch. Queer carvings and crimpings and ridges forming ornate patterns all over the floor were, to the exploring hand, nonexistent; they were eye-deceiving paintings, or lay beneath a smooth transparent surface. The angles where walls met were thrown out of true by optical-illusion devices of cross-hatching and pseudo-parallels used as decoration; to pull the corners into right angles took an effort of will, which was perhaps an effort of self-deception, since they might, after all, not be right angles. But none of this teasing subtlety of decoration so disoriented Falk as the fact that the entire room was translucent. Vaguely, with the effect of looking into a depth of very green pond-water, underneath him another room was visible. Overhead was a patch of light that might be the moon, blurred and greened by one or more intervening ceilings. Through one wall of the room strings and patches of brightness were fairly distinct, and he could make out the motion of the lights of helicopters or aircars. Through the other three walls these outdoor lights were much dimmer, blurred by the veilings of further walls, corridors, rooms. Shapes moved in those other rooms. He could see them but there was no identifying them: features, dress, color, size, all was blurred away. A blot of shadow somewhere in the green depths suddenly rose and grew less, greener, dimmer, fading into the maze of vagueness. Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy. It was extraordinarily beautiful, this masked shimmer of lights and shapes through inchoate planes of green, and extraordinarily disturbing.

“A Shing,” he whispered in blank dread. The face mocked him, the terrible lips mouthing soundlessly A Shing, and he saw that it was the reflection of his own face.

“You are welcome here, Falk. We have long awaited you, long guided and guarded you.”

There came unbidden into his mind words spoken months ago by an old man in the forest: The awful darkness of the bright lights of Es Toch. He would not be played with, drugged, deluded any longer. A fool he had been to come here, and he would never get away alive; but he would not be played with. He started forward to find the hidden doorway to follow the man. A voice from the mirror said, “Wait a moment more, Falk. Illusions are not always lies. You seek truth.”

“Why—why did you lie to me?” he said. “Why did you bring me here?” He knew why; he knew what he was and always had been in Estrel’s eyes. It was not his intelligence that spoke, but his self-respect and his loyalty, which could not endure or admit the truth in this first moment. “I was sent to bring you here. You wanted to come here.”

Go alone, Opalstone, said the Prince of Kansas. Go alone, said Hiardan the Bee-Keeper. Go alone, said the old Listener in the forest. Go alone, my son, said Zove. 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?