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

by Ursula K. Le Guin

All men were alien one to another, at times, not only aliens.

In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes.

When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed.

But there was no integrating or balancing the two minds and personalities that shared his skull, not yet;

It was night, and he was left to himself. To myselves, Falk commented. Falk was at first the stronger, having had some preparation for this ordeal. It was Falk who got the first dialogue going: I have got to get some sleep, Ramarren, he said, and Ramarren received the words as if in mindspeech and without premeditation replied in kind: I’m afraid to sleep. Then he kept watch for a little while, and knew Falk’s dreams like shadows and echoes in his mind.

The basic motor and sensory paths had never been blocked off and so in a sense had been shared all along, though difficulties arose there caused by the doubling of the sets of motor habits and modes of perception. An object looked different to him depending on whether he looked at it as Falk or as Ramarren,

The City and the City

even in his bewilderment there was the germ of interaction, of the coherence toward which he strove. For the fact remained, he was, bodily and chronologically, one man: his problem was not really that of creating a unity, only of comprehending it.

the two-minded man was in a very obscure and hazardous situation.

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,

Ramarren found that he could handle himself pretty well; the necessity of keeping Falk completely hidden and suppressed was actually a convenience, freeing him to behave spontaneously.