The replacement-personality…It meant nothing particular. What did it mean?
Falk felt a little cold creep over him, and he said carefully, "Do you mean that, in. order to remember what I was, I must…forget what I am?"
"Unfortunately that is the case. We regret it very much. The loss, however, of a replacement-personality of a few years' growth is, though regrettable, perhaps not too high a price to pay for the repossession of a mind such as yours obviously was, and, of course, for the chance of completing your great mission across the stars and returning at last to your home with the knowledge you so gallantly came to seek."
Despite his rusty, unused-sounding whisper, Abundibot was as fluent in speaking as in mindspeaking; his words poured out and Falk caught the meaning, if he caught it, only on the third or fourth bounce…"The chance—of completing—?" he repeated, feeling a fool, and glancing at Orry as if for support. "You mean, you would send me—us—back to…this planet I am supposed to have come from?"
"We would consider it an honor and a beginning of the reparation due you to give you a lightspeed ship for the voyage home to Werel."
"Earth is my home," Falk said with sudden violence. Abundibot was silent. After a minute the boy spoke: "Werel is mine, prech Ramarren," he said wistfully. "And I can never go back to it without you."
"Why not?"
"I don't know where it is. I was a child. Our ship was destroyed, the course-computers and all were blown up when we were attacked. I can't recalculate the course!"
"But these people have lightspeed ships and course-computers! What do you mean? What star does Werel circle, that's all you need to know."
"But I don't know it."
"This is nonsense." Falk began, pushed by mounting incredulity into anger. Abundibot held up his hand in a curiously potent gesture. "Let the boy explain, Agad Ramarren," he whispered.
"Explain that he doesn't know the name of his planet's sun?"
"It's true, prech Ramarren," Orry said shakily, his face crimson. "If—if you were only yourself, you'd know it without being told. I was in my ninth moonphase—I was still First Level. The Levels…Well, our civilization, at home, it's different from anything here, I guess. Now that I see it by the light of what the Lords here try to do, and democratic ideals, I realize it's very backward in some ways. But anyhow, there are the Levels, that cut across all the Orders and ranks, and make up the Basic Harmony of—prechnoye…I don't know how to say it in Galaktika. Knowledge, I guess. Anyway I was on the First Level, being a child, and you were Eighth Level and Order. And each Level has—things you don't learn, and things you aren't told, and can't be told or understand, until you enter into it. And below the Seventh Level, I think, you don't learn the True Name of the World or the True Name of the Sun—they're just the world, Werel, and the sun, prahan. The True Names are the old ones—they're in the Eighth Analect of the Books of Alterra, the books of the Colony. They're in Galaktika, so that they'd mean something to the Lords here. But I couldn't tell them, because I didn't know; all I know is'sun' and 'world,' and that wouldn't get me home—nor you, if you can't remember what you knew! Which sun? Which world? Oh, you've got to let them give you your memory back, prech Ramarren! Do you see?"
"As through a glass," Falk said, "darkly."
And with the words from the Yaweh Canon he remembered all at once, certain and vivid amidst his bewilderment, the sun shining above the Clearing, bright on the windy, branch-embowered balconies of the Forest House. Then it was not his name he had come here to learn, but the sun's, the true name of the sun.
VIII
THE STRANGE UNSEEN Council of the Lords of Earth was over. In parting Abundibot had said to Falk, "The choice is yours: to remain Falk, our guest on Earth, or to regain your heritage and complete your destiny as Agad Ramarren of Werel. We wish that your choice be made knowingly and in your own time. We await your decision and will abide by it." Then to Orry: "Make your kinsman free of the City, Har Orry, and let all he and you desire be known to us." The slit-door opened behind Abundibot and he withdrew, his tall bulky figure vanishing so abruptly outside the doorway that it seemed to have been flicked off. Had he in fact been there in substance, or only as some kind of projection? Falk was not sure. He wondered if he had yet seen a Shing or only the shadows and images of the Shing.
"Is there anywhere we can walk—out of doors?" he asked the boy abruptly, sick of the indirect and insubstantial ways and walls of this place, and also, wondering how far their freedom actually extended.
"Anywhere, prech Ramarren. Out in the streets—or shall we take a slider? Or there is a garden here in the Palace."
"A garden will do."
Orry led him down a great, empty, glowing corridor and through a valve-door into a small room. "The Garden," he said aloud, and the valve shut; there was no sense of motion but when it opened they stepped out into a garden. It was scarcely out of doors: the translucent walls glimmered with the lights of the City, far below; the moon, near full, shone hazy and distorted through the glassy roof. The place was full of soft moving lights and shadows, crowded with tropical shrubs and vines that twined about trellises and hung from arbors, their masses of cream and crimson flowers sweetening the steamy air, their leafage closing off vision within a few feet on every side. Falk turned suddenly to make sure that the path to the exit still lay clear behind him. The hot, heavy, perfumed silence was uncanny; it seemed to him for a moment that the ambiguous depths of the garden held a hint of something alien and enormously remote, the hues, the mood, the complexity of a lost world, a planet of perfumes and illusions, of swamps and transformations…
On the path among the shadowy flowers Orry paused to take a small white tube from a case and insert it endwise between his lips, sucking on it eagerly. Falk was too absorbed in other impressions to pay much heed, but as if slightly embarrassed the boy explained, "It's parьtha, a tranquillant—the Lords all use it; it has a very stimulating effect on the mind. If you'd care to—"
"No, thanks. There are some more things I want to ask you." He hesitated, however. His new questions could not be entirely direct. Throughout the "Council" and Abundibot's explanations he had felt, recurrently and uncomfortably, that the whole thing was a performance—a play, such as he had seen on ancient telescrolls in the library of the Prince of Kansas, the Dreamplay of Hain, the mad old king Lir raving on a stormswept heath. 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.
And the boy believed it. It was no play to him; or else he was an actor in it.
"One thing puzzles me," Falk said, cautiously. "You told me that Werel is a hundred and thirty or forty light-years from Earth. There cannot be very many stars at just that distance.
"The Lords say there are four stars with planets that might be our system, between a hundred and fifteen and a hundred and fifty light-years away. But they are in four different directions, and if the Shing sent out a ship to search it could spend up to thirteen hundred years realtime going to and among those four to find the right one."
"Though you were a child, it seems a little strange that you didn't know how long the voyage was to take—how old you would be when you got home, as it were."
"It was spoken of as'two years', prech Ramarren—that is, roughly a hundred and twenty Earth years—but it was clear to me that that was not the exact figure, and that I was not to ask the exact figure." For a moment, harking back thus to Werel, the boy spoke with a touch of sober resoluteness that he did not show at other times. "I think that perhaps, not knowing who or what they were going to find on Earth, the adults of the Expedition wanted to be sure that we children, with no mindguard technique, could not give away Werel's location to an enemy. It was safest for us to be ignorant, perhaps."
"Do you remember how the stars looked from Werel—the constellations?"
Orry shrugged for no, and smiled. "The Lords asked that too. I was Winter-born, prech Ramarren. Spring was just beginning when we left. I scarcely ever saw a cloudless sky."
If all this was true, then it would seem that in fact only he—his suppressed self, Ramarren—could say where he and Orry came from. 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 light-speed 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 sighed. He was weary of this turmoil of suspicions, this plethora of unsubstantiated marvels. At moments he wondered if he was still under the influence of some drug. He felt wholly inadequate to judge what he should do. He, and probably this boy, were like toys in the hands of strange faithless players.
"Was he—the one called Abundibot—was he in the room just now, or was it a projection, an illusion?"
"I don't know, prech Ramarren," Orry replied. The stuff he was breathing in from the tube seemed to cheer and soothe him; always rather childlike, he spoke now with blithe ease. "I expect he was there. But they never come close. I tell you—this is strange—in this long time I've been here, six years, I have never touched one of them. They keep very much apart, each one alone. I don't mean that they are unkind," he added hastily, looking with his clear eyes at Falk to make sure he had not given the wrong impression. "They are very kind. I am very fond of Lord Abundibot, and Ken Kenyek, and Parla. But they are so far—beyond me—They know so much. They bear so much. They keep knowledge alive, and keep the peace, and bear the burdens, and so they have done for a thousand years, while the rest of the people of Earth take no responsibility and live in brutish freedom. Their fellow men hate them and will not learn the truth they offer. And so they must always hold themselves apart, stay alone, in order to preserve the peace and the skills and knowledge that would be lost, without them, in a few years, among these warrior tribes and Houses and Wanderers and roving cannibals."
"They are not all cannibals," Falk said dryly.
Orry's well-learnt lesson seemed to have run out. "No," he agreed, "I suppose not."
"Some of them say that they have sunk so low because the Shing keep them low; that if they seek knowledge the Shing prevent them, if they seek to form a City of their own the Shing destroy it, and them."
There was a pause. Orry finished sucking on his tube of parьtha and carefully buried it around the roots of a shrub with long, hanging, flesh-red flowers. Falk waited for his answer and only gradually realized that there was not going to be one. What he had said simply had not penetrated, had not made sense to the boy.
They walked on a little among the shifting lights and damp fragrances of the garden, the moon blurred above them.
"The one whose image appeared first, just now…do you know her?"
"Strella Siobelbel," the boy answered readily. "Yes, I have seen her at Council Meetings before."
"Is she a Shing?"
"No, she's not one of the Lords; I think her people are mountain natives, but she was brought up in Es Toch. Many people bring or send their children here to be brought up in the service of the Lords. And 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?"
"Came with her; walked with her, ate with her, slept with her. She called herself Estrel, a Wanderer."
"You could have known she was not a Shing—" the boy said, then went red, and got out another of his tranquillant-tubes and began sucking on it.
"A Shing would not have slept with me?" Falk inquired. The boy shrugged his Werelian "No," still blushing; the drug finally encouraged him to speak and he said, "They do not touch common men, prech Ramarren—they are like gods, cold and kind and wise—they hold themselves apart—"
He was fluent, incoherent, childish. Did he know his own loneliness, orphaned and alien, living out his childhood and entering adolescence among these people who held themselves apart, who would not touch him, who stuffed him with words but left him so empty of reality that, at fifteen, he sought contentment from a drug? 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. Yearning and feebly hoping, the look of one perishing of thirst in a dry salt desert who looks up at a mirage. There was much more Falk wanted to ask him, but little use in asking. Pitying him, Falk put his hand on Orry's slender shoulder. The boy started at the touch, smiled timidly and vaguely, and sucked again at his tranquillant.
Back in his room, where everything was so luxuriously arranged for his comfort—and to impress Orry?—Falk paced a while like a caged bear, and finally lay down to sleep. In his dreams he was in a house, like the Forest House, but the people in the dream house had eyes the color of agate and amber. He tried to tell them he was one of them, their own kinsman, but they did not understand his speech and watched him strangely while he stammered and sought for the right words, the true words, the true name.
Toolmen waited to serve him when he woke. He dismissed them, and they left. He went out into the hall. No one barred his way; he met no one as he went on. It all seemed deserted, no one stirring in the long misty corridors or on the ramps or inside the half-seen, dim-walled rooms whose doors he could not find. Yet all the time he felt he was being watched, that every move he made was seen.
When he found his way back to his room Orry was waiting for him, wanting to show him about the city. All afternoon they explored, on foot and on a paristolis slider, the streets and terraced gardens, the bridges and palaces and dwellings of Es Toch. Orry was liberally provided with the slips of iridium that served as money, and when Falk remarked that he did not like the fancy-dress his hosts had provided him, Orry insisted they go to a clothier's shop and outfit him as he wished. He stood among racks and tables of gorgeous cloth, woven and plastiformed, dazzling with bright patterned colors; he thought of Parth weaving at her small loom in the sunlight, a pattern of white cranes on gray. "I will weave black cloth to wear," she had said, and remembering that he chose, from all the lovely rainbow of robes and gowns and clothing, black breeches and dark shirt and a short black cloak of wintercloth.
"Those are a little like our clothes at home—on Werel," Orry said, looking doubtfully for a moment at his own flame-red tunic. "Only we had no wintercloth there. Oh, there would be so much we could take back from Earth to Werel, to tell them and teach them, if we could go!"
They went on to an eating-place built out on a transparent shelf over the gorge. As the cold, bright evening of the high mountains darkened the abyss under them, the buildings that sprang up from its edges glowed iridescent and the streets and hanging bridges blazed with lights. Music undulated in the air about them as they ate the spice-disguised foods and watched the crowds of the city come and go.
Some of the people who walked in Es Toch were dressed poorly, some lavishly, many in the transvestite, gaudy apparel that Falk vaguely remembered seeing Estrel wear. There were many physical types, some different from any Falk had ever seen. One group was whitish-skinned, with blue eyes and hair like straw. Falk thought they had bleached themselves somehow, but Orry explained they were tribesmen from an area on Continent two, whose culture was being encouraged by the Shing, who brought their leaders and young people here by air-car to see Es Toch and learn its ways. "You see, prech Ramarren, it is not true that the Lords refuse to teach the natives—it is the natives who refuse to learn. These white ones are sharing the Lords' knowledge."
"And what have they forgotten, to earn that prize?" Falk asked, but the question meant nothing to Orry. He knew almost nothing of any of the "natives," how they lived or what they knew. Shopkeepe
rs and waiters he treated with condescension, pleasantly, as a man among inferiors. This arrogance he might have brought from Werel; he described Kelshak society as hierarchic, intensely conscious of each person's place on a scale or in an order, though what established the order, what values it was founded on, Falk did not understand. It was not mere birth-ranking, but Orry's childish memories did not suffice to give a clear picture. However that might be, 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. The Lords are natives—aren't they?"
"Oh, yes. The natives call themselves that, because they insist the Lords are alien conquerors. I can't always tell them apart either," the boy said with his vague, engaging, ingenuous smile. "Most of these people in the streets are Shing?"
"I suppose so. Of course I only know a few by sight."
"I don't understand what keeps the Lords, the Shing, apart from the natives, if they are all Terran men together."
"Why, knowledge, power—the Lords have been ruling Earth for longer than the achinowao have been ruling Kelshy!"
"But they keep themselves a caste apart? You said the Lords believe in democracy." It was an antique word and had struck him when Orry used it; he was not sure of its meaning but knew it had to do with general participation in government.
"Yes, certainly, prech Ramarren. The Council rules democratically for the good of all, and there is no king or dictator. Shall we go to a parьtha-hall? They have stimulants, if you don't care for parьtha, and dancers and teanb-players—"
"Do you like music?"
"No," the boy said with apologetic candor. "It makes me want to weep or scream. Of course on Werel only animals and little children sing. It is—it seems wrong to hear grown men do it. But the Lords like to encourage the native arts. And the dancing, sometimes that's very pretty…"
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