City of Illusions hc-3

by Ursula Kroeber Le Guin

  No word was spoken, but the newcomer directed at the woman a telepathic command of such shattering coercive force that it made Ramarren wince. The weapon dropped to the floor and the woman, making a thin keening sound, ran stooped from the room, trying to escape the destroying insistence of that mental order. Her blurred shadow wavered a moment in the wall, vanished.

  The tall man turned his white-rimmed eyes to Ramarren and bespoke him with normal power: "Who are you?"

  Ramarren answered in kind, "Agad Ramarren," but no more, nor did he bow. Things had gone even more wrong than he had first imagined. 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.

  But the tall man came forward a little, a smile on his heavy, rigid face, and spoke aloud courteously in the Tongue of the Books. "I am Pelleu Abundibot, and I welcome you heartily to Earth, kinsman, son of the long exile, messenger of the Lost Colony!"

  Ramarren, at that, made a very brief bow and stood a moment in silence. "It appears," he said, "that I have been on Earth some while, and made an enemy of that woman, and earned certain scars. Will you tell me how this was, and how my shipmates perished? Bespeak me if you will: I do not speak Galaktika so well as you."

  Trech Ramarren," the other said—he had evidently picked that up from Orry as if it were a mere honorific, and had no notion of what constituted the relationship of prechnoye—"forgive me first that I speak aloud. It is not our custom to use mindspeech except in urgent need, or to our inferiors. And forgive next the intrusion of that creature, a servant whose madness has driven her outside the Law. We will attend to her mind. She will not trouble you again. As for your questions, all will be answered. In brief, however, here is the unhappy tale which now at last draws to a happy ending. Your ship Alterra was attacked as it entered Earthspace by our enemies, rebels outside the Law. They took two or more of you off the Alterra into their small planetary cars before our guard-ship came. When it came, they destroyed the Alterra with all left aboard her, and scattered in their small ships. We caught the one on which Har Orry was prisoner, but you were carried off—I do not know for what purpose. They did not kill you, but erased your memory back to the pre-lingual stage, and then turned you loose in a wild forest to find your death. You survived, and were given shelter by barbarians of the forest; finally our searchers found you, brought you here, and by parahypnotic techniques we have succeeded in restoring your memory. It was all we could do—little indeed, but all."

  Ramarren listened intently. The story shook him, and he made no effort to hide his feelings; but he felt also a certain uneasiness or suspicion, which he did conceal. The tall man had addressed him, though very briefly, in mindspeech, and thus given him a degree of attunement. Then Abundibot had ceased all telepathic sending and had put up an empathic guard, but not a perfect one; Ramarren, highly sensitive and finely trained, received vague empathic impressions so much at discrepancy with what the man said as to hint at dementia, or at lying. Or was he himself so out of tune with himself—as he might well be after parahypnosis—that his empathic receptions were simply not reliable?

  "How long…?" he asked at last, looking up for a moment into those alien eyes.

  "Six years ago Terran style, prech Ramarren."

  The Terran year was nearly the length of a moonphase. "So long," he said. He could not take it in. His friends, his fellow-Voyagers had been dead then for a long time, and he had been alone on Earth…"Six years?"

  "You remember nothing of those years?"

  "Nothing."

  "We were forced to wipe out what rudimentary memory you may have had of that time, in order to restore your true memory and personality. We very much regret that loss of six years of your life. But they would not have been sane or pleasant memories. The outlaw brutes had made of you a creature more brutish than themselves. I am glad you do not remember it, prech Ramarren."

  Not only glad, but gleeful. This man must have very little empathic ability or training, or he would be putting up a better guard; his telepathic guard was flawless. More and more distracted by these mindheard overtones that implied falsity or unclarity in what Abundibot said, and by the continuing lack of coherence in his own mind, even in his physical reactions, which remained slow and uncertain, Ramarren had to pull himself together to make any response at all. Memories—how could six years have passed without his remembering one moment from them? But a hundred and forty years had passed while his light-speed ship had crossed from Werel to Earth and of that he remembered only a moment, indeed, one terrible, eternal moment…What had the madwoman called him, screaming a name at him with crazy, grieving rancor?

  "What was I called, these past six years?"

  "Called? Among the natives, do you mean, prech Ramarren? I am not sure what name they gave you, if they bothered to give you any…"

  Falk, she had called him, Falk. "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."

  "Surely, surely, prech Ramarren. Your young friend Orry is eager to be with you—shall I send him to you?" But 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.

  "We too have much to learn of you, and are eager to learn it, once you feel quite recovered." Silence. Then the noise again: "Our servants wait to serve you; if you desire refreshment or company you have only to go to the door and speak." Silence again, and at last the unmannerly presence withdrew.

  Ramarren sent no speculations after it. He was too preoccupied with himself to worry about these strange hosts of his. The turmoil within his mind was increasing sharply, coming to some kind of crisis. He felt as if he were being dragged to face something that he could not endure to face, and at the same time craved to face, to find. The bitterest days of his Seventh Level training had only been a hint of this disintegration of his emotions and identity, for that had been an induced psychosis, carefully controlled, and this was not under his control. Or was it?—was he leading himself into this, compelling himself towards the crisis? But who was "he" who compelled and was compelled? He had been killed, and brought back to life. What was death, then, the death he could not remember?

  To escape the utter panic welling up in him he looked around for any object to fix on, reverting to early trance-discipline, the Outcome technique of fixing on one concrete thing to build up the world from once more. But everything about him was alien, deceptive, unfamiliar; the very floor under him was a dull sheet of mist. There was the book he had been looking at when the woman entered calling him by that name he would not remember. He would not remember it. The book: he had held it in his hands, it was real, it was there. He picked it up very carefully and stared at the page that it opened to. Columns of beautiful meaningless patterns, lines of half-comprehensible script, changed from the letters he had learned long ago in the First Analect, deviant, bewildering. He stared at them and could not read them, and a word of which he did not know the meaning rose up from them, the first word:

  The way …

  He looked from the book to his own hand that held it. Whose hand, darkened and scarred beneath an alien sun? Whose hand?

  The way that can be gone

  is not the eternal Way.

  The name—

  He could not remember the name; he would not read it. In a dream he had read these words, in a long sleep, a death, a dream.

  The name that can be named

  is not the eternal Name.

  And with that the dream rose up overwhelming him like a wave rising, and broke.

  He was Falk, and he was Ramarren. He was the fool and the wise man: one man twice born.

  In those first fearful hours, he begged and prayed to be delivered sometimes from one self, sometimes from th
e other. Once when he cried out in anguish in his own native tongue, he did not understand the words he had spoken, and this was so terrible that in utter misery he wept; it was Falk who did not understand, but Ramarren who wept.

  In that same moment of misery he touched for the first time, for a moment only, the balance-pole, the center, and for a moment was himself: then lost again, but with just enough strength to hope for the next moment of harmony. Harmony: when he was Ramarren he clung to that idea and discipline, and it was perhaps his mastery of that central Kelshak doctrine that kept him from going right over the edge into madness. But 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 did not dare sleep, though he was worn out: he feared the waking too much.

  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.

  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.

  There was of course no actual overlap of his two sets of memories. Falk had come to conscious being in the vast number of neurons that in a highly intelligent brain remain unused—the fallow fields of Ramarren's mind. The basic motor and sensory paths has 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, and though in the long run this reduplication might prove an augmentation of his intelligence and perceptive power, at the moment it was confusing to the point of vertigo. There was considerable emotional intershading, so that his feelings on some points quite literally conflicted. And, since Falk's memories covered his "lifetime" just as did Ramarren's, the two series tended to appear simultaneously instead of in proper sequence. It was hard for Ramarren to allow for the gap of time during which he had not consciously existed. Ten days ago where had he been? He had been on muleback among the snowy mountains of Earth; Falk knew that; but Ramarren knew that he had been taking leave of his wife in a house on the high green plains of Werel…Also, 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. Yet even in this 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.

  Coherence was far from being gained. One or the other of the two memory-structures still had to dominate, if he was to think and act with any competence. Most often, now, it was Ramarren who took over, for the Navigator of the Alterra was a decisive and potent person. Falk, in comparison, felt himself childish, tentative; he could offer what knowledge he had, but relied upon Ramarren's strength and experience. Both were needed, for the two-minded man was in a very obscure and hazardous situation.

  One question was basic to all the others. It was simply put: whether or not the Shing could be trusted. For if Falk had merely been inculcated with a groundless fear of the Lords of Earth, then the hazards and obscurities would themselves prove groundless. At first Ramarren thought this might well be the case; but he did not think it for long.

  There were open lies and discrepancies which already his double memory had caught. Abundibot had refused to mindspeak to Ramarren, saying the Shing avoided paraverbal communication: that Falk knew to be a lie. Why had Abundibot told it? Evidently because he wanted to tell a lie—the Shing story of what had happened to the Alterra and its crew—and could not or dared not tell it to Ramarren in mindspeech.

  But he had told Falk very much the same story, in mindspeech.

  If it was a false story, then, the Shing could and did mindlie. Was it false?

  Ramarren called upon Falk's memory. At first that effort of combination was beyond him, but it became easier as he struggled, pacing up and down the silent room, and suddenly it came clear; he could recall the brilliant silence of Abundibot's words: "We whom you know as Shing are men…" And hearing it even in memory, 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.

  They were not men but aliens, gifted with an alien power; and no doubt they had broken the League and gained power over Earth by the use of that power. And it was they who had attacked the Alterra as she had come into Earthspace; all the talk of rebels was mere fiction. They had killed or brainrazed all the crew but the child Orry. Ramarren could guess why: because they had discovered, testing him or one of the other highly trained paraverbalists of the crew, that a Werelian could tell when they were mindlying. That had frightened the Shing, and they had done away with the adults, saving out only the harmless child as an informant.

  To Ramarren it was only yesterday that his fellow-Voyagers had perished, and, struggling against that blow, he tried to think that like him they might have survived somewhere on Earth. But if they had—and he had been very lucky—where were they now? The Shing had had a hard time locating even one, it appeared, when they had discovered that they needed him.

  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.

  That gave Falk-Ramarren his first amount of amusement. If it really was that simple, it was funny. They had saved out Orry because he was so young; untrained, unformed, vulnerable, amenable, a perfect instrument and informant. He certainly had been all of that. But did not know where he came from…And by the time they discovered that, they had wiped the information they wanted clean out of the minds that knew it, and scattered their victims over the wild, ruined Earth to die of accident or starvation or the attack of wild beasts or men.

  He could assume that Ken Kenyek, while manipulating his mind through the psychocomputer yesterday, had tried to get him to divulge the Galaktika name of Werel's sun. And he could assume that if he had divulged it, he would be dead or mindless now. They did not want him, Ramarren; they wanted only his knowledge. And they had not got it.

  That in itself must have them worried, and well it might. The Kelshak code of secrecy concerning the Books of the Lost Colony had evolved along with a whole technique of mindguarding. That mystique of secrecy—or more precisely of restraint—had grown over the long years from the rigorous control of scientific-technical knowledge exercised by the original Colonists, itself an outgrowth from the League's Law of Cultural Embargo, which forbade cultural importation to colonial planets. The whole concept of restraint was fundamental in Werelian culture by now, and the stratification of Werlian society was directed by the conviction that knowledge and technique must remain under intelligent control. Such details as the True Name of the Sun were formal and symbolical, but the formalism was taken seriously—with ultimate seriousness, for in Kelshy knowledge was religion, religion knowledge. To guard the intangible holy places in the minds of men, intangible and invulnerable defenses had been devised. 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.

  He possessed, of course, equivalent knowledge: the complex of astronomical facts that had enabled him to plot the Alterra's coordinates from Werel to Earth; his knowledge of the exact distance between the two planets' suns; his clear, astronomer's memory of the stars as seen from Werel. They had not got this information from him yet, probably because his mind had been in too chaotic a state when first restored by Ken Kenyek's manipulations, or because even then his parahypnotically strengthened mindguards and specific barriers had been functioning. Knowing there might still be an Enemy on Earth, the crewmen of the Alterra had not set off unprepared. Unless Shing mindscience was much stronger than Werelian, they would not now be able to force him to tell them anything. They hoped to induce him, to persuade him. Therefore, for the present, he was at least physically safe.

  —So long as they did not know that he remembered his existence as Falk.

  That came over him with a chill. It had not occurred to him before. As Falk he had been useless to them, but harmless. As Ramarren he was useful to them, and harmless. But as Falk-Ramarren, he was a threat. And they did not tolerate threats: they could not afford to.