City of Illusions (16 page)

"No Enemy ever came from distant stars to attack the League of All Worlds. The League was destroyed by revolution, civil war, by its own corruption, militarism, despotism. On all the worlds there were revolts, rebellions, usurpations; from the Prime World came reprisals that scorched planets to black sand. No more lightspeed ships went out into so risky a future: only the FTLs, the missile-ships, the world-busters. Earth was not destroyed, but half its people were, its cities, its ships and ansibles, its records, its culture—all in two terrible years of civil war between the Loyalists and the Rebels, both armed with the unspeakable weapons developed by the League to fight an alien enemy.

"Some desperate men on Earth, dominating the struggle for a moment but knowing further counter-revolt and wreckage and ruin was inevitable, employed a new weapon. They lied. They invented a name for themselves, and a language, and some vague tales of the remote home-world they came from, and then they went spreading the rumor over Earth, in their own ranks and the Loyalist camps as well, that the Enemy had come. The civil war was all due to the Enemy. The Enemy had infiltrated everywhere, had wrecked the League and was running Earth, was in power now and was going to stop the war. And they had achieved all this by their one unexpectable, sinister, alien power: the power to mindlie.

"Men believed the tale. It suited their panic, their dismay, their weariness. Their world in ruins around them, they submitted to an Enemy whom they were glad to believe supernatural, invincible. They swallowed the bait of peace.

"And they have lived since then in peace.

"We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God's truth, the universe at once began to exist…

"If human peace depended on a lie, there were those willing to maintain the lie. Since men insisted that the Enemy had come and ruled the Earth, we called ourselves the Enemy, and ruled. None came to dispute our lie or wreck our peace; the worlds of the League are all sundered, the age of interstellar flight is past; once in a century, perhaps, some ship from a far world blunders here, like yours. There are rebels against our rule, such as those who attacked your ship at the Barrier. We try to control such rebels, for, rightly or wrongly, we bear and have borne for a millennium the burden of human peace. For having told a great lie, we must now uphold a great law. You know the law that we—men among men—enforce: the one Law, learned in humanity's most terrible hour."

The brilliant toneless mindspeech ceased; it was like the switching off of a light. In the silence like darkness which followed, young Orry whispered aloud, "Reverence for Life."

Silence again. Falk stood motionless, trying not to betray in his face or in his perhaps overheard thoughts the confusion and irresolution he felt. Was all he had learned false? Had mankind indeed no Enemy?

"If this history is the true one," he said at last, "why do you not tell it and prove it to men?"

"We are men," came the telepathic answer. "There are thousands upon thousands of us who know the truth. We are those who have power and knowledge, and use them for peace. There come dark ages, and this is one of them, all through man's history, when people will have it that the world is ruled by demons. We play the part of demons in their mythologies. When they begin to replace mythology with reason, we help them; and they learn the truth."

"Why do you tell me these things?"

"For truth's sake, and for your own."

"Who am I to deserve the truth?" Falk repeated coldly, looking across the room into Abundibot's masklike face.

"You were a messenger from a lost world, a colony of which all record was lost in the Years of Trouble. You came to Earth, and we, the Lords of Earth, failed to protect you. This is a shame and a grief to us. It was men of Earth who attacked you, killed or mindrazed all your company—men of Earth, of the planet to which, after so many centuries, you were returning. They were rebels from Continent Three, which is neither so primitive nor so sparsely inhabited as this Continent One; they were using stolen interplanetary cars; they assumed that any lightspeed ship must belong to the 'Shing,' and so attacked it without warning. This we could have prevented, had we been more alert. We owe to you any reparation we can make."

"They have sought for you and the others all these years," Orry put in, earnest and a little pleading; obviously he very much wanted Falk to believe it all, to accept it, and to—to do what?

"You tried to restore my memory," Falk said. "Why?"

"Is that not what you came seeking here: your lost self?"

"Yes. It is. But I…" He did not even know what questions to ask; he could neither believe nor disbelieve all he had been told. There seemed to be no standard to judge it all by. That Zove and the others had lied to him was inconceivable, but that they themselves were deceived and ignorant was certainly possible. He was incredulous of everything Abundibot affirmed, and yet it had been mindsent, in clear immediate mindspeech where lying was impossible—or was it possible? If a liar says he is not lying—Falk gave it all up again. Looking once more at Abundibot he said, "Please do not bespeak me. I—I would rather hear your voice. You found, I think you said, that you could not restore my memory?"

Abundibot's muted, creaking whisper in Galaktika came strangely after the fluency of his sending. "Not by the means we used."

"By other means?"

"Possibly. We thought you had been given a para-hypnotic block. Instead, you were mindrazed. We do not know where the rebels learned that technique, which we keep a close secret. An even closer secret is the fact that a razed mind can be restored." A smile appeared for a moment on the heavy, mask-like face, then disappeared completely. "With our psycho-computer techniques, we think we can effect the restoration in your case.В However, this incurs the permanent total blocking of the replacement-personality; and this being so we did not wish to proceed without your consent."

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."