City of Illusions (22 page)

That was the dream-self grieving, the dreamer Falk. Ramarren tried to evade that hopeless yearning by thinking of his wife, dark-haired, golden-eyed, in a gown sewn with a thousand tiny chains of silver, his wife Adrise. But his wedding-ring was gone. And Adrise was dead. She had been dead a long, long time. She had married Ramarren knowing that they would have little more than a moonphase together, for he was going on the Voyage to Terra. And during that one, terrible moment of his Voyage, she had lived out her Me, grown old, died; she had been dead for a hundred of Earth's years, perhaps. Across the years between the stars, which now was the dreamer, which the dream?

"You should have died a century ago," the Prince of Kansas had told uncomprehending Falk, seeing or sensing or knowing of the man that lay lost within him, the man born so long ago. And now if Ramarren were to return to Werel it would be yet farther into his own future. Nearly three centuries, nearly five of Werel's great Years would then have elapsed since he had left; all would be changed; he would be as strange on Werel as he had been on Earth.

There was only one place to which he could truly go home, to the welcome of those who had loved him: Zove's House. And he would never see it again. If his way led anywhere, it was out, away from Earth. He was on his own, and had only one job to do: to try to follow that way through to the end.

X

IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT now, and realizing that he was very hungry Ramarren went to the concealed door and asked aloud, in Galaktika, for food. There was no reply, but presently a toolman brought and served him food; and as he was finishing it a little signal sounded outside the door. "Come in!" Ramarren said in Kelshak, and Har Orry entered, then the tall Shing Abundibot, and two others whom Ramarren had never seen. Yet their names were in his mind: Ken Kenyek and Kradgy. They were introduced to him; politenesses were uttered. 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. He was aware that the mentalist Ken Kenyek was trying to mindprobe, and with considerable skill and force, but that did not worry him. If his barriers had held good even under the parahypnotic hood, they certainly would not falter now.

None of the Shing bespoke him. They stood about in their strange stiff fashion as if afraid of being touched, and whispered all they said. Ramarren managed to ask some of the questions which as Ramarren he might be expected to ask concerning Earth, mankind, the Shing, and listened gravely to the answers. Once he tried to get into phase with young Orry, but failed. The boy had no real guard up, but perhaps had been subjected to some mental treatment which nullified the little skill in phase-catching he had learned as a child, and also was under the influence of the drug he had been habituated to. Even as Ramarren sent him the slight, familiar signal of their relationship in prechnoye, Orry began sucking on a tube of parьtha. In the vivid distracting world of semi-hallucination it provided him, his perceptions were dulled, and he received nothing.

"You have seen nothing of Earth as yet but this one room," the one dressed as a woman, Kradgy, said to Ramarren in a harsh whisper. Ramarren was wary of them all, but Kradgy roused an instinctive fear or aversion in him; there was a hint of nightmare in the bulky body under flowing robes, the long purplish-black hair, the harsh, precise whisper.

"I should like to see more."

"We shall show you whatever you wish to see. The Earth is open to its honored visitor."

"I do not remember seeing Earth from the
Alterra
when we came into orbit," Ramarren said in stiff, Werelian-accented Galaktika. "Nor do I remember the attack on the ship. Can you tell me why this is so?

The question might be risky, but he was genuinely curious for the answer; it was the one blank still left in his double memory.

"You were in the condition we term achronia," Ken Kenyek replied. "You came out of lightspeed all at once at the Barrier, since your ship had no retemporalizer. You were at that moment, and for some minutes or hours after, either unconscious or insane."

"We had not run into the problem in our short runs at lightspeed."

"The longer the flight, the stronger the Barrier."

"It was a gallant thing," Abundibot said in his creaky whisper and with his usual floridity, "a journey of a hundred and twenty-five light-years in a scarcely tested ship!"

Ramarren accepted the compliment without correcting the number.

"Come, my Lords, let us show our guest the City of Earth." Simultaneously with Abundibot's words, Ramarren caught the passage of mindspeech between Kradgy and Ken Kenyek, but did not get the sense of it; he was too intent on maintaining his own guard to be able to mindhear or even to receive much empathic impression.

"The ship in which you return to Werel," Ken Kenyek said, "will of course be furnished with a retemporalizer, and you will suffer no derangement at re-entering planetary space."

Ramarren had risen, rather awkwardly—Falk was used to chairs but Ramarren was not, and had felt most uncomfortable perched up in mid-air—but he stood still now and after a moment asked, "The ship in which we return—?"

Orry looked up with blurry hopefulness. Kradgy yawned, showing strong yellow teeth. Abundibot said, "When you have seen all you wish to see of Earth and have learned all you wish to learn, we have a lightspeed ship ready for you to go home to Werel in—you, Lord Agad, and Har Orry. We ourselves travel little. There are no more wars; we have no need for trade with other worlds; and we do not wish to bankrupt poor Earth again with the immense cost of lightspeed ships merely to assuage our curiosity. We Men of Earth are an old race now; we stay home, tend our garden, and do not meddle and explore abroad. But your Voyage must be completed, your mission fulfilled. The
New Alterra
awaits you at our spaceport, and Werel awaits your return. It is a great pity that your civilization had not rediscovered the ansible principle, so that we could be in communication with them now. By now, of course, they may have the instantaneous transmitter; but we cannot signal them, having no coordinates."

"Indeed," Ramarren said politely.

There was a slight, tense pause.

"I do not think I understand," he said.

"The ansible—"

"I understand what the ansible transmitter did, though not how it did it. As you say, sir, we had not when I left Werel rediscovered the principles of instantaneous transmission. But I do not understand what prevented you from attempting to signal Werel."

Dangerous ground.
He was all alert now, in control, a player in the game not a piece to be moved: and he sensed the electric tension behind the three rigid faces.

"Prech Ramarren," Abundibot said, "as Har Orry was too young to have learned the precise distances involved, we have never had the honor of knowing exactly where Werel is located, though of course we have a general idea. As he had learned very little Galaktika, Har Orry was unable to tell us the Galaktika name for Werel's sun, which of course would be meaningful to us, who share the language with you as a heritage from the days of the League. Therefore we have been forced to wait for your assistance, before we could attempt ansible contact with Werel, or prepare the coordinates on the ship we have ready for you."

"You do not know the name of the star Werel circles?"

"That unfortunately is the case. If you care to tell us—"

"I cannot tell you."

The Shing could not be surprised; they were too self-absorbed, too egocentric. Abundibot and Ken Kenyek registered nothing at all. Kradgy said in his strange, dreary, precise whisper, "You mean you don't know either?"

"I cannot tell you the True Name of the Sun," Ramarren said serenely.

This time he caught the flicker of mindspeech, Ken Kenyek to Abundibot:
I told you so.

"I
apologize, prech Ramarren for my ignorance in inquiring after a forbidden matter. Will you forgive me? We do not know your ways, and though ignorance is a poor excuse it is all I can plead." Abundibot was creaking on when all at once the boy Orry interrupted him, scared into wakefulness:

"Prech Ramarren, you—you will be able to set the ship's coordinates? You do remember what—what you knew as Navigator?"

Ramarren turned to him and asked quietly, "Do you want to go home, vesprechna?"

"Yes!"

"In twenty or thirty days, if it pleases these Lords who offer us so great a gift, we shall return in their ship to Werel. I am sorry," he went on, turning back to the Shing, "that my mouth and mind are closed to your question. My silence is a mean return for your generous frankness." Had they been using mindspeech, he thought, the exchange would have been a great deal less polite; for he, unlike the Shing, was unable to mindlie, and therefore probably could not have said one word of his last speech.

"No matter, Lord Agad! It is your safe return, not our questions, that is important! So long as you can program the ship—and all our records and course-computers are at your service when you may require them—then the question is as good as answered." And indeed it was, for if they wanted to know where Werel was they would only have to examine the course he programmed into their ship. After that, if they still distrusted him, they could re-erase his mind, explaining to Orry that the restoration of his memory had caused him finally to break down. They would then send Orry off to deliver their message to Werel. They did still distrust him, because they knew he could detect their mindlying. If there was any way out of the trap he had not found it yet.

They all went together through the misty halls, down the ramps and elevators, out of the palace into daylight Falk's element of the double mind was almost entirely repressed now, and Ramarren moved and thought and spoke quite freely as Ramarren. He sensed the constant, sharp readiness of the Shing minds, particularly that of Ken Kenyek, waiting to penetrate the least flaw or catch the slightest slip. The very pressure kept him doubly alert. So it was as Ramarren, the alien, that he looked up into the sky of late morning and saw Earth's yellow sun.

He stopped, caught by sudden joy. For it was something, no matter what had gone before and what might follow after—it was something to have seen the light, in one lifetime, of two suns. The orange gold of Werel's sun, the white gold of Earth's: he could hold them now side by side as a man might hold two jewels, comparing their beauty for the sake of heightening their praise.

The boy was standing beside him; and Ramarren murmured aloud the greeting that Kelshak babies and little children were taught to say to the sun seen at dawn or after the long storms of winter, "Welcome the star of life, the center of the year…" Orry picked it up midway and spoke it with him. It was the first harmony between them, and Ramarren was glad of it, for he would need Orry before this game was done.

A slider was summoned and they went about the city, Ramarren asking appropriate questions and the Shing replying as they saw fit. Abundibot described elaborately how all of Es Toch, towers, bridges, streets and palaces, had been built overnight a thousand years ago, on a river-isle on the other side of the planet, and how from century to century whenever they felt inclined the Lords of Earth summoned their wondrous machines and instruments to move the whole city to a new site suiting their whim. It was a pretty tale; and Orry was too benumbed with drugs and persuasions to disbelieve anything, while if Ramarren believed or not was little matter. Abundibot evidently told lies for the mere pleasure of it. Perhaps it was the only pleasure he knew. There were elaborate descriptions also of how Earth was governed, how most of the Shing spent their lives among common men, disguised as mere "natives" but working for the master plan emanating from Es Toch, how carefree and content most of humanity was in their knowledge that the Shing would keep the peace and bear the burdens, how arts and learning were gently encouraged and rebellious and destructive elements as gently repressed. A planet of humble people, in their humble little cottages and peaceful tribes and townlets; no warring, no killing, no crowding; the old achievements and ambitions forgotten; almost a race of children, protected by the firm kindly guidance and the invulnerable technological strength of the Shing caste——

The story went on and on, always the same with variations, soothing and reassuring. It was no wonder the poor waif Orry believed it; Ramarren would have believed most of it, if he had not had Falk's memories of the Forest and the Plains to show the rather subtle but total falseness of it. Falk had not lived on Earth among children, but among men, brutalized, suffering, and impassioned.

That day they showed Ramarren all over Es Toch, which seemed to him who had lived among the old streets of Wegest and in the great Winterhouses of Kaspool a sham city, vapid and artificial, impressive only by its fantastic natural setting. Then they began to take him and Orry about the world by aircar and planetary car, all-day tours under the guidance of Abundibot or Ken Kenyek, jaunts to each of Earth's continents and even out to the desolate and long-abandoned Moon. The days went on; they went on playing the play for Orry's benefit, wooing Ramarren till they got from him what they wanted to know. Though he was directly or electronically watched at every moment, visually and telepathically, he was in no way restrained; evidently they felt they had nothing to fear from him now.

Perhaps they would let him go home with Orry, then. Perhaps they thought him harmless enough, in his ignorance, to be allowed to leave Earth with his readjusted mind intact.

But he could buy his escape from Earth only with the information they wanted, the location of Werel. So far he had told them nothing and they had asked nothing more.

Did it so much matter, after all, if the Shing knew where Werel was?

It did. Though they might not be planning any immediate attack on this potential enemy, they might well be planning to send a robot monitor out after the
New Alterra,
with an ansible transmitter aboard to make instantaneous report to them of any preparation for interstellar flight on Werel. The ansible would give them a hundred and forty year start on the Werelians; they could stop an expedition to Terra before it started. The one advantage that Werel possessed tactically over the Shing was the fact that the Shing did not know where it was and might have to spend several centuries looking for it. Ramarren could buy a chance of escape only at the price of certain peril for the world to which he was responsible.