City of Illusions (3 page)

"How could you teach me those?"

"We could not. You learned to see the world somewhere else—some other world, maybe. We could help you become a man again, but we could not give you a true childhood. That one has only once…"

"I feel childish enough, among you," Falk said with a somber ruefulness.

"You're, not childish. You are an inexperienced man. You are a cripple, because there is no child in you, Falk; you are cut off from your roots, from your source. Can you say that this is your home?"

"No," Falk answered, wincing. Then he said, "I have been very happy here."

The Master paused a little, but returned to his questioning. "Do you think our life here is a good one, that we follow a good way for men to go?"

"Yes."

"Tell me another thing. Who is our enemy?"

"The Shing."

"Why?"

"They broke the League of All Worlds, took choice and freedom from men, wrecked all man's works and records, stopped the evolution of the race. They are tyrants, and liars."

"But they don't keep us from leading our good life here."

"We're in hiding—we live apart, so that they'll let us be. If we tried to build any of the great machines, if we gathered in groups or towns or nations to do any great work together, then the Shing would infiltrate and ruin the work and disperse us. I tell you only what you told me and I believed, Master!"

"I know. I wondered if behind the fact you had perhaps sensed the…legend, the guess, the hope…"

Falk did not answer.

"We hide from the Shing. Also we hide from what we were. Do you see that, Falk? We live well in the Houses—well enough. But we are ruled utterly by fear. There was a time we sailed in ships between the stars, and now we dare not go a hundred miles from home. We keep a little knowledge, and do nothing with it. But once we used that knowledge to weave the pattern of life like a tapestry across night and chaos. We enlarged the chances of life. We did man's work."

After another silence Zove went on, looking up into the bright November sky: "Consider the worlds, the various men and beasts on them, the constellations of their skies, the cities they built, their songs and ways. All that is lost, lost to us, as utterly as your childhood is lost to you. What do we really know of the time of our greatness? A few names of worlds and heroes, a ragtag of facts we've tried to patch into a history. The Shing law forbids killing, but they killed knowledge, they burned books, and what may be worse, they falsified what was left. They slipped in the Lie, as always. We aren't sure of anything concerning the Age of the League; how many of the documents are forged? You must remember, you see, wherein the Shing are our Enemy. It's easy enough to live one's whole life without ever seeing one of them—knowingly; at most one hears an aircar passing by far away. Here in the Forest they let us be, and it may be the same now all over the Earth, though we don't know. They let us be so long as we stay here, in the cage of our ignorance and the wilderness, bowing when they pass by above our heads. But they don't trust us. How could they, even after twelve hundred years? There is no trust in them, because there is no truth in them. They honor no compact, break any promise, perjure, betray and lie inexhaustibly; and certain records from the time of the Fall of the League hint that they could mindlie. It was the Lie that defeated all the races of the League and left us subject to the Shing. Remember that, Falk. Never believe the truth of anything the Enemy has said."

"I will remember, Master, if I ever meet the Enemy."

"You will not, unless you go to them."

The apprehensiveness in Falk's face gave way to a listening, still look. What he had been waiting for had arrived. "You mean leave the House," he said.

"You have thought of it yourself," Zove said as quietly.

"Yes, I have. But there is no way for me to go. I want to live here. Parth and I—"

He hesitated, and Zove struck in, incisive and gentle. "I honor the love grown between you and Parth, your joy and your fidelity. But you came here on the way to somewhere else, Falk. You are welcome here; you have always been welcome. Your partnership with my daughter must be childless; even so, I have rejoiced in it. But I do believe that the mystery of your being and your coming here is a great one, not lightly to be put aside; that you walk a way that leads on; that you have work to do…"

"What work? Who can tell me?"

"What was kept from us and stolen from you, the Shing will have. That you can be sure of."

There was an aching, scathing bitterness in Zove's voice that Falk had never heard.

"Will those who speak no truth tell me the truth for the asking? And how will I recognize what I seek when I find it?"

Zove was silent a little while, and then said with his usual ease and control, "I cling to the notion, my son, that in" you lies some hope for man. I do not like to give up that notion. But only you can seek your own truth; and if it seems to you that your way ends here, then that, perhaps, is the truth."

"If I go," Falk said abruptly, "will you let Parth go with me?"

"No, my son."

A child was singing down in the garden—Garra's four-year-old, turning inept somersaults on the path and singing shrill, sweet nonsense. High up, in the long wavering V of the great migrations, skein after skein of wild geese went over southward.

"I was to go with Metock and Thurro to fetch home Thurro's bride," Falk said. "We planned to go soon, before the weather changes. If I go, I'l1 go on from Ransifel House."

"In winter?"

"There are Houses west of Ransifel, no doubt, where I can ask shelter if I need it."

He did not say and Zove did not ask why west was the direction he would go.

"There may be; I don't know. I don't know if they would give shelter to strangers as we do. If you go you will be alone, and must be alone. Outside this House there is no safe place for you on Earth."

He spoke, as always, absolutely truthfully…and paid the cost of truth in self-control and pain. Falk said with quick reassurance, "I know that, Master. It's not safety I'd regret—"

"I will tell you what I believe about you. I think you came from a lost world; I think you were not born on Earth. I think you came here, the first Alien to return in a thousand years or more, bringing us a message or a sign. The Shing stopped your mouth, and turned you loose in the forests so that none might say they had killed you. You came to us. If you go I will grieve and fear for you, knowing how alone you go. But I will hope for you, and for ourselves! If you had words to speak to men, you'll remember them, in the end. There must be a hope, a sign: we cannot go on like this forever."

"Perhaps my race was never a friend of mankind," Falk said, looking at Zove with his yellow eyes. "Who knows what I came here to do?"

"You'll find those who know. And then you'll do it. I don't fear it. If you serve the Enemy, so do we all: all's lost and nothing's to lose. If not, then you have what we men have lost: a destiny; and in following it you may bring hope to us all…"

II

ZOVE HAD LIVED sixty years, Parth twenty; but she seemed, that cold afternoon in the Long Fields, old in a way no man could be old, ageless. She had no comfort from ideas of ultimate star-spanning triumph or the prevalence of truth. Her father's prophetic gift in her was only lack of illusion. She knew Falk was going. She said only, "You won't come back."

"I will come back, Parth."

She held him in her arms but she did not listen to his promise.

He tried to bespeak her, though he had little skill in telepathic communication. The only Listener in the house was blind Kretyan; none of them was adept at the nonverbal communication, mindspeech. The techniques of learning mindspeech had not been lost, but they were little practiced. The great virtue of that most intense and perfect form of communication had become its peril for men.

Mindspeech between two intelligences could be incoherent or insane, and could of course involve error, misbelief; but it could not be misused. Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol be twisted aside, and the lie come to be. Between thought and sent-thought is no gap; they are one act. There is no room for the lie.

In the late years of the League, the tales and fragmentary records Falk had studied seemed to show, the use of mind-speech had been widespread and the telepathic skills very highly developed. It was a skill Earth had come to late, learning its techniques from some other race; the Last Art, one book called it. There were hints of troubles and upheavals in the government of the League of All Worlds, rising perhaps from that prevalence of a form of communication that precluded lying. But all that was vague and half-legendary, like all man's history. Certainly since the coming of the Shing and the downfall of the League, the scattered community of man had mistrusted trust and used the spoken word. A free man can speak freely, but a slave or fugitive must be able to hide truth and lie. So Falk had learned in Zove's House, and soВ it was that he had had little practice in the attunement of minds. But he tried now to bespeak Parth so she would know he was not lying: "Believe me, Parth, I will come back to you!"

But she wouldn't hear. "No, I won't mindspeak," she said aloud.

"Then you're keeping your thoughts from me."

"Yes, I am. Why should I give you my grief? What's the good of truth? If you had lied to me yesterday, I'd still believe that you were only going to Ransifel and would be back home in a tennight. Then I'd still have ten days and nights. Now I have nothing left, not a day, not an hour. It's all taken, all over. What good is truth?"

"Faith, will you wait for me one year?"

"No."

"Only a year—"

"A year and a day, and you'll return riding a silver steed to carry me to your kingdom and make me its queen. No, I won't wait for you, Falk. Why must I wait for a man who will be lying dead in the forest, or shot by Wanderers out on the prairie, or brainless in the City of the Shing, or gone off a hundred years to another star? What should I wait for? You needn't think I'll take another man. I won't. I'll stay here in my father's house. I'll dye black thread and weave black cloth to wear, black to wear and black to die in. But I won't wait for anyone, or anything. Never."

"I had no right to ask you," he said with the humility of pain—and she cried, "O Falk, I don't reproach you!"

They were sitting together on the slight slope above the Long Field. Goats and sheep grazed over the mile of fenced pasture between them and the forest. Yearling colts pranced and tagged around the shaggy mares. A gray November wind blew.

Their hands lay together. Parth touched the gold ring on his left hand. "A ring is a thing given," she said. "Sometimes I've thought, have you? that you may have had a wife. Think, if she was waiting for you…" She shivered.

"What of it?" he said. "What do I care about what may have been, what I was? Why should I go from here? All that I am now is yours, Parth, came from you, your gift—"

"It was freely given," the girl said in tears. "Take it and go. Go on…" They held each other, and neither would break free.

The House lay far behind hoar black trunks and inter-tangling leafless branches. The trees closed in behind the trail.

The day was gray and cool, silent except for the drone of wind through branches, a meaningless whisper without locality that never ceased. Metock led the way, setting a long easy pace. Falk followed and young Thurro came last. They were all three dressed light and warm in hooded shirt and breeches of an unwoven stuff called wintercloth, over which no coat was needed even in snow. Each carried a light backpack of gifts and trade-goods, sleeping-bag, enough dried concentrated food to see him through a month's blizzard. Buckeye, who had never left the House of her birth, had a great fear of perils and delays in the Forest and had supplied their packs accordingly. Each wore a laser-beam gun; and Falk carried some extras—another pound or two of food; medicines, compass, a second gun, a change of clothing, a coil of rope; a little book given him two years ago by Zove—amounting in all to about fifteen pounds of stuff, his earthly possessions. Easy and tireless Metock loped on ahead, and ten yards or so behind he followed, and after him came Thurro. They went lightly, with little sound, and behind them the trees gathered motionless over the faint, leaf-strewn trail.

They would come to Ransifel on the third day. At evening of the second day they were in country different from that around Zove's House. The forest was more open, the ground broken. Gray glades lay along hillsides above brush-choked streams. They made camp in one of these open places, on a south-facing slope, for the north wind was blowing stronger with a hint of winter in it. Thurro brought armloads of dry wood while the other two cleared away the gray grass and piled up a rough hearth of stones. As they worked Metock said, "We crossed a divide this afternoon. The stream down there runs west. To the Inland River, finally."

Falk straightened up and looked westward, but the low hills rose up soon and the low sky closed down, leaving no distant view.

"Metock," he said, I've been thinking there's no point in my going on to Ransifel. I may as well be on my way. There seemed to be a trail leading west along the big stream we crossed this afternoon. I'll go back and follow it."

Metock glanced up; he did not mindspeak, but his thought was plain enough: Are you thinking of running back home?

Falk did use mindspeech for his reply: "No, damn it, I'm not!"

"I'm sorry," the Elder Brother said aloud, in his grim, scrupulous way. He had not tried to hide the fact that he was glad to see Falk go. To Metock nothing mattered much but the safety of the House; any stranger was a threat, even the stranger he had known for five years, his hunting-companion and his sister's lover. But he went on, "They'll make you welcome at Ransifel. Why not start from there?"

"Why not from here?"

"Your, choice." Metock worked a last rock into place, and Falk began to build up the fire. "If that was a trail we crossed, I don't know where it comes from or goes. Early tomorrow we'll cross a real path, the old Hirand Road. Hirand House was a long way west, a week on foot at least; nobody's gone there for sixty or seventy years. I don't know why. But the trail was still plain last time I came this way. The other might be an animal track, and lead you straying or leave you in a swamp."