City of Illusions hc-3 Read online

  The sun shone bright and level in his eyes. He turned over, then sat up yawning and stared into the deep, red-leaved branches of the oak that towered up beside the sleeping-porch. He became aware that in leaving Parth had turned on the sleepteacher beside his pillow; it was muttering softly away, reviewing Cetian number theory. That made him laugh, and the cold of the bright November morning woke him fully. He pulled on his shirt and breeches—heavy, soft, dark cloth of Parth's weaving, cut and fitted for him by Buckeye—and stood at the wooden rail of the porch looking across the Clearing to the brown and red and gold of the endless trees.

  Fresh, still, sweet, the morning was as it had been when the first people on this land had waked in their frail, pointed houses and stepped outside to see the sun rise free of the dark forest. Mornings are all one, and autumn always autumn, but the years men count are many. There had been a first race on this land…and a second, the conquerors; both were lost, conquered and conquerors, millions of lives, all drawn together to a vague point on the horizon of past time. The stars had been gained, and lost again. Still the years went on, so many years that the Forest of archaic times, destroyed utterly during the era when men had made and kept their history, had grown up again. Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumerable wind-stirred branches…

  Falk stood rejoicing in it, perhaps the more intensely because for him behind this morning there were so few other mornings, so short a stretch of remembered days between him and the dark. He listened to the remarks made by a chickadee in the oak, then stretched, scratched his head vigorously, and went off to join the work and company of the house.

  Zove's House was a rambling, towering, intermitted chalet-castle-farmhouse of stone and timber; some parts of it had stood a century or so, some longer. There was a primitiveness to its aspect: dark staircases, stone hearths and cellars, bare floors of tile or wood. But nothing in it was unfinished; it was perfectly fireproof and weatherproof; and certain elements of its fabric and function were highly sophisticated devices or machines—the pleasant, yellowish fusion-lights, the libraries of music, words and images, various automatic tools or devices used in house-cleaning, cooking, washing, and farmwork, and some subtler and more specialized instruments kept in workrooms in the East Wing. All these things were part of the House, built into it or along with it, made in it or in another of the Forest Houses. The machinery was heavy and simple, easy to repair; only the knowledge behind its power-source was delicate and irreplaceable.

  One type of technological device was notably lacking. The library evinced a skill with electronics that had become practically instinctive; the boys liked to build little tellies to signal one another with from room to room. But there was no television, telephone, radio, telegraph transmitting or receiving beyond the Clearing. There were no instruments of communication over distance. There were a couple of homemade air-cushion sliders in the East Wing, but again they featured mainly in the boys' games. They were hard to handle in the woods, on wilderness trails. When people went to visit and trade at another House they went afoot, perhaps on horseback if the way was very long.

  The work of the House and farm was light, no hard burden to anyone. Comfort did not rise above warmth and cleanliness, and the food was sound but monotonous. Life in the House had the drab levelness of communal existence, a clean, serene frugality. Serenity and monotony rose from isolation. Forty-four people lived here together. Kathol's House, the nearest, was nearly thirty miles to the south. Around the Clearing mile after mile uncleared, unexplored, indifferent, the forest went on. The wild forest, and over it the sky. There was no shutting out the inhuman here, no narrowing man's life, as in the cities of earlier ages, to within man's scope. To keep anything at all of a complex civilization intact here among so few was a singular and very perilous achievement, though to most of them it seemed quite natural: it was the way one did; no other way was known. Falk saw it a little differently than did the children of the House, for he must always be aware that he had come out of that immense unhuman wilderness, as sinister and solitary as any wild beast that roamed it, and that all he had learned in Zove's House was like a single candle burning in a great field of darkness.

  At breakfast—bread, goat's-milk cheese and brown ale—Metock asked him to come with him to the deer-blinds for the day. That pleased Falk. The Elder Brother was a very skillful hunter, and he was becoming one himself; it gave him and Metock, at last, a common ground. But the Master intervened: "Take Kai today, my son. I want to talk with Falk."

  Each person of the household had his own room for a study or workroom and to sleep in in freezing weather; Zove's was small, high, and light, with windows west and north and east. Looking across the stubble and fallow of the autumnal fields to the forest the Master said, "Parth first saw you there, near that copper beech, I think. Five and a half years ago. A long time! Is it time we talked?"

  "Perhaps it is, Master," Falk said, diffident.

  "It's hard to tell, but I guessed you to be about twenty-five when you first came. What have you now of those twenty-five years?"

  Falk held out his left hand a moment: "A ring," he said.

  "And the memory of a mountain?"

  "The memory of a memory." Falk shrugged. "And often, as I've told you, I find for a moment in my mind the sound of a voice, or the sense of a motion, a gesture, a distance. These don't fit into my memories of my lif e here with you. But they make no whole, they have no meaning."

  Zove sat down in the windowseat and nodded for Falk to do the same. "You had no growing to do; your gross motor skills were unimpaired. But even given that basis, you have learned with amazing quickness. I've wondered if the Shing, in controlling human genetics in the old days and weeding out so many as colonists, were selecting us for docility and stupidity, and if you spring from some mutant race that somehow escaped control. Whatever you were, you were a highly intelligent man…And now you are one again. And I should like to know what you yourself think about your mysterious past."

  Falk was silent a minute. He was a short, spare, well-made man; his very lively and expressive face just now looked rather somber or apprehensive, reflecting his feelings as candidly as a child's face. At last, visibly summoning up his resolution, he said, "While I was studying with Ranya this past summer, she showed me how I differ from the human genetic norm. It's only a twist or two of a helix…a very small difference. Like the difference between wei and o." Zove looked up with a smile at the reference to the Canon which fascinated Falk, but the younger man was not smiling. "However, I am unmistakably not human. So I may be a freak; or a mutant, accidental or intentionally produced; or an alien. I suppose most likely I am an unsuccessful genetic experiment, discarded by the experimenters…There's no telling. I'd prefer to think I'm an alien, from some other world. It would mean that at least I'm not the only creature of my kind in the universe."

  "What makes you sure there are other populated worlds?"

  Falk looked up, startled, going at once with a child's credulity but a man's logic to the conclusion: "Is there reason to think the other Worlds of the League were destroyed?"

  "Is there reason to think they ever existed?"

  "So you taught me yourself, and the books, the histories—"

  "You believe them? You believe all we tell you?"

  "What else can I believe?" He flushed red. "Why would you lie to me?"

  "We might lie to you day and night about everything, for either of two good reasons. Because we are Shing. Or because we think you serve them."

  There was a pause. "And I might serve them and never know it," Falk said, looking down.

  "Possibly," said the Master. "You must consider that possibility, Falk. Among us, Metock has always believed you to be a programmed mind, as they call it.—But all the same, he's never lied to you. None of us has, kn
owingly. The River Poet said a thousand years ago, 'In truth manhood lies…'" Zove rolled the words out oratorically, then laughed. "Double-tongued, like all poets. Well, we've told you what truths and facts we know, Falk. But perhaps not all the guesses and the legends, the stuff that comes before the facts…"

  "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?"