City of Illusions

"Are we descendants of that race?"

"You are descended from the Alterra Agat, who led the colony through the Winter of the Tenth Year! We learned about Agat even in boy-school. That is your name, prech Ramarren—Agad of Charen. I am of no such lineage, but my great-grandmother was of the family Esmy of Kiow—that is an Alterran name. Of course, in a democratic society as Earth's, these distinctions are meaningless, aren't they…?" Again Orry looked worried, as if some vague conflict was occurring in his mind. Falk steered him back to the history of Werel, filling out with guesses and extrapolation the childish narrative that was all Orry could supply.

The new mixed stock and mixed culture of the Tevar-Alterran nation flourished in the years after that perilous Tenth Winter. The little cities grew; a mercantile culture was established on the single north-hemisphere continent. Within a few generations it was spreading to the primitive peoples of the southern continents, where the problem of keeping alive through the winter was more easily solved. Population went up; science and technology began their exponential climb, guided and aided always by the Books of Alterra, the ship's library, the mysteries of which grew explicable as the colonists' remote descendants relearned lost knowledge. They had kept and copied those books, generation after generation, and learned the tongue they were written in—Galaktika, of course. Finally, the moon and sister-planets all explored, the sprawl of cities and the rivalries of nations controlled and balanced by the powerful Kelshak Empire in the old Northland, at the height of an age of peace and vigor the Empire had built and sent forth a lightspeed ship.

That ship, the Alterra, left Werel eighteen and a half years after the ship of the Colony from Earth landed: twelve hundred years, Earth style. Its crew had no idea what they would find on Earth. Werel had not yet been able to reconstruct the principles of the ansible transmitter, and had hesitated to broadcast radio-signals that would betray their location to a possible hostile world ruled by the Enemy the League had feared. To get information living men must go, and return, crossing the long night to the ancient home of the Alterrans.

"How long was that voyage?"

"Over two Werelian years—maybe a hundred and thirty or forty light-years—I was only a boy, a child, prech Ramarren, and some things I didn't understand, and much wasn't told me—"

Falk did not see why this ignorance should embarrass the lad; he was much more struck by the fact that Orry, who looked fifteen or sixteen, had been alive for perhaps a hundred and fifty years. And himself?

The Alterra, Orry went on, had left from a base near the old coast-town Tevar, her coordinates set for Terra. She had carried nineteen people, men, women and children, Kelshak for the most part and claiming Colonist descent: the adults selected by the Harmonious Council of the Empire for training, intelligence, courage, generosity, and arlesh.

"I don't know a word for it in Galaktika. It's just arlesh." Orry smiled his ingenuous smile. "Rale is…the right thing to do, like learning things at school, or like a river following its course, and arlesh derives from rale, I guess."

"Tao?" asked Falk; but Orry had never heard of the Old Canon of Man.

"What happened to the ship? What happened to the other seventeen people?"

"We were attacked at the Barrier. The Shing got there only after the Alterra was destroyed and the attackers were dispersing. They were rebels, in planetary cars. The Shing rescued me off one. They didn't know whether the rest of us had been killed or carried off by the rebels. They kept searching, over the whole planet, and about a year ago they heard a rumor about a man living in the Eastern Forest—that sounded like it might be one of us…"

"What do you remember of all this—the attack and so on?"

"Nothing. You know how lightspeed flight affects you—"

"I know that for those in the ship, no time passes. But I have no idea how that feels."

"Well, I don't really remember it very clearly. I was just a boy—nine years old, Earth style. And I'm not sure anybody could remember it clearly. You can't tell how—how things relate. You see and hear, but it doesn't hang together—nothing means anything—I can't explain it. It's horrible, but only like a dream. But then coming down into planetary space again, you go through what the Lords call the Barrier, and that blacks out the passengers, unless they're prepared for it. Our ship wasn't. None of us had come to when we were attacked, and so I don't remember it, any—any more than you, prech Ramarren. When I came to I was aboard a Shing vessel."

"Why were you brought along as a boy?"

"My father was the captain of the expedition. My mother was on the ship too. You know, otherwise, prech Ramarren—well, if one came back one's people would all have been dead, long long ago. Not that it mattered—my parents are dead, now, anyhow. Or maybe they were treated like you, and…and wouldn't recognize me if we met…"

"What was my part in the expedition?"

"You were our navigator."

The irony of that made Falk wince, but Orry went on in his respectful, naive fashion, "Of course, that means you set the ship's course, the coordinates—you were the greatest prosteny, a mathematician-astronomer, in all Kelshy. You were prechnowa to all of us aboard except my father, Har Weden. You are of the Eighth Order, prech Ramarren! You—you remember something of that—?"

Falk shook his head.

The boy subsided, saying at last, sadly, "I can't really believe that you don't remember, except when you do that."

"Shake my head?"

"On Werel we shrug for no. This way."

Orry's simplicity was irresistible. Falk tried the shrug; and it seemed to him that he found a certain Rightness in it, a propriety, that could persuade him that it was indeed an old habit. He smiled, and Orry at once cheered up. "You are so like yourself, prech Ramarren, and so different! Forgive me. But what did they do, what did they do to make you forget so much?"

"They destroyed me. Surely I'm like myself. I am myself. I'm Falk…" He put his head in his hands. Orry, abashed, was silent. The quiet, cool air of the room glowed like a blue-green jewel around them; the western wall was lambent with late sunlight.

"How closely do they watch you here?"

"The Lords like me to carry a communicator if I go off by aircar." Orry touched the bracelet on his left wrist, which appeared to be simple gold links. "It can be dangerous, after all, among the natives."

"But you're free to go where you like?"

"Yes, of course. This room of yours is just like mine, across the canyon." Orry looked puzzled again. "We have no enemies here, you know, prech Ramarren," he ventured.

"No? Where are our enemies, then?"

"Well—outside—where you came from—"

They stared at each other in mutual miscomprehension.

"You think men are our enemies—Terrans, human beings? You think it was they that destroyed my mind?"

"Who else?" Orry said, frightened, gaping.

"The aliens—the Enemy—the Shing!"

"But," the boy said with timid gentleness, as if realizing at last how utterly his former lord and teacher was ignorant and astray, "there never was an Enemy. There never was a War."

The room trembled softly like a tapped gong to an almost sub-aural vibration, and a moment afterward a voice, disembodied, spoke: The Council meets. The slit-door parted and a tall figure entered, stately in white robes and an ornate black wig. The eyebrows, were shaven and repainted high; the face, masked by makeup to a matte smoothness, was that of a husky man of middle age. Orry rose quickly from the table and bowed, whispering, "Lord Abundibot."

"Har Orry," the man acknowledged, his voice also damped to a creaking whisper, then turned to Falk. "Agad Ramarren. Be welcome. The Council of Earth meets, to answer your questions and consider your requests. Behold now . . ." He had glanced at Falk only for a second, and did not approach either Werelian closely. There was a queer air about him of power and also of utter self-containment, self-absorption. He was apart, unapproachable. All three of them stood motionless a moment; and Falk, following the others' gaze, saw that the i