Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 100

"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 powerf ul 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?"
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