Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 126

Laws are made against the impulse a people most fears in itself. Do
not kill was the Shing's vaunted single Law. All else was permitted:
which meant, perhaps, there was little else they really wanted to
do…Fearing their own profound attraction towards death, they preached
Reverence for Life, fooling themselves at last with their own lie.
Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one
quality no liar can cope with, integrity. Perhaps it would not occur to them
that a man could so will to be himself, to live his life, that he might resist
them even when helpless in their hands.
Perhaps, perhaps.
Deliberately stilling his thoughts at last, he took up the book that the
Prince of Kansas had given him and which, belying the Prince's prediction,
he had not yet lost again, and read in it for a while, very intently, before he
slept.
Next morning—his last, perhaps, of this life—Orry suggested that
they sightsee by aircar, and Falk assented, saying that he wished to see the
Western Ocean. With elaborate courtesy two of the Shing, Abundibot and
Ken Kenyek, asked if they might accompany their honored guest, and
answer any further questions he might wish to ask about the Dominion of
Earth, or about the operation planned for tomorrow. Falk had had some
vague hopes in fact of learning more details of what they planned to do to
his mind, so as to be able to put up a stronger resistance to it. It was no
good. Ken Kenyek poured out endless verbiage concerning neurons and
synapses, salvaging, blocking, releasing, drugs, hypnosis, parahypnosis,
brain-linked computers…none of which was meaningful, all of which was
frightening. Falk soon ceased to try to understand.
The aircar, piloted by a speechless toolman who seemed little more
than an extension of the controls, cleared the mountains and shot west ov er
the deserts, bright with the brief flower of their spring. Within a few
minutes they were nearing the granite face of the Western Range. Still
sheered and smashed and raw from the cataclysms of two thousand years
ago, the Sierras stood, jagged pinnacles upthrust from chasms of snow.
Over the crests lay the ocean, bright in the sunlight; dark beneath the
waves lay the drowned lands,
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