Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 130

man, a stranger.
"Who are you?"
"Har Orry."
The name dropped like a stone into the dreamy tranquillity of his mind
and vanished. Only the circles from it widened out and widened out softly,
slowly, until at last the outermost circle touched shore, and broke. Orry,
Har Weden's son, one of the Voyagers…a boy, a child, winterborn.
The still surface of the pool of sleep was crisscrossed with a little
disturbance. He closed his eyes again and willed to go under.
"I dreamed," he murmured with his eyes closed. "I had a lot of
dreams…"
But he was awake again, and looking into that frightened, irresolute,
boyish face. It was Orry, Wedens son: Orry as he would look five or six
moonphases from now, if they survived the Voyage.
What was it he had forgotten? "What is this place?"
"Please be still, prech Ramarren—don't talk yet; please lie still."
"What happened to me?" Dizziness forced him to obey the boy and lie
back. His body, even the muscles of his lips and tongue as he spoke, did
not obey him properly. It was not weakness but a queer lack of control. To
raise his hand he had to use conscious volition, as if it were someone else's
hand he was picking up.
Someone else's hand…He stared at his arm and hand for a good while.
The skin was curiously darkened to the color of tanned hann-hide. Down
the forearm to the wrist ran a series of parallel bluish scars, slightly
stippled, as if made by repeated jabs of a needle. Even the skin of the palm
was toughened and weathered as if he had been out in the open for a long
time, instead of in the laboratories and computer-rooms of Voyage Center
and the Halls of Council and Places of Silence in Wegest…
He looked around suddenly. The room he was in was windowless; but,
weirdly, he could see the sunlight in and through its greenish walls.
"There was an accident," he said at last. "In the launching, or
when…But we made the Voyage. We made it. Did I dream it?"
"No, prech Ramarren. We made the Voyage."
Silence again. He said after a while, "I can only remember the Voyage
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