Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 132

Sister, little sister, beloved Arnan…What had his father called her?—not
by her right name but something else, another name—
Ramarren woke. He sat up, with a definite effort taking command of
his body—yes, his, still hesitant and shaky but certainly his own. For a
moment in waking he had felt he was a ghost in alien flesh, displaced, lost.
He was all right. He was Agad Ramarren, born in the silverstone
house among broad lawns under the white peak of Charn, the Single
Mountain; Agad's heir, fall-born, so that all his Me had been lived in
autumn and winter. Spring he had never seen, might never see, for the ship
Alterra had begun her Voyage to Earth on the first day of spring. But the
long winter and the fall, the length of his manhood, boyhood, childhood
stretched back behind him vivid and unbroken, remembered, the river
reaching upward to the source.
The boy Orry was no longer in the room. "Orry!" he said aloud; for he
was able and determined now to learn what had happened to him, to his
companions, to the Alterra and its mission. There was no reply or signal.
The room seemed to be not only windowless but doorless. He checked his
impulse to mindcall the boy; he did not know whether Orry was still tuned
with him, and also since his own mind had evidently suffered either
damage or interference, he had better go carefully and keep out of phase
with any other mind, until he learned if he was threatened by volitional
control or antichrony.
He stood up, dismissing vertigo and a brief, sharp occipital pain, and
walked back and forth across the room a few times, getting himself into
muscular harmony while he studied the outlandish clothes he was wearing
and the queer room he was in. There was a lot of furniture, bed, tables, and
sitting-places, all set up on long thin legs. The translucent, murky green
walls were covered with explicitly deceptive and disjunctive patterns, one
of which disguised an iris-door, another a half-length mirror. He stopped
and looked at himself a moment. He looked thin, and weatherbeaten, and
perhaps older; he hardly knew. He felt curiously self-conscious, looking at
himself. What was this uneasiness, this lack of concentration? What had
happened, what had been lost? He turned away and set himself to study the
room again. There were various enigmatic objects about, and two of
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