Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 133

familiar type though foreign in detail: a drinking-cup on one table, and a
leafed book beside it. He picked up the book. Something Orry had said
flickered in his mind and went out again. The title was meaningless,
though the characters were clearly related to the alphabet of the Tongue of
the Books. He opened the thing and glanced through it. The left-hand
pages were written—handwritten, it appeared—with columns of
marvelously complicated patterns that might be holistic symbols,
ideographs, technological shorthand. The right-hand pages were also
handwritten, but in the letters that resembled the letters of the Books,
Galaktika. A code-book? But he had not yet puzzled out more than a word
or two when the doorslit silently irised open and a person entered the
room: a woman.
Ramarren looked at her with intense curiosity, unguardedly and
without fear; only perhaps, feeling himself vulnerable, he intensified a
little the straight, authoritative gaze to which his birth, earned Level and
arlesh entitled him. Unabashed, she returned his gaze. They stood there a
moment in silence.
She was handsome and delicate, fantastically dressed, her hair
bleached or reddish-pigmented. Her eyes were a dark circle set in a white
oval. Eyes like the eyes of painted faces in the Lighall of the Old City,
frescoes of dark-skinned, tall people building a town, warring with the
Migrators, watching the stars: the Colonists, the Terrans of Alterra…
Now Ramarren knew past doubt that he was indeed on Earth, that he
had made his Voyage. He set pride and self-defense aside, and knelt down
to her. To him, to all the people who had sent him on the mission across
eight hundred and twenty-five trillion miles of nothingness, she was of a
race that time and memory and forgetting had imbued with the quality of
the divine. Single, individual as she stood before him, yet she was of the
Race of Man and looked at him with the eyes of that Race, and he did
honor to history and myth and the long exile of his ancestors, bowing his
head to her as he knelt.
He rose and held out his open hands in the Kelshak gesture of
reception, and she began to speak to him. Her speaking was strange, very
strange, for though he had never seen her before her voice was infinitely
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