Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Seite 14

first came. What have you now of those twenty-five years?"
Falk held out his left hand a moment: "A ring," he said.
"And the memory of a mountain?"
"The memory of a memory." Falk shrugged. "And often, as I've told
you, I find for a moment in my mind the sound of a voice, or the sense of a
motion, a gesture, a distance. These don't fit into my memories of my lif e
here with you. But they make no whole, they have no meaning."
Zove sat down in the windowseat and nodded for Falk to do the same.
"You had no growing to do; your gross motor skills were unimpaired. But
even given that basis, you have learned with amazing quickness. I've
wondered if the Shing, in controlling human genetics in the old days and
weeding out so many as colonists, were selecting us for docility and
stupidity, and if you spring from some mutant race that somehow escaped
control. Whatever you were, you were a highly intelligent man…And now
you are one again. And I should like to know what you yourself think
about your mysterious past."
Falk was silent a minute. He was a short, spare, well-made man; his
very lively and expressive face just now looked rather somber or
apprehensive, reflecting his feelings as candidly as a child's face. At last,
visibly summoning up his resolution, he said, "While I was studying with
Ranya this past summer, she showed me how I differ from the human
genetic norm. It's only a twist or two of a helix…a very small difference.
Like the difference between wei and o." Zove looked up with a smile at the
reference to the Canon which fascinated Falk, but the younger man was
not smiling. "However, I am unmistakably not human. So I may be a
freak; or a mutant, accidental or intentionally produced; or an alien. I
suppose most likely I am an unsuccessful genetic experiment, discarded by
the experimenters…There's no telling. I'd prefer to think I'm an alien, from
some other world. It would mean that at least I'm not the only creature of
my kind in the universe."
"What makes you sure there are other populated worlds?"
Falk looked up, startled, going at once with a child's credulity but a
man's logic to the conclusion: "Is there reason to think the other Worlds of
the League were destroyed?"
~ 12 ~