Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 140

of harmony. Harmony: when he was Ramarren he clung to that idea and
discipline, and it was perhaps his mastery of that central Kelshak doctrine
that kept him from going right over the edge into madness. But there was
no integrating or balancing the two minds and personalities that shared his
skull, not yet; he must swing between them, blanking one out for the
other's sake, then drawn at once back the other way. He was scarcely able
to move, being plagued by the hallucination of having two bodies, of being
actually physically two different men.
He did not dare sleep, though he was worn out: he feared the waking
too much.
It was night, and he was left to himself. To myselves, Falk
commented. Falk was at first the stronger, having had some preparation for
this ordeal. It was Falk who got the first dialogue going: I have got to get
some sleep, Ramarren, he said, and Ramarren received the words as if in
mindspeech and without premeditation replied in kind: I'm afraid to sleep.
Then he kept watch for a little while, and knew Falk's dreams like shadows
and echoes in his mind.
He got through this first, worst time, and by the time morning shone
dim through the green veilwalls of his room, he had lost his fear and was
beginning to gain real control over both thought and action.
There was of course no actual overlap of his two sets of memories.
Falk had come to conscious being in the vast number of neurons that in a
highly intelligent brain remain unused—the fallow fields of Ramarren's
mind. The basic motor and sensory paths has never been blocked off and
so in a sense had been shared all along, though difficulties arose there
caused by the doubling of the sets of motor habits and modes of
perception. An object looked different to him depending on whether he
looked at it as Falk or as Ramarren, and though in the long run this
reduplication might prove an augmentation of his intelligence and
perceptive power, at the moment it was confusing to the point of vertigo.
There was considerable emotional intershading, so that his feelings on
some points quite literally conflicted. And, since Falk's memories covered
his "lifetime" just as did Ramarren's, the two series tended to appear
simultaneously instead of in proper sequence. It was hard for Ramarren to
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