Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 142

up and down the silent room, and suddenly it came clear; he could recall
the brilliant silence of Abundibot's words: "We whom you know as Shing
are men…" And hearing it even in memory, Ramarren knew it for a lie. It
was incredible, and indubitable. The Shing could lie telepathically—that
guess and dread of subjected humanity was right. The Shing were, in truth,
the Enemy.
They were not men but aliens, gifted with an alien power; and no
doubt they had broken the League and gained power over Earth by the use
of that power. And it was they who had attacked the Alterra as she had
come into Earthspace; all the talk of rebels was mere fiction. They had
killed or brainrazed all the crew but the child Orry. Ramarren could guess
why: because they had discovered, testing him or one of the other highly
trained paraverbalists of the crew, that a Werelian could tell when they
were mindlying. That had frightened the Shing, and they had done away
with the adults, saving out only the harmless child as an informant.
To Ramarren it was only yesterday that his fellow-Voyagers had
perished, and, struggling against that blow, he tried to think that like him
they might have survived somewhere on Earth. But if they had—and he
had been very lucky—where were they now? The Sh ing had had a hard
time locating even one, it appeared, when they had discovered that they
needed him.
What did they need him for? Why had they sought him, brought him
here, restored the memory that they had destroyed?
No explanation could be got from the facts at his disposal except the
one he had arrived at as Falk: The Shing needed him to tell them where he
came from.
That gave Falk-Ramarren his first amount of amusement. If it really
was that simple, it was funny. They had saved out Orry because he was so
young; untrained, unformed, vulnerable, amenable, a perfect instrument
and informant. He certainly had been all of that. But did not know where
he came from…And by the time they discovered that, they had wiped the
information they wanted clean out of the minds that knew it, and scattered
their victims over the wild, ruined Earth to die of accident or starvation or
the attack of wild beasts or men.
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