Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 144

them anything. They hoped to induce him, to persuade him. Therefore, for
the present, he was at least physically safe.
—So long as they did not know that he remembered his existence as
Falk.
That came over him with a chill. It had not occurred to him before. As
Falk he had been useless to them, but harmless. As Ramarren he was
useful to them, and harmless. But as Falk-Ramarren, he was a threat. And
they did not tolerate threats: they could not afford to.
And there was the answer to the last question: Why did they want so
badly to know where Werel was—what did Werel matter to them?
Again Falk's memory spoke to Ramarren's intelligence, this time
recalling a cabin, blithe, ironic voice. The old Listener in the deep forest
spoke, the old man lonelier on Earth than even Falk had been: "There are
not very many of the Shing…"
A great piece of news and wisdom and advice, he had called it; and it
must be the literal truth. The old histories Falk had learned in Zove's
House held the Shing to be aliens from a very distant region of the galaxy,
out beyond the Hyades, a matter perhaps of thousands of light-years. If
that was so, probably no vast numbers of them had crossed so immense a
length of spacetime. There had been enough to infiltrate the League and
break it, given their powers of mindlying and other skills or weapons they
might possess or have possessed; but had there been enough of them to
rule over all the worlds they had divided and conquered? Planets were very
large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them. The
Shing must have had to spread themselves thin, and take much care to
keep the subject planets from re-allying and joining to rebel. Orry had told
Falk that the Shing did not seem to travel or trade much by lightspeed; he
had never even seen a lightspeed ship of theirs. Was that because they
feared their own kin on other worlds, grown away from them over the
centuries of their dominion? Or conceivably was Earth the only planet they
still ruled, defending it from all explorations from other worlds? No
telling; but it did seem likely that on Earth there were indeed not very
many of them.
They had refused to believe Orry's tale of how the Terrans on Werel
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