Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 145

had mutated toward the local biological norm and so finally blended stocks
with the native hominids. They had said that was impossible: which meant
that it had not happened to them; they were unable to mate with Terrans.
They were still alien, then, after twelve hundred years; still isolated on
Earth. And did they in fact rule mankind, from this single City? Once
again Ramarren turned to Falk for the answer, and saw it as No. They
controlled men by habit, ruse, fear, and weaponry, by being quick to
prevent the rise of any strong tribe or the pooling of knowledge that might
threaten them. They prevented men from doing anything. But they did
nothing themselves. They did not rule, they only blighted.
It was clear, then, why Werel posed a deadly threat to them. They had
so far kept up their tenuous, ruinous hold on the culture which long ago
they had wrecked and redirected; but a strong, numerous, technologically
advanced race, with a mythos of blood-kinship with the Terrans, and a
mindscience and weaponry equal to their own, might crush them at a blow.
And deliver men from them.
If they learned from him where Werel was, would they send out a
lightspeed bomb-ship, like a long fuse burning across the light-years, to
destroy the dangerous world before it ever learned of their existence?
That seemed only too possible. Yet two things told against it: their
careful preparation of young Orry, as if they wanted him to act as a
messenger; and their singular Law..
Falk-Ramarren was unable to decide whether that rule of Reverence
for Life was the Shing's one genuine belief, their one plank across the
abyss of self-destruction that underlay their behavior as the black canyon
gaped beneath their city, or instead was simply the biggest lie of all their
lies. They did in fact seem to avoid killing sentient beings. They had left
him alive, and perhaps the others; their elaborately disguised foods were
all vegetable; in order to control populations they evidently pitted tribe
against tribe, starting the war but letting humans do the killing; and the
histories told that in the early days of their rule, they had used eugenics
and resettlement to consolidate their empire, rather than genocide. It might
be true, then, that they obeyed their Law, in their own fashion.
In that case, their grooming of young Orry indicated that he was to be
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