Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 146

their messenger. Sole survivor of the Voyage, he was to return across the
gulfs of time and space to Werel and tell them all the Shing had told him
about Earth—quack, quack, like the birds that quacked It is wrong to take
life, the moral boar, the squeaking mice in the foundations of the house of
Man…Mindless, honest, disastrous, Orry would carry the Lie to Werel.
Honor and the memory of the Colony were strong forces on Werel,
and a call for help from Earth might bring help from them; but if they were
told there was not and never had been an Enemy, that Earth was an ancient
happy garden-spot, they were not likely to make that long journey just to
see it. And if they did they would come unarmed, as Ramarren and his
companions had come.
Another voice spoke in his memory, longer ago yet, deeper in the
forest: "We cannot go on like this forever. There must be a hope, a sign…"
He had not been sent with a message to mankind, as Zove had
dreamed. The hope was a stranger one even than that, the sign more
obscure. He was to carry mankind's message, to utter their cry for help, for
deliverance.
I must go home; I must tell them, the truth, he thought, knowing that
the Shing would at all costs prevent this, that Orry would be sent, and he
would be kept here or killed.
In the great weariness of his long effort to think coherently, his will
relaxed all at once, his chancy control over his racked and worried double
mind broke. He dropped down exhausted on the couch and put his head in
his hands. If I could only go home, he thought; if I could walk once more
with Parth down in the Long Field…
That was the dream-self grieving, the dreamer Falk. Ramarren tried to
evade that hopeless yearning by thinking of his wife, dark-haired,
golden-eyed, in a gown sewn with a thousand tiny chains of silver, his
wife Adrise. But his wedding-ring was gone. And Adrise was dead. She
had been dead a long, long time. She had married Ramarren knowing that
they would have little more than a moonphase together, for he was going
on the Voyage to Terra. And during that one, terrible moment of his
Voyage, she had lived out her Me, grown old, died; she had been dead for
a hundred of Earth's years, perhaps. Across the years between the stars,
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