Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 31

first room of a series which; to judge by echoes, seemed to go on
indefinitely. He found his way directly back to the stairs, which because he
had started from them were home base. He sat down, on the lowest step
this time, and sat still. He was hungry and very thirsty. They had taken his
pack, and left him nothing.
It's your own fault , Falk told himself bitterly, and a kind of dialogue
began in his mind:
What did I do? Why did they attack me?
Zove told you: trust nobody. They trust nobody, and they're right.
Even someone who comes alone asking for help?
With your face—your eyes? When it's obvious even at a glance that
you're not a normal human being?
All the same, they could have given me a drink of water, said the
perhaps childish, still fearless part of his mind.
You're damned lucky they didn't kill you at sight , his intellect
replied, and got no further answer.
All the people of Zove's House had of course got accustomed to Falk's
looks, and guests were fair and circumspect, so that he had never been
forced into particular awareness of his physical difference from the human
norm. It had seemed so much less of a difference and barrier than the
amnesia and ignorance that had isolated him so long. Now for the first
time he realized that a stranger looking into his face would not see the face
of a man.
The one called Drehnem had been afraid of him, and had struck him
because he was afraid and repelled by the alien, the monstrous, the
inexplicable.
It was only what Zove had tried to tell him when he had said with
such grave and almost tender warning, "You must go alone, you can only
go alone."
There was nothing for it, now, but sleep. He curled up as well as he
could on the bottom step, for the dirt floor was damp, and closed his eyes
on the darkness.
Some time later in timelessness he was awakened by the mice. They
ran about making a faint tiny scrabble, a zigzag scratch of sound across the
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