Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 44

lean-to if you want it. I don't."
The people of Kathol's House, the settlement nearest Zove's, were
Thurro-dowists; Falk knew that one of their principles was to get along, as
long as they could do so sanely and unf anatically, without mechanical
devices and artifices. That this old man, living much more primitively than
they, raising poultry and vegetables because he did not even own a gun to
hunt with, should possess a bit of fancy technology like a slider, was queer
enough to make Falk for the first time look up at him with a shadow of
doubt.
The Listener sucked his teeth and cackled. "You never had any reason
to trust me, outlandish laddie," he said. "Nor I you. After all, things can be
hidden from even the greatest Listener. Things can be hidden from a man's
own mind, can't they, so that he can't lay the hands of thought upon them.
Take the slider. My traveling days are done. It carries only one, but you'll
be going alone. And I think you've got a longer journey to make than you
can ever go by foot. Or by slider, for that matter."
Falk asked no question, but the old man answered it:
"Maybe you have to go back home," he said.
Parting from him in the icy, misty dawn under the ice-furred pines,
Falk in regret and gratitude offered his hand as to the Master of a House;
so he had been taught to do; but as he did so he said, "Tiokioi…"
"What name do you call me, Messenger?"
"It means…it means father, I think…" The word had come on his lips
unbidden, incongruous. He was not sure he knew its meaning, and had no
idea what language it was in.
"Goodbye, poor trusting fool! You will speak the truth and the truth
will set you free. Or not, as the case may be. Go all alonio, dear fool; it's
much the best way to go. I will miss your dreams. Goodbye, goodbye. Fish
and visitors stink after three days. Goodbye!"
Falk knelt on the slider, an elegant little machine, black paristolis
inlaid with a three-dimensional arabesque of platinum wire. The
ornamentation all but concealed the controls, but he had played with a
slider at Zove's House, and after studying the control-arcs a minute he
touched the left arc, moved his finger along it till the slider had silently
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