Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 7

she listened intently. She was bound by sympathy to the stranger and
wanted him to live.
Rayna and Kretyan joined the group; Rayna had been running what
physiological tests she could on the stranger, with Kretyan standing by to
catch any mental response. They had little to report as yet, other than that
the stranger's nervous system and the sense areas and basic motor capacity
of his brain seemed normal, though his physical responses and motor skill
compared with those of a year-old child, perhaps, and no stimulus of
localities in the speech area had got any response at all. "A man's strength,
a baby's coordination, an empty mind," Ranya said.
"If we don't kill him like a wild beast," said Buckeye, "then we shall
have to tame him like a wild beast…"
Kretyan's brother Kai spoke up. "It seems worth trying. Let some of us
younger ones have charge of him; we'll see what we can do. We don't have
to teach him the Inner Canons right away, after all. At least teaching him
not to wet the bed comes first…I want to know if he's human. Do you
think he is, Master?"
Zove spread out his big hands. "Who knows? Rayna's blood-tests may
tell us. I never heard that any Shing had yellow eyes, or any visible
differences from Terran men. But if he is neither Shing nor human, what is
he? No being from the Other Worlds that once were known has walked on
Earth for twelve hundred years. Like you, Kai, I think I would risk his
presence here among us out of pure curiosity…"
So they let their guest live.
At first he was little trouble to the young people who looked after him.
He regained strength slowly, sleeping much, sitting or lying quietly most
of the time he was awake. Parth named him Falk, which in the dialect of
the Eastern Forest meant "yellow," for his sallow skin and opal eyes.
One morning several days after his arrival, coming to an unpatterned
stretch in the cloth she was weaving, she left her sunpowered loom to purr
away by itself down in the garden and climbed up to the screened balcony
where "Falk" was kept. He did not see her enter. He was sitting on his
pallet gazing intently up at the haze-dimmed summer sky. The glare made
his eyes water and he rubbed them vigorously with his hand, then seeing
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