Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 87

marren-marren-marren…
He woke. It took a while, but he woke, and managed to sit up. He had
to bury his acutely aching head in his arms for a while to get over the
vertigo the movement caused, and at first was aware only that he was
sitting on the floor of some room, a floor which seemed to be warm and
yielding, almost soft, like the flank of some great beast. Then he lifted his
head, and got his eyes into focus, and looked about him.
He was alone, in the midst of a room so uncanny that it revived his
dizziness for a while. There was no furniture. Walls floor and ceiling were
all of the same translucent stuff, which appeared soft and undulant like
many thicknesses of pale green veiling, but was tough and slick to the
touch. Queer carvings and crimpings and ridges forming ornate patterns all
over the floor were, to the exploring hand, nonexistent; they were
eye-deceiving paintings, or lay beneath a smooth transparent surface. The
angles where walls met were thrown out of true by optical-illusion devices
of crosshatching and pseudo-parallels used as decoration; to pull the
corners into right angles took an effort of will, which was perhaps an effort
of self-deception, since they might, after all, not be right angles. But none
of this teasing subtlety of decoration so disoriented Falk as the fact that the
entire room was translucent. Vaguely, with the effect of looking into a
depth of very green pond-water, underneath him another room was visible.
Ove rhead was a patch of light that might be the moon, blurred and greened
by one or more intervening ceilings. Through one wall of the room strings
and patches of brightness were fairly distinct, and he could make out the
motion of the lights of helicopters or air-cars. Through the other three
walls these outdoor lights were much dimmer, blurred by the veilings of
further walls, corridors, rooms. Shapes moved in those other rooms. He
could see them but there was no identifying them: features, dress, color,
size, all was blurred away. A blot of shadow somewhere in the green
depths suddenly rose and grew less, greener, dimmer, fading into the maze
of vagueness. Visibility without discrimination, solitude without privacy.
It was extraordinarily beautiful, this masked shimmer of lights and shapes
through inchoate planes of green, and extraordinarily disturbing. . All at
once in a brighter patch on the near wall Falk caught a glimpse of
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