Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 93

pleasant room with its furniture of heavy, glass-clear plastic and its
windowless, translucent walls, and then studied his guard or attendant with
curiosity. A big, blank-faced man, with a gun strapped to his belt. "What is
the Law?" he asked on impulse.
Obediently and with no surprise the big, staring fellow answered, "Do
not take life."
"But you carry a gun."
"Oh, this gun, it makes you all stiff, not dead," said the guard, and
laughed. The modulations of his voice were arbitrary, not connected with
the meaning of the words, and there was a slight pause between the words
and the laugh. "Now you eat, drink, get clean. Here's good clothes. See,
here's clothes."
"Are you a Raze?"
"No. I am a Captain of the Bodyguard of the True Lords, and I key in
to the Number Eight computer. Now you eat, drink, get clean."
"I will if you leave the room."
A slight pause. "Oh yes, very well, Lord Agad," said the big man, and
again laughed as if he had been tickled. Perhaps it tickled when the
computer spoke through his brain. He withdrew. Falk could see the vague
hulking shapes of the two guards through the inner wall of the, room; they
waited one on either side of the door in the corridor. He found the
washroom and washed up. Clean clothes were laid out on the great soft
bed that filled one end of the room; they were loose long robes patterned
wildly with red, magenta and violet, and he examined them with distaste,
but put them on. His battered backpack lay on the table of gold-mounted
glassy plastic, its contents seemingly untouched, but his clothes and guns
were not in evidence. A meal was laid out, and he was hungry. How long
had it been since he had entered the doors that closed behind him? He had
no idea, but his hunger told him it had been some while, and he fell to. The
food was queer stuff, highly flavored, mixed, sauced, and disguised, but he
ate it all and looked for more. There being no more, and since he had done
what he had been asked to do, he examined the room more carefully. He
could not see the vague shadows of the guards on the other side of the
semi-transparent, bluish-green wall any longer, and was going to
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