Books In English "City Of Illusions" Ursula K. Le Guin | Page 98

ecliptic away from the sun while the planet was at its farthest from the sun,
were cold, dark, terrible: the vast summers, half a lifetime long, were
measurelessly opulent. Giant tides of the planet's deep seas obeyed a giant
moon that took four hundred days to wax and wane; the world was rife
with earthquakes, volcanoes, plants that walked, animals that sang, men
who spoke and built cities: a catalogue of wonders. To this miraculous
though not unusual world had come, twenty years ago, a ship from outer
space. Twenty of its great years, Orry meant: something over twelve
hundred Ter-ran years.
Colonists and hilfers of the League of All Worlds, the people on that
ship were committing their work and lives to the new-found planet, remote
from the ancient central worlds of the League, in the hope of bringing its
native intelligent species eventually into the League, a new ally in the War
To Come. Such had been the policy of the League ever since, generations
before, warnings had come from beyond the Hyades of a great wave of
conquerors that moved from world to world, from century to century,
closer toward the farflung cluster of eighty planets that so proudly called
itself the League of All Worlds. Terra, near the edge of the League
heart-zone and the nearest League planet to the new-found planet Werel,
had supplied all the colonists on this first ship. There were to have been
other ships from other worlds of the League, but none ever came: the War
came first.
The colonists' only communications with Earth, with the Prime World
Davenant, and the rest of the League, was by the ansible, the instantaneous
transmitter, aboard their ship. No ship, said Orry, had ever flown faster
than light—here Falk corrected him. Warships had indeed been built on
the ansible principle, but they had been only automatic death-machines,
incredibly costly and carrying no living creatures. Lightspeed, with its
foreshortening of time for the voyager, was the limit of human voyaging,
then and now. So the colonists of. Werel were a very long way from
home and wholly dependent on their ansible for news. They had only been
on Werel five years when they were informed that the Enemy had come,
and immediately after that the communications grew confused,
contradictory, intermittent, and soon ceased altogether. About a third of
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