City of Illusions

III

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THE DAYS of which Falk kept no count had grown very short, and had perhaps already passed Year's End, the winter solstice. Though the weather was not so bad as it might have been in the years when the city had stood aboveground, this being a warmer meteorological cycle, still it was mostly bleak and gray. Snow fell often, not so thickly as to make the going hard, but enough to make Falk know that if he had not had his wintercloth clothing and sleeping-bag from Zove's House he would have suffered more than mere discomfort from the cold. The north wind blew so unwearyingly bitter that he tended always to be pushed a little southwards by it, picking the way south of west when there was a choice, rather than face into the wind.

In the dark wretched afternoon of one day of sleet and rain he came slogging down a south-trending stream-valley, struggling through thick brambly undergrowth over rocky, muddy ground. All at once the brush thinned out, and he was brought to a sudden halt. Before him lay a great river, dully shining, peppered with rain. Rainy mist half obscured the low farther bank. He was awed by the breadth, the majesty of this great silent westward drive of dark water under the low sky. At first he thought it must be the Inland River, one of the few landmarks of the inner continent known by rumor to the eastern Forest Houses; but that was said to run south marking the western edge of the kingdom of the trees. Surely it was a tributary of the Inland River, then. He followed it, for that reason, and because it kept him out of the high hills and provided both water and good hunting; moreover it was pleasant to have, sometimes, a sandy shore for a path, with the open sky overhead instead of the everlasting leafless darkness of branches. So following the river he went west by south through a rolling land of woods, all cold and still and colorless in the grip of winter.

One of these many mornings by the river he shot a wild hen, so common here in their squawking, low-flying flocks that they provided his staple meat. He had only winged the hen and it was not dead when he picked it up. It beat its wings and cried in its piercing bird-voice, "Take—life—take—life—take—" Then he wrung its neck.

The words rang in his mind and would not be silenced. Last time a beast had spoken to him he had been on the threshold of the house of Fear. Somewhere in these lonesome gray hills there were, or had been, men: a group in hiding like Argerd's household, or savage Wanderers who would kill him when they saw his alien eyes, or toolmen who would take him to their Lords as a prisoner or slave. Though at the end of it all he might have to face those Lords, he would find his own way to them, in his own time, and alone. Trust no one, avoid men! He knew his lesson now. Very warily he went that day, alert, so quiet that often the waterbirds that thronged the shores of the river rose up startled almost under his feet.

He crossed no path and saw no sign at all that any human beings dwelt or ever came near the river. But towards the end of the short afternoon a flock of the bronze-green wild fowl rose up ahead of him and flew out over the water all clucking and calling together in a gabble of human words.

A little farther on he stopped, thinking he had scented woodsmoke on the wind.

The wind was blowing upriver to him, from the northwest. He went with double caution. Then as the night rose up among the tree-trunks and blurred the dark reaches of the river, far ahead of him along the brushy, willow-tangled shore a light glimmered, and vanished, and shone again.

It was not fear or even caution that stopped him now, standing in his tracks to stare at that distant

glimmer. Aside from his own solitary campfire this was the first light he had seen lit in the wilderness since he had left the Clearing. It moved him very strangely, shining far off there across the dusk.

Patient in his fascination as any forest animal, he waited till full night had come and then made his way slowly and noiselessly along the riverbank, keeping in the shelter of the willows, until he was close enough to see the square of a window yellow with firelight and the peak of the roof above it, snow-rimmed, pine-overhung. Huge over black forest and river Orion stood. The winter night was very cold and silent. Now and then a fleck of dry snow dislodged from a branch drifted down towards the black water and caught the sparkle of the firelight as it fell.

Falk stood gazing at the light in the cabin. He moved a little closer, then stood motionless for a long time. The door of the cabin creaked open, laying down a fan of gold on the dark ground, stirring up powdery snow in puffs and spangles. "Come on into the light," said a man standing, vulnerable, in the golden oblong of the doorway.

Falk in the darkness of the thickets put his hand on his laser, and made no other movement.

"I mindheard you. I'm a Listener. Come on. Nothing to fear here. Do you speak this tongue?"

Silence.

"I hope you do, because I'm not going to use mind-speech. There's nobody here but me, and you," said the quiet voice. "I hear without trying, as you hear with your ears, and I still hear you out there in the dark. Come and knock if you want to get under a roof for a while."

The door closed.

Falk stood still for some while. Then he crossed the few dark yards to the door of the little cabin, and knocked.

"Come in!"

He opened the door and entered into warmth and light.

An old man, gray hair braided long down his back, knelt at the hearth building up the fire. He did not turn to look at the stranger, but laid his firewood methodically. After a while he said aloud in a slow chant,

"I alone am confused

confused

desolate

Oh, like the sea

adrift

Oh, with no harbor to anchor in."

The gray head turned at last. The old man was smiling; his narrow, bright eyes looked sidelong at Falk.

In a voice that was hoarse and hesitant because he had not spoken any words for a long time, Falk replied with the next verse of the Old Canon:

"Everyone is useful only I alone am inept outlandish.

I alone differ from others but I seek

the milk ofthe Mother the Way..."

"Ha ha ha!" said the old man. "Do you, Yellow-eyes? Come on, sit down, here by the hearth. Outlandish, yes yes, yes indeed. You are outlandish. How far out the land?—who knows? How long since you washed in hot water? Who knows? Where's the damned kettle? Cold tonight in the wide world, isn't it, cold as a traitor's kiss. Here we are; fill that from the pail there by the door, will you, then I'll put it on the fire, so. I'm a Thurro-dowist, you know what that is I see, so you won't get much comfort here. But a hot bath's hot, whether the kettle's boiled with hydrogen fusion or pine-knots, eh? Yes, you really are outlandish, lad, and your clothes could use a bath too, weatherproof though they may be. What's that?—rabbits?

Good. We'll stew 'em tomorrow with a vegetable or two. Vegetables are one thing you can't hunt down with a lasergun. And you can't store cabbages in a backpack. I live alone here, my lad, alone and all alonio. Because I am a great, a very great, the greatest Listener, I live alone, and talk too much. I wasn't born here, like a mushroom in the woods; but with other men I never could shut out the minds, all the buzz and grief and babble and worry and all the different ways they went, as if I had to find my way through forty different forests all at once. So I came to live alone in the real forest with only the beasts around me, whose minds are brief and still. No death lies in their thoughts. And no lies lie in their thoughts. Sit down; you've been a long time coming here and your legs are tired."

Falk sat down on the wooden hearth-bench. "I thank you for your hospitality," he said, and was about to name himself when the old man spoke: "Never mind. I can give you plenty of good names, good enough for this part of the world. Yellow Eyes, Outlander, Guest, anything will do. Remember I'm a Listener, not a paraverbalist. I get no words or names. I don't want them. That there was a lonely soul out there in the dark, I knew, and I know how my lighted window shone into your eyes. Isn't that enough, more than enough? I don't need names. And my name is All-Alonio. Right? Now pull up to the fire, get warm."

"I'm getting warm," FaIk said.

The old man's gray braid flipped across his shoulders as he moved about, quick and frail, his soft voice running on; he never asked a real question, never paused for an answer. He was fearless and it was impossible to fear him.

Now all the days and nights of journeying through the forest drew together and were behind Falk. He was not camping: he had come to a place. He need not think at all about the weather, the dark, the stars and beasts and trees. He could sit stretching out his legs to a bright hearth, could eat in company with another, could bathe in front of the fire in a wooden tub of hot water. He did not know which was the greater pleasure, the warmth of that water washing dirt and weariness away, or the warmth that washed his spirit here, the absurd elusive vivid talk of the old man, the miraculous complexity of human conversation after the long silence of the wilderness.

He took as true what the old man told him, that he was able to sense Falk's emotions and perceptions, that he was a mindhearer, an empath. Empathy was to telepathy somewhat as touch to sight, a vaguer, more primitive, and more intimate sense. It was not subject to fine learned control to the degree that telepathic communication was; conversely, involuntary empathy was not uncommon even among the untrained. Blind Kretyan had trained herself to mindhear, having the gift by nature. But it was no such gift as this. It did not take Falk long to make sure that the old man was in fact constantly aware to some degree of what his visitor was feeling and sensing. For some reason this did not bother Falk, whereas the knowledge that Argerd's drug had opened his mind to telepathic search had enraged him. It was the difference in intent; and more.

"This morning I killed a hen," he said, when for a little the old man was silent, warming a rough towel for him by the leaping fire. "It spoke, in this speech. Some words of. of the Law. Does that mean anyone is near here, who teaches language to the beasts and fowls?" He was not so relaxed, even getting out of the hot bath, as to say the Enemy's name—not after his lesson in the house of Fear.

By way of answer the old man merely asked a question for the first time: "Did you eat the hen?"

"No," said Falk, toweling himself dry in the firelight that reddened his skin to the color of new bronze. "Not after it talked. I shot the rabbits instead."

"Killed it and didn't eat it? Shameful, shameful." The old man cackled, then crowed like a wild cock. "Have you no reverence for life? You must understand the Law. It says you mustn't kill unless you must kill. And hardly even then. Remember that in Es Toch. Are you dry? Clothe your nakedness, Adam of the Yaweh Canon. Here, wrap this around you, it's no fine artifice.like your own clothes, it's only deerhide tanned in piss, but at least it's clean."

"How do you know I'm going to Es Toch?" Falk asked, wrapping the soft leather robe about him like a toga.

"Because you're not human," said the old man. "And remember, I am the Listener. I know the compass of your mind, outlandish as it is, whether I will or no. North and south are dim; far back in the east is a lost brightness; to the west there lies darkness, a heavy darkness. I know that darkness. Listen. Listen to me, because I don't want to listen to you, dear guest and blunderer. If I wanted to listen to men talk I wouldn't live here among the wild pigs like a wild pig. I have this to say before I go to sleep. Now listen: There are not very many of the Shing. That's a great piece of news and wisdom and advice. Remember it, when you walk in the awful darkness of the bright lights of Es Toch. Odd scraps of information may always come in handy. Now forget the east and west, and go to sleep. You take the bed. Though as a Thurro-dowist I am opposed to ostentatious luxury, I applaud the simpler pleasures of existence, such as a bed to sleep on. At least, every now and then. And even the company of a fellow man, once a year or so. Though I can't say I miss them as you do. Alone's not lonely." And as he made himself a sort of pallet on the floor he quoted in an affectionate singsong from the Younger Canon of his creed: "'I am no more lonely than the mill brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house. I am no more lonely than the loon on the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself' ".

Then he said, "Good night!" and said no more. Falk slept that night the first sound, long sleep he had had since his journey had begun.

He stayed two more days and nights in the riverside cabin, for his host made him very welcome and he found it hard to leave the little haven of warmth and company. The old man seldom listened and never answered questions, but in and out of his ever-running talk certain facts and hints glanced and vanished. He knew the way west from here and what lay along it—for how far, Falk could not make sure. Clear to Es Toch, it seemed; perhaps even beyond? What lay beyond Es Toch? Falk himself had no idea, except that one would come eventually to the Western Sea, and on beyond that to the Great Continent, and eventually on around again to the Eastern Sea and the Forest. That the world was round, men knew, but there were no maps left. Falk had a notion that the old man might have been able to draw one; but where he got such a notion he scarcely knew, for his host never spoke directly of anything he himself had done or seen beyond this little river-bank clearing.

"Look out for the hens, downriver," said the old man, apropos of nothing, as they breakfasted in the early morning before Falk set off again. "Some of them can talk. Others can listen. Like us, eh? I talk and you listen. Because, of course, I am the Listener and you are the Messenger. Logic be damned. Remember about the hens, and mistrust those that sing. Roosters are less to be mistrusted; they're too busy crowing. Go alone. It won't hurt you. Give my regards to any Princes or Wanderers you may meet, particularly Henstrella. By the way, it occurred to me in between your dreams and my own last night that you've walked quite enough for exercise and might like to take my slider. I'd forgotten I had it. I'm not going to use it, since I'm not going anywhere, except to die. I hope someone comes by to bury me, or at least drag me outside for the rats and ants, once I'm dead. I don't like the prospect of rotting around in here after all the years I've kept the place tidy. You can't use a slider in the forest, of course, now there are no trails left worth the name, but if you want to follow the river it'll take you along nicely. And across the Inland River too, which isn't easy to cross in the thaws, unless you're a catfish. It's in the 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 risen about two feet, and then with the right arc sent the little craft slipping over the yard and the river-bank till it hovered above the scummy ice of the backwater below the cabin. He looked back then to call goodbye, but the old man had already gone into the cabin and shut the door. And as Falk steered his noiseless craft down the broad dark avenue of the river, the enormous silence closed in around him again.

Icy mist gathered on the wide curves of water ahead of him and behind him, and hung among the gray trees on either bank. Ground and trees and sky were all gray with ice and fog. Only the water sliding along a little slower than he slid airborne above it was dark. When on the following day snow began to fall the flakes were dark against tie sky, white against the water before they vanished, endlessly falling and vanishing in the endless current.

This mode of travel was twice the speed of walking, and safer and easier—too easy indeed, monotonous, hypnotic. Falk was glad to come ashore when he had to hunt or to make camp. Waterbirds all but flew into his hands, and animals coming down to the shore to drink glanced at him as if he on the slider were a crane or heron skimming past, and offered their defenseless flanks and chests to his hunting gun. Then all he could do was skin, hack up, cook, eat, and build himself a little shelter for the night against snow or rain with boughs or bark and the up-ended slider as a roof; he slept, at dawn ate cold meat left from last night, drank from the river, and went on. And on.

He played games with the slider to beguile the eventless hours: taking her up above fifteen feet where wind and air-layers made the aircushion unreliable and might tilt the slider right over unless he compensated instantly with the controls and his own weight; or forcing her down into the water in a wild commotion of foam and spray so she slapped and skipped and skittered all over the river, bucking like a colt. A couple of falls did not deter Falk from his amusements. The slider was set to hover at one foot if uncontrolled, and all he had to do was clamber back on, get to shore and make a fire if he had got chilled, or if not, simply go on. His clothes were weatherproof, and in any case the river could get him little wetter than the rain. The wintercloth kept him fairly warm; he was never really warm. His little camp-fires were strictly cookingfires. There was not enough dry wood in the whole Eastern Forest, probably, for a real fire, after the long days of rain, wet snow, mist, and rain again.

He became adept at slapping the slider downriver in a series of long, loud fish-leaps, diagonal bounces ending in a whack and a jet of spray. The noisiness of the process pleased him sometimes as a break in the smooth silent monotony of sliding along above the water between the trees and hills. He came whacking around a bend, banking his curves with delicate flicks of the control-arcs, then braked to a sudden soundless halt in mid-air. Far ahead down the steely-shining reach of the river a boat was coming towards him.

Each craft was in full view of the other; there was no slipping past in secret behind screening trees. Falk lay flat on the slider, gun in hand, and steered down the right bank of the river, up at ten feet so he had height advantage on the people in the boat.

They were coming along easily with one little triangular sail set. As they drew nearer, though the wind was blowing downriver, he could faintly hear the sound of their singing.

They came still nearer, paying no heed to him, still singing.

As far back as his brief memory went, music had always both drawn him and frightened him, filling him with a kind of anguished delight, a pleasure too near torment. At the sound of a human voice singing he felt most intensely that he was not human, that this game of pitch and time and tone was alien to him. But by that strangeness it drew him, and now unconsciously he slowed the slider to listen. Four or five voices sang, chiming and parting and interweaving in a more artful harmony than any he had heard. He did not understand the words. All the forest, the miles of gray water and gray sky, seemed to him to listen in intense, uncomprehending silence.

The song died away, chiming and fading into a little gust of laughter and talk. The slider and the boat were nearly abreast now, separated by a hundred yards or more. A tall, very slender man erect in the stern hailed Falk, a clear voice ringing easily across the water. Again he caught none of the words. In the steely winter light the man's hair and the hair of the four or five others in the boat shone fulvent gold, all the same, as if they were all of one close kin, or one kind. He could not see the faces clearly, only the red-gold hair, the slender figures bending forward to laugh and beckon. He could not make sure how many there were. For a second one face was distinct, a woman's face, watching him across the moving water and the wind. He had slowed the slider to a hover, and the boat too seemed to rest motionless on the river. "Follow us," the man called again, and this time, recognizing the language, Falk understood. It was the old League tongue, Galaktika. Like all Foresters, Falk had learned it from tapes and books, for the documents surviving from the Great Age were recorded in it, and it served as a common speech among men of different tongues. The Forest dialect was descended from Galaktika, but had grown far from it over a thousand years, and by now differed even from House to House. Travelers once had come to Zove's House from the coast of the Eastern Sea, speaking a dialect so divergent that they had found it easier to speak Galaktika with their hosts, and only then had Falk heard it used as a living tongue; otherwise it had only been the voice of a soundbook, or the murmur of the sleep teacher in his ear in the dark of a winter morning. Dreamlike and archaic it sounded now in the clear voice of the steersman. "Follow us, we go to the city!"

"To what city?"

"Our own," the man called, and laughed.

"The city that welcomes the traveler," another called; and another, in the tenor that had rung so sweetly in their singing, spoke more softly: "Those that mean no harm find no harm among us." And a woman called as if she smiled as she spoke, "Come out of the wilderness, traveler, and hear our music for a night."

The name they called him meant traveler, or messenger.

"Who are you?" he asked.

Wind blew and the broad river ran. The boat and the airboat hovered motionless amid the flow of air and water, together and apart as if in an enchantment.

"We are men."

With that reply the charm vanished, blown away like a sweet sound or fragrance in the wind from the east. Falk felt again a maimed bird struggle in his hands crying out human words in its piercing unhuman voice: now as then a chill went through him, and without hesitation, without decision, he touched the silver arc and sent the slider forward at full speed.

No sound came to him from the boat, though now the wind blew from them to him, and after a few moments, when hesitation had had time to catch up with him, he slowed his craft and looked back. The boat was gone. There was nothing on the broad dark surface of the water, clear back to the distant bend. After that Falk played no more loud games, but went on as swiftly and silent as he might; he lit no fire at all that night, and his sleep was uneasy. Yet something of the charm remained. The sweet voices had spoken of a city, Elonaae in the ancient tongue, and drifting downriver alone in mid-air and midwilderness Falk whispered the word aloud. Elonaae, the Place of Man: myriads of men gathered together, not one house but thousands of houses, great dwelling-places, towers, walls, windows, streets and the open places where streets met, the trading-houses told of in books where all the ingenuities of men's hands were made and sold, the palaces of government where the mighty met to speak together of the great works they did, the fields from which ships shot out across the years to alien suns: had Earth ever borne so wonderful a thing as the Places of Man?

They were all gone now. There remained only Es Toch, the Place of the Lie. There was no city in the Eastern Forest. No towers of stone and steel and crystal crowded with souls rose up from among the swamps and alder-groves, the rabbit-warrens and deer-trails, the lost roads, the broken, buried stones.

Yet the vision of a city remained with Falk almost like the dim memory of something he had once known. By that he judged the strength of the lure, the illusion which he had blundered safely through, and he wondered if there would be more such tricks and lures as he went on always westward, towards their source.

The days and the river went on, flowing with him, until on one still gray afternoon the world opened slowly out and out into an awesome breadth, an immense plain of muddy waters under an immense sky: the confluence of the Forest River with the Inland River. It was no wonder they had heard of the Inland River even in the deep ignorance of their isolation hundreds of miles back east in the Houses: it was so huge even the Shing could not hide it. A vast and shining desolation of yellow-gray waters spread from the last crowns and islets of the flooded Forest on and on west to a far shore of hills. Falk soared like one of the river's low-flying blue herons over the meetingplace of the waters. He landed on the western bank and was, for the first time in his memory, out of the Forest.

To north, west, and south lay rolling land, clumped with many trees, full of brush and thickets in the lowlands, but an open country, wide open. Falk with easy self-delusion looked west, straining his eyes to see the mountains. This open land, the Prairie, was believed to be very wide, a thousand miles perhaps; but no one in Zove's House really knew.

He saw no mountains, but that night he saw the rim of the world where it cut across the stars. He had never seen a horizon. His memory was all encircled with a boundary of leaves, of branches. But out here nothing was between him and the stars, which burned from the Earth's edge upwards in a huge bowl, a dome built of black patterned with fire. And beneath his feet the circle was completed; hour by hour the tilting horizon revealed the fiery patterns that lay eastward and beneath the Earth. He spent half the long

winter night awake, and was awake again when that tilting eastern edge of the world cut across the sun and daylight struck from outer space across the plains.

That day he went on due west by the compass, and the next day, and the next. No longer led by the meanderings Of the river, he went straight and fast. Running the slider was no such dull game as it had been over the water; here above uneven ground it bucked and ripped at each drop and rise unless he was very alert every moment at the controls. He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in. The weather was mild, a calm sunlit spell of late winter. Thinking back to the Forest he felt as if he had come out of stifling, secret darkness into light and air, as if the prairies were one enormous Clearing. Wild red cattle in herds of tens of thousands darkened the far plains like cloud-shadows. The ground was everywhere dark, but in places misted faintly with green where the first tiny double-leaved shoots of the hardiest grasses were opening; and above and below the ground was a constant scurrying and burrowing of little beasts, rabbits, badgers, coneys, mice, feral cats, moles, stripe-eyed arcturies, antelope, yellow yappers, the pests and pets of fallen civilizations. The huge sky whirred with wings. At dusk along the rivers flocks of white cranes settled, the water between the reeds and leafless cotton-woods mirroring their long legs and long uplifted wings.

Why did men no longer journey forth to see their world? Falk wondered, sitting by his campfire that burned like a tiny opal in the vast blue vault of the prairie twilight. Why did such men as Zove and Metock hide in the woods, never once in their lives coming out to see the wide splendor of the Earth? He now knew something that they, who had taught him everything, did not know: that a man could see his planet turn among the stars...

Next day under a lowering sky and through a cold wind from the north he went on, guiding the slider with a skill soon become habit. A herd of wild cattle covered half the plains south of his course, every one of the thousands and thousands of them standing facing the wind, white faces lowered in front of shaggy red shoulders. Between him and the first ranks of the herd for a mile the long gray grass bowed under the wind, and a gray bird flew towards him, gliding with no motion of its wings. He watched it, wondering at its straight gliding flight—not quite straight, for it turned without a wingbeat to intercept his course. It was coming very fast, straight at him. Abruptly he was alarmed, and waved his arm to frighten the creature away, then threw himself down flat and veered the slider, too late. The instant before it struck he saw the blind featureless head, the glitter of steel. Then the impact, a shriek of exploding metal, a sickening backward fall. And no end to the falling.