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Aien Mhariseth, but certainly it's pleasant enough..."
They headed out of the hotel into that bright morning. "We're lucky with the weather, so far," Mellie said,
throw-ing Lee a thoughtful glance. She also had not missed the choice of tour guide. She's a spook,
Mellie had said. Lee had always known in a general way that they would all be watched when they got
here, but now she found it hard not to look at everyone they passed as if they were spies or in-formers.
Dil'Hemrev smiled that cool smile of hers with its faint edge of superiority, charming but very much there.
"It's summer here at the moment," she said, as they headed out of the main street in front of the hotel; "we
don't get a lot of wet weather until the fall. Even if we did, many of the streets we'll be going down this
morning are arcaded. Come along this way..."
She led them down streets that grew steadily smaller in scale, compared to the taller towers that seemed
to encircle the harbor proper. Lee looked around in some admiration as dil'Hemrev talked easily about
the history of the Alfen who'd first settled here, the industries they practiced, the trade routes they
established. The city itself, at least in its older buildings, had a look of both antiquity and calm pros-perity,
its architecture featuring both sharp and curved arches, and a great deal of what looked like a soft green
sandstone, the delicate carvings pleasantly blunted by time.
Lee walked along behind the others and let dil'Hemrev's narration wash over her as she looked at the
buildings—apartment houses and shops, rarely more than three or four stories high, with an odd tendency
for windows and flights of steps to come in groups of eleven. Something cultural? she wondered.
Something to do with religion, or superstition?
She resolved to ask dil'Hemrev about it later. But as they walked through the mild, pretty morning,
passing various Alfen in the streets and being courteously saluted by them, something began to itch in the
back of Lee's mind. The color of the sandstone started to look a little strange to her: watery, somehow.
She would glance at a worn, charming old build-ing that from the corner of her eye had seemed to waver
slightly, as if submerged, only to find it perfectly steady when she looked at it. I'm not trying to See...
she thought. Yet that was the effect she was getting ... as if she was bringing judicial Sight to bear on
something, and being resisted.
Or as if this whole place was under a glamour, Lee thought. Initially, the thought was laughable. There
were ways to lay a deceptive seeming over physical objects for short periods—appearances generated
by mind or by me-chanical instrumentality—that could deceive people without the Sight easily, and those
with it with more difficulty. But these required a considerable outlay of energy and couldn't be maintained
long. If what she was perceiving here was in-deed a glamour, it was one of a complexity and power Lee
had never seen before. And if it is a glamour ... why are they doing it? Are we being shown a kind
of Potemkin vil-lage?
What for?...
Lee tried to keep herself from showing any unease and followed along behind their guide, who was
talking again now about parts of the city that were said to have sunk under the sea. "There is an
earthquake fault not far from here," dil'Hemrev was saying. "Every thousand years or so it tends to slip;
that may have happened in prehistory, and so the legend persists..."
She was refraining from using the Sight just now, if only because it tended to make her walk into things.
But even as she and the group turned another corner into yet another tiny street, lined with small and cozy
buildings, Lee began to wonder whether the innate "fragility" of Ys she had per-ceived yesterday was just
that: perception, no more, well di-vorced from reality—or from any reality that mattered here and now.
For a psychoforencisist it was always a question: were you doing physical reality a disservice by
constantly prying around underneath it, trying to find out what it meant? And here more than usual, the
physical reality was so arresting—
But that was the problem. Lee trailed her hand idly along a building's stonework as she passed, looking
at it as she did: looking, just for a flash, judicially—though not very deep, and not long enough to be
caught at it. And then she glanced away again, as casually, for what she'd seen was at odds with what
she'd felt. The stone under her hand was stone, right enough: but it was being misrepresented by what
Lee saw. It was not a small building, but a tall one, possibly even a skyscraper. She was certain of that,
without even looking.
I'm being had, she thought. We all are.
And at all costs, I mustn't let them know that I know it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]