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[4 Nov 1999] When the Killing Stopped [5 Nov 1999] Worst Crimes of the Millennium [8 Nov 1999] Four Gates to the City [9 Nov 1999] Conviction of E. German Chief Upheld [10 Nov 1999] Prisoner's Dilemma [11 Nov 1999] The Mechanical Demon [12 Nov 1999] Psalm 23 [19 Nov 1999] Translator's Note [22 Nov 1999] Future Shocks |
[24 Nov 1999] Worlds Enough, and Time [26 Nov 1999] Everybody Knows [29 Nov 1999] The German Atomic Bomb [30 Nov 1999] The Endless Frontier [1 Dec 1999] The Scarlet Pimpernel [2 Dec 1999] Was the Great War Necessary? [3 Dec 1999] Bullet Proof Soul [6 Dec 1999] Rocannon's World I |
Rocannon's World IIBy URSULA K. LEGUIN It was a queer journey Rocannon made, to a place he had never seen and yet knew inside and out with the varying impressions of hundreds of different minds. For though there was no seeing with the mind-sense, there was tactile sensation and perception of space and spatial relationships, of time, motion, and position. From attending to such sensations over and over for hours on end in a hundred days of practice as he sat moveless in his room in Breygna Castle, he had acquired an exact though unvisualized and unverbalized knowledge of every building and area of the enemy base. And from direct sensation and extrapolation from it, he knew what the base was, and why it was here, and how to enter it, and where to find what he wanted from it. ... Only for a moment, when he had located the control room and found the ansible and sat down before it, did he permit his mind-sense to drift over to the ship that sat east of this one. There he picked up a vivid sensation of a dubious hand hovering over a white Bishop. ... As his fingers (left hand only, awkwardly) struck each key, the letter appeared simultaneously on a small black screen in a room in a city on a planet eight lightyears distant: URGENT TO THE LEAGUE PRESIDIUM. The FTL warship base of the Faradayan revolt is on Fomalhaut II, Southwest Continent... The 6 FTLs are not on the base but in open just SW of rocket field at edge of a forest and are camouflaged with net and light-absorbers. Do not attack indiscriminately as aborigines are not inculpated. This is Gaveral Rocannon of Fomalhaut Ethnographic Survey. I am the only survivor of the expedition. Am sending from ansible aboard grounded enemy FTL. About 5 hours till daylight here. |