their captors had given her. They both had kept on their shirts for warmth.
"Did you contact the Embassy, Batikam?" she was asking, her voice shaking, as she pulled on her sandals.
"Oh, yes. I've been there and come back,
A 121 Ao
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
indeed. Sorry it took so long. I don't think I quite realised your situation here."
"Kergat has done his best for us," Teyeo said at once, stiffly.
"I can see that. At considerable risk- I think the risk from now on is low. That is . . ." He looked straight at Teyeo. "Rega, how do you feel about putting yourself in the hands of Hame?" he said. "Any problems with that?"
"Don't, Batikam," Solly said. "Trust him!"
Teyeo tied his shoe, straightened up, and said,
"We are all in the hands of the Lord Kamye."
Batikam laughed, the beautiful full laugh they remembered.
"In the Lord's hands, then," he said, and led them out of the room.
In the Arkamye it is said, "To live simply is most complicated."
Solly requested to stay on Werel, and after a recuperative leave at the seashore was sent as Observer to South Voe Deo. Teyeo went straight home, being informed that his father was very ill. After his father's death, he asked for indefinite leave from the Embassy Guard, and stayed on the farm with his mother until her death two years later. He and Solly, a continent apart, met only occasionally during those years.
When his mother died, Teyeo freed his family's assets by act of irrevocable manumission, deeded
over their farms to them, sold his now almost valueless property at auction, and went to the capital. He knew Solly was temporarily staying at the
asus 122 cA-s
Forgiveness Day
Embassy. Old Music told him where to find her. He found her in a small office of the palatial building.
She looked older, very elegant. She looked at him with a stricken and yet wary face. She did not come forward to greet or touch him. She said, "Teyeo, I've been asked to be the first Ambassador of the Ekumen to Yeowe."
He stood still.
"Just now — I just came from talking on the ansible with Hain —"
She put her face in her hands. "Oh, my God!" she said.
He said, "My congratulations, truly, Solly."
She suddenly ran at him, threw her arms around him, and cried, "Oh, Teyeo, and your mother died, I
never thought, I'm so sorry, I never, I never do — I thought we could — What are you going to do? Are you going to stay there?"
"I sold it," he said. He was enduring rather than returning her embrace. "I thought I might return to the service."
"You sold your farm? But I never saw it!"
"I never saw where you were born," he said-There was a pause. She stood away from him. and they looked at each other.
"You would come?" she said.
"I would," he said.
Several years after Yeowe entered the Ekumen, Mobile Solly Agat Terwa was sent as an Ekumenical liaison to Terra; later she went from there to Hain, where she served with great distinction as a Stabile. In all her travels and posts she
A 123 A
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
was accompanied by her husband, a Werelian army officer, a very handsome man, as reserved as she was outgoing. People who knew them knew their passionate pride and trust in each other.
Solly was perhaps the happier person, rewarded and fulfilled in her work; but Teyeo had no regrets.
He had lost his world, but he had held fast to the one noble thing.
„-»&) 124 a-*-.®
A Man of the People
Stse
He sat beside his father by the great irrigation tank. Fire-copied wings soared and dipped through the twilight air. Trembling circles enlarged, interlocked, faded on the still surface of the water. "What makes the water go that way?" he asked, softly because it was mysterious, and his father answered softly, "It's where the araha touch it when they drink." So he understood that in the center of each circle was a desire, a thirst. Then it was time to go home, and he ran before his father, pretending he was an araha flying, back
through the dusk into the steep, bright-windowed town.
His name was Mattinyehedarheddyuragamurus-kets Havzhiva. The word havzhiva means "ringed pebble," a small stone with a quartz inclusion running through it that shows as a stripe round it. The people
T»S 125 a®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
of Stse are particular about stones and names. Boys of the Sky, the Other Sky, and the Static Interference lineages are traditionally given the names of stones or desirable manly qualities such as courage, patience, and grace. The Yehedarhed family were traditionalists, strong on family and lineage. "If you know who your people are, you know who you are," said Havzhiva's father. Granite. A kind, quiet man who took his paternal responsibility seriously, he spoke often in sayings.
Granite was Havzhiva's mother's brother, of course; that is what a father was. The man who had helped his mother conceive Havzhiva lived on a farm; he stopped in sometimes to say hello when he was in town. Havzhiva's mother was the Heir of the Sun. Sometimes Havzhiva envied his cousin Aloe, whose father was only six years older than she was and played with her like a big brother. Sometimes he envied children whose mothers were unimportant. His mother was always fasting or dancing or traveling, had no husband, and rarely slept at home. It was exciting to be with her, but difficult. He had to be important when he was with her. It was always a relief to be home with nobody there but his father and his undemanding grandmother and her sister the Winter Dancekeeper and her husband and whichever Other Sky relatives from farms and other pueblos were visiting at the moment.
There were only two Other Sky households in Stse, and the Yehedarheds were more hospitable than the Doyefarads, so all the relatives came and stayed with them. They would have been hard put to afford it if the visitors hadn't brought all sorts of farm stuff, and if Tovo hadn't been Heir of the Sun.
csAs 126 is*-s>
A Man of the People
She got paid richly for teaching and for performing the rituals and handling the protocol at other pueblos. She gave all she earned to her family, who spent it all on their relatives and on ceremonies, festivities, celebrations, and funerals.
"Wealth can't stop," Granite said to Havzhiva.
"It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You keep it, it gets stopped — that's a heart attack. You die."
"Will Hezhe-old-man die?" the boy asked. Old Hezhe never spent anything on a ritual or a relative;
and Havzhiva was an observant child.
"Yes," his father answered. "His araha is already dead."
Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular quality of one's gender, manhood or womanhood; generosity; the savor of good food or wine.
It is also the name of the plumed, fire-colored, quick-flying mammal that Havzhiva used to see come to drink at the irrigation ponds, tiny flames darting above the darkening water in the evening.
Stse is an almost-island, separated from the mainland of the great south continent by marshes and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gather to mate and nest. Ruins of an enormous bridge are visible on the landward side, and another halfsunk fragment of min is the basis of the town's boat pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest of the landscape. A child standing on the pier to watch his mother sail off to the mainland might wonder why people had bothered to build a bridge when there were boats and flyers to ride. They must
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
have liked to walk, he thought. I'd rather sail in a boat. Or fly.
But the silver flyers flew over Stse, not landing, going from somewhere else to somewhere else,
where historians lived. Plenty of boats came in and out of Stse harbor, but the people of his lineage did not sail them. They lived in the Pueblo of Stse and did the things that their people and their lineage did. They learned what people needed to learn, and lived their knowledge.
"People have to learn to be human," his father said. "Look at Shell's baby. It keeps saying 'Teach me! Teach me!'"
"Teach me," in the language of Stse, is "aowa."
"Sometimes the baby says 'ngaaaaa,'" Havzhiva observed.
Granite nodded. "She can't speak human words very well yet," he said.
Havzhiva hung around the baby that winter, teaching her to say human words. She was one of his Etsahin relatives, his second cousin once removed, visiting with her mother and her father and his wife. The family watched Havzhiva with. approval as he patiently said "baba" and "gogo" to
the fat, placid, staring baby. Though he had no sister and thus could not be a father, if he went on studying education with such seriousness, he would probably have the honor of being the adopted father of a baby whose mother had no brother.
He also studied at school and in the temple, studied dancing, and studied the local version of soccer. He was a serious student. He was good at soccer but not as good as his best friend, a Buried Cable girl named lyan lyan (a traditional name for Buried
is*® 128 crva
A Man of the People
Cable girls, a seabird name). Until they were twelve, boys and girls were educated together and alike. lyan lyan was the best soccer player on the children's team. They always had to put her on the other side at halftime so that the score would even out and they could go home for dinner without anybody having lost or won badly. Part of her advantage was that she had got her height very early, but most of it was pure skill.
"Are you going to work at the temple?" she asked Havzhiva as they sat on the porch roof of her house watching the first day of the Enactment of the Unusual Gods, which took place every eleven years. No unusual things were happening yet, and the amplifiers weren't working well, so the music in the plaza sounded faint and full of static. The two children kicked their heels and talked quietly. "No, I think I'll leam weaving from my father," the boy said.
"Lucky you. Why do only stupid boys get to use looms?" It was a rhetorical question, and Havzhiva paid it no attention. Women were not weavers. Men did not make bricks- Other Sky people did not operate boats but did repair electronic devices. Buried Cable people did not castrate animals but did maintain generators. There were things one could do and things one could not do; one did those things for people and people did those things for one. Coming up on puberty, lyan lyan and Havzhiva were making a first choice of their first profession. lyan lyan had already chosen to apprentice in house-building and repair, although the adult soccer team would probably claim a good deal of her time.
A globular silver person with spidery legs came csAs 129 aA-®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
down the street in long bounds, emitting a shower of sparks each time it landed. Six people in red with tall white masks ran after it, shouting and throwing speckled beans at it. Havzhiva and lyan lyan joined in the shouting and craned from the roof to see it go bounding round the corner towards the plaza. They both knew that this Unusual God was Chert, a young man of the Sky lineage, a goalkeeper for the adult soccer team; they both also knew that it was a manifestation of deity, A god called Zarstsa or Ball-Lighting was using Chert to come into town for the ceremony, and had just bounded down the street pursued by shouts of fear and praise and showers of fertility. Amused and entertained by the spectacle, they judged with some acuteness the quality of the god's costume, the jumping, and the fireworks, and were awed by the strangeness and power of the event. They did not say anything for a long time after the god had passed, but sat dreamily in the
foggy sunlight on the roof. They were children who lived among the daily gods. Now they had seen one of the unusual gods. They were content. Another one would come along, before long. Time is nothing to the gods.
At fifteen, Havzhiva and lyan lyan became gods together.
Stse people between twelve and fifteen were vigilantly watched; there would be a great deal of grief and deep, lasting shame if a child of the house, the family, the lineage, the people, should change being prematurely and without ceremony. Virginity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly abandoned; sexual
aA 130 -rw A Man of the People
activity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly undertaken. It was assumed that a boy would masturbate and make some homosexual experiments, but not a homosexual pairing; adolescent boys who paired off, and those who incurred suspicion of try-
ing to get alone with a girl, were endlessly lectured and hectored and badgered by older men. A grown man who made sexual advances to a virgin of either sex would forfeit his professional status, his religious offices, and his houseright.
Changing being took a while. Boys and girls had to be taught how to recognise and control their fertility, which in Hainish physiology is a matter of personal decision. Conception does not happen: it is performed. It cannot take place unless both the woman and the man have chosen it. At thirteen, boys began to be taught the technique of deliberately releasing potent sperm. The teachings were full of warnings, threats, and scoldings, though the boys were never actually punished. After a year or two came a series of tests of achieved potency, a threshold ritual, frightening, formal, extremely secret, exclusively male. To have passed the tests was, of course, a matter of intense pride; yet Havzhiva, like most boys, came to his final change-of-being rites very apprehensive, hiding fear under a sullen stoicism.
The girls had been differently taught. The people of Stse believed that a woman's cycle of fertility
made it easy for her to leam when and how to conceive, and so the teaching was easy too- Girls' threshold rituals were celebratory, involving praise rather than shame, arousing anticipation rather than fear. Women had been telling them for years,
'S9.S131 G-*-®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
with demonstrations, what a man wants, how to make him stand up tall, how to show him what a woman wants. During this training, most girls asked if they couldn't just go on practicing with each other, and got scolded and lectured. No, they couldn't. Once they had changed status they could do as they pleased, but everybody must go through "the twofold door" once.
The change-of-being rites were held whenever the people in charge of them could get an equal number of fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the pueblo and its farms. Often a boy or girl had to be borrowed from one of the related pueblos to even out the number or to pair the lineages correctly.
Magnificently masked and costumed, silent, the participants danced and were honored all day in the plaza and in the house consecrated to the ceremony;
in the evening they ate a ritual meal in silence; then they were led off in pairs by masked and silent ritualists. Many of them kept their masks on, hiding their fear and modesty in that sacred anonymity.
Because Other Sky people have sex only with Original and Buried Cable people and they were the only ones of those lineages in the group, lyan lyan and Havzhiva had known they must be paired. They had recognised each other as soon as the dancing began- When they were left alone in the consecrated room, they took off their masks at once. Their eyes met. They looked away.
They had been kept apart most of the time for the past couple of years, and completely apart for the last months. Havzhiva had begun to get his growth, and was nearly as tall as she was now.
Each saw a stranger. Decorous and serious, they
Ae 132 As
A Man of the People
approached each other, each thinking, "Let's get it over with." So they touched, and that god entered them, becoming them; the god for whom they were the doorway; the meaning for which they were the word. It was an awkward god at first, clumsy, but became an increasingly happy one.
When they left the consecrated house the next day, they both went to lyan lyan's house. "Havzhiva will live here," lyan lyan said, as a woman has a right to say. Everybody in her family made him welcome and none of them seemed surprised.
When he went to get his clothes from his grandmother's house, nobody there seemed surprised, everybody congratulated him, an old woman cousin from Etsahin made some embarrassing jokes, and his father said, "You are a man of this house now;
come back for dinner."
So he slept with lyan lyan at her house, ate breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at his house, and went on with his education, which now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the power broadlooms and with the nature of the cosmos. He and lyan lyan both played on the adult soccer team.
He began to see more of his mother, because when he was seventeen she asked him if he wanted to learn Sun-stuff with her, the rites and protocols of trade, arranging fair exchange with farmers of Stse and bargaining with other pueblos of the lineages and with foreigners. The rituals were learned by rote, the protocols were learned by practice-Havzhiva went with his mother to the market, to outlying farms, and across the bay to the mainland
s»® 133 »»-s'
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
pueblos. He had been getting restless with weaving, which filled his mind with patterns that left no room outside themselves. The travel was welcome, the work was interesting, and he admired Tovo's authority, wit, and tact. Listening to her and a group of old merchants and Sun people maneuvering around a deal was an education in itself. She did not push him; he played a very minor role in these negotiations. Training in complicated business such as Sun-stuff took years, and there were other, older people in training before him. But she was satisfied with him. "You have a knack for persuading," she told him one afternoon as they were sailing home across the golden water, watching the roofs of Stse solidify out of mist and sunset light. "You could inherit the Sun, if you wanted to."
Do I want to? he thought. There was no response in him but a sense of darkening or softening, which he could not interpret. He knew he liked the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It gave him something to do which he didn't know how to do, and he liked that.
"The woman who used to live with your father is coming for a visit," Tovo said.
Havzhiva pondered. Granite had never married.
The women who had borne the children Granite
sired both lived in Stse and always had. He asked nothing, a polite silence being the adult way of signifying that one doesn't understand.
"They were young. No child came," his mother said. "She went away after that. She became a historian."
"Ah," Havzhiva said in pure, blank surprise.
A Man of the People
He had never heard of anybody who became a historian. It had never occurred to him that a person could become one, any more than a person could become a Stse- You were born what you were. You were what you were born.
The quality of his polite silence was desperately intense, and Tovo certainly was not unaware of it. Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a question needed an answer. She said nothing.
As their sail slackened and the boat slid in toward the pier built on the ancient bridge foundations, he asked, "Is the historian Buried Cable or
Original?"
"Buried Cable," his mother said. "Oh, how stiff I am! Boats are such stiff creatures!" The woman who had sailed them across, a fenywoman of the Grass lineage, rolled her eyes, but said nothing in defense of her sweet, supple little boat.
"A relative of yours is coming?" Havzhiva said to lyan lyan that night.
"Oh, yes, she templed in." lyan lyan meant a message had been received in the information center of Stse and transmitted to the recorder in her household. "She used to live in your house, my mother said. Who did you see in Etsahin today?"
"Just some Sun people. Your relative is a historian?"
"Crazy people," lyan lyan said with indifference, and came to sit naked on naked Havzhiva and massage his back.
The historian arrived, a little short thin woman
of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Havzhiva met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes
?*e' 135 wvs
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about her showed that she had broken the social contract, done things no woman does, ignored her lineage, become another kind of being. For all he knew she was married to the father of her children, and wove at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the household took her off for a returning-traveler ceremony, just as if she were still one of them.
He kept wondering about her, wondering what she had done. He asked lyan lyan questions about her till lyan lyan snapped at him, "I don't know what she does, I don't know what she thinks. Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!"
When Havzhiva realised that he was afraid to do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in the presence of a god who was requiring something of him. He went up to one of the sitting holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town. Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation tanks shone silver among fields and orchards. Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking out to sea and into his soul. He came back down to his own house and slept there. When he turned up for breakfast at lyan lyan's house she looked at him and said nothing.
"I was fasting," he said.
She shrugged a Mttle. "So eat," she said, sitting down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He did not, though he was expected at the looms.
"Mother of All Children," he said to the historian, giving her the most respectful title a man of one
A-*e 136 '*a*s'
A Man of the People
lineage can give a woman of another, "there are things I do not know, which you know."
"What I know I will teach you with pleasure," she said, as ready with the formula as if she had lived here all her life. She then smiled and forestalled his next oblique question. "What was given me I give," she said, meaning there was no question of payment or obligation. "Come on, let's go to the plaza."
Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot days under the arcades, and watches other people come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little more public than Havzhiva would have liked, but he was obedient to his god and his teacher.
They sat in a niche of the fountain's broad base and conversed, greeting people every sentence or two with a nod or a word.
"Why did —" Havzhiva began, and stuck.
"Why did I leave? Where did I go?" She cocked
her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that those were the questions he wanted answered. "Yes. Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no child, and he wanted a child. . . - You look like he did then. I like to look at you. ... So, I was unhappy- Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew how to do everything here. Or that's what I thought."
Havzhiva nodded once.
"I worked at the temple. I'd read messages that came in or came by and wonder what they were about. I thought, all that's going on in the world!
Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
some of them in other places in the temple: who are you, what do you do, what is it like there. . . . Right away they put me in touch with a group of historians who were born in the pueblos, who look out for people like me, to make sure they don't waste time or offend a god."
This language was completely familiar to Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.
"I asked them questions. They asked me questions. Historians have to do a lot of that, I found out they have schools, and asked if I could go to one. Some of them came here and talked to me and my family and other people, finding out if there would be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo. There hadn't been a historian from here for four hundred years."
She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but the young man listened with unchanging, intense seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.
"People here were upset, but nobody was angry.
So after they talked about it, I left with those people. We flew to Kathhad. There's a school there. 1 was twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed being. I learned to be a historian."
"How?" he asked, after a long silence.
She drew a long breath. "By asking hard ques-
tions," she said. "Like you're doing now.... And by giving up all the knowledge I had — throwing it away."
"How?" he asked again, frowning. "Why?"
"Like this. When I left, I knew 1 was a Buried Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow that knowledge. There, I'm not a Buried Cable woman. I'm a woman. I can have sex with any per-
3-hi® 138 -i-*-®
A Man of the People
son I choose. I can take up any profession I choose. Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and no use, anywhere else in the universe." She was as intense as he, now. "There are two kinds of knowledge, local and universal. There are two kinds of time, local and historical."
"Are there two kinds of gods?"
"No," she said. "There are no gods there. The gods are here."
She saw his face change.
She said after a while, "There are souls, there.
Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years ago. Minds and souls of people from worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of them with their own knowledge, their own history.
The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred. That's not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I learned, here and there, only increased it. There's nothing that is not sacred." She spoke slowly and quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo. "You can choose the local sacredness or the great one. In the end they're the same. But not in the life one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.' The Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river."
After a while he said, "Rocks are the river's bed."
She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again,
appraising and affectionate. "So I came home," she said. "For a rest."
"But you're not — you're no longer a woman of your lineage?"
As> 139 a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
"Yes; here. Still. Always."
"But you've changed being. You'll leave again."
"Yes," she said decisively. "One can be more than one kind of being. I have work to do, there."
He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive. "What good is work without the gods? It makes no sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don't have the mind to understand."
She smiled at the double meaning. "I think you'll understand what you choose to understand, Man of my People," she said, addressing him formally to show that he was free to leave when he wanted.
He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to work, filling his mind and world with the great repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.
That night he made it up to lyan lyan so ardently that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god had come back to them burning, consuming.
" 1 want a child," Havzhiva said as they lay melded, sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and breath all mingled in the musky dark.
"Oh," lyan lyan sighed, not wanting to talk, decide, resist. "Maybe . . . Later , . . Soon . .."
"Now," he said, "now."
"No," she said softly. "Hush."
He was silent. She slept.
More than a year later, when they were nineteen, lyan lyan said to him before he put out the light, "I
want a baby."
"It's too soon."
"Why? My brother's nearly thirty. And his wife J-»® 140 -xAs A Man of the People
would like a baby around. After it's weaned I'll come sleep with you at your house. You always said you'd like that."
"It's too soon," he repeated. "I don't want it."
She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing, reasonable tone. "What do you want, Havzhiva?"
"I don't know."
"You're going away. You're going to leave the People. You're going crazy. That woman, that damned witch!"
"There are no witches," he said coldly. "That's stupid talk. Superstition."
They stared at each other, the dear friends, the lovers.
"Then what's wrong with you? If you want to move back home, say so. If you want another woman, go to her. But you could give me my child, first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your araha?" She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce, unyielding.
He put his face in his hands. "Nothing is right," he said. "Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to do because that's how it's done, but it — it doesn't make sense — there are other ways —"
"There's one way to live rightly," lyan lyan said,
"that I know of. And this is where I live. There's one way to make a baby. If you know another, you can do it with somebody else!" She cried hard after this, convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.
When she could speak, she leaned her head
against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse voice, "To have when you go, Havzhiva."
At that he wept for shame and pity, and whis-
FOURWAYSTO FORGIVENESS
pered, "Yes, yes." But that night they lay holding each other, trying to console each other, till they fell asleep like children.
"I am ashamed," Granite said painfully.
"Did you make this happen?" his sister asked, dry.
"How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now my son. Was I too stern with him?"
"No, no."
"Too lax, then. I didn't teach him well. Why is he crazy?"
"He isn't crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I
think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way children do. I would answer: That's how it is, that's how it's done. He understood. But his mind has no peace. My mind is like that, if I don't remind myself. Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus? why this way, not another way? I answered: Because in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are:
that is the truth. But he wasn't satisfied by the truth. He isn't crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can't walk. He can't walk with us. So, if a man can't walk, what should he do?"
"Sit still and sing," Granite said slowly.
"If he can't sit still? He can fly."
"Fly?"
"They have wings for him, brother."
"1 am ashamed," Granite said, and hid his face in his hands.
'-r*eS 142 3-a.S A Man of the People
Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to Mezha at Kathhad: "Your pupil wishes to join you." There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed the historian for upsetting her son's balance, offcen-tering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or her brother's humiliation matter? What they had to do was grieve.
As the boat for Daha sailed away, Havzhiva looked back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields, hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls, black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof. As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the town the heights of the island came in view, grey-blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the
clouds, white skeins of marsh birds Hying.
At the port in Daha, though he was farther from Stse than he had ever been and people had a strange accent, he could understand them and read the signs. He had never seen signs before, but their usefulness was evident. Using them, he found his way to the waiting room for the Kathhad flyer. People were sleeping on the cots provided, in their own blankets. He found an empty cot and lay on it, wrapped in the blanket Granite had woven for him years ago. After a short, strange night, people came in with fruit and hot drinks. One of them gave
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
Havzhiva his ticket. None of the passengers knew anyone else; they were all strangers; they kept their eyes down. Announcements were made, and they all went outside and went into the machine, the flyer.
Havzhiva made himself look at the world as it fell out from under him. He whispered the Staying Chant soundlessly, steadily. The stranger in the seat next to him joined in.
When the world began to tilt and rush up towards him he shut his eyes and tried to keep breathing.
One by one they filed out of the flyer onto a
flat, black place where it was raining. Mezha came to
him through the rain, saying his name. "Havzhiva,
Man of my People, welcome! Come on. There's a place for you at the School."
Kathhad and Ve
By the third year at Kathhad Havzhiva knew a great many things that distressed him. The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
For instance, he knew now that historians did not study history. No human mind could encompass the history of Hain; three million years of it. The events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras, tike layers of metamorphic rock, were so compressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding A Man of the People
millennia and their infinite events that one could reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to find some miraculously preserved document from a thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion rocket has landed on Ve. . . . But there had been uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies, democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods, infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs, an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next?
You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
To Havzhiva the knowledge that his life, any life
was one flicker of light for one moment on the surface of that river was sometimes distressing, sometimes restful.
What the historians mostly did was explore, in an easy and unhurried fashion, the local reach and moment of the river, Hain itself had been for several thousand years in an unexciting period marked by the coexistence of small, stable, self-contained societies, currently called pueblos, with a high-technology, low-density network of cities and information centers, currently called the temple. Many of the people of the temple, the historians, spent their lives traveling to and gathering knowledge about the other
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
inhabited planets of the nearby Orion Arm, colonised by their ancestors a couple of million years ago during the Fore-Eras. They acknowledged no motive in these contacts and explorations other than curiosity and fellow-feeling. They were getting in touch with their long-lost relatives. They called that greater network of worlds by an alien word, Ekumen, which meant "the household."
By now Havzhiva knew that everything he had learned in Stse, all the knowledge he had had, could be labeled: typical pueblo culture of northwestern coastal South Continent. He knew that the beliefs, practices, kinship systems, technologies, and intellectual organising patterns of the different pueblos were entirely different one from another, wildly different, totally bizarre — )ust as bizarre as the system of Stse — and he knew that such systems were to be met with on every Known World that contained human populations living in small, stable groups with a technology adapted to their environment, a low, constant birth rate, and a political life based on consent.
At first such knowledge had been intensely distressing. It had been painful. It had made him ashamed and angry. First he thought the historians kept their knowledge from the pueblos, then he thought the pueblos kept knowledge from their own people. He accused; his teachers mildly denied. No, they said. You were taught that certain things were true, or necessary; and those things are true and necessary. They are the local knowledge of Stse.
They are childish, irrational beliefs' he said.
They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational.
sA-s 146 x**s A Man of the People
Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be learned- The way they know in the Household isn't taught in the pueblos, but it wasn't hidden from you, by your people or by us- Everybody anywhere on Hain has access to all the information in the temple.
This was true; he knew it to be true- He could have found out for himself, on the screens of the temple of Stse, what he was learning now. Some of his fellow students from other pueblos had indeed taught themselves how to learn from the screens, and had entered history before they ever met a his-
torian.
Books, however, books that were the body of history, the durable reality of it, barely existed'in Stse, and his anger sought justification there. You keep the books from us, all the books in the Library of Hain! No, they said mildly. The pueblos choose not to have many books. They prefer the live knowledge, spoken or passing on the screens, passing from the breath to the breath, from living mind to living mind. Would you give up what you learned that way? Is it less than, is it inferior to what you've learned here from books? There's more than one kind of knowledge, said the historians.
By his third year, Havzhiva had decided that there was more than one kind of people. The pueblans, able to accept that existence is fundamentally arbitrary, enriched the world intellectually and spiritually. Those who couldn't be satisfied with
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
mystery were more likely to be of use as historians, enriching the world intellectually and materially.
Meanwhile he had got quite used to people who had no lineage, no relatives, and no religion. Sometimes he said to himself with a glow of pride, "I am a citizen of all history, of the millions of years of Hainish history, and my country is the whole galaxy!" At other times he felt miserably small, and he would leave his screens or his books and go look for company among his fellow students, especially the young women who were so friendly, so companionable.
At the age of twenty-four Havzhiva, or Zhiv as he was now called, had been at the Ekumenicat School on Ve for a year.
Ve, the next planet out from Hain, was colonised eons ago, the first step in the vast Hainish expansion of the Fore-Eras. It has gone through many phases as a satellite or partner of Hainish civilizations; at this period it is inhabited entirely by historians and Aliens.
In their current (that is, for at least the past hundred millennia) mood of not tampering, the Hainish have let Ve return to its own norms of coldness, dryness, and bleakness — a climate within human tolerance, but likely to truly delight only people from the Terran Altiplano or the uplands of Chiffewar. Zhiv was out hiking through this stem landscape with his companion, friend, and lover, Tiu.
They had met two years before, in Kathhad- At that point Zhiv had still been reveling in the availability of all women to himself and himself to all
•r*.s 148 s-s-
A Man of the People
women, a freedom that had only gradually dawned on him, and about which Mezha had warned him gently. "You will think there are no rules," she said. "There are always rules." He had been conscious mainly of his own increasingly fearless and careless transgression of what had been the rules- Not all the women wanted to have sex, and not all the women wanted to have sex with men, as he had soon discovered, but that still left an infinite variety. He found that he was considered attractive. And being Hainish was a definite advantage with the Alien women.
The genetic alteration that made the Hainish able to control their fertility was not a simple bit of gene-splicing; involving a profound and radical reconstruction of human physiology, it had probably taken up to twenty-five generations to establish — so say the historians of Hain, who think they know in general terms the steps such a transformation must have followed. However the ancient Hainish did it, they did not do it for any of their colonists. They left the peoples of their colony worlds to work out their own solutions to the First Heterosexual Problem. These have been, of course, various and ingenious; but in all cases so far, to avoid conception you have to do something or have done something or take something or use something — unless you have sex with the Hainish.
Zhiv had been outraged when a girl from Beldene asked him if he was sure he wouldn't get her pregnant. "How do you know?" she said. "Maybe I should take a zapper just to be safe." Insulted in the quick of his manhood, he disentangled himself, said, "Maybe it is only safe not to be with me," and
•sAs 149 tCT-®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
stalked out. Nobody else questioned his integrity, fortunately, and he cruised happily on, until he met Tiu.
She was not an Alien. He had sought out women from offworld; sleeping with Aliens added exoticism to transgression, or, as he put it, was an enrichment of knowledge such as every historian should seek- But Tiu was Hainish. She had been born and brought up in Darranda, as had her ancestors before her. She was a child of the Historians as he was a child of the People. He realised very soon that this bond and division was far greater than any mere foreignness: that their unlikeness was true difference and their likeness was true kinship. She was the country he had left his own country to discover. She was what he sought to be. She was what he sought.
What she had — so it seemed to him — was perfect equilibrium. When he was with her he felt that for the first time in his life he was learning to walk.
To walk as she did: effortless, unself-conscious as an
animal, and yet conscious, careful, keeping in mind alt that might unbalance her and using it as tightrope walkers use their long poles. . . . This, he thought, this is a dweller in true freedom of mind, this is a woman free to be fully human, this perfect measure, this perfect grace.
He was utterly happy when he was with her. For a long time he asked nothing beyond that, to be with her. And for a long time she was wary of him, gentle but distant. He thought she had every right to keep her distance. A pueblo boy, a fellow who couldn't tell his uncle from his father — he knew what he was, here, in the eyes of the ill-natured and the insecure. Despite their vast knowledge of human
svs 150 "<»
A Man of the People
ways of being, historians retained the vast human capacity for bigotry. Tiu had no such prejudices, but what did he have to offer her? She had and was everything. She was complete. Why should she look at him? If she would only let him look at her, be
with her, it was all he wanted.
She looked at him, liked him, found him appealing and a little frightening. She saw how he wanted her, how he needed her, how he had made her into the center of his life and did not even know it. That would not do. She tried to be cold, to turn him away. He obeyed. He did not plead. He stayed away.
But after fifteen days he came to her and said,
"Tiu, I cannot live without you," and knowing that he was speaking the plain truth she said. "Then live with me a while/' For she had missed the passion his presence filled the air with. Everybody else seemed so tame, so balanced.
Their lovemaking was an.immediate, immense, and continual delight. Tiu was amazed at herself, at her obsession with Zhiv, at her letting him pull her out of her orbit so far. She had never expected to adore anybody, let alone to be adored. She had led an orderly life, in which the controls were individual and internal, not social and external as they had been in Zhiv's life in Stse. She knew what she wanted to be and do. There was a direction in her, a true
north, that she would always follow. Their first year together was a series of continual shifts and changes in their relationship, a kind of exciting love dance, unpredictable and ecstatic. Very gradually, she began to resist the tension, the intensity, the ecstasy. It was lovely but it wasn't right, she thought. She
(•"a® 151 St-S
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
wanted to go on. That constant direction began to pull her away from him again; and then he fought for his life against it.
That was what he was doing, after a long day's hike in the Desert of Asu Asi on Ve, in their miraculously warm Gethenian-made tent. A dry, icy wind moaned among cliffs of crimson stone above them, polished by the endless winds to a shine like lacquer and carved by a lost civilization with lines of some vast geometry.
They might have been brother and sister, as they sat in the glow of the Cnabe stove: their red-bronze coloring was the same, their thick, glossy, black hair, their fine, compact body type. The pueblan decorum and quietness of Zhiv's movements and voice met in her an articulate, quicker, more vivid response.
But she spoke now slowly, almost stiffly.
"Don't force me to choose, Zhiv," she said. "Ever since I started in the Schools I've wanted to go to Terra. Since before. When I was a kid. All my life. Now they offer me what I want, what I've worked for. How can you ask me to refuse?"
"I don't."
"But you want me to put it off. If I do, I may lose the chance forever. Probably not. But why risk it — for one year? You can follow me next year!"
He said nothing.
"If you want to," she added stiffly. She was always too ready to forgo her claim on him. Perhaps she had never believed fully in his love for her. She did not think of herself as lovable, as worthy of his passionate loyalty. She was frightened by it, felt inadequate, false. Her self-respect was an intellectu-
a* s 152 -•-•-s'
A Man of the People
al thing. "You make a god of me," she had told him, and did not understand when he replied with happy seriousness, "We make the god together."
"I'm sorry," he said now. "It's a different form of reason. Superstition, if you like. I can't help it, Tiu. Terra is a hundred and forty light-years away. If you go, when you get there, I'll be dead."
"You will not! You'll have lived another year here, you'll be on your way there, you'll arrive a year after I do!"
"I know that. Even in Stse we teamed that," he said patiently. "But I'm superstitious. We die to each other if you go. Even in Kathhad you learned that."
"I didn't. It's not true. How can you ask me to
give up this chance for what you admit is a superstition? Be fair, Zhiv!"
After a long silence, he nodded.
She sat stricken, understanding that she had won. She had won badly.
She reached across to him, trying to comfort him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But it wasn't betrayal — she rejected the word at once. She wouldn't betray him. They were in love. They loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two years at the most. They were adults, they must not cling together like children. Adult relationships are based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told herself all these things as she said them to him. He said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood singing in his ears, he lay awake and thought, "It has died unborn. It was never conceived."
They stayed together in their little apartment at
-rMs 153 a.'-s'
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left. They made love cautiously, gently, talked about history and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu had to prepare herself to work with the team she was going with, studying the Terran concepts of hierarchy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy generation on Werel. They worked hard. Their friends gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment on the South Campus of the School. There a friend found him three days later sitting at his desk in a curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the friend recognised this state and called in the medicine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors). Having ascertained that he was from one of the Southern pueblos, the medicine man said,
"Havzhiva! The god cannot die in you here!"
After a long silence the young man said softly in a voice which did not sound like his voice, "I need to go home."
"That is not possible now," said the medicine man. "But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I find a person able to address the god." He promptly put out a call for students who were ex-People of the South- Four responded. They sat all night with Havzhiva singing the Staying Chant in two languages and four dialects, until Havzhiva joined them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarsely, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.
He woke in his own room. An old woman was
•J-AS 154 TAS>
A Man of the People
having a conversation with nobody beside him. "You aren't here," she said. "No, you are mistaken. You can't die here. It would not be right, it would be quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place. This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the
way home? Here it is. Listen." She began singing in a thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless song that was familiar to Havzhiva, as if he had heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old woman went on talking to nobody.
When he woke again she was gone. He never knew who she was or where she came from; he never asked- She had spoken and sung in his own language, in the dialect of Stse-
He was not going to die now, but he was very unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow. There are paths endlessly winding under great trees, warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay till he was recovered.
He began to speak into his noter, after he had been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the
sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way of the little recording machine. "What you select from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than everything," he said, watching the branches of the old trees dark against the sky. "What you build up
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
your world from, your local, intelligible, rational, coherent world, is nothing less than everything.
And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is partial — infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
All human knowledge is local. Every life, each human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal momentary glitter of a reflection of . . ." His voice ceased; the silence of the glade among the great trees continued.
After forty-five days he returned to the School.
He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leaving social science, Tiu's field, for Ekumenical service training, which was intellectually closely related but led to a different kind of work. The change would lengthen his time at the School by at least a year, after which if he did well he could hope for a post with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party for him.
"I thought you were aiming for Terra," said one of his less-astute classmates. "All that stuff about war and slavery and class and caste and gender — isn't that Terran history?"
"It's current events in Werel," Havzhiva said.
He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from the Hospital as Havzhiva.
Somebody else was stepping on the unastute classmate's foot, but she paid no attention. "I thought you were going to follow Tiu," she said. "
I thought that's why you never slept with anybody.
37-B® 156 SSA>
A Man of the People
God, if I'd only known!" The others winced, but Havzhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.
In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had betrayed and forsaken lyan lyan, so Tiu had betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back and no going forward. So he must turn aside.
Though he was one of them, he could no longer live with the People; though he had become one of them, he did not want to live with the historians. So he must go live among Aliens.
He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he thought. But he knew that the two long, intense disciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and that of history, had given him an uncommon knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfillment.
The medicine man came to visit him the day before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a while saying nothing. Havzhiva sat with him. He had long been used to silence, and still sometimes
forgot that it was not customary among historians.
"What's wrong?" the medicine man said. It seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its meditative tone; at any rate, Havzhiva made no answer.
"Please stand up," the medicine man said, and when Havzhiva had done so, "Now walk a tittle." He walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him. "You're out of balance," he said. "Did you know it?"
"Yes."
"I could get a Staying Chant together this evening."
"It's all right," Havzhiva said. "I've always been off-balance."
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
"There's no need to be," the medicine man said.
"On the other hand, maybe it's best, since you're going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life."
They embraced formally, as historians did, especially when as now it was absolutely certain that they would never see one another again. Havzhiva had to give and get a good many formal embraces that day. The next day he boarded the Terraces of Darranda and went across the darkness.
Yeowe
During his journey of eighty light-years at NAFAL speed, his mother died, and his father, and lyan lyan, everyone he had known in Stse, everyone he knew in Kathhad and on Ve. By the time the ship landed, they had all been dead for years. The child lyan lyan had borne had lived and grown old and died.
This was a knowledge he had lived with ever since he saw Tiu board her ship, leaving him to die. Because of the medicine man, the four people who had sung for him, the old woman, and the waterfalls ofTes, he had lived; but he had lived with that knowledge.
Other things had changed as well. At the time he left Ve, Werel's colony planet Yeowe had been a slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over, Yeowe had declared its independence, and the institution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to disintegrate.
Havzhiva longed to observe this terrible and ffcs. 158 A*e>
A Man of the People
magnificent process, but the Embassy sent him promptly off to Yeowe. A Hainishman called Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdardon Aya counseled him before he left. "If you want danger, it's dangerous," he said, "and if you like hope, it's hopeful. Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe's trying to make itself. I don't know if it's going to succeed. I tell you what, Yehedarhed Havzhiva: there are great gods loose on these worlds."
Yeowe had got rid of its Bosses, its Owners, the Four Corporations who had run the vast slave plantations for three hundred years; but though the thirty years of the War of Liberation were over, the fighting had not stopped. Chiefs and warlords among the slaves who had risen to power during the Liberation now fought to keep and extend their power. Factions had battled over the question of whether to kick all foreigners off the planet forever or to admit Aliens and join the Ekumen. The isolationists had finally been voted down, and there was a new Ekumenical Embassy in the old colonial capital. Havzhiva spent a while there learning "the language and the table manners," as they said. Then the Ambassador, a clever young Terran named Solly, sent him south to the region called Yotebber, which was clamoring for recognition.
History is infamy, Havzhiva thought as he rode the train through the ruined landscapes of the world.
The Werelian capitalists who colonised the planet had exploited it and their slaves recklessly, mindlessly, in a long orgy of profit-making. It takes a while to spoil a world, but it can be done. Strip-mining and single-crop agriculture had defaced and
As159 a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
sterilised the earth. The rivers were polluted, dead. Huge dust storms darkened the eastern horizon.
The Bosses had run their plantations by force and fear. For over a century they had shipped male slaves only, worked them till they died, imported fresh ones as needed. Work gangs in these all-male compounds developed into tribal hierarchies. At last, as the price of slaves on Werel and the cost of shipping rose, the Corporations began to buy bonds women for Yeowe Colony. So over the next two centuries the slave population grew, and slave-cities were founded, "Assetvilles" and "Dustytowns" spreading out from the old compounds of the plantations. Havzhiva knew that the Liberation movement had arisen first among the women in the tribal compounds, a rebellion against male domination, before it became a war of all slaves against their owners.
The slow train stopped in city after city: miles of shacks and cabins, treeless, whole tracts bombed or burnt out in the war and not yet rebuilt; factories, some of them gutted ruins, some functioning but ancient-looking, rattletrap, smoke-belching. At each station hundreds of people got off the train and onto it, swarming, crowding, shouting out bribes to the porters, clambering up onto the roofs of the cars, brutally shoved off again by uniformed guards and policemen. In the north of the long continent, as on Werel, he had seen many black-skinned people, blue-black; but as the train went farther south there were fewer of these, until in Yotebber the people in the villages and on the desolate sidings were much paler than he was, a bluish, dusty color. These were the "dust people," the descendants of a hundred generations of Werelian slaves.
-A*si 160 A-s
A Man of the People
Yotebber had been an early center of the Liberation. The Bosses had made reprisal with bombs and poison gas; thousands of people had died. Whole towns had been burned to get rid of the unburied dead, human and animal. The mouth of the great river had been dammed with rotting bodies- But all that was past. Yeowe was free, a new member of the Ekumen of the Worlds, and Havzhiva in the capacity of Sub-Envoy was on his way to help the people of Yotebber Region to begin their new history. Or from the point of view of a Hainishman, to rejoin their ancient history.
He was met at the station in Yotebber City by a large crowd surging and cheering and yelling behind barricades manned by policemen and soldiers; in front of the barricades was a delegation of officials wearing splendid robes and sashes of office and variously ornate uniforms: big men, most of them, dignified, very much public figures. There were speeches of welcome, reporters and photographers for the holonet and the neareal news. It wasn't a circus, however- The big men were definitely in control. They wanted their guest to know he was welcome, he was popular, he was — as the Chief said in his brief, impressive speech — the Envoy from the Future.
That night in his luxurious suite in an Owner's city mansion converted to a hotel, Havzhiva thought: If they knew that their man from the future grew up in a pueblo and never saw a neareal till he came here ...
He hoped he would not disappoint these people. From the moment he had first met them on Werel he had liked them, despite their monstrous
-A-s 161 Ag>
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
society. They were full of vitality and pride, and here on Yeowe they were full of dreams of justice. Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran said of another god: I believe in it because it is impossible. He slept well, and woke early in the warm, bright morning, full of anticipation. He walked out to begin to get to know the city, his city-
The doorman — it was disconcerting to find that people who had fought so desperately for their freedom had servants — the doorman tried hard to get him to wait for a car, a guide, evidently distressed at the great man's going out so early, afoot, without a retinue. Havzhiva explained that he wanted to walk and was quite able to walk alone. He set off, leaving the unhappy doorman calling after him, "Oh, sir, please, avoid the City Park, sir!"
Havzhiva obeyed, thinking the park must be closed for a ceremony or replanting. He came on a plaza where a market was in full swing, and there found himself likely to become the center of a crowd; people inevitably noticed him. He wore the handsome Yeowan clothes, singlet, breeches, a light narrow robe, but he was the only person with red-brown skin in a city of four hundred thousand people. As soon as they saw his skin, his eyes, they knew him: the Alien. So he slipped away from the market and kept to quiet residential streets, enjoying the soft, warm air and the decrepit, charming colonial architecture of the houses. He stopped to admire an. ornate Tualite temple. It looked rather shabby and desolate, but there was, he saw, a fresh offering of flowers at the feet of the image of the Mother at the doorway. Though her nose had been knocked off during the war, she smiled serenely, a little cross-
TAK 162 -As A Man of the People
eyed. People called out behind him. Somebody said
close to him, "Foreign shit, get off our world," and his arm was seized as his legs were kicked out from under him. Contorted faces, screaming, closed in around him. An enormous, sickening cramp seized his body, doubling him into a red darkness of struggle and voices and pain, then a dizzy shrinking and dwindling away of light and sound.
An old woman was sitting by him, whispering an almost tuneless song that seemed dimly familiar.
She was knitting. For a long time she did not look at him; when she did she said, "Ah." He had trouble making his eyes focus, but he made out that her face was bluish, a pale bluish tan, and there were no whites to her dark eyes.
She rearranged some kind of apparatus that was attached to him somewhere, and said, "I'm the medicine woman — the nurse. You have a concussion, a slight skull fracture, a bruised kidney, a broken shoulder, and a knife wound in your gut; but you'll be all right; don't worry." All this was in a foreign language, which he seemed to understand. At least he understood "don't worry," and obeyed.
He thought he was on the Terraces ofDananda in NAFAL mode. A hundred years passed in a bad dream but did not pass. People and clocks had no faces. He tried to whisper the Staying Chant and it had no words. The words were gone. The old woman took his hand. She held his hand and slowly, slowly brought him back into time, into local time, into the dim, quiet room where she sat knitting.
.TtAS 163 A*-S
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
It was morning, hot, bright sunlight in the window. The Chief of Yotebber Region stood by his bedside, a tower of a man in white-and-crimson robes.
"I'm very sorry," Havzhiva said, slowly and thickly because his mouth was damaged. "It was stupid of me to go out alone. The fault was entirely mine."
"The villains have been caught and will be tried in a court of justice," said the Chief.
"They were young men," Havzhiva said- "My ignorance and folly caused the incident —"
"They will be punished," the Chief said.
The day nurses always had the holoscreen up and watched the news and the dramas as they sat with him. They kept the sound down, and Havzhiva could ignore it. It was a hot afternoon; he was watching faint clouds move slowly across the sky, when the nurse said, using the formal address to a person of high status, "Oh, quick — if the gentleman will look, he can see the punishment of the bad men who attacked him!"
Havzhiva obeyed. He saw a thin human body suspended by the feet, the arms and hands twitching, the intestines hanging down over the chest and face- He cried out aloud and hid his face in his arm. "Turn it off," he said, "turn it off!" He retched and gasped for air. "You are not people!" he cried in his own language, the dialect of Stse. There was some coming and going in the room. The noise of a. yelling crowd ceased abruptly. He got control of his breath and lay with his eyes shut, repeating one
phrase of the Staying Chant over and over until his mind and body began to steady and find a little balance somewhere, not much.
A»e> 164 "•s A Man of the People
They came with food; he asked them to take it away.
The room was dim, lit only by a night-light somewhere low on the wall and the lights of the city outside the window. The old woman, the night nurse, was there, knitting in the half dark.
"I'm sorry," Havzhiva said at random, knowing he didn't know what he had said to them.
"Oh, Mr. Envoy," the old woman said with a long sigh. "I read about your people. The Hainish people. You don't do things like we do. You don't torture and kill each other. You live in peace-1 wonder, I wonder what we seem to you. Like witches, like devils, maybe," "No," he said, but he swallowed down another wave of nausea.
"When you feel better, when you're stronger,
Mr. Envoy, I have a thing I want to speak to you about." Her voice was quiet and full of an absolute, easy authority, which probably could become formal and formidable. He had known people who talked that way all his life.
"I can listen now," he said, but she said, "Not now. Later. You are tired. Would you like me to sing?"
"Yes," he said, and she sat and knitted and sang voicelessly, tunelessly, in a whisper. The names of her gods were in the song: Tual, Kamye, They are not my gods, he thought, but he closed his eyes and slept, safe in the rocking balance.
Her name was Yeron, and she was not old. She was forty-seven. She had been through a thirty-year war
3-ASI 165 SVS
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
and several famines. She had artificial teeth, something Havzhiva had never heard of, and wore eyeglasses with wire frames; body mending was not unknown on Werel, but on Yeowe most people couldn't afford it, she said. She was very thin, and her hair was thin. She had a proud bearing, but moved stiffly from an old wound in the left hip. "Everybody, everybody in this world has a bullet in them, or whipping scars, or a leg blown off, or a dead baby in their heart," she said. "Now you're one of us, Mr- Envoy. You've been through the fire."
He was recovering well. There were five or six medical specialists on his case. The Regional Chief visited every few days and sent officials daily. The Chief was, Havzhiva realised, grateful. The outrageous attack on a representative of the Ekumen had given him the excuse and strong popular support for a strike against the diehard isolationist World Party led by his rival, another warlord hero of the Liberation. He sent glowing reports of his victories to the Sub-Envoy's hospital room. The holonews was all of men in uniforms running, shooting, flyers
buzzing over desert hills. As he walked the halls, gaining strength, Havzhiva saw patients lying in bed in the wards wired in to the neareat net, "experiencing" the fighting, from the point of view, of course, of the ones with guns, the ones with cameras, the ones who shot.
At night the screens were dark, the nets were down, and Yeron came and sat by him in the dim light from the window.
"You said there was something you had to tell me," he said. The city night was restless, full of noises, music, voices down in the street below the
.s*ssi 166 a<~
A Man of the People
window she had opened wide to let in the warm, many-scented air.
"Yes, I did." She put her knitting down. "I am your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When I heard you'd been hurt, forgive me, but I said, 'Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!'
Because I had not known how to bring my message to you, and now I knew how." Her quiet voice paused a minute. "I ran this hospital for fifteen years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings here." Again she paused. Like her voice, her silences were familiar to him. "I'm a messenger to the Ekumen," she said, "from the women. Women here. Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance with you. ... I know, the government already did that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To us? It means nothing. Do you know what women are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are not part of the government. Women made the Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like the men. But they weren't generals, they aren't chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock. Here it's some better. But not good. I was trained in the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And we're what we always were. Property. I don't think that's what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr. Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to
make. We have to finish the job."
After a long silence, Havzhiva asked softly, "Are you organised?"
VtWS 167 TAiS
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
"Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Just like the old days. We can organise in the dark!" She laughed a little. "But I don't think we can win freedom for ourselves alone by ourselves alone. There has to be a change. The men think they have to be bosses. They have to stop thinking that. Well, one thing we have learned in my lifetime, you don't change a mind with a gun.
You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind.
We have got to change it, Mr. Envoy. With your help. The Ekumen's help."
"I'm here to be a link between your people and the Ekumen. But I'll need time," he said. "I need to learn."
"All the time in the world. We know we can't
turn the boss mind around in a day or a year. This is a matter of education." She said the word as a sacred word. "It will take a long time. You take your time.
If we just know that you will listen."
"I will listen," he said.
She drew a long breath, took up her knitting again. Presently she said, "It won't be easy to hear us."
He was tired. The intensity of her talk was more than he could yet handle. He did not know what she meant. A polite silence is the adult way of signifying that one doesn't understand. He said nothing.
She looked at him- "How are we to come to you? You see, that's a problem. I tell you, we are nothing-We can come to you only as your nurse. Your housemaid. The woman who washes your clothes. We don't mix with the chiefs. We aren't on the councils. We wait on table. We don't eat the banquet."
"Tell me —" he hesitated. "Tell me how to start.
TW 168 T*-SI A Man of the People
Ask to see me if you can. Come as you can, as it... if it's safe?" He had always been quick to learn his lessons. "I'll listen. I'll do what I can." He would never learn much distrust.
She leaned over and kissed him very gently on the mouth. Her lips were light, dry, soft.
"There," she said, "no chief will give you that."
She took up her knitting again. He was half-asleep when she asked, "Your mother is living, Mr. Havzhiva?"
"All my people are dead."
She made a little soft sound. "Bereft," she said. "And no wife?"
"No."
"We will be your mothers, your sisters, your
daughters. Your people. I kissed you for that love that will be between us. You will see."
"The list of the persons invited to the reception, Mr. Yehedarhed," said Doranden, the Chiefs chief liaison to the Sub-Envoy.
Havzhiva looked through the list on the hand-screen carefully, ran it past the end, and said,
"Where is the rest?"
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Envoy — are there omissions?
This is the entire list."
"But these are all men."
In the infinitesimal silence before Doranden replied, Havzhiva felt the balance of his life poised.
"You wish the guests to bring their wives? Of course! If this is the Ekumenical custom, we shall be delighted to invite the ladies!"
a«s 169 T-a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
Yeowan men said "the ladies," a word which Havzhiva had thought was applied only to women of the owner class on Werel. The balance dipped. "What ladies?" he asked, frowning. "I'm talking about women. Do they have no part in this society?"
He became very nervous as he spoke, for he now knew his ignorance of what constituted danger here. If a walk on a quiet street could be nearly fatal, embarrassing the Chief’s liaison might be completely so. Doranden was certainly embarrassed — floored. He opened his mouth and shut it.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Doranden," Havzhiva said,
"please pardon my poor efforts at jocosity. Of course I know that women have all kinds of responsible positions in your society. I was merely saying, in a stupidly unfortunate manner, that I should be very glad to have such women and their husbands, as well as the wives of these guests, attend the reception. Unless I am truly making an enormous blunder
concerning your customs? I thought you did not segregate the sexes socially, as they do on Werel. Please, if I was wrong, be so kind as to excuse the ignorant foreigner once again."
Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had already decided. The other half is silence.
Doranden availed himself of the latter option, and with a few earnest reassurances got himself away. Havzhiva remained nervous until the following morning, when Doranden reappeared with a revised list containing eleven new names, all female. There was a school principal and a couple of teachers; the rest were marked "retired."
"Splendid, splendid!" said Havzhiva. "May I add A 170 A
A Man of the People
one more name?" — Of course, of course, anyone Your Excellency desires — "Dr. Yecon," he said.
Again the infinitesimal silence, the grain of dust dropping on the scales. Doranden knew that name. "Yes," he said.
"Dr. Yeron nursed me, you know. at your excellent hospital. We became friends. An ordinary nurse might not be an appropriate guest among such very distinguished people; but 1 see there are several other doctors on our list."
"Quite," said Doranden. He seemed bemused.
The Chief and his people had become used to patronising the Sub-Envoy, ever so slightly and politely. An invalid, though now well recovered; a victim; a man of peace, ignorant of attack and even of self-defense;
a scholar, a foreigner, unworldly in every sense: they saw him as something like that, he knew. Much as they valued him as a symbol and as a means to their ends, they thought him an insignificant man. He agreed with them as to the fact, but not as to the quality, of his insignificance- He knew that what he did might signify. He had just seen it.
"Surely you understand the reason for having a bodyguard, Envoy," the General said with some
impatience.
"This is a dangerous city. General Denkam, yes, I understand that. Dangerous for everyone. 1 see on the net that gangs of young men, such as those who attacked me, roam the streets quite beyond the control of the police. Every child, every woman needs a bodyguard- I should be distressed to know that the safety which is every citizen's right was my special privilege."
A 171 A
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
The General blinked but stuck to his guns. "We can't let you get assassinated," he said.
Havzhiva loved the bluntness of Yeowan honesty. "I don't want to be assassinated," he said. "I have a suggestion, sir. There are policewomen, female members of the city police force, are there not? Find me bodyguards among them. After all, an armed woman is as dangerous as an armed man, isn't she? And I should like to honor the great part women played in winning Yeowe's free-
dom, as the Chief said so eloquently in his talk yesterday."
The General departed with a face of cast iron.
Havzhiva did not particularly like his bodyguards. They were hard, tough women, unfriendly, speaking a dialect he could hardly understand. Several of them had children at home, but they refused to talk about their children. They were fiercely efficient. He was well protected. He saw when he went about with these cold-eyed escorts that he began to be looked at differently by the city crowds: with amusement and a kind of fellow-feeling. He heard an old man in the market say, "That fellow has some sense."
Everybody called the Chief the Chief except to his face. "Mr. President," Havzhiva said, "the question really isn't one of Ekumenical principles or Hainish customs at all. None of that is or should be of the least weight, the least importance, here on Yeowe. This is your world."
The Chief nodded once, massively.
"Into which," said Havzhiva, by now insuperably yyAs, 172 a®
A Man of the People
loquacious, "immigrants are beginning to come from Were! now, and many, many more will come, as the Werelian ruling class tries to lessen revolutionary pressure by allowing increasing numbers of the underclass to emigrate. You, sir, know far better than 1 the opportunities and the problems that this great influx of population will cause here in Yotebber. Now of course at least half the immigrants will be female, and I think it worth considering that there is a very considerable difference between Werel and Yeowe in what is called the construction of gender — the roles, the expectations, the behavior, the relationships of men and women. Among the Werelian immigrants most of the decision-makers, the people of authority, will be female. The Council of the Hame is about nine-tenths women, I believe. Their speakers and negotiators are mostly women. These people are coming into a society governed and represented entirely by men. I think there is the possibility of misunderstandings and conflict, unless-the situation is carefully considered beforehand. Perhaps the use of some women as representatives — "
"Among slaves on the Old World," the Chief said, "women were chiefs. Among our people, men are chiefs. That is how it is. The slaves of the Old World will be the free men of the New World." "And the women, Mr. President?"
"A free man's women are free," said the Chief.
"Well, then," Yeron said, and sighed her deep sigh. "I guess we have to kick up some dust."
"What dust people are good at," said Dobibe.
"Then we better kick up a whole lot," said
173
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
Tualyan. "Because no matter what we do, they'll get hysterical. They'll yell and scream about castrating dykes who kill boy babies. If there's five of us singing some damn song, it'll get into the neareals as five hundred of us with machine guns and the
end of civilisation on Yeowe. So I say let's go for it. Let's have five thousand women out singing. Let's stop the trains. Lie down on the tracks. Fifty thousand women lying on the tracks all over Yotebber. You think?"
The meeting (of the Yotebber City and Regional Educational Aid Association) was in a schoolroom of one of the city schools. Two of Havzhiva's bodyguards, in plain clothes, waited unobtrusively in the hall. Forty women and Havzhiva were jammed into small chairs attached to blank netscreens.
"Asking for?" Havzhiva said.
"The secret ballot!"
"No job discrimination!"
"Pay for our work!"
"The secret ballot'"
"Child care!"
"The secret ballot!"
"Respect!"
Havzhiva's noter scribbled away madly. The women went on shouting for a while and then settled down to talk again.
One of the bodyguards spoke to Havzhiva as she drove him home. "Sir," she said. "Was those all teachers?"
"Yes," he said. "In a way."
"Be damn," she said. "Different from they used to be."
A Man of the People
"Yehedarhed! What the hell are you doing down there?"
"Ma'am?"
"You were on the news. Along with about a million women lying across railroad tracks and all over flyer pads and draped around the President's Residence. You were talking to women and smiling."
"It was hard not to."
"When the Regional Government begins shooting, will you stop smiling?"
"Yes. Will you back us?"
"How?"
"Words of encouragement to the women of Yotebber from the Ambassador of the Ekumen. Yeowe a model of true freedom for immigrants from the Slave World. Words of praise to the Government of Yotebber — Yotebber a model for all Yeowe of restraint, enlightenment, et cetera."
"Sure. I hope it helps. Is this a revolution,
Havzhiva?"
"It is education, ma'am."
The gate stood open in its massive frame; there were no walls.
"In the time of the Colony," the Elder said, "this gate was opened twice in the day: to let the people out to work in the morning, to let the people in from work in the evening. At all other times it was locked and barred." He displayed the great broken lock that hung on the outer face of the gate, the massive bolts rusted in their hasps. His gesture was solemn, measured, like his words, and again Havzhiva admired the dignity these people had kept
nsA 175 AAr.
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
in degradation, the stateliness they had maintained in, or against, their enslavement. He had begun to appreciate the immense influence of their sacred text, the Arkamye, preserved in oral tradition. "This was what we had. This was our belonging," an old man in the city had told him, touching the book which, at sixty-five or seventy, he was learning to read.
Havzhiva himself had begun to read the book in
its original language. He read it slowly, trying to understand how this tale of fierce courage and abnegation had for three millennia informed and nourished the minds of people in bondage. Often he heard in its cadences the voices he had heard speak that day.
He was staying for a month in Hayawa Tribal Village, which had been the first slave compound of the Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe in Yotebber, three hundred fifty years ago. In this immense, remote region of the eastern coast, much of the society and culture of plantation slavery had been preserved. Yeron and other women of the Liberation Movement had told him that to know who the Yeowans were he must know the plantations and the tribes.
He knew that the compounds had for the first century been a domain of men without women and without children. They had developed an internal government, a strict hierarchy of force and favoritism. Power was won by tests and ordeals and kept by a nimble balancing of independence and collusion. When women slaves were brought in at last, they entered this rigid system as the slaves of slaves. By bondsmen as by Bosses, they were used as servants
A 176 A
A Man of the People
and sexual outlets. Sexual loyalty and partnership continued to be recognized only between men, a nexus of passion, negotiation, status, and tribal politics. During the next centuries the presence of children in the compounds had altered and enriched tribal customs, but the system of male dominance, so entirely advantageous to the slave-owners, had not essentially changed.
"We hope to have your presence at the initiation tomorrow," the Elder said in his grave way, and Havzhiva assured him that nothing could please or honor him more than attendance at a ceremony of such importance. The Elder was sedately but visibly gratified. He was a man over fifty, which meant he had been bom a slave and had lived as a boy and man through the years of the Liberation. Havzhiva looked for scars, remembering what Yeron had said, and found them: the Elder was thin, meager, lame,
and had no upper teeth; he was marked all through by famine and war. Also he was ritually scarred, four parallel ridges running from neck to elbow over the point of the shoulder like long epaulets, and a dark blue open eye tattooed on his forehead, the sign, in this tribe, of assigned, unalterable chiefdom. A slave chief, a chattel master of chattels, till the walls went down.
The Elder walked on a certain path from the gate to the longhouse, and Havzhiva following him observed that no one else used this path: men, women, children trotted along a wider, parallel road that diverged off to a different entrance to the long-house. This was the chiefs' way, the narrow way.
That night, while the children to be initiated next day fasted and kept vigil over on the women's
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
side, all the chiefs and elders gathered for a feast. There were inordinate amounts of the heavy food Yeowans were accustomed to, spiced and ornately served, the marsh rice that was the basis of everything fancied up with colorings and herbs; above all there was meat. Women slipped in and out serving ever more elaborate platters, each one with more meat on it — cattle flesh. Boss food, the sure and certain sign of freedom.
Havzhiva had not grown up eating meat, and could count on it giving him diarrhea, but he chewed his way manfully through the stews and steaks, knowing the significance of the food and the meaning of plenty to those who had never had enough-
After huge baskets of fruit finally replaced the platters, the women disappeared and the music began. The tribal chief nodded to his leos, a word meaning "sexual favorite/adopted brother/not heir/not son." The young man, a self-assured, good-natured beauty, smiled; he clapped his long hands very softly once, then began to brush the grey-blue palms in a subtle rhythm. As the table fell silent he sang, but in a whisper.
Instruments of music had been forbidden on most plantations; most Bosses had allowed no singing except the ritual hymns to Tuat at the tenthday service. A slave caught wasting Corporation time in
singing might have acid poured down his throat. So long as he could work there was no need for him to make noise.
On such plantations the slaves had developed this almost silent music, the touch and brush of palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied,
A 178 A
A Man of the People
long line of melody. The words sung were deliberately broken, distorted, fragmented, so that they seemed meaningless. Shesh, the owners had called it, rubbish, and slaves were permitted to "pat hands and sing rubbish" so long as they did it so softly it could not be heard outside the compound walls. Having sung so for three hundred years, they sang so now.
To Havzhiva it was unnerving, almost frightening, as voice after voice joined, always at a whisper, increasing the complexity of the rhythms till the cross-beats nearly, but never quite, joined into a sin-
gle texture of hushing sibilant sound, threaded by the long-held, quarter-tonal melody sung on syllables that seemed always about to make a word but never did. Caught in it, soon almost lost in it, he kept thinking now — now one of them will raise his voice — now the leos will give a shout, a shout of triumph, letting his voice free! — But he did not. None did. The soft, rushing, waterlike music with its infinitely delicate shifting rhythm went on and on. Bottles of the orange Yote wine passed up and down the table. They drank. They drank freely, at least. They got drunk. Laughter and shouts began to interrupt the music. But they never once sang above a whisper.
They all reeled back to the longnouse on the chiefs' path, embracing, peeing companionably, one or two pausing to vomit here and there. A kind, dark man who had been seated next to Havzhiva now Joined him in his bed in his alcove of the longhouse.
Earlier in the evening this man had told him that during the night and day of the initiation heterosexual intercourse was forbidden, as it would
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
change the energies. The initiation would go crooked, and the boys might not become good members of the tribe. Only a witch, of course, would deliberately break the taboo, but many women were witches and would try to seduce a man out of malice. Regular, that is, homosexual, intercourse would encourage the energies, keep the initiation straight, and give the boys strength for their ordeal. Hence every man leaving the banquet would have a partner for the night. Havzhiva was glad he had been assigned to this man, not to one of the chiefs, whom he found daunting, and who might have expected a properly energetic performance. As it was, as well as he could remember in the morning, he and his companion had been too drunk to do much but fall asleep amidst well-intended caresses.
Too much Yote wine left a ringing headache, he knew that already, and his whole skull reconfirmed the knowledge when he woke.
At noon his friend brought him to a place of
honor in the plaza, which was filling up with men. Behind them were the men's longhouses, in front of them the ditch that separated the women's side, the inside, from the men's or gate side — still so-called, though the compound walls were gone and the gate alone stood, a monument, towering above the huts and longhouses of the compound and the flat grain-fields that stretched away in all directions, shimmering in the windless, shadowless heat.
From the women's huts, six boys came at a run to the ditch. It was wider than a thirteen-year-old could jump, Havzhiva thought; but two of the boys made it. The other four leapt valiantly, fell short, clambered out, one of them hobbling, having hurt
A 180 A
A Man of the People
a leg or foot in his fall. Even the two who had made the jump successfully looked exhausted and frightened, and all six were bluish grey from fasting and staying awake. Elders surrounded them and got them standing in line in the plaza, naked and shivering, facing the crowd of all the men of
the tribe.
No women at all were visible, over on the women's side.
A catechism began, chiefs and elders barking questions which must evidently be answered without delay, sometimes by one boy, sometimes by all together, depending on the questioner's pointing or sweeping gesture. They were questions of ritual, protocol, and ethics. The boys had been well drilled, delivering their answers in prompt yelps. The one who had lamed himself in the jump suddenly vomited and then fainted, slipping quietly down in a little heap. Nothing was done, and some questions were still pointed to him, followed by a moment of painful silence. After a while the boy moved, sat up, sat a while shuddering, then struggled to his feet and stood with the others. His bluish lips moved in answer to all the questions, though no voice reached the audience.
Havzhiva kept his apparent attention fixed on the ritual, though his mind wandered back a long time, a long way. We teach what we know, he
thought, and all our knowledge is local.
After the inquisition came the marking: a single deep cut from the base of the neck over the point of the shoulder and down the outer arm to the elbow, made with a hard, sharp stake of wood dragged gouging through skin and flesh to leave, when it
:0-© 181 -A-9
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
healed, the furrowed scar that proved the man. Slaves would not have been allowed any metal tools inside the gate, Havzhiva reflected, watching steadily as behooved a visitor and guest. After each arm and each boy, the officiating elders stopped to resharpen the stake, rubbing it on a big grooved stone that sat in the plaza. The boys' pale blue lips drew back, baring their white teeth; they writhed, half-fainting, and one of them screamed aloud, silencing himself by clapping his free hand over his mouth. One bit on his thumb till blood flowed from it as well as from his lacerated arms. As each boy's marking was finished the Tribal Chief washed the wounds and smeared some ointment on them-
Dazed and wobbling, the boys stood again in line;
and now the old men were tender with them, smiling, calling them "tribesman," "hero." Havzhiva drew a long breath of relief.
But now six more children were being brought into the plaza, led across the ditch-bridge by old women. These were girls, decked with anklets and bracelets, otherwise naked. At the sight of them a great cheer went up from the audience of men. Havzhiva was surprised. Women were to be made members of the tribe too? That at least was a good thing, he thought.
Two of the girls were barely adolescent, the others were younger, one of them surely not more than six. They were lined up, their backs to the audience, facing the boys. Behind each of them stood the veiled woman who had led her across the bridge;
behind each boy stood one of the naked elders. As Havzhiva watched, unable to turn his eyes or mind from what he saw, the little girls lay down face up
A 182 A~
A Man of the People
on the bare, greyish ground of the plaza. One of them, slow to lie down, was tugged and forced down by the woman behind her. The old men came around the boys, and each one lay down on one of the girls, to a great noise of cheering, jeering, and laughter and a chant of "ha-ah-ha-ah!" from the spectators. The veiled women crouched at the girls' heads. One of them reached out and held down a thin, flailing arm. The elders' bare buttocks pumped, whether in actual coitus or an imitation Havzhiva could not tell. "That's how you do it, watch, watch!" the spectators shouted to the boys, amid jokes and comments and roars of laughter. The elders one by one stood up, each shielding his penis with curious modesty.
When the last had stood up, the boys stepped forward. Each lay down on a girl and pumped his buttocks up and down, though not one of them, Havzhiva saw, had had an erection. The men around him grasped their own penises, shouting, "Here, try mine!" and cheering and chanting until the last boy scrambled to his feet. The girls lay flat, their legs parted, like little dead lizards. There was a slight, terrible movement towards them in the crowd of men. But the old women were hauling the girls to their feet, yanking them up, hurrying them back across the bridge, followed by a wave of howls and jeers from the audience.
"They're drugged, you know," said the kind, dark man who had shared Havzhiva's bed, looking into his face. "The girls. It doesn't hurt them."
"Yes, I see," said Havzhiva, standing still in his place of honor.
"These ones are lucky, privileged to assist initia-aA 183 A-®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
tion. It's important that girls cease to be virgin as soon as possible, you know. Always more than one man must have them, you know. So that they can't make claims — 'this is your son,' 'this baby
is the chief's son,' you know. That's all witchcraft.
A son is chosen. Being a son has nothing to do with bondswomen's cunts. Bondswomen have to be taught that early. But the girls are given drugs now. It's not like the old days, under the Corporations."
"I understand," Havzhiva said- He looked into his friend's face, thinking that his dark skin meant he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody's son, begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen- AH knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial. In Stse, in the Schools of the Ekumen, in the compounds of Yeowe.
"You still call them bondswomen," he said. His tact, all his feelings were frozen, and he spoke in mere stupid intellectual curiosity.
"No," the dark man said, "no, I'm sorry, the language I learned as a boy — I apologize —"
"Not to me."
Again Havzhiva spoke only and coldly what was in his head. The man winced and was silent, his head bowed.
"Please, my friend, take me to my room now," Havzhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed him.
He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the dark. "You can't change anything from outside it.
184
A Man of the People
Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview, you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing. You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the weaving." This last phrase was in the dialect of Stse.
Four women squatted on a patch of ground on the women's side, which had roused his curiosity by its untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space, he had thought. He walked towards them. They
squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the carelessness of men's gaze, that he had noticed before on the women's side. Their heads were shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people, dusties, was the old epithet, but to Havzhiva their color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as he came near. Two were old, withered up, with knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth patch of ground.
On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, colored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture. Following the boundaries between colors he made out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch, and a deep curve of earthen red.
Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but simply squatted there. Presently they went back to
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
what they were doing, talking in whispers to one another now and then.
When they stopped working, he said, "Is it sacred?"
The old women looked at him, scowled, and said nothing.
"You can't see it," said the darker of the young women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took Havzhiva by surprise.
"I shouldn't be here, you mean."
"No. You can be here. But you can't see it."
He rose and looked over the earth painting they had made with grey and tan and red and umber dust. The lines and forms were in a definite relationship, rhythmical but puzzling.
"It's not all there," he said.
"This is only a little, little bit of it," said the teasing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in her dark face.
"Never all of it at once?"
"No," she said, and the others said, "No," and even the old women smiled.
"Can you tell me what the picture is?"
She did not know the word "picture." She glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up at him shrewdly.
"We make what we know, here," she said, with a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries between the colors.
"They don't know it," said the other young woman, ashen-skinned, in a whisper.
"The men? — They never see it whole?"
"Nobody does. Only us. We have it here." The -i-*-'® 186 -a-s A Man of the People
dark woman did not touch her head but her heart, covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened hands. She smiled again.
The old women stood up; they muttered together, one said something sharply to the young women, a phrase Havzhiva did not understand; and they stumped off.
"They don't approve of your talking of this work to a man," he said,
"A city man," said the dark woman, and laughed. "They think we'll run away."
"Do you want to run away?"
She shrugged. "Where to?"
She rose to her feet in one graceful movement and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly random, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and areas.
"Can you see it?" she asked Havzhiva, with that liquid teasing flash of the eyes.
"Maybe someday I can leam to," he said, meeting her gaze.
"You'll have to find a woman to teach you," said the woman the color of ashes.
"We are a free people now," said the Young Chief, the Son and Heir, the Chosen.
"I haven't yet known a free people," Havzhiva said, polite, ambiguous.
"We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble thing. We are a free people." The Chosen was a strongfaced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a
a-vsi 187 =-*o
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between his eyes, unwinking.
"You are free men," Havzhiva said.
There was a silence.
"Men of the cities do not understand our women," the Chosen said. "Our women do not want a man's freedom. It is not for them. A woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In other places it may be different. There may be another kind of woman, who does not care for her children. That may be. Here it is as I have said."
Havzhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. "That is
so," he said.
The Chosen looked gratified.
"I have seen a picture," Havzhiva went on.
The Chosen was impassive; he might or might not know the word. "Lines and colors made with earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All knowledge is local, all truth is partial," Havzhiva said with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking to foreign merchants. "No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole."
The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a while he said, "If we come to live as they live in the cities, all we know will be lost." Under his dogmatic tone was fear and grief.
vw 188 -a-®
"Chosen One," Havzhiva said, "you speak the truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowledge must be given to gain the greater. And not once only."
"The men of this tribe will not deny our truth," the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-haze above the endless fields, though his own dark eyes gazed downward at the earth.
His guest looked from that alien face to the fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above the alien land. "I am sure of that," he said.
When he was fifty-five. Stabile Yehedarhed Havzhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had not been there for a long time. His work as Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of Social Justice had kept him in the north, with frequent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but often visited the New Capital at the request of a new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his
expertise. His partner — they had lived together for eighteen years, but there was no marriage on Yeowe — had a book she was trying to finish, and admitted that she would like to have the apartment to herself for a couple of weeks while she wrote. "Take that trip south you keep mooning about," she said. "I'll fly down as soon as I'm done.
I won't tell any damned politicians where you are. Escape! Go, go, go!"
He went. He had never liked flying, though he had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the
Aa. 189 a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
long journey by train. They were good, fast trains, terribly crowded, people at every station swarming and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors, though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cottages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawling Werel-style compounds with connected houses and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge new plants; and then suddenly the country again, canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of sleep.
On the third afternoon he got off the train in Yotebber City Station. No crowds. No chiefs- No bodyguards. He walked through the hot, familiar streets, past the market, through the City Park. A little bravado, there. Gangs, muggers were still about, and he kept his eye alert and his feet on the main pathways. On past the old Tualite temple. He had picked up a white flower that had dropped from a shrub in the park. He set it at the Mother's feet. She smiled, looking cross-eyed at her missing nose. He walked on to the big, rambling new compound where Yeron lived.
She was seventy-four and had retired recently from the hospital where she had taught, practiced,
and been an administrator for the last fifteen years. She was little changed from the woman
•As 190 A
A Man of the People
he had first seen sitting by his bedside, only she seemed smaller all over. Her hair was quite gone, and she wore a glittering kerchief tied round her head. They embraced hard and kissed, and she stroked him and patted him, smiling irrepress-ibiy. They had never made love, but there had always been a desire between them, a yearning to the other, a great comfort in touch. "Look at that, look at that grey'." she cried, petting his hair, "how beautiful! Come in and have a glass of wine with mel How is your Araha? When is she coming? You walked right across the city carrying that bag? You're still crazy!"
He gave her the gift he had brought her, a treatise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it greedily. For some while she conversed only between plunges into the table of contents and the chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange wine. They had a second glass. "You look fine, Havzhiva," she said, putting the book down and looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an opaque bluish darkness. "Being a saint agrees with you."
"It's not that bad, Yeron."
"A hero, then. You can't deny that you're a hero."
"No," he said with a laugh. "Knowing what a hero is, 1 won't deny it."
"Where would we be without you?"
"Just where we are now. ..." He sighed.
"Sometimes I think we're losing what little we've ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don't underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure
cAc" 191 —®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and people are eating it up —"
She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the demagogue. "There is no end to that," she said. "But I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away. When I heard your name, even. I knew."
"You didn't give me much choice, you know."
"Bah. You chose, man."
"Yes," he said. He savored the wine. "I did."
After a while he said, "Not many people have the choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose because I grew up where all choices had been made for me."
"So you rebelled, made your own way," she said, nodding.
He smiled. "I'm no rebel."
"Bah!" she said again. "No rebel? You, in the
thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the way?"
"Oh yes," he said. "But not in a rebellious spirit- That had to be your spirit. My job was acceptance, To keep an acceptant spirit. That's what I learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in the world. Be rightly in the world."
She listened but looked unconvinced. "Sounds like a woman's way of being," she said. "Men generally want to change things to suit."
"Not the men of my people," he said.
She poured them a third glass of wine. "Tell me about your people. I was always afraid to ask. The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so much history, so many worlds! Us here with our
.a 192 rt-5>
three hundred years of misery and murder and ignorance — you don't know how small you make us feel."
"I think I do," Havzhiva said. After a while he said, "I was born in a town called Stse."
He told her about the pueblo, about the Other Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his mother the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about changing being; he told her about the historian's visit, and how he had changed being again, going to Kathhad.
"All those rules!" Yeron said. "So complicated
and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran
away."
"All I did was go team in Kathhad what I wouldn't learn in Stse," he said, smiling. "What the rules are. Ways of needing one another. Human ecology.
What have we been doing here, all these years, but trying to find a good set of rules — a pattern that makes sense?" He stood up, stretched his shoulders, and said, "I'm drunk. Come for a walk with me."
They went out into the sunny gardens of the compound and walked slowly along the paths between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva's arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to hers.
"When you have to sit still, you want to fly," he said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate hand on his arm. "If you have to fly, you want to sit still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with the historians. But I still couldn't keep my balance."
-a 193 a-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
"Then you came here," she said.
"Then I came here."
"And learned?"
"How to walk," he said. "How to walk with my people."
a 194
A Woman's Liberation
GCa
1. Shomeke
My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life, thinking it might be of interest to people of other worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I have lived in years of mighty changes and have been advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of servitude and the nature of freedom.
I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the faults of my narrative.
I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child I was called Shomekes' Radosse Rakam. That is, Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke family owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo.
Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God. The Shomekes possessed over four hundred TAs> 195 i-"®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede, to herd the saltgrass cattle, to work in the mills, and as domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had been great in history. Our Owner was an important man politically, often away in the capital.
Assets took their name from their grandmother because it was the grandmother that raised the child. The mother worked all day, and there was no father. Women were always bred to more than one man- Even if a man knew his child he could not care for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time. Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If they were valuable, they were traded to other estates or sold to the factories. If they were worthless, they were worked to death.
Women were not often sold. The young ones were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to raise the young and keep the compound in order.
On some estates women bore a baby a year till they died, but on ours most had only two or three children. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They did not want the men always getting at the women. The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded the young women closely.
I say men, women, children, but you are to understand that we were not called men, women, children. Only our owners were called so. We assets or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and pups or young. I will use those words, though I have not heard or spoken them for many years, and never before on this blessed world.
The bondsmen's part of the compound, the gateside, was ruled by the Bosses, who were men. some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired
a 196 a
A Woman's Liberation
by them. On the inside the young and the bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grandmothers ruled. Indeed nothing in the compound happened without the grandmothers' knowledge.
If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to work, the Bosses would let that one stay home. Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman from being sold away, sometimes they could protect a girl from being bred by more than one man, or could give a delicate girl a contraceptive. Everybody in the compound obeyed the council of the grandmothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut off. When I was a young child, there lived in our compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother, who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my grandmother Dosse's tongue would wither in her mouth. I told her that. She sai4, "No. It won't get any shorter, because I don't let it get too long."
I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me there, and was allowed to stay three months to
nurse me; then I was weaned to cow's milk, and my mother returned to the House. Her name was Shomekes' Rayowa Yowa. She was light-skinned like most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender wrists and ankles and delicate features. My grandmother, too, was light, but I was dark, darker than anybody else in the compound.
My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey dust on my body. When she scolded me, 1 told her that I wanted to look like the others.
:a-.s 197 a»®
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
"Listen, Rakam," she said to me, "they are dust people. They'll never get out of the dust. You're something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do you think you're so black?" I had no idea what she meant. "Someday I'll tell you who your father is," she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I knew that the Shomekes' stallion, a prized and valuable animal, serviced mares from other estates. I did not know a father could be human.
That evening I boasted to my grandmother:
"I'm beautiful because the black stallion is my father'" Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell down and wept. She said, "Never speak of your father."
I knew there was anger between my mother and my grandmother, but it was a long time before I understood why. Even now I am not sure I understand all that lay between them.
We little pups ran around in the compound. We knew nothing outside the walls. All our world was the bondswomen's huts and the bondsmen's long-houses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare plaza beaten hard by bare feet- To me, the stockade wall seemed a long way off.
When the field and mill hands went out the gate in the early morning I didn't know where they went. They were just gone. AH day long the whole compound belonged to us pups, naked in the summer, mostly naked in the winter too, running around playing with sticks and stones and mud, keeping away from the grandmothers, until we begged them for something to eat or they put us to work weeding the gardens for a while.
In the evening or the early night the workers eA-a 198 A-s A Woman's Liberation
would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by the Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others would be cheerful and talking and calling back and forth. The great gate was slammed behind the last of them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves. The burning cowdung smelled sweet. People gathered on the porches of the huts and longhouses. Bondsmen and bondswomen lingered at the ditch that divided the gateside from the inside, talking across the ditch. After the meal the freedmen led prayers to Tual's statue, and we lifted our own prayers to Kamye, and then people went to their beds, except for those who lingered to "jump the ditch." Some nights, in the summer, there would be singing, or a dance was allowed. In the winter one of the grandfathers — poor old broken men, not strong people like the grandmothers — would "sing the word." That is what we called reciting the Arkamye. Every night, always, some of the people were teaching and others were learning the sacred verses. On winter nights one of these old worthless bondsmen kept alive by the grandmothers' charity would begin to sing the word. Then even the pups would be still to listen to that story.
The friend of my heart was Walsu. She was bigger than I, and was my defender when there were fights and quarrels among the young or when older pups called me "Blackie" and "Bossie." I was small but had a fierce temper. Together, Walsu and I did not get bothered much. Then Walsu was sent out the gate. Her mother had been bred and was now stuffed big, so that she needed help in the fields to make her quota. Gede must be hand-harvested. Every day as a new section of the bearing stalk
i»-s 199 -»-*o
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
comes ripe it has to be picked, and so gede pickers go through the same field over and over for twenty or thirty days, and then move on to a later planting. Walsu went with her mother to help her pick her rows. When her mother felt ill, Walsu took her place, and with help from other hands she kept up her mother's quota. She was then six years old by owner's count, which gave all assets the same birthday, new year's day at the beginning of spring. She might have truly been seven. Her mother remained ill both before birthing and after, and Walsu took her place in the gede field all that time. She never afterward came back to play, only in the evenings to eat and sleep. I saw her then and we could talk. She was proud of her work. 1 envied her and longed to go through the gate. I followed her to it and looked through it at the world. Now the walls of the compound seemed very close-
1 told my grandmother Dosse that I wanted to go to work in the fields.
"You're too young."
"I'll be seven at the new year."
"Your mother made me promise not to let you go out."
Next time my mother visited the compound, I said, "Grandmother won't let me go out. 1 want to go work with Walsu."
"Never," my mother said. "You were born for better than that."
"What for?"
"You'll see."
She smiled at me. I knew she meant the House, where she worked. She had told me often of the wonderful things in the House, things that shone
3*a> 200 i-*-®
A Woman's Liberation
and were colored brightly, things that were thin and delicate, clean things. It was quiet in the House, she said. My mother herself wore a beautiful red scarf,
her voice was soft, and her clothing and body were always clean and fresh.
"When will I see?"
I teased her until she said, "All right! I'll ask my lady."
"Ask her what?"
All I knew of my-lady was that she too was delicate and clean, and that my mother belonged to her in some particular way, of which she was proud. I knew my-lady had given my mother the red scarf.
"I'll ask her if you can come begin training at the House."
My mother said "the House" in a way that made me see it as a great sacred place like the place in our prayer: May I enter in the clear house, in the rooms of peace.
I was so excited I began to dance and sing, "I'm going to the House, to the House!" My mother
slapped me to make me stop and scolded me for being wild. She said, "You are too young! You can't behave! If you get sent away from the House, you can never come back."
I promised to be old enough.
"You must do everything right," Yowa told me.
"You must do everything I say when I say it. Never question. Never delay. If my lady sees that you're wild, she'll send you back here. And that will be the end of you forever."
I promised to be tame. I promised to obey at once in everything, and not to speak. The more
a-s 201 a-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
frightening she made it, the more I desired to see the wonderful, shining House.
When my mother left I did not believe she would speak to my-lady. I was not used to promises being
kept. But after some days she returned, and I heard her speaking to my grandmother. Dosse was angry at first, speaking loudly. I crept under the window of the hut to listen. I heard my grandmother weep. I was frightened and amazed. My grandmother was patient with me, always looked after me, and fed me well. It had never entered my mind that there was anything more to it than that, until I heard her crying. Her crying made me cry, as if I were part of her.
"You could let me keep her one more year," she said. " She's just a baby. I would never let her out the gate." She was pleading, as if she were powerless, not a grandmother. "She is my joy, Yowa!"
"Don't you want her to do well, then?"
"Just a year more. She's too wild for the House."
"She's run wild too long. She'll get sent out to the fields if she stays. A year of that and they won't have her at the House. She'll be dust. Anyhow, there's no use crying about it. I asked my lady, and she's expected. I can't go back without her." "Yowa, don't let her come to harm," Dosse said very low, as if ashamed to say this to her daughter, and yet with strength in her voice.
"I'm taking her to keep her out of harm," my mother said. Then she called me, and I wiped my tears and came-
It is queer, but I do not remember my first walk through the world outside the compound or my first sight of the House. I suppose I was frightened and
As 202 s-s
A Woman's Liberation
kept my eyes down, and everything was so strange to me that I did not understand what I saw. I know it was a number of days before my mother took me to show me to Lady Tazeu. She had to scrub me and train me and make sure I would not disgrace her. I was terrified when at last she took my hand, scolding me in a whisper all the time, and brought me out of the bondswomen's quarters, through halls and doorways of painted wood, into a bright, sunny
room with no roof, full of flowers growing in pots.
I had hardly ever seen a flower, only the weeds in the kitchen gardens, and I stared and stared at them. My mother had to jerk my hand to make me look at the woman lying in a chair among the flowers, in clothes soft and brightly colored like the flowers. I could hardly tell them apart. The woman's hair was long and shining, and her skin was shining and black. My mother pushed me, and I did what she had made me practice over and over: I went and knelt down beside the chair and waited, and when the woman put out her long, narrow, soft hand, black above and azure on the palm, I touched my forehead to it. I was supposed to say "I am your slave Rakam, ma'am," but my voice would not come out.
"What a pretty little thing," she said. "So dark."
Her voice changed a little on the last words.
"The Bosses came in ... that night," Yowa said in a timid, smiling way, looking down as if embarrassed.
"No doubt about that," the woman said. I was able to glance up at her again. She was beautiful. I
did not know a person could be so beautiful. I think she saw my wonder. She put out her long, soft hand again and caressed my cheek and neck. "Very, very
s-*-? 203 -a-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
pretty, Yowa," she said. "You did quite right to bring her here. Has she been bathed?"
She would not have asked that if she had seen me when I first came, filthy and smelling of the cowdung we made our fires with. She knew nothing of the compound at all. She knew nothing beyond the beza, the women's side of the House. She was kept there just as I had been kept in the compound, ignorant of anything outside. She had never smelled cowdung, as I had never seen flowers.
My mother assured her I was clean, and she said, "Then she can come to bed with me tonight.
I'd like that. Will you like to come sleep with me, pretty little — " She glanced at my mother, who murmured, "Rakam." Ma'am pursed her lips at the name. "I don't like that," she murmured. "So ugly. Toti. Yes. You can be my new Toti. Bring her this evening, Yowa."
She had had a foxdog called Toti, my mother told me. Her pet had died. I did not know animals ever had names, and so it did not seem odd to me to be given an animal's name, but it did seem strange at first not to be Rakam. I could not think of myself as Toti.
That night my mother bathed me again and oiled my skin with sweet oil and dressed me in a soft gown, softer even than her red scarf. Again she scolded and warned me, but she was excited, too, and pleased with me, as we went to the beza again, through other halls, meeting some other bondswomen on the way, and to the lady's bedroom. It was a wonderful room, hung with mirrors and draperies and paintings. I did not understand what the mirrors were, or the paintings, and was
•"•s 204 -a-®
A Woman's Liberation
frightened when I saw people in them. Lady Tazeu saw that I was frightened. "Come, little one," she said, making a place for me in her great, wide, soft bed strewn with pillows, "come and cuddle up." I crawled in beside her, and she stroked my hair and skin and held me in her warm, soft arms until I was comfortable and at ease. "There, there, little Toti," she said, and so we slept.
I became the pet of Lady Tazeu Wehoma Shomeke. I slept with her almost every night. Her husband was seldom home and when he was there did not come to her, preferring bondswomen for his pleasure. Sometimes she had my mother or other, younger bondswomen come into her bed, and she sent me away at those times, until I was older, ten or eleven, when she began to keep me and have me join in with them, teaching me how to be pleasured. She was gentle, but she was the mistress in love, and I was her instrument which she played.
I was also trained in household arts and duties.
She taught me to sing with her, as I had a true voice. All those years I was never punished and never made to do hard work. I who had been wild in the compound was perfectly obedient in the Great House. I had been rebellious to my grandmother and impatient of her commands, but whatever my lady ordered me to do I gladly did- She held me fast to her by the only kind of love she had to give me.
I thought that she was the Merciful Tual come down upon the earth. That is not a way of speaking, that is the truth. I thought she was a higher being, superior to myself.
Perhaps you will say that I could not or should not have had pleasure in being used without my
a.s 205 a-s'
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
consent by my mistress, and if I did, I should not speak of it, showing even so little good in so great an evil. But I knew nothing of consent or refusal. Those are freedom words.
She had one child, a son, three years older than I- She lived quite alone among us bondswomen. The Wehomas were nobles of the Islands, old-fashioned people whose women did not travel, so she was cut off from her family. The only company she had was when Owner Shomeke brought friends with him from the capital, but those were all men, and she could be with them only at table.
I seldom saw the Owner and only at a distance.
I thought he too was a superior being, but a dangerous one.
As for Erod, the Young Owner, we saw him when he came to visit his mother daily or when he went out riding with his tutors. We girls would peep at him and giggle to each other when we were eleven or twelve, because he was a handsome boy, night-black and slender like his mother. I knew that he was afraid of his father, because I had heard him weep when he was with his mother. She would comfort him with candy and caresses, saying, "He'll be gone again soon, my darling." I too felt sorry for Erod, who was like a shadow, soft and harmless. He was sent off to school for a year at fifteen, but his father brought him back before the year was up. Bondsmen told us the Owner had beaten him cruelly and had forbidden him even to ride off the estate.
Bondswomen whom the Owner used told us how brutal he was, showing us where he had bruised and hurt them. They hated him, but my mother would not speak against him. "Who do you
a 206 a
A Woman's Liberation
think you are?" she said to a girl who was complaining of his use of her. "A lady to be treated like glass?" And when the girl found herself pregnant, stuffed was the word we used, my mother had her sent back to the compound. I did not understand why. I thought Yowa was hard and jealous. Now I think she was also protecting the girl from our lady's jealousy.
I do not know when I understood that I was the Owner's daughter. Because she had kept that secret from our lady, my mother believed it was a secret from all. But the bondswomen all knew it. I do not know what I heard or overheard, but when I saw Erod, I would study him and think that I looked much more like our father than he did, for by then I knew what a father was. And I wondered that Lady
Tazeu did not see it. But she chose to live in ignorance.
During these years I seldom went to the compound. After I had been a_halfyear or so at the House, I was eager to go back and see Walsu and my grandmother and show them my fine clothes and clean skin and shining hair; but when I went, the pups I used to play with threw dirt and stones at me and tore my clothes- Walsu was in the fields. I had to hide in my grandmother's hut all day. I never wanted to go back. When my grandmother sent for me, I would go only with my mother and always stayed close by her. The people in the compound, even my grandmother, came to look coarse and foul to me. They were dirty and smelled strongly. They had sores, scars from punishment, lopped fingers, ears, or noses. Their hands and feet were coarse, with deformed nails. I was no longer used to people
•sAs 207 =-e
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
who looked so. We domestics of the Great House were entirely different from them, 1 thought,
Serving the higher beings, we became like them.
When I was thirteen and fourteen Lady Tazeu still kept me in her bed, making love to me often.
But also she had a new pet, the daughter of one of the cooks, a pretty little girl though white as clay.
One night she made love to me for a long time in ways that she knew gave me great ecstasy of the body. When I lay exhausted in her arms she whispered "good-bye, good-bye," kissing me all over my face and breasts. I was too spent to wonder at this.
The next morning my lady called in my mother and myself to tell us that she intended to give me to her son for his seventeenth birthday. "I shall miss you terribly, Toti darling," she said, with tears in her eyes. "You have been my joy. But there isn't another girl on the place that I could let Erod have. You are the cleanest, dearest, sweetest of them all. I know you are a virgin," she meant a virgin to men, "and I know my boy will enjoy you. And he'll be kind to her, Yowa," she said earnestly to my mother. My mother bowed and said nothing. There was nothing she could say. And she said nothing to me. It was too late to speak of the secret she had been so proud of.
Lady Tazeu gave me medicine to prevent conception, but my mother, not trusting the medicine, went to my grandmother and brought me contraceptive herbs-1 took both faithfully that week.
If a man in the House visited his wife he came to the beza, but if he wanted a bondswoman she was "sent across." So on the night of the Young Owner's birthday I was dressed all in red and led over, for the first time in my life, to the men's side of the House.
a 208 a
A Woman's Liberation
My reverence for my lady extended to her son, and I had been taught that owners were superior by nature to us. But he was a boy whom I had known since childhood, and I knew that his blood and mine were half the same. It gave me a strange feeling towards him.
I thought he was shy, afraid of his manhood.
Other girls had tried to tempt him and failed. The
women had told me what I was to do, how to offer myself and encourage him, and I was ready to do that. I was brought to him in his great bedroom, all of stone carved like lace, with high, thin windows of violet glass. I stood timidly near the door for a while, and he stood near a table covered with papers and screens. He came forward at last, took my hand, and led me to a chair. He made me sit down, and spoke to me standing, which was all improper, and confused my mind.
"Rakam," he said — "that's your name, isn't it?" — I nodded — "Rakam, my mother means only kindness, and you must not think me ungrateful to her, or blind to your beauty. But I will not take a woman who cannot freely offer herself. Intercourse between owner and slave is rape." And he talked on, talking beautifully, as when my lady read aloud from one of her books. I did not understand much, except that I was to come whenever he sent for me and sleep in his bed, but he would never touch me. And I was not to speak of this to anyone. "I am sorry, I am very sony to ask you to lie," he said, so earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That made him seem more like a god than a human being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive?
"I will do just as you say. Lord Erod," I said.
TA3> 209 -a
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
So, most nights, his bondsmen came to bring me across. I would sleep in his great bed, while he worked at the papers on his table. He slept on a couch beneath the windows. Often he wanted to talk to me, sometimes for a long time, telling me his ideas. When he was in school in the capital he had become a member of a group of owners who wished to abolish slavery, called The Community. Getting wind of this, his father had ordered him out of school, sent him home, and forbidden him to leave the estate. So he too was a prisoner. But he corresponded constantly with others in The Community through the net, which he knew how to operate without his father's knowledge, or the government's.
His head was so full of ideas he had to speak them. Often Geu and Ahas, the young bondsmen who had grown up with him, who always came to
fetch me across, stayed with us while he talked to all of us about slavery and freedom and many other things. Often I was sleepy, but I did listen, and heard much I did not know how to understand or even believe. He told us there was an organization among assets, called the Hame, that worked to steal slaves from the plantations. These slaves would be brought to members of The Community, who would make out false papers of ownership and treat them well, renting them to decent work in the cities. He told us about the cities, and I loved to hear all that- He told us about Yeowe Colony, saying that there was a revolution there among the slaves.
Of Yeowe I knew nothing. It was a great blue-green star that set after the sun or rose before it, brighter than the smallest of the moons. It was a name in an old song they sang in the compound:
•As 210 TW
A Woman's Liberation
0, 0, Ye-o-we,
Nobody never comes back.
I had no idea what a revolution was. When Erod told me that it meant that assets on plantations in this place called Yeowe were fighting their owners, I did not understand how assets could do that. From the beginning it was ordained that there should be higher and lower beings, the Lord and the human, the man and the woman, the owner and the owned.
All my world was Shomeke Estate and it stood on that one foundation. Who would want to overturn it? Everyone would be crushed in the ruins.
I did not like Erod to call assets slaves, an ugly word that took away our value. I decided in my mind that here on Werel we were assets, and in that other place, Yeowe Colony, there were slaves, worthless bondspeople, intractables. That was why they had been sent there. It made good sense.
By this you know how ignorant I was.
Sometimes Lady Tazeu had let us watch shows on the holonet with her, but she watched only dramas, not the reports of events. Of the world beyond the estate I knew nothing but what I learned from Erod, and that I could not understand.
Erod liked us to argue with him. He thought it meant our minds were growing free. Geu was good at it. He would ask questions like, "But if there's no assets, who'll do the work?" Then Erod could answer at length. His eyes shone, his voice was eloquent. I loved him very much when he talked to us. He was beautiful and what he said was beautiful. It was like hearing the old men "singing the word," reciting the Arkamye, when I was a little pup in the compound.
A 211 A
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
I gave the contraceptives my lady gave me every month to girls who needed them- Lady Tazeu had aroused my sexuality and accustomed me to being used sexually. I missed her caresses. But I did not know how to approach any of the bondswomen, and they were afraid to approach me, since I belonged to the Young Owner. Being with Erod often, while he talked I yearned to him in my body. I lay in his bed and dreamed that he came and stooped over me and did with me as my lady used to do- But he never touched me.
Geu also was a handsome young man, clean and well mannered, rather dark-skinned, attractive to me. His eyes were always on me. But he would not approach me, until I told him that Erod did not touch me.
Thus I broke my promise to Erod not to tell anyone; but I did not think myself bound to keep promises, as I did not think myself bound to speak the truth. Honor of that kind was for owners, not for us.
After that, Geu used to tell me when to meet him in the attics of the House. He gave me little pleasure- He would not penetrate me, believing that he must save my virginity for our master. He had me take his penis in my mouth instead. He would turn away in his climax, for the slave's sperm must not defile the master's woman. That is the honor of a slave.
Now you may say in disgust that my story is all of such things, and there is far more to life, even a slave's life, than sex. That is very true. I can say only that it may be in our sexuality that we are most easily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there, a.s 212 .-»®
A Woman 's Liberation
even as free men and women, that we find freedom hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the roots of power.
I was young, hill of health and desire for joy.
And even now, even here, when I look back across the years from this world to that, to the compound and the House of Shomeke, I see images like those in a bright dream. I see my grandmother's big, hard hands. I see my mother smiling, the red scarf about her neck. I see my lady's black, silky body among the cushions. I smell the smoke of the cowdung fires, and the perfumes of the beza. I feel the soft, fine clothing on my young body, and my lady's hands and lips. I hear the old men singing the word, and my voice twining with my lady's voice in a love song, and Erod telling us of freedom. His face is illuminated with his vision. Behind him the windows of stone lace and violet glass keep out the night. I do not say I would go back. I would die before 1 would go back to Shomeke. I would xlie before I left this free world, my world, to go back to the place of slavery. But whatever I knew in my youth of beauty, of love, and of hope, was there.
And there it was betrayed. All that is built upon that foundation in the end betrays itself.
I was sixteen years old in the year the world changed.
The first change I heard about was of no interest to me except that my lord was excited about it, and so were Geu and Anas and some of the other young bondsmen. Even my grandmother wanted to hear about it when I visited her. "That Yeowe, that slave world," she said, "they made freedom? They sent away their owners? They opened the gates? My
ar-S 213 79'si
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
lord, my sweet Lord Kamye, how can that be? Praise his name, praise his marvels!" She rocked back and
forth as she squatted in the dust, her arms about her knees. She was an old, shrunken woman now. "Tell mel" she said.
I knew little else to tell her. "All the soldiers came back here," I said. "And those other people, those alemens, they're there on Yeowe. Maybe they're the new owners. That's all somewhere way out there," I said, flipping my hand at the sky.
"What's alemens?" my grandmother asked, but I did not know.
It was all mere words to me.
But when our Owner, Lord Shomeke, came home sick, that I understood. He came on a flyer to our little port. 1 saw him carried by on a stretcher, the whites showing in his eyes, his black skin mottled grey. He was dying of a sickness that was ravaging the cities. My mother, sitting with Lady Tazeu, saw a politician on the net who said that the alemens had brought the sickness to Werel. He talked so fearsomely that we thought everybody was going to die. When I told Geu about it he snorted. "Aliens, not alemens," he said, "and they've got nothing to do with it. My lord talked with the doctors. It's just a new kind of pusworm."
That dreadful disease was bad enough. We knew that any asset found to be infected with it was slaughtered at once like an animal and the corpse burned on the spot.
They did not slaughter the Owner. The House filled with doctors, and Lady Tazeu spent day and night by her husband's bed. It was a cruel death. It went on and on. Lord Shomeke in his suffering made
•A»a 214 A-s A Woman's Liberation
terrible sounds, screams, howls. One would not believe a man could cry out hour after hour as he did. His flesh ulcerated and fell away, he went mad, but he did not die.
As Lady Tazeu became like a shadow, worn and silent, Erod filled with strength and excitement. Sometimes when we heard his father howling his eyes would shine. He would whisper, "Lady Tual have mercy on him," but he fed on those cries. I knew from Geu and Ahas, who had been brought up with him, how the father had tormented and despised him, and how Erod had vowed to be everything his father was not and to undo all he did.
But it was Lady Tazeu who ended it. One night she sent away the other attendants, as she often did, and sat alone with the dying man. When he began his moaning howl, she took her little sewing knife and cut his throat. Then she cut the veins in her arms across and across, and lay down by him, and so died. My mother was in the next room all night. She said she wondered a little at the silence, but was so weary that she fell asleep; and in the morning she went in and found them lying in their cold blood.
All I wanted to do was weep for my lady, but everything was in confusion. Everything in the sickroom must be burned, the doctors said, and the bodies must be burned without delay. The House was under quarantine, so only the priests of the House could hold the funeral. No one was to leave the estate for twenty days. But several of the doctors themselves left when Erod, who was now Lord
Shomeke, told them what he intended to do. I heard some confused word of it from Ahas, but in my grief I paid little heed.
AA- 215 "A
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
That evening, all the House assets stood outside the Lady's Chapel during the funeral service to hear the songs and prayers within. The Bosses and cut-frees had brought the people from the compound, and they stood behind us. We saw the procession come out, the white biers carried by, the pyres lighted, and the black smoke go up. Long before the smoke ceased rising, the new Lord Shomeke came to us all where we stood.
Erod stood up on the little rise of ground behind the chapel and spoke in a strong voice such as I had never heard from him. Always in the House it had been whispering in the dark. Now it was broad day and a strong voice. He stood there black and straight in his white mourning clothes. He was not yet twenty years old. He said, "Listen, you people: you have been slaves, you will be free. You have been my property, you will own your own lives now. This morning I sent to the Government the Order of Manumission for every asset on the estate, four hundred and eleven men, women, and children. If you will come to my office in the Counting House in the morning, I wilt give you your papers. Each of you is named in those papers as a free person. You can never be enslaved again. You are free to do as you please from tomorrow on. There will be money for each one of you to begin your new life with. Not what you deserve, not what you have earned in all your work for us, but what I have to give you. I am leaving Shomeke. I will go to the capital, where I will work for the freedom of every slave on Werel. The Freedom Day that came to Yeowe is coming to us, and soon. Any of you who wish to come with me, come! There's work for us all to do!"
s9-s 216 'r»*s1
A Woman's Liberation
I remember all he said. Those are his words as he spoke them. When one does not read and has not had one's mind filled up by the images on the nets,
words spoken strike down deep in the mind.
There was such a silence when he stopped speaking as I had never heard.
One of the doctors began talking, protesting to Erod that he must not break the quarantine.
"The evil has been burned away," Erod said, with a great gesture to the black smoke rising. "This has been an evil place, but no more harm will go forth from Shomeke!"
At that a slow sound began among the compound people standing behind us, and it swelled into a great noise of jubilation mixed with wailing, crying, shouting, singing. "Lord Kamye! Lord Kamye!" the men shouted. An old woman came forward: my grandmother. She strode through us House assets as if we were a field of grain. She stopped a good way from Erod. People fell silent to listen to the grandmother. She said, "Lord Master, are you turning us out of our homes?"
"No," he said. "They are yours. The land is yours
to use. The profit of the fields is yours. This is your home, and you are free!"
At that the shouts rose up again so loud I cowered down and covered my ears, but I was crying and shouting too, praising Lord Erod and Lord Kamye in one voice with the rest of them.
We danced and sang there in sight of the burning pyres until the sun went down. At last the grandmothers and the cutfrees got the people to go back to the compound, saying they did not have their papers yet. We domestics went straggling back
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
to the House, talking about tomorrow, when we would get our freedom and our money and our land.
All that next day Erod sat in the Counting House and made out the papers for each slave and counted out the same amount of money for each: a hundred kue in cash, and a draft for five hundred kue on the district bank, which could not be drawn for forty days. This was, he explained to each one, to save them from exploitation by the unscrupulous before they knew how best to use their money. He advised them to form a cooperative, to pool their funds, to run the estate democratically. "Money in the bank, Lord!" an old crippled man came out crying, jigging on his twisted legs. "Money in the bank. Lord!"
If they wanted, Erod said over and over, they could save their money and contact the Hame, who would help them buy passage to Yeowe with it.
"0, 0, Ye-o-we," somebody began singing, and they changed the words:
"Everybody's going to go.
0, 0, Ye-o-we,
Everybody's going to go!"
They sang it all day long. Nothing could change the sadness of it. I want to weep now, remembering that song, that day.
The next morning Erod left. He could not wait to get away from the place of his misery and begin his life in the capital working for freedom. He did not say good-bye to me. He took Geu and Ahas with him- The doctors and their aides and assets had all left the day before. We watched his flyer go up into the air.
a-As 218 -CT>si
A Woman's Liberation
We went back to the House. It was like something dead. There were no owners in it, no masters, no one to tell us what to do.
My mother and I went in to pack up our clothing. We had said little to each other, but felt we could not stay there. We heard other women running through the beza, rummaging in Lady Tazeu's rooms, going through her closets, laughing and screaming with excitement, finding jewelry and valuables. We heard men's voices in the hall: Bosses' voices. Without a word my mother and I took what we had in our hands and went out by a back door, slipped through the hedges of the garden, and ran all the way to the compound.
The great gate of the compound stood wide open.
How can I tell you what that was to us, to see that, to see that gate stand open? How can I tell you?
2. Zeskra
Erod knew nothing about how the estate was run, because the Bosses ran it. He was a prisoner too. He had lived in his screens, his dreams, his visions.
The grandmothers and others in the compound had spent all that night trying to make plans, to draw our people together so they could defend themselves. That morning when my mother and I came, there were bondsmen guarding the compound with weapons made of farm tools. The grandmothers and cutfrees had made an election of a headman, a strong, well-liked field hand. In
iA-a 219 ''•'"-s1
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
that way they hoped to keep the young men with
them.
By the afternoon that hope was broken. The young men ran wild. They went up to the House to loot it. The Bosses shot them from the windows, killing many; the others fled away. The Bosses stayed holed up in the House, drinking the wine of the Shomekes. Owners of other plantations were flying reinforcements to them. We heard the flyers land, one after another. The bondswomen who had stayed in the House were at their mercy now.
As for us in the compound, the gates were closed again. We had moved the great bars from the outside to the inside, so we thought ourselves safe for the night at least. But in the midnight they came with heavy tractors and pushed down the wall, and a hundred men or more, our Bosses and owners from all the plantations of the region, came swarming in. They were armed with guns. We fought them with farm tools and pieces of wood. One or two of them were hurt or killed. They killed as many of us as they wanted to kill and then began to rape us. It went on all night.
men and held them and shot them between the eyes, the way they kill cattle. My grandmother was one of them. I do not know what happened to my mother. I did not see any bondsmen living when they took me away in the morning. I saw white papers lying in the blood on the ground. Freedom papers-
Several of us girls and young women still alive were herded into a truck and taken to the port field. There they made us enter a flyer, shoving and using
a-w 220 aw
A Woman's Liberation
sticks, and we were carried off in the air. I was not then in my right mind. All I know of this is what the others told me later.
We found ourselves in a compound, like our compound in every way. I thought they had brought us back home. They shoved us in by the cutfrees' ladder. It was still morning and the hands were out at work, only the grandmothers and pups and old men in the compound. The grandmothers
came to us fierce and scowling. I could not understand at first why they were all strangers. I looked for my grandmother.
They were frightened of us, thinking we must be runaways. Plantation slaves had been running away, the last years, trying to get to the cities. They thought we were intractables and would bring trouble with us. But they helped us clean ourselves, and gave us a place near the cutfrees' tower. There were no huts empty, they said. They told us this was Zeskra Estate. They did not want to hear about what had happened at Shomeke. They did not want us to be there. They did not need our trouble.
We slept there on the ground without shelter.
Some of the bondsmen came across the ditch in the night and raped us because there was nothing to prevent them from it, no one to whom we were of any value. We were too weak and sick to fight them. One of us, a girl named Abye, tried to fight. The men beat her insensible. In the morning she could not talk or walk. She was left there when the Bosses came and took us away. Another girl was left behind too, a big farmhand with white scars on her head like parts in her hair. As we were going I looked at
her and saw that it was Walsu, who had been my •»-s> 221 A-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
friend. We had not recognised each other. She sat in the dirt, her head bowed down.
Five of us were taken from the compound to the Great House of Zeskra, to the bondswomen's quarters. There for a while I had a little hope, since I knew how to be a good domestic asset. I did not know then how different Zeskra was from Shomeke- The House at Zeskra was full of people, full of owners and bosses. It was a big family, not a single Lord as at Shomeke but a dozen of them with their retainers and relations and visitors, so there might be thirty or forty men staying on the men's side and as many women in the beza, and a House staff of fifty or more. We were not brought as domestics, but as use-women.
After we were bathed we were left in the use-women's quarters, a big room without any private places. There were ten or more use-women already there. Those of them who liked their work were not glad to see us, thinking of us as rivals; others welcomed us, hoping we might take their places and they might be let to join the domestic staff. But none were very unkind, and some were kind, giving us clothes, for we had been naked all this time, and comforting the youngest of us, Mio, a little compound girl of ten or eleven whose white body was mottled all over with brown-and-blue bruises.
One of them was a tall woman called Sezi-TuaI.
She looked at me with an ironic face. Something in her made my soul awaken.
"You're not a dusty," she said. "You're as black as old Lord Devil Zeskra himself. You're a Bossbaby, aren't you?"
"No ma'am," I said. "A lord's child. And the Lord's child. My name is Rakam."
-ryAs 222 -As A Woman's Liberation
"Your Grandfather hasn't treated you too well
lately," she said. "Maybe you should pray to the Merciful Lady Tual."
"I don't look for mercy," I said. From then on Sezi-Tual liked me, and I had her protection, which I needed.
We were sent across to the men's side most nights. When there were dinner parties, after the ladies left the dinner room we were brought in to sit on the owners' knees and drink wine with them. Then they would use us there on the couches or take us to their rooms. The men of Zeskra were not cruel. Some liked to rape, but most preferred to think that we desired them and wanted whatever they wanted. Such men could be satisfied, the one kind if we showed fear or submission, the other kind if we showed yielding and delight. But some of their visitors were another kind of man.
There was no law or rule against damaging or killing a use-woman. Her owner might not like it, but in his pride he could not say so: he was supposed to have so many assets that the loss of one or another did not matter at all. So some men whose
pleasure lay in torture came to hospitable estates like Zeskra for their pleasure. Sezi-Tual, a favorite of the Old Lord, could and did protest to him, and such guests were not invited back. But while I was there, Mio, the little girl who had come with us from Shomeke, was murdered by a guest. He tied her down to the bed. He made the knot across her neck so tight that while he used her she strangled to death.
I will say no more of these things. I have told what I must tell. There are truths that are not useful.
-CT-S 223 ;--s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
All knowledge is local, my friend has said. Is it true, where is it true, that that child had to die in that way? Is it true, where is it true, that she did not have to die in that way?
I was often used by Lord Yaseo, a middle-aged man, who liked my dark skin, calling me "My Lady." Also he called me "Rebel," because what had happened at Shomeke they called a rebellion of the
slaves. Nights when he did not send for me I served as a common-girl.
After I had been at Zeskra two years Sezi-Tual came to me one morning early. I had come back late from Lord Yaseo's bed. Not many others were there, for there had been a drinking party the night before, and all the common-girls had been sent for. Sezi-Tual woke me. She had strange hair, curly, in a bush.
I remember her face above me, that hair curling out all about it. "Rakam," she whispered, "one of the visitor's assets spoke to me last night. He gave me this. He said his name is Suhame."
"Suhame," I repeated. I was sleepy. I looked at what she was holding out to me: some dirty crumpled paper. "I can't read!" I said, yawning, impatient.
But I looked at it and knew it. I knew what it said. It was the freedom paper. It was my freedom paper. I had watched Lord Erod write my name on it. Each time he wrote a name he had spoken it aloud so that we would know what he was writing.
I remembered the big flourish of the first letter of
both my names: Radosse Rakam. I took the paper in my hand, and my hand was shaking. "Where did you get this?" I whispered.
"Better ask this Suhame," she said. Now I heard
-r»tgi 224 *»"®
A Woman's Liberation
what that name meant: "from the Hame." It was a password name. She knew that too. She was watching me, and she bent down suddenly and leaned her forehead against mine, her breath catching in her throat. "If I can, I'll help," she whispered.
I met with "Suhame" in one of the pantries. As soon as I saw him I knew him; Ahas, who had been Lord Erod's favorite along with Geu. A slight, silent young man with dusty skin, he had never been much in my mind. He had watchful eyes, and I had thought when Geu and I spoke that he looked at us with ill will. Now he looked at me with a strange face, still watchful, yet blank.
"Why are you here with that Lord Boeba?" I
said. "Aren't you free?"
"I am as free as you are," he said.
I did not understand him, then.
"Didn't Lord Erod protect even you?" I asked.
"Yes. I am a free man." His face began to come alive, losing that dead blankness it had when he first saw me. "Lady Boeba's a member of The Community. I work with the Hame. I've been trying to find people from Shomeke. We heard several of the women were here. Are there others still alive, Rakam?"
His voice was soft, and when he said my name my breath caught and my throat swelled. I said his name and went to him, holding him. "Ratual, Ramayo, Keo are still here," I said. He held me gently. "Walsu is in the compound," I said, "if she's still alive." I wept. I had not wept since Mio's death. He too was in tears-
We talked, then and later. He explained to me
that we were indeed, by law, free, but that law meant -r*i® 225 a*-s>
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
nothing on the Estates. The government would not interfere between owners and those they claimed as their assets. If we claimed our rights, the Zeskras would probably kill us, since they considered us stolen goods and did not want to be shamed. We must run away or be stolen away, and get to the city, the capital, before we could have any safety at all.
We had to be sure that none of the Zeskra assets would betray us out of jealousy or to gain favor, Sezi-Tual was the only one I tmsted entirely.
Ahas arranged our escape with Sezi-Tual's help-1 pleaded once with her to join us, but she thought that since she had no papers she would have to live always in hiding, and that would be worse than her life at Zeskra.
"You could go to Yeowe," I said.
She laughed. "All I know about Yeowe is nobody ever came back. Why run from one hell to the next one?"
Ratual chose not to come with us; she was a favorite of one of the young lords and content to remain so. Ramayo, the oldest of us from Shomeke, and Keo, who was now about fifteen, wanted to come. Sezi-Tual went down to the compound and found that Walsu was alive, working as a field hand. Arranging her escape was far more difficult than ours. There was no escape from a compound. She could get away only in daylight, in the fields, under the overseer's and the Boss's eyes. It was difficult even to talk to her, for the grandmothers were distrustful. But Sezi-Tual managed it, and Walsu told her she would do whatever she must do "to see her paper again."
Lady Boeba's flyer waited for us at the edge of a great gede field that had just been harvested. It was
A^Ma 226 ^s-9-s
A Woman's Liberation
late summer. Ramayo, Keo, and I walked away from the House separately at different times of the morning. Nobody watched over us closely, as there was nowhere for us to go. Zeskra lies among other great estates, where a runaway slave would find no friends for hundreds of miles. One by one, taking different ways, we came through the fields and woods, crouching and hiding all the way to the flyer where Ahas waited for us. My heart beat and beat so I could not breathe. There we waited for Walsu.
"There!" said Keo, perched up on the wing of the flyer. She pointed across the wide field of stubble-
Walsu came running from the strip of trees on the far side of the field. She ran heavily, steadily, not as if she were afraid. But all at once she halted. She turned. We did not know why for a moment. Then we saw two men break from the shadow of the trees in pursuit of her.
She did not run from them, leading them towards us. She ran back at them. She leapt at them like a hunting cat. As she made that leap, one of them fired a gun. She bore one man down with her, falling. The other fired again and again. "In," Ahas said, "now." We scrambled into the flyer and it rose into the air, seemingly all in one instant, the same instant in which Walsu made that great leap, she too rising into the air, into her death, into her freedom.
3. The City
I had folded up my freedom paper into a tiny packet. I carried it in my hand all the time we were in the
s».a> 227 ws
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
flyer and while we landed and went in a public car through the city streets. When Ahas found what I was clutching, he said I need not worry about it. Our manumission was on record in the Government Office and would be honored, here in the City. We were free people, he said- We were gareots, that is, owners who have no assets. "Just like Lord Erod," he said. That meant nothing to me. There was too much to learn. I kept hold of my freedom paper until I had a place to keep it safe. I have it still.
We walked a little way in the streets and then Ahas led us into one of the huge houses that stood side by side on the pavement. He called it a compound, but we thought it must be an owners' house. There a middle-aged woman welcomed us. She was pale-skinned, but talked and behaved like an owner, so that I did not know what she was. She said she was Ress, a rentswoman and an elderwoman of the house.
Rentspeople were assets rented out by their owners to a company. If they were hired by a big company, they lived in the company compounds, but there were many, many rentspeople in the City who worked for small companies or businesses they managed themselves, and they occupied buildings run for profit, called open compounds.
In such places the occupants must keep curfew, the doors being locked at night, but that was all; they were self-governed. This was such an open compound. It was supported by The Community. Some of the occupants were rentspeople, but many were like us. gareots who had been slaves. Over a hundred people lived there in forty apartments. It was supervised by several women, whom I would have
.3-*-® 228 "*®
A Woman's Liberation
called grandmothers, but here they were called elderwomen.
On the estates deep in the country, deep in the past, where the life was protected by miles of land and by the custom of centuries and by determined ignorance, any asset was absolutely at the mercy of any owner. From there we had come into this great crowd of two million people where nothing and nobody was protected from chance or change, where we had to leam as fast as we could how to stay alive, but where our life was in our own hands.
I had never seen a street. I could not read a word. I had much to leam.
Ress made that clear at once. She was a City woman, quick-thinking and quick-talking, impatient, aggressive, sensitive. I could not like or understand her for a long time. She made me feel stupid, slow, a clod. Often I was angry at her.
There was anger in me now. I had not felt anger while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no use for it. I lived with it in silence. Keo and Ramayo had a big room together, I had a small one next to theirs. I had never had a room to myself. At first I felt lonely in it and as if ashamed, but soon I came to like it. The first thing I did freely, as a free woman, was to shut my door.
Nights, I would shut my door and study. Days, we had work training in the morning, classes in the afternoon: reading and writing, arithmetic, history. My work training was in a small shop which made boxes of paper and thin wood to hold cosmetics, candies, jewelry, and such things. I was trained in all the different steps and crafts of making and oma-
•9-s 229 TA-S
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
meriting the boxes, for that is how most work was done in the City, by artisans who knew all their trade. The shop was owned by a member of The
Community. The older workers were rentspeople. When my training was finished I too would be paid wages.
Till then Lord Erod supported me as well as Keo and Ramayo and some men from Shomeke compound, who lived in a different house. Erod never came to the house. I think he did not want to see any of the people he had so disastrously freed. Ahas and Geu said he had sold most of the land at Shomeke and used the money for The Community and to make his way in politics, as there was now a Radical Party which favored emancipation,
Geu came a few times to see me. He had become a City man, dapper and knowing. I felt when he looked at me he was thinking I had been a use-woman at Zeskra, and I did not like to see him.
Ahas, whom I had never thought about in the old days, I now admired, knowing him brave, resolute, and kind. It was he who had looked for us, found us, rescued us. Owners had paid the money but Ahas had done it. He came often to see us. He was the only link that had not broken between me
and my childhood.
And he came as a friend, a companion, never driving me back into my slave body. I was angry now at every man who looked at me as men look at women. I was angry at women who looked at me seeing me sexually. To Lady Tazeu all I had been was my body. At Zeskra that was all I had been. Even to Erod who would not touch me that was all I had been. Flesh to touch or not to touch, as they
3-*® 230 a-s>
A Woman's Liberation
pleased. To use or not to use, as they chose. I hated the sexual parts of myself, my genitals and breasts and the swell of my hips and belly. Ever since I was a child, I had been dressed in soft clothing made to display all that sexuality of a woman's body. When I began to be paid and could buy or make my own clothing, I dressed in hard, heavy cloth. What I liked of myself was my hands, clever at their work, and my head, not clever at learning, but still learning, no matter how long it took-
What I loved to learn was history. I had grown up without any history. There was nothing at Shomeke or Zeskra but the way things were. Nobody knew anything about any time when things had been different- Nobody knew there was any place where things might be different. We were enslaved by the present time.
Erod had talked of change, indeed, but the owners were going to make the change. We were to be changed, we were to be freed, just as we had been owned. In history I saw that any freedom has been made, not given.
The first book I read by myself was a history of Yeowe, written very simply. It told about the days of the Colony, of the Four Corporations, of the terrible first century when the ships carried slave men to Yeowe and precious ores back. Slave men were so cheap then they worked them to death in a few years in the mines, bringing in new shipments continually. 0, 0, Yeowe, nobody never comes back. Then the Corporations began to send women slaves to work and breed, and over the years the assets spilled out of the compounds and made cities — whole
great cities like this one I was living in. But not run •sw 231 -A-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
by the owners or Bosses. Run by the assets, the way this house was run by us. On Yeowe the assets had belonged to the Corporations. They could rent their freedom by paying the Corporation a part of what they earned, the way sharecropper assets paid their owners in parts of Voe Deo. On Yeowe they called those assets freedpeople. Not free people, but freed-people. And then, this history I was reading said, they began to think, why aren't we free people? So they made the revolution, the Liberation. It began on a plantation called Nadami, and spread from there. Thirty years they fought for their freedom.
And just three years ago they had won the war, they had driven the Corporations, the owners, the bosses, off their world. They had danced and sung in the streets, freedom, freedom! This book I was reading (slowly, but reading it) had been printed there — there on Yeowe, the Free World. The Aliens had brought it to Werel. To me it was a sacred book.
I asked Anas what it was like now on Yeowe, and he said they were making their government, writing a perfect Constitution to make all men equal under the Law.
On the net, on the news, they said they were fighting each other on Yeowe, there was no government at all, people were starving, savage tribesmen in the countryside and youth gangs in the cities running amuck, law and order broken down. Corruption, ignorance, a doomed attempt, a dying world, they said.
Ahas said that the Government of Voe Deo, which had fought and lost the war against Yeowe, now was afraid of a Liberation on Werel. "Don't believe any news," he counseled me. "Especially
siva 232 sAvsi
A Woman's Liberation
don't believe the neareals. Don't ever go into them. They're just as much lies as the rest, but if you feel and see a thing, you will believe it. And they know
that. They don't need guns if they own our minds."
The owners had no reporters, no cameras on Yeowe, he said; they invented their "news," using actors.
Only some of the Aliens of the Ekumen were allowed on Yeowe, and the Yeowans were debating whether they should send them away, keeping the world they had won for themselves alone.
"But then what about us?" I said, for I had begun dreaming of going there, going to the Free World, when the Hame could charter ships and send people.
"Some of them say assets can come. Others say they can't feed so many, and would be overwhelmed. They're debating it democratically. It will be decided in the first Yeowan elections, soon." Ahas was dreaming of going there too. We talked together of our dream the way lovers talk of their love.
But there were no ships going to Yeowe now. The Hame could not act openly and The Community was forbidden to act for them. The Ekumen had offered transportation on their own ships to anyone who wanted to go, but the government of Voe Deo refused to let them use any spaceport for that purpose. They could carry only their own people. No Werelian was to leave Werel.
It had been only forty years since Werel had at last allowed the Aliens to land and maintain diplomatic relations. As I went on reading history 1 began to understand a little of the nature of the dominant people of Werel. The black-skinned race that conquered all the other peoples of the Great Continent,
A*e 233 *"-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
and finally all the world, those who call themselves the owners, have lived in the belief that there is only one way to be. They have believed they are what people should be, do as people should do, and know all the truth that is known. All the other peoples of Werel, even when they resisted them, imitated them, trying to become them, and so became their property. When a people came out of the sky looking differently, doing differently, knowing differently, and would not let themselves be conquered or enslaved, the owner race wanted nothing to do with them. It took them four hundred years to admit that they had equals.
I was in the crowd at a rally of the Radical Party, at which Erod spoke, as beautifully as ever. I noticed a woman beside me in the crowd listening. Her skin was a curious orange-brown, like the rind of a pini, and the whites showed in the corners of her eyes. I thought she was sick — I thought of the pusworm, how Lord Shomeke's skin had changed and his eyes had shown their whites. I shuddered and drew away. She glanced at me, smiling a tittle, and returned her attention to the speaker. Her hair curled in a bush or cloud, like Sezi-Tual's. Her clothing was of a delicate cloth, a strange fashion. It came upon me very slowly what she was. that she had come here from a world unimaginably far. And the wonder of it was that for all her strange skin and eyes and hair and mind, she was human, as I am human: I had no doubt of that. I felt it. For a moment it disturbed me deeply. Then it ceased to trouble me and I felt a great curiosity, almost a yearning, a drawing to her. I wished to know her, to know what she knew.
3-*-® 234 s*-si
A Woman's Liberation
In me the owner's soul was struggling with the free soul. So it will do all my life.
Keo and Ramayo stopped going to school after they had learned to read and write and use the calculator, but I kept on. When there were no more classes to take from the school the Hame kept, the teachers helped me find classes in the net. Though the government controlled such courses, there were fine teachers and groups from all over the world, talking about literature and history and the sciences and arts. Always 1 wanted more history.
Ress, who was a member of the Hame, first took me to the Library of Voe Deo. As it was open only to owners, it was not censored by the government. Freed assets, if they were light-skinned, were kept out by the librarians on one pretext or another. I was dark-skinned, and had learned here in the City to carry myself with an indifferent pride that spared one many insults and offenses. Ress told me to stride in as if I owned the place. I did so, and was given all privileges without question. So I began to read freely, to read any book I wanted in that great library, every book in it if I could. That was my joy, that reading. That was the heart of my freedom-Beyond my work at the boxmaker's, which was well paid, pleasant, and among pleasant companions, and my learning and reading, there was not much to my life- I did not want more. I was lonely, but felt that loneliness was no high price to pay for what I wanted.
Ress, whom I had disliked, was a friend to me. I went with her to meetings of the Hame, and also to entertainments that I would have known nothing about without her guidance. "Come on, Bumpkin,"
r-W 235 C9.S
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
she would say. "Got to educate the plantation pup." And she would take me to the makil theater, or to asset dance halls where the music was good. She always wanted to dance. I let her teach me, but was not very happy dancing. One night as we were dancing the "slow-go" her hands began pressing me to
her, and looking in her face I saw the mask of sexual desire on it, soft and blank. 1 broke away. "I don't want to dance," I said.
We walked home. She came up to my room with me, and at my door she tried to hold and kiss me. I was sick with anger. "I don't want that!" I said.
"I'm sorry, Rakam," she said, more gently than I had ever heard her speak. "I know how you must feel. But you've got to get over that, you've got to have your own life. I'm not a man, and 1 do want you."
I broke in — "A woman used me before a man ever did. Did you ask me if I wanted you? I will never be used again!"
That rage and spite came bursting out of me like poison from an infection. If she had tried to touch me again, I would have hurt her. I slammed my door in her face. I went trembling to my desk, sat down, and began to read the book that was open on it.
Next day we were both ashamed and stiff. But
Ress had patience under her City quickness and roughness. She did not try to make love to me again, but she got me to trust her and talk to her as I could not talk to anybody else- She listened intently and told me what she thought. She said, "Bumpkin, you have it all wrong. No wonder. How could you have got it right? You think sex is something that gets done to you. It's not. It's something you do. With
•ws 236 '•a-s'
A Woman's Liberation
somebody else- Not to them. You never had any sex. All you ever knew was rape."
"Lord Erod told me all that a long time ago." I said. I was bitter. "I don't care what it's called. I had enough of it. For the rest of my life. And I'm glad to be without it."
Ress made a face. "At twenty-two?" she said.
"Maybe for a while. If you're happy, then fine- But think about what I said. It's a big part of life to just cut out."
"If I have to have sex, I can pleasure myself," 1 said, not caring if I hurt her. "Love has nothing to do with it."
"That's where you're wrong," she said, but I did not listen. I would learn from teachers and books which I chose for myself, but I would not take advice I had not asked for. I refused to be told what to do or what to think. If I was free, I would be free by myself. I was like a baby when it first stands up.
Ahas had been giving me advice too. He said it was foolish to pursue education so far. "There's nothing useful you can do with so much book learning," he said. "It's self-indulgent. We need leaders and members with practical skills."
"We need teachers!"
"Yes," he said, "but you knew enough to teach a year ago. What's the good of ancient history, facts about alien worlds? We have a revolution to make!"
I did not stop my reading, but I felt guilty. I took
a class at the Hame school teaching illiterate assets and freedpeople to read and write, as I myself had been taught only three years before. It was hard work. Reading is hard for a grown person to learn,
sf-s 237 a~*>s'
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
tired, at night, after work all day. It is much easier to let the net take one's mind over.
I kept arguing with Anas in my mind, and one day I said to him, "Is there a Library on Yeowe?"
"I don't know."
"You know there isn't. The Corporations didn't leave any libraries there. They didn't have any. They were ignorant people who knew nothing but profit. Knowledge is a good in itself. I keep on learning so that I can bring my knowledge to Yeowe. If I could, I'd bring them the whole Library'"
He stared. "What owners thought, what owners did — that's all their books are about. They don't
need that on Yeowe."
"Yes they do," I said, certain he was wrong, though again I could not say why.
At the school they soon called on me to teach history, one of the teachers having left. These classes went well. I worked hard preparing them. Presently I was asked to speak to a study group of advanced students, and that, too, went well. People were interested in the ideas I drew from history and the comparisons I had learned to make of our world with other worlds. I had been studying the way various peoples bring up their children, who takes the responsibility for them and how that responsibility is understood, since this seemed to me a place where a people frees or enslaves itself.
To one of these talks a man from the Embassy of the Ekumen came. I was frightened when I saw the alien face in my audience. I was worse frightened when I recognised him. He had taught the first course in Ekumenical History that I had taken in the net. I had listened to it devotedly though I never
v*.s 238 3-*®
A Woman's Liberation
participated in the discussion. What I learned had had a great influence on me. I thought he would find me presumptuous for talking of things he truly knew. I stammered on through my lecture, trying not to see his white-cornered eyes.
He came up to me afterwards, introduced himself politely, complimented my talk, and asked if I had read such-and-such a book. He engaged me so deftly and kindly in conversation that I had to like and trust him. And he soon earned my trust. I needed his guidance, for much foolishness has been written and spoken, even by wise people, about the balance of power between men and women, on which depend the lives of children and the value of their education. He knew useful books to read, from which I could go on by myself.
His name was Esdardon Aya. He worked in some high position, I was not sure what, at the Embassy. He had been born on Hain, the Old World, humanity's first home, from which all our ancestors came.
Sometimes I thought how strange it was that I knew about such things, such vast and ancient matters, I who had not known anything outside the compound walls till I was six, who had not known the name of the country I lived in till I was eighteen! When I was new to the City someone had spoken of "Voe Deo," and I had asked, "Where is that?" They had all stared at me. A woman, a hard-voiced old City rentswoman, had said, "Here, Dusty. Right here's Voe Deo. Your country and mine!"
I told Esdardon Aya that. He did not laugh. "A country, a people," he said. "Those are strange and very difficult ideas."
"My country was slavery," I said, and he nodded.
'A-6 239 Ae
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
By now I seldom saw Ahas. I missed his kind friendship, but it had all turned to scolding- "You're puffed up, publishing, talking to audiences all the
time," he said. "You're putting yourself before our cause."
I said, "But I talk to people in the Hame, I write about things we need to know. Everything I do is for freedom."
"The Community is not pleased with that pamphlet of yours," he said, in a serious, counseling way, as if telling me a secret I needed to know. "I've been asked to tell you to submit your writings to the committee before you publish again. That press is run by hotheads. The Hame is causing a good deal of trouble to our candidates."
"Our candidates!" I said in a rage- "No owner is my candidate! Are you still taking orders from the Young Owner?"
That stung him. He said, "If you put yourself
first, if you won't cooperate, you bring danger on us
all."
"I don't put myself first — politicians and capitalists do that. I put freedom first. Why can't you cooperate with me? It goes two ways, Ahas!"
He left angry, and left me angry.
I think he missed my dependence on him.
Perhaps he was jealous, too, of my independence, for he did remain Lord Erod's man. His was a loyal heart. Our disagreement gave us both much bitter pain. I wish I knew what became of him in the troubled times that followed.
There was truth in his accusation. I had found that I had the gift in speaking and writing of moving people's minds and hearts- Nobody told me that
TK-S 240 T-*-®
A Woman's Liberation
such a gift is as dangerous as it is strong. Ahas said I •was putting myself first, but I knew I was not doing that. 1 was wholly in the service of the truth and of liberty. No one told me that the end cannot purify the means, since only the Lord Kamye knows what the end may be. My grandmother could have told me that. The Arkamye would have reminded me of
it, but I did not often read in it, and in the City there were no old men singing the word, evenings. If there had been, I would not have heard them over the sound of my beautiful voice speaking the beautiful truth.
I believe 1 did no harm, except as we all did, in bringing it to the attention of the rulers of Voe Deo that the Hame was growing bolder and the Radical Party was growing stronger, and that they must move against us.
The first sign was a divisive one. In the open compounds, as well as the men's side and the women's side there were several apartments for couples. This was a radical thing. Any kind of marriage between assets was illegal. They were allowed to live in pairs only by their owners' indulgence. Assets' only legitimate loyalty was to their owner. The child did not belong to the mother, but to the owner. But since gareots were living in the same place as owned assets, these apartments for couples had been tolerated or ignored. Now suddenly the law was invoked, asset couples were arrested, fined if they were wage earners, separated, and sent to company-run compound houses. Ress and the other elderwomen who ran our house were fined and warned that if "immoral arrangements" were discovered again, they would be held responsible and sent to the labor
i-*.® 241 TA
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
camps. Two little children of one of the couples were not on the government's list and so were left, abandoned, when their parents were taken oft. Keo and Ramayo took them in. They became wards of the women's side, as orphans in the compounds always did.
There were fierce debates about this in meetings of the Hame and The Community- Some said the right of assets to live together and to bring up their children was a cause the Radical Party should support. It was not directly threatening to ownership, and might appeal to the natural instincts of many owners, especially the women, who could not vote but who were valuable allies. Others said that private affections must be overridden by loyalty to the cause of liberty, and that any personal issue must take sec-
ond place to the great issue of emancipation. Lord Erod spoke thus at a meeting. I rose to answer him. I said that there was no freedom without sexual freedom, and that until women were allowed and men were willing to take responsibility for their children, no woman, whether owner or asset, would be free.
"Men must bear the responsibility for the public side of life, the greater world the child will enter;
women, for the domestic side of life, the moral and physical upbringing of the child. This is a division enjoined by God and Nature," Erod answered.
"Then will emancipation for a woman mean she's free to enter the beza, be locked in on the women's side?"
"Of course not," he began, but I broke in again, fearing his golden tongue — "Then what is freedom for a woman? Is it different from freedom for a man? Or is a free person free?"
-A-a 242 -A-®
A Woman's Liberation
The moderator was angrily thumping his staff,
•but some other asset women took up my question. "When will the Radical Party speak for us?" they said, and one elderwoman cried, "Where are your women, you owners who want to abolish slavery? Why aren't they here? Don't you let them out of the beza?"
The moderator pounded and finally got order restored. I was half-triumphant and half-dismayed. I saw Erod and also some of the people from the Hame now looking at me as an open troublemaker. And indeed my words had divided us. But were we not already divided?
A group of us women went home talking through the streets, talking aloud. These were my streets now, with their traffic and lights and dangers and life. I was a City woman, a free woman. That night 1 was an owner. I owned the City. I owned the future.
The arguments went on. I was asked to speak at many places- As I was leaving one such meeting, the
Hainishman Esdardon Aya came to me and said in a casual way, as if discussing my speech, "Rakam, you're in danger of arrest."
1 did not understand. He walked along beside me away from the others and went on: "A rumor has come to my attention at the Embassy. - . . The government of Voe Deo is about to change the status of manumitted assets. You're no longer to be considered gareots. You must have an owner-sponsor."
This was bad news, but after thinking it over I said, "I think I can find an owner to sponsor me. Lord Boeba, maybe."
"The owner-sponsor will have to be approved a»® 243 A-s
FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS
by the government.... This will tend to weaken The Community both through the asset and the owner members. It's very clever, in its way," said Esdardon Aya.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги