The Telling

FOUR

If the monitor was keeping her under observation, she could go nowhere, learn nothing, without getting people into trouble. Possibly getting into trouble herself. And he was here to watch her; he had said so, if she’d only listened. It had taken all this time to dawn upon her that Corporation officials didn’t travel by boat. They flew in Corporation planes and helis. Her conviction of her own insignificance had kept her from understanding his presence and heeding his warning.

She hadn’t listened to what Tong Ov told her either: like it or not, admit it or not, she was important. She was the presence of the Ekumen on Aka. And the Monitor had told her, and she hadn’t listened, that the Corporation had authorised him to prevent the Ekumen — her — from investigating and revealing the continued existence of reactionary practices, rotten-corpse ideologies.

A dog in a graveyard, that’s how he saw her. Keep far the Dog that’s friend to men, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again…

"Your heritage is Anglo-Hindic." Uncle Hurree, with his wild white eyebrows and his sad, fiery eyes. "You must know Shakespeare and the Upanishads, Sutty. You must know the Gita and the Lake Poets."

She did. She knew too many poets. She knew more poets, more poetry, she knew more grief, she knew more than anybody needed to know. So she had sought to be ignorant. To come to a place where she didn’t know anything. She had succeeded beyond all expectation.

After long pondering in her peaceful room, long indecision and anxiety, some moments of despair, she sent her first report to Tong Ov — and incidentally to the Office of Peace and Surveillance, the Sociocultural Ministry, and whatever other bureaus of the Corporation intercepted everything that came to Tong’s office. It took her two days to write two pages. She described her boat journey, the scenery, the city. She mentioned the excellent food and fine mountain air. She requested a prolongation of her holiday, which had proved both enjoyable and educational, though hampered by the well-intended but overprotective zeal of an official who thought it necessary to insulate her from conversations and interactions with the local people.

The corporative government of Aka, while driven to control everyone and everything, also wanted very much to please and impress their visitors from the Ekumen. To measure up, as Uncle Hurree would have said. The Envoy was expert at using that second motive to limit the first; but her message could cause him problems. They had let him send an Observer into a ’primitive’ area, but they had sent an observer of their own to observe the Observer.

She waited for Tong’s reply, increasingly certain that he would be forced to call her back to the capital. The thought of Dovza City made her realise how much she did not want to leave the little city, the high country. For three days she went on hikes out into the farmlands and up along the bank of the glacier-blue, rowdy young river, sketched Silong above the curlicued roofs of Okzat-Ozkat, entered Iziezi’s recipes for her exquisite food in her noter but did not return to ’exercise class’ with her, talked with Akidan about his schoolwork and sports but did not talk to any strangers or street people, was studiously touristic and innocuous.

Since she came to Okzat-Ozkat, she had slept well, without the long memory-excursions that had broken her nights in Dovza City; but during this time of waiting she woke every night in the depths of the darkness and was back in the Pale.

The first night, she was in the tiny living room of her parents’ flat, watching Dalzul on the neareal. Father, a neurologist, abominated vr-proprios. "Lying to the body is worse than torturing it," he growled, looking like Uncle Hurree. He had long ago disconnected the vr modules from their set, so that it functioned merely as a holo TV. Having grown up in the village with no commtech but radios and an ancient 2D television in the town meeting hall, Sutty didn’t miss vr-prop. She had been studying, but turned her chair round to see the Envoy of the Ekumen standing on the balcony of the Sanctum, flanked by the white-robed Fathers.

The Fathers’ mirror masks reflected the immense throng, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the Great Square, as a tiny dappling. Sunlight shone on Dalzul’s bright, amazing hair. The Angel, they called him now, God’s Herald, the Divine Messenger. Mother scoffed and grumbled at such terms, but she watched him as intently, listened to his words as devoutly as any Unist, as anybody, everybody in the world. How did Dalzul bring hope to the faithful and hope to the unbelievers at the same time, in the same words?

"I want to distrust him," Mother said. "But I can’t. He is going to do it — to put the Meliorist Fathers into power. Incredible! He is going to set us free."

Sutty had no trouble believing it. She knew, from Uncle Hurree and from school and from her own apparently innate conviction, that the Rule of the Fathers under which she had lived all her life had been a fit of madness. Unism was a panic response to the great famines and epidemics, a spasm of global guilt and hysterical expiation, which had been working itself into its final orgy of violence when Dalzul the "Angel" came from "Heaven" and with his magic oratory turned all that zeal from destruction to loving-kindness, from mass murder to mild embrace. A matter of timing; a tip of the balance. Wise with the wisdom of Hainish teachers who had been through such episodes a thousand times in their endless history, canny as his white Terran ancestors who had convinced everybody else on Earth that their way was the only way, Dalzul had only to set his finger on the scales to turn blind, bigoted hatred into blind, universal love. And now peace and reason would return, and Terra would regain her place among the peaceful, reasonable worlds of the Ekumen. Sutty was twenty-three and had no trouble believing it at all.

Freedom Day, the day they opened the Pale: the restrictions on unbelievers lifted, all the restrictions on communications, books, women’s clothing, travel, worship and nonworship, everything. The people of the Pale came pouring out of the shops and houses, the high schools and the training schools into the rainy streets of Vancouver.

They didn’t know what to do, really, they had lived so long silent, demure, cautious, humble, while the Fathers preached and ruled and ranted and the Officers of the Faith confiscated, censored, threatened, punished. It had always been the faithful who gathered in huge crowds, shouted praises, sang songs, celebrated, marched here and marched there, while the unbelievers lay low and talked soft. But the rain let up, and people brought guitars and sitars and saxophones out into the streets and squares and began playing music and dancing. The sun came out, low and gold under big clouds, and they went on dancing the joyous dances of unbelief. In McKenzie Square there was a girl leading a round dance, black heavy glossy hair, ivory skin, Sino-Canadian, laughing, a noisy, laughing girl, too loud, brassy, self-confident, but Sutty joined her round dance because the people in it were having such a good time and the boy playing the concertina made such terrific music. She and the black-haired girl came face to face in some figure of the dance they had just invented. They took each other’s hands. One laughed, and the other laughed. They never let go of each other’s hands all night.

From that memory Sutty plunged soft and straight into sleep, the untroubled sleep she almost always had in this high, quiet room.

Next day she hiked a long way up the river, came back late and tired. She ate with Iziezi, read a while, unrolled her bed.

As soon as she turned the light off and lay down, she was back in Vancouver, the day after freedom.

They had gone for a walk up above the city in New Stanley Park, the two of them. There were still some big trees there, enormous trees from before the pollution. Firs, Pao said. Douglas firs, and spruce, they were called. Once the mountains had been black with them. "Black with them!" she said in her husky, unmodulated voice, and Sutty saw the great black forests, the heavy, glossy black hair.

"You grew up here?" she asked, for they had everything to learn about each other, and Pao said, "Yes I did, and now I want to get out!"

"Whereto?"

"Hain, Ve, Chiffewar, Werel, Yeowe-Werel, Gethen, Urras-Anarres, O!"

"O, O, O!" Sutty crowed, laughing and half crying to hear her own litany, her secret mantra shouted out loud. "I do too! I will, I will, I’m going!"

"Are you in training?"

"Third year."

"I just started."

"Catch up!" Sutty said.

And Pao almost did so. She got through three years of work in two. Sutty graduated after the first of those years and stayed on the second as a graduate associate, teaching deep grammar and Hainish to beginning students. When she went to the Ekumenical

School in Valparaiso, she and Pao would be apart only eight months; and she would fly back up to Vancouver for the December holiday, so they’d only actually be separated for four months and then four months again, and then together, together all the way through the Ekumenical School, and all the rest of their lives, all over the Known Worlds. "We’ll be making love on a world nobody even knows the name of now, a thousand years from now!" Pao said, and laughed her lovely chortling laugh that started down inside her belly, in what she called her tan-tien-tummy, and ended up rocking her to and fro. She loved to laugh, she loved to tell jokes and be told them. Sometimes she laughed out loud in her sleep. Sutty would feel and hear the soft laughter in the darkness, and in the morning Pao would explain that her dreams had been so funny, and laugh again trying to tell the funny dreams.

They lived in the flat they’d found and moved into two weeks after freedom, the dear grubby basement flat on Souché Street, Sushi Street because there were three Japanese restaurants on it. They had two rooms: one with wall-to-wall futons, one with the stove, the sink, and the upright piano with four dead keys that came with the flat because it was too far gone to repair and too expensive to move. Pao played crashing waltzes with holes in them while Sutty cooked bhaigan tamatar. Sutty recited the poems of Esnanaridaratha of Darranda and filched almonds while Pao fried rice. A mouse gave birth to infant mice in the storage cabinet. Long discussions about what to do about the infant mice ensued. Ethnic slurs were exchanged: the ruthlessness of the Chinese, who treated animals as insentient, the wickedness of the Hindus, who fed sacred cows and let children starve. "I will not live with mice!" Pao shouted. "I will not live with a murderer!" Sutty shouted back. The infant mice became adolescents and began making forays. Sutty bought a secondhand box trap. They baited it with tofu. They caught the mice one by one and released them in New Stanley Park. The mother mouse was the last to be caught, and when they released her they sang:

Pao knew a lot of Unist hymns, and had one for most occasions. Sutty got the flu. Flu was a frightening thing, so many strains of it were fatal. She remembered vividly her terror, standing in the crowded streetcar while the headache got worse and worse, and when she got home and couldn’t focus her eyes on Pao’s face. Pao cared for her night and day and when the fever went down made her drink Chinese medicinal teas that tasted like piss and mildew. She was weak for days and days, lying there on the futons staring at the dingy ceiling, weak and stupid, peaceful, coming back to life.

But in that epidemic little Aunty found her way back to the village. The first time Sutty was strong enough to visit home, it was strange to be there with Mother and Father and not with Aunty. She kept turning her head, thinking Aunty was standing in the doorway or sitting in her chair in the other room in her ragged blanket cocoon. Mother gave Sutty Aunty’s bangles, the six everyday brass ones, the two gold ones for dressing up, tiny, frail circlets through which Sutty’s hands would never pass. She gave them to Lakshmi for her baby girl to wear when she got bigger. "Don’t hold on to things, they weigh you down. Keep in your head what’s worth keeping," Uncle Hurree had said, preaching what he’d had to practice; but Sutty kept the red-and-orange saree of cotton gauze, which folded up into nothing and could not weigh her down. It was in the bottom of her suitcase here, in Okzat-Ozkat. Someday maybe she would show it to Iziezi. Tell her about Aunty. Show her how you wore a saree. Most women enjoyed that and liked to try it on themselves. Pao had tried on Sutty’s old grey-and-silver saree once, to entertain Sutty while she was convalescing, but she said it felt too much like skirts, which of course she had been forced to wear in public all her life because of the Unist clothing laws, and she couldn’t get the trick of securing the top. "My tits are going to pop out!" she cried, and then, encouraging them to do so, had performed a remarkable version of what she called Indian classical dance all over the futons.

Sutty had been frightened again, very badly frightened, when she discovered that everything she’d learned in the months before she got the flu — the Ekumenical history, the poems she’d memorised, even simple words of Hainish she had known for years — seemed to have been wiped out. "What will I do, what will I do, if I can’t keep things even in my head?" she whispered to Pao, when she finally broke down and confessed to the terror that had been tormenting her for a week. Pao hadn’t comforted her much, just let her tell her fear and misery, and finally said, "I think that will wear off. I think you’ll find it all coming back." And of course she was right. Talking about it changed it. The next day, as Sutty was riding the streetcar, the opening lines of The Terraces of Darranda suddenly flowered out in her mind like great fireworks, the marvelous impetuous orderly fiery words; and she knew that all the other words were there, not lost, waiting in the darkness, ready to come when she called them. She bought a huge bunch of daisies and took them home for Pao. They put them in the one vase they had, black plastic, and they looked like Pao, black and white and gold. With the vision of those flowers an intense and complete awareness of Pao’s body and presence filled her now, here in the high quiet room on another world, as it had filled her constantly there, then, when she was with Pao, and when she wasn’t with her, but there was no time that they weren’t together, no time that they were truly apart, not even that long, long flight down all the coast of the Americas had separated them. Nothing had separated them. Let me not to the marriage, of true minds admit impediment… "O my true mind," she whispered in the dark, and felt the warm arms holding her before she slept.

Tong Ov’s brief reply came, a printout, received at a bureau of the District Prefecture and hand-delivered, after inspection of her ZIL bracelet, by a uniformed messenger. Observer Sutty Dass: Consider your holiday the beginning of a field trip. Continue research and recording personal observations as you see fit.

So much for the Monitor! Surprised and jubilant, Sutty went outdoors to look up at the bannered peak of Silong and think where to start.

She had gathered in her mind innumerable things to learn about: the meditation exercises; the double-cloud doors, which she had found all over the city, always whitewashed or painted over; the inscriptions in shops; the tree metaphors she kept hearing in talk about food or health or anything to do with the body; the possible existence of banned books; the certain existence of a web or net of information, subtler than the electronic one and uncontrolled by the Corporation, that kept people all over the city in touch and aware at all times of, for instance, Sutty: who she was, where she was, what she wanted. She saw this awareness in the eyes of street people, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, the old women who dug in the little gardens, the old men who sat in the sun on barrels on street corners. She felt it as uninvasive, as if she walked among faint lines of guidance, not bonds, not constraints, but reassurances. That she had not first entered either Iziezi’s or the Fertiliser’s door entirely by chance now seemed probable, though she could not explain it, and acceptable, though she did not know why.

Now that she was free, she wanted to go back to the Fertiliser’s shop. She went up into the hills of the city, began to climb that narrow street. Halfway up it she came face to face with the Monitor.

Released from concern about either obeying or evading him, she looked at him as she had at first on the river journey, not as the object of bureaucratic control looks at the bureaucrat, but humanly. He had a straight back and good features, though ambition, anxiety, authority had made his face hard, tight. Nobody starts out that way, Sutty thought. There are no hard babies. Magnanimous, she greeted him, "Good morning, Monitor!"

Her cheery, foolish voice rang in her own ears. Wrong, wrong. To him such a greeting was mere provocation. He stood silent, facing her.

He cleared his throat and said, "I have been ordered to withdraw my request to you to inform my office of your contacts and travel plans. Since you did not comply with it, I attempted to keep some protective surveillance over you. I am informed that you complained of this. I apologise for any annoyance or inconvenience caused you by myself or my staff."

His tone was cold and dour but he had some dignity, and Sutty, ashamed, said, "No — I’m sorry, I—"

"I warn you," he said, paying no attention, his voice more intense, "that there are people here who intend to use you for their own ends. These people are not picturesque relics of a time gone by. They are not harmless. They are vicious. They are the dregs of a deadly poison — the drug that stupefied my people for ten thousand years. They seek to drag us back into that paralysis, that mindless barbarism. They may treat you kindly, but I tell you they are ruthless. You are a prize to them. They’ll flatter you, teach you lies, promise you miracles. They are the enemies of truth, of science. Their so-called knowledge is rant, superstition, poetry. Their practices are illegal, their books and rites are banned, and you know that. Do not put my people into the painful position of finding a scientist of the Ekumen in possession of illegal materials — participating in obscene, unlawful rites. I ask this of you — as a scientist of the Ekumen—" He had begun to stammer, groping for words.

Sutty looked at him, finding his emotion unnerving, grotesque. She said drily, "I am not a scientist. I read poetry. And you need not tell me the evils religion can do. I know them."

"No," he said, "you do not." His hands clenched and unclenched. "You know nothing of what we were. How far we have come. We will never go back to barbarism."

"Do you know anything at all about my world?" she said with incredulous scorn. Then none of this talk seemed worthwhile to her, and she only wanted to get away from the zealot. "I assure you that no representative of the Ekumen will interfere in Akan concerns unless explicitly asked to do so," she said.

He looked straight at her and spoke with extraordinary passion. "Do not betray us!"

"I have no intention—"

He turned his head aside as if in denial or pain. Abruptly he walked on past her, down the street.

She felt a wave of hatred for him that frightened her.

She turned and went on, telling herself that she should be sorry for him. He was sincere. Most bigots are sincere. The stupid, arrogant fool, trying to tell her that religion was dangerous! But he was merely parroting Dovzan propaganda. Trying to frighten her, angry because his superiors had put him in the wrong. That he couldn’t control her was so intolerable to him that he’d lost control of himself. There was absolutely no need to think about him any more.

She walked on up the street to the little shop to ask the Fertiliser what the double-cloud doors were, as she had intended.

When she entered, the high dim room with its word-covered walls seemed part of a different reality altogether. She stood there for a minute, letting that reality become hers. She looked up at the inscription: In the dark cloud’s descent from sky the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth.

The elegant little pot the Fertiliser had given her bore a motif that she had taken to be a stylised shrub or tree before she saw that it might be a variation on the cloud-door shape. She had sketched the design from the pot. When the Fertiliser materialised from the dark backward and abysm of his shop, she put her sketch down on the counter and said, "Please, yoz, can you tell me what this design is?"

He studied the drawing. He observed in his thin, dry voice, "It’s a very pretty drawing."

"It’s from the gift you gave me. Has the design a meaning, a significance?"

"Why do you ask, yoz?"

"I’m interested in old things. Old words, old ways."

He watched her with age-faded eyes and said nothing.

"Your government" — she used the old word, biedins, ‘system of officials,’ rather than the modern vizdestit, ‘joint business’ or ‘corporation’—"Your government, I know, prefers that its people learn new ways, not dwelling on their past." Again she used the old word for people, not riyingdutey, producer-consumers. "But the historians of the Ekumen are interested in everything that our member worlds have to teach, and we believe that a useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past."

The Fertiliser listened, affably impassive.

She forged ahead. "I’ve been asked by the official senior to me in the capital to learn what I can about some of the old ways that no longer exist in the capital, the arts and beliefs and customs that flourished on Aka before my people came here. I’ve received assurance from a Sociocultural Monitor that his office won’t interfere with my studies." She said the last sentence with a certain vengeful relish. She still felt shaken, sore, from her confrontation with the Monitor. But the peacefulness in this place, the dim air, the faint scents, the half-visible ancient writings, made all that seem far away.

A pause. The old man’s thin forefinger hovered over the design she had drawn. "We do not see the roots," he said.

She listened.

"The trunk of the tree," he said, indicating the element of the design that, in a building, was the double-leafed door. "The branches and foliage of the tree, the crown of leaves." He indicated the five-lobed ’cloud’ that rose above the trunk. "Also this is the body, you see, yoz." He touched his own hips and sides, patted his head with a certain leafy motion of the fingers, and smiled a little. "The body is the body of the world. The world’s body is my body. So, then, the one makes two." His finger showed where the trunk divided. "And the two bear each three branches, that rejoin, making five." His finger moved to the five lobes of foliage. "And the five bear the myriad, the leaves and flowers that die and return, return and die. The beings, creatures, stars. The being that can be told. But we don’t see the roots. We cannot tell them."

"The roots are in the ground … ?"

"The mountain is the root." He made a beautiful formal gesture, the backs of his fingers touching at the tip to shape a peak, then moving in to touch his breast over his heart.

"The mountain is the root," she repeated. "These are mysteries."

He was silent.

"Can you tell me more? Tell me about the two, and the three, and the five, yoz."

"These are things that take a long time to tell, yoz."

"My time is all for listening. But I don’t want to waste yours, or intrude on it. Or ask you to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me, anything better kept secret."

"Everything’s kept secret now," he said in that papery voice. "And yet it’s all in plain sight." He looked round at the cases of little drawers and the walls above them entirely covered with words, charms, poems, formulas. Today in Sutty’s eyes the ideograms did not swell and shrink, did not breathe, but rested motionless on the high, dim walls. "But to so many they aren’t words, only old scratches. So the police leave them alone… In my mother’s time, all children could read. They could begin to read the story. The telling never stopped. In the forests and the mountains, in the villages and the cities, they were telling the story, telling it aloud, reading it aloud. Yet it was all secret then too. The mystery of the beginning, of the roots of the world, the dark. The grave, yoz. Where it begins."

So her education began. Though later she thought it had truly begun when she sat at the little tray-table in her room in Iziezi’s house, with the first taste of that food on her tongue.

One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without

belief is to sing a song without the tune.

A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance. So Sutty’s teachers, gathered from many worlds to the city Valparaiso de Chile, had taught her, and she had had no cause to question their teaching.

She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world’s tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city’s endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.

Day after day she recorded her notes, observations that stumbled over each other, contradicted, amplified, backtracked, speculated, a wild profusion of information on all sorts of subjects, a jumbled and jigsawed map that for all its complexity represented only a rough sketch of one corner of the vastness she had to explore: a way of thinking and living developed and elaborated over thousands of years by the vast majority of human beings on this world, an enormous interlocking system of symbols, metaphors, correspondences, theories, cosmology, cooking, calisthenics, physics, metaphysics, metallurgy, medicine, physiology, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, calligraphy, numerology, herbalism, diet, legend, parable, poetry, history, and story.

In this vast mental wilderness she looked for paths and signs, institutions that could be described, ideas that could be defined. Instinctively she avoided great cloudy concepts and sought tangibilities, such as architecture. The buildings in Okzat-Ozkat with the double doors that represented the Tree had been temples, umyazu, a word now banned, a nonword. Nonwords were useful markers of paths that might lead through the wilderness. Was ’temple’ the best translation? What had gone on in the umyazu?

Well, people said, people used to go there and listen.

To what?

Oh, well, the stories, you know.

Who told the stories?

Oh, the maz did. They lived there. Some of them.

Sutty gathered that the umyazu had been something like monasteries, something like churches, and very much like libraries: places where professionals gathered and kept books and people came to learn to read them, to read them, and to hear them read. In richer areas, there had been great, rich umyazu, to which people went on pilgrimage to see the treasures of the library and ’hear the Telling.’ These had all been destroyed, pulled down or blown up, except the oldest and most famous of all, the Golden Mountain, far to the east.

From an official neareal she had partissed in while she was in Dovza City, she knew that the Golden Mountain had been made into a Corporate Site for the worship of the God of Reason: an artificial cult that had no existence except at this tourist center and in slogans and vague pronouncements of the Corporation. The Golden Mountain had been gutted, first, however. The neareal showed scenes of books being removed from a great underground archive by machinery, big scoops shoveling books up like dirt into dump trucks, backhoes ramming and scraping books into a landfill. The viewer of the neareal partissed in the operation of one of these machines, while lively, bouncy music played. Sutty had stopped the neareal in the midst of this scene and disconnected the vr-proprios from the set. After that she had watched and listened to Corporation neareals but never partissed in one again, though she reconnected the vr-p modules every day when she left her special research cubicle at the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art.

Memories such as that inclined her to some sympathy with this religion, or whatever it was she was studying, but caution and suspicion balanced her view. It was her job to avoid opinion and theory, stick to evidence and observation, listen and record what she was told.

Despite the fact that it was all banned, all illicit, people talked to her quite freely, trustfully answering her questions. She had no trouble finding out about the yearlong and lifelong cycles and patterns of feasts, fasts, indulgences, abstinences, passages, festivals. These observances, which seemed in a general way to resemble the practices of most of the religions she knew anything about, were now of course subterranean, hidden away, or so intricately and unobtrusively woven into the fabric of ordinary life that the Monitors of the Sociocultural Office couldn’t put their finger on any act and say, "This is forbidden."

The menus of the little restaurants for working people in Okzat-Ozkat were a nice example of this kind of obscurely flourishing survival of illicit practices. The menu was written up in the modern alphabet on a board at the door. Along with akakafi, it featured the foods produced by the Corporation and advertised, distributed, and sold all over Aka by the Bureau of Public Health and Nutrition: produce from the great agrifactories, high-protein, vitamin-enriched, packaged, needing only heating. The restaurants kept some of these things in stock, freeze-dried, canned, or frozen, and a few people ordered them. Most people who came to these little places ordered nothing. They sat down, greeted the waiter, and waited to be served the fresh food and drink that was appropriate to the day, the time of day, the season, and the weather, according to an immemorial theory and practice of diet, the goal of which was to live long and well with a good digestion. Or with a peaceful heart. The two phrases were the same in Rangma, the local language.

In her noter in one of her long evening recording sessions, late in the autumn, sitting on the red rug in her quiet room, she defined the Akan system as a religion-philosophy of the type of Buddhism or Taoism, which she had learned about during her Terran education: what the Hainish, with their passion for lists and categories, called a religion of process. "There are no native Akan words for God, gods, the divine," she told her noter. "The Corporation bureaucrats made up a word for God and installed state theism when they learned that a concept of deity was important on the worlds they took as models. They saw that religion is a useful tool for those in power. But there was no native theism or deism here. On Aka, god is a word without referent. No capital letters. No creator, only creation. No eternal father to reward and punish, justify injustice, ordain cruelty, offer salvation. Eternity not an endpoint but a continuity. Primal division of being into material and spiritual only as two-as-one, or one in two aspects. No hierarchy of Nature and Supernatural. No binary Dark/Light, Evil/ Good, or Body/Soul. No afterlife, no rebirth, no immortal disembodied or reincarnated soul. No heavens, no hells. The Akan system is a spiritual discipline with spiritual goals, but they’re exactly the same goals it seeks for bodily and ethical well-being. Right action is its own end. Dharma without karma."

She had arrived at a definition of Akan religion. For a minute she was perfectly satisfied with it and with herself.

Then she found she was thinking about a group of myths that Ottiar Uming had been telling. The central figure, Ezid, a strange, romantic character who appeared sometimes as a beautiful, gentle young man and sometimes as a beautiful, fearless young woman, was called "the Immortal." She added a note: "What about ’Immortal Ezid’? Does this imply belief in an afterlife? Is Ezid one person, two, or many? Immortal/living-forever seems to mean: intense, repeated many times, famous, perhaps also a special ’educated’ meaning: in perfect bodily/spiritual health, living wisely. Check this."

Again and again in her notes, after every conclusion: Check this. Conclusions led to new beginnings. Terms changed, were corrected, recorrected. Before long she became unhappy with her definition of the system as a religion; it seemed not incorrect, but not wholly adequate. The term philosophy was even less adequate. She went back to calling it the system, the Great System. Later she called it the Forest, because she learned that in ancient times it had been called the way through the forest. She called it the Mountain when she found that some of her teachers called what they taught her the way to the mountain. She ended up calling it the Telling. But that was after she came to know Maz Elyed.

She had long debates with her noter about whether any word in Dovzan, or in the older and partly non-Dovzan vocabulary used by ’educated’ people, could be said to mean sacred or holy. There were words she translated as power, mystery, not-controlled-by-people, part-of-harmony. These terms were never reserved for a certain place or type of action. Rather it appeared that in the old Akan way of thinking any place, any act, if properly perceived, was actually mysterious and powerful, potentially sacred. And perception seemed to involve description — telling about the place, or the act, or the event, or the person. Talking about it, making it into a story.

But these stories weren’t gospel. They weren’t Truth. They were essays at the truth. Glances, glimpses of sacredness. One was not asked to believe, only to listen.

"Well, that’s how I learned the story," they would say, having told a parable or recounted a historical episode or recited an ancient and familiar legend. "Well, that’s the way this telling goes."

The holy people in their stories achieved holiness, if that was what it was, by all kinds of different means, none of which seemed particularly holy to Sutty. There were no rules, such as poverty chastity obedience, or exchanging one’s worldly goods for a wooden begging bowl, or reclusion on a mountaintop. Some of the heroes and famous maz in the stories were flamboyantly rich; their virtue had apparently consisted in generosity — building great beautiful umyazu to house their treasures, or going on processions with hundreds of companions all mounted on eberdin with silver harnesses. Some of the heroes were warriors, some were powerful leaders, some were shoemakers, some were shopkeepers. Some of the holy people in the stories were passionate lovers, and the story was about their passion. A lot of them were couples. There were no rules. There was always an alternative. The story-tellers, when they commented on the legends and histories they told, might point out that that had been a good way or a right way of doing something, but they never talked about the right way. And good was an adjective, always: good food, good health, good sex, good weather. No capital letters. Good or Evil as entities, warring powers, never.

This system wasn’t a religion at all, Sutty told her noter with increasing enthusiasm. Of course it had a spiritual dimension. In fact, it was the spiritual dimension of life for those who lived it. But religion as an institution demanding belief and claiming authority, religion as a community shaped by a knowledge of foreign deities or competing institutions, had never existed on Aka.

Until, perhaps, the present time.

Aka’s habitable lands were a single huge continent with an immensely long archipelago off its eastern coast. Dovza was the farthest southwestern region of the great continent. Undivided by oceans, the Akans were physically all of one type with slight local variations. All the Observers had remarked on this, all had pointed out the ethnic homogeneity, the lack of societal and cultural diversity, but none of them had quite realised that among the Akans there were no foreigners. There had never been any foreigners, until the ships from the Ekumen landed.

It was a simple fact, but one remarkably difficult for the Terran mind to comprehend. No aliens. No others, in the deadly sense of otherness that existed on Terra, the implacable division between tribes, the arbitrary and impassable borders, the ethnic hatreds cherished over centuries and millennia. ’The people’ here meant not my people, but people-everybody, humanity. ’Barbarian’ didn’t mean an incomprehensible outlander, but an uneducated person. On Aka, all competition was familial. All wars were civil wars.

One of the great epics Sutty was now recording in pieces and fragments concerned a long-running and bloody feud over a fertile valley, which began as a quarrel between a brother and sister over inheritance. Struggles between regions and city-states for economic dominance had gone on all through Akan history, flaring often into armed conflict. But these wars and feuds had been fought by professional soldiers, on battlefields. It was a very rare thing, and treated in the histories and annals as shamefully, punishably wrong, for soldiers to destroy cities or farmlands or to hurt civilians. Akans fought each other out of greed and ambition for power, not out of hatred and not in the name of a belief. They fought by the rules. They had the same rules. They were one people. Their system of thought and way of life had been universal. They had all sung one tune, though in many voices.

Much of this communality, Sutty thought, had depended on the writing. Before the Dovzan cultural revolution there had been several major languages and innumerable dialects, but they had all used the same ideograms, mutually intelligible to all. Clumsy and archaic as nonalphabetic scripts were in some respects, they could bond and preserve, as Chinese ideograms had done on Earth, a great diversity of languages and dialects; and they made texts written thousands of years ago readable without translation even though the sounds of the words had changed out of all recognition. Indeed, to the Dovzan reformers, that may have been the chief reason for getting rid of the old script: it was not only an impediment to progress but an actively conservative force. It kept the past alive.

In Dovza City she had met nobody who could, or who admitted they could, read the old writing. Her few early questions concerning it met with such disapproval and blank rejection that she promptly learned not to mention the fact that she could read it. And the officials dealing with her never asked. The old writing had not been used for decades; it probably never occurred to them that, through the accident of time lapse during space travel, it had been the writing she learned.

She had not been entirely foolish to wonder, there in Dovza City, if she might actually be the only person in the world who could now read it, and not entirely foolish to be frightened by the thought. If she carried the entire history of a people, not her own people, in her head, then if she forgot one word, one character, one diacritical mark, that much of all those lives, all those centuries of thought and feeling, would be lost forever…

It had been a vast relief to her to find, here in Okzat-Ozkat, many people, old and young, even children, carrying and sharing that precious cargo. Most could read and write a few dozen characters, or a few hundred, and many went on to full literacy. In the Corporation schools, children learned the Hainish-derived alphabet and were educated as producer-consumers; at home or in illicit classes in little rooms behind a shop, a workshop, a warehouse, they learned the ideograms. They practiced writing the characters on small blackboards that could be wiped clean with a stroke. Their teachers were working people, householders, shopkeepers, common people of the city.

These teachers of the old language and the old way, the ’educated people,’ were called maz. Yoz was a term indicating respectful equality; maz as an address indicated increased respect. As a title or a noun, it meant, as Sutty began to understand it, a function or profession that wasn’t definable as priest, teacher, doctor, or scholar, but contained aspects of them all.

All the maz Sutty met, and as the weeks went on she met most of the maz in Okzat-Ozkat, lived in more or less comfortable poverty. Usually they had a trade or job to supplement what they were paid as maz for teaching, dispensing medicine and counsel on diet and health, performing certain ceremonies such as marriage and burial, and reading and talking in the evening meetings, the tellings. The maz were poor, not because the old way was dying or was treasured only by the old, but because the people who paid them were poor. This was a hard-bitten little city, marginal, without wealth. But the people supported their maz, paid for their teaching "by the word," as they said. They came to the house of one maz or another in the evening to listen to the stories and the discussions, paying regular fees in copper money, small paper bills. There was no shame in the transaction on either side, no hypocrisy of ’donation’: cash was paid for value received.

Many children were brought along in the evening to the tellings, to which they listened, more or less, or fell quietly asleep. No fee was charged for children until they were fifteen or so, when they began to pay the same fees as adults. Adolescents favored the sessions of certain maz who specialised in reciting or reading epics and romances, such as The Valley War and the tales of Ezid the Beautiful. Exercise classes of the more vigorous and martial kind were full of young men and women.

The maz, however, were mostly middle-aged or old, again not because they were dying out as a group, but because, as they said, it took a lifetime to learn how to walk in the forest.

Sutty wanted to find out why the task of becoming educated was interminable; but the task of finding out seemed to be interminable itself. What was it these people believed? What was it they held sacred? She kept looking for the core of the matter, the words at the heart of the Telling, the holy books to study and memorise. She found them, but not it. No bible. No koran. Dozens of upanishads, a million sutras. Every maz gave her something else to read. Already she had read or heard countless texts, written, oral, both written and oral, many or most of them existing in more than one mode and more than one version. The subject matter of the tellings seemed to be endless, even now, when so much had been destroyed.

Early in the winter she thought she had found the central texts of the system in a series of poems and treatises called The Arbor. All the maz spoke of it with great respect, all of them quoted from it. She spent weeks studying it. As well as she could determine, it had mostly been written between fifteen hundred and a thousand years ago in the central region of the continent during a period of material prosperity and artistic and intellectual ferment. It was a vast compendium of sophisticated philosophical reasonings on being and becoming, form and chaos, mystical meditations on the Making and the Made, and beautiful, difficult, metaphysical poems concerning the One that is Two, the Two that are One, all interconnected, illuminated, and complicated by the commentaries and marginalia of all the centuries since. Uncle Hurree’s niece, the scholar-pedant, rushed exulting into that jungle of significances, willing to be lost there for years. She was brought back to daylight only by her conscience, which trailed along carrying the heavy baggage of common sense, nagging: But this isn’t the Telling, this is just a part of it, just a small part of it…

Conscience finally got decisive help in its task from Maz Oryen Viya, who mentioned that the text of The Arbor that Sutty had been coming to study at his house every day for a month was only a portion of, and in many places entirely different from, a text he had seen many years ago in a great umyazu in Amareza.

There was no correct text. There was no standard version. Of anything. There was not one Arbor but many, many arbors. The jungle was endless, and it was not one jungle but endless jungles, all burning with bright tigers of meaning, endless tigers…

Sutty finished scanning Oryen Viya’s version of The Arbor into her noter, put the crystal away, knocked her inner pedant on the head, and started all over.

Whatever it was she was trying to learn, the education she was trying to get, was not a religion with a creed and a sacred book. It did not deal in belief. All its books were sacred. It could not be defined by symbols and ideas, no matter how beautiful, rich, and interesting its symbols and ideas. And it was not called the Forest, though sometimes it was, or the Mountain, though sometimes it was, but was mostly, as far as she could see, called the Telling.

Why?

Well (said common sense, rudely), because what the educated people do all the time is tell stories.

Yes, of course (her intellect replied with some disdain) they tell parables, stories, that’s how they educate. But what do they do?

She set out to observe the maz.

Back on Terra, when she first studied the languages of Aka, she had learned that all the major ones had a peculiar singular/dual pronoun, used for a pregnant woman or animal and for a married couple. She had met it again in The Arbor and many other texts, where it referred to the single/double trunk of the tree of being and also to the mythic-heroic figures of the stories and epics, who usually-like the producer-consumer heroes of Corporation propaganda-came in pairs. This pronoun had been banned by the Corporation. Use of it in speech or writing was punishable by fine. She had never heard it spoken in Dovza City. But here she heard it daily, though not publicly, spoken of and to the teacher-officiants, the maz. Why?

Because the maz were couples. They were always couples. A sexual partnership, heterosexual or homosexual, monogamous, lifelong. More than lifelong, for if widowed they never remarried. They took and kept each other’s name. The Fertiliser’s wife, Ang

Sotyu, had been dead fifteen years, but he was still Sotyu Ang. They were two who were one, one who was two.

Why?

She got excited. She was on the track of the central principle of the system: it was the Two that are One. She must concentrate upon understanding it.

Obliging maz gave her many texts, all more or less relevant. She learned that from the interplay of the Two arise the triple Branches that join to make the Foliages, consisting of the Four Actions and the Five Elements, to which the cosmology and the medical and ethical systems constantly referred, and which were built into the architecture and were structural to the language, particularly in its ideogrammatic form… She realised that she was getting into another jungle, a very ancient one, an appallingly exuberant one. She stood on the outskirts and peered in, yearning but cautious, with conscience whining behind her like a dog. Good dog, dharma dog. She did not go into that jungle.

She remembered that she had intended to find what it was that the maz actually did.

They performed, or enacted, or did, the Telling. They told.

Some people had only a little to tell. They owned a book or poem or map or treatise that they had inherited or been given, and that, at least once a year, generally in the winter, they displayed or read aloud or recited from memory to anybody who wanted to come. Such people were politely called educated people, and were respected for owning and sharing their treasure, but they were not maz.

The maz were professionals. They gave a major part of their life to acquiring and sharing what they told, and made their living by doing so.

Some of them, specialists in ceremonies, resembled the priests of conventional Terran religions, officiating at the rites of passage, marriages, funerals, welcoming the newborn into the community, celebrating the fifteenth birthday, which was considered an important and fortunate occasion (One plus Two plus Three plus Four plus Five). The tellings of such maz were mostly formulaic — chants and rituals and recitations of the most familiar hero tales.

Some maz were physicians, healers, herbalists, or botanists. Like the leaders of exercise and gymnastic arts, they told the body, and also listened to the body (the body that was the Tree, that was the Mountain). Their tellings were factual, descriptive, medical teachings.

Some maz worked mostly with books: they taught children and adults to write and read the ideograms, they taught the texts and ways of understanding them.

But the essential work of the maz, what gave them honor among the people, was telling: reading aloud, reciting, telling stories, and talking about the stories. The more they told, the more they were honored, and the better they told it, the better they were paid. What they talked about depended on what they knew, what they possessed of the lore, what they invented on their own, and, evidently, what they felt like talking about at the moment.

The incoherence of it all was staggering. During the weeks that Sutty had laboriously learned about the Two and the One, the Tree and the Foliage, she had gone every evening to hear Maz Ottiar Uming tell a long mythico-historical saga about the explorations of the Rumay among the Eastern Isles six or seven thousand years ago, and also gone several mornings a week to hear Maz Imyen Katyan tell the origins and history of the cosmos, name the stars and constellations, and describe the movements of the other four planets in the Akan system, while displaying beautiful, accurate, ancient charts of the sky. How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?

Fed up with the abstractions of philosophy, for which she had little gift and less inclination, Sutty turned to what the maz called body-telling. The healer maz seemed to know a good deal about maintaining health. She asked Sotyu Ang to teach her about medicine. He patiently began to tell her the curative properties of each of the items in the immense herbary he had inherited from Ang Sotyu’s parents, which filled most of the little drawers in his shop.

He was very pleased that she was recording all he told her in her noter. So far she had met no arcane wisdoms in the Telling, no holy secrets that could be told only to adepts, no knowledge withheld to fortify the authority of the learned, magnify their sanctity, or increase their fees. "Write down what I tell you!" all the maz kept saying. "Memorise it! Keep it to tell other people!" Sotyu Ang had spent his adult life learning the properties of the herbs, and having no disciple or apprentice, he was touchingly grateful to Sutty for preserving that knowledge. "It is all I have to give the Telling," he said. He was not a healer himself but an apothecary and herbalist. He wasn’t strong on theory; his explanations of why this or that herb worked were often mere associative magic or went in pure verbal circles: this bark dispels fever because it is a febrifuge— But the system of medicine that underlay this pharmaceutics was, as well as she could judge, pragmatic, preventive, and effective.

Pharmacy and medicine were one of the branches of the Great System. There were many, many branches. The endless story-telling of the maz was about many, many things. All things, all the leaves of the immense foliage of the Tree. She could not give up the conviction that there must be some guiding motive, some central concern. The trunk of the Tree. Was it ethics? The right conduct of life?

Having grown up under Unism, she was not so naive as to think there was any necessary relation between religion and morality, or that if there was a relation it was likely to be a benevolent one.

But she had begun to discern and learn a characteristic Akan ethic, expressed in all the parables and moral tales she heard in the tellings, and in the behavior and conversation of the people she knew in Okzat-Ozkat. Like the medicine, the ethic was pragmatic and preventive, and seemed to be pretty effective. It chiefly prescribed respect for your own and everybody else’s body, and chiefly proscribed usury.

The frequency with which excess profit making was denounced in the stories and in public opinion showed that the root of all evil went deep on Aka. In Okzat-Ozkat, crime consisted mostly of theft, cheating, embezzlement. There was little personal violence. Assault and battery, perpetrated by thieves or by enraged victims of theft or extortion getting revenge, was so rare that every case of it was discussed for days or weeks. Crimes of passion were even rarer. They were not glamorised or condoned. In the tales and histories, heroism was not earned by murder or slaughter. Heroes were those who atoned for violent acts, or those who died bravely. The word for murderer was a cognate of the word for madman. Iziezi couldn’t tell Sutty whether murderers were locked up in a jail or in a madhouse, because she didn’t know of any murderers in Okzat-Ozkat. She had heard that in the old days rapists had been castrated, but wasn’t sure how rape was punished now, because she didn’t know of any cases of it either. Akans were gentle with their children, and Iziezi seemed to find the idea of mistreating children almost inconceivable; she knew some folktales of cruel parents, of children left orphaned who starved because nobody took them in, but she said, "Those stories are from long ago, before people were educated."

The Corporation, of course, had introduced a new ethic, with new virtues such as public spirit and patriotism, and a vast new area of crime: participation in banned activities. But Sutty had yet to meet anybody in Okzat-Ozkat, outside Corporation officials and perhaps some of the students at the Teachers’ College, who thought of the maz or anything they did as criminal. Banned, illicit, illegal, deviant: these new categories redefined behavior, but they were without moral meaning except to their authors.

Had there been no crimes, then, in the old days, but rape, murder, and usury?

Maybe there had been no need for further sanctions. Maybe the system had been so universal that nobody could imagine living outside it, and only self-destructive insanity could subvert it. It had been the way of life. It had been the world.

That ubiquity of the system, its great antiquity, the tremendous force of habit it had acquired through its detailed patterning of daily life, food, drink, hours and aims of work and recreation — all this, Sutty told her noter, might explain modern Aka. At least it might explain how the Corporation of Dovza had achieved hegemony so easily, had been able to enforce uniform, minute control over how people lived, what they ate, drank, read, heard, thought, did. The system had been in place. Anciently, massively in place, all over the Continent and Isles of Aka. All Dovza had done was take the system over and change its goals. From a great consensual social pattern within which each individual sought physical and spiritual satisfaction, they had made it a great hierarchy in which each individual served the indefinite growth of the society’s material wealth and complexity. From an active homeostatic balance they had turned it to an active forward-thrusting imbalance.

The difference, Sutty told her noter, was between somebody sitting thinking after a good meal and somebody running furiously to catch the bus.

She was pleased with that image.

She looked back on her first half year on Aka with incredulity and with pity both for herself and for the consumer-producers of Dovza City. "What sacrifices these people have made!" she told her noter. "They agreed to deny their entire culture and impoverish their lives for the ’March to the Stars’ — an artificial, theoretical goal — an imitation of societies they assumed to be superior merely because they were capable of space flight. Why? There’s a step missing. Something happened to cause or catalyse this enormous change. Was it nothing more than the arrival of the First Observers from the Ekumen? Of course that was an enormous event for a people who’d never known outsiders…"

An enormous burden of responsibility on the outsiders, too, she thought.

"Do not betray us!" the Monitor had said. But her people, the starfarers of the Ekumen, the Observers who were so careful not to intervene, not to interfere, not to take control, had brought betrayal with them. A few Spaniards arrive, and the great empires of the Incas, the Aztecs, betray themselves, collapse, let their gods and their very language be denied… So the Akans had been their own conquerors. Bewildered by foreign concepts, by the very concept of foreignness, they had let the ideologues of Dovza dominate and impoverish them. As the ideologues of Communocapitalism in the twentieth century, and the zealots of Unism in her own century, had dominated and impoverished the Earth.

If indeed this process had begun with first contact, perhaps it was by way of reparation that Tong Ov wanted to learn what could be learned of Aka before the First Observers came. Did he have some hope of eventually restoring to the Akans what they had thrown away? But the Corporation State would never allow it.

"Look in the garbage for the gold piece," was a saying she had learned from Maz Ottiar Uming, but she didn’t think the Monitor would agree with it. To him the gold piece was a rotten corpse.

She had mental conversations with the Monitor quite often during that long winter of learning and listening, reading and practicing, thinking and rethinking. She set him up as her boxing dummy. He didn’t get to answer, only to listen to her. There were things she didn’t want to record in her noter, things she thought in the privacy of her head, opinions that she couldn’t cease to cherish but tried to keep separate from observation. Such as her opinion that if the Telling was a religion it was very different from Terran religions, since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, deferral of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry. All those elements, which the Akans had done so well without, she thought, had been introduced by Dovza. It was the Corporation State that was the religion. And so she liked to summon up the blue-and-tan uniform, the stiff back and cold face of the Monitor, and tell him what a zealot he was, and what a fool, along with all the other bureaucrat-ideologues, for grasping after other people’s worthless goods while tossing his own treasure into the garbage.

The actual flesh-and-blood Monitor must have left Okzat-Ozkat; she had not met him in the streets for weeks. It was a relief. She much preferred him as a minatory figment.

She had stopped posing the question about what the maz did. Any four-year-old could have said what they did. They told. They retold, read, recited, discussed, explained, and invented. The infinite matter of their talk was not fixed and could not be defined. And it was still growing, even now; for not all the texts were learned from others, not all the stories were of ancient days, not all the thoughts and ideas had been handed down over the years.

The first time she met the maz Odiedin Manma was at a telling where he told the story of a young man, a villager up in the foothills of Silong, who dreamed that he could fly. The young man dreamed flying so often and so vividly that it seemed he began to take his dreams for waking life. He would describe the sensations of flight and the things he saw from the air. He drew maps of beautiful unknown lands on the other side of the world that he discovered in his flights. People came to hear him tell about flying and to see the marvelous maps. But one day, climbing down a river gorge after a strayed eberdin, he missed his footing, fell, and was killed.

That was all the story. Odiedin Manma made no comment, and no one asked questions. The telling was at the house of the maz Ottiar and Uming. Sutty later asked Maz Ottiar Uming about the story, for it puzzled her.

The old woman said, "Odiedin’s partner Manma was killed in a fall when he was twenty-seven. They had been maz only a year."

"And Manma used to tell his dreams of flying?"

Ottiar Uming shook her head. "No," she said. "That is the story, yoz. Odiedin Manma’s story. He tells that one. The rest of his telling is in the body." She meant exercises, gymnastic practice, of which Odiedin was a highly respected teacher.

"I see," Sutty said, and went away and thought about it.

She knew one thing, she had learned one thing for sure, here in Okzat-Ozkat: she had learned how to listen. To listen, hear, keep listening to what she’d heard. To carry the words away and listen to them. If telling was the skill of the maz, listening was the skill of the yoz. As they all liked to remark, neither one was any use without the other.