The Telling

EIGHT

His tent was lighted only by the faint glimmer of the heater. When she entered, he began pumping the little crank of the lantern. It took a long time to brighten, and the glow was small and feeble.

She sat down cross-legged in the empty half of the tent. As well as she could make out, his face was no longer swollen, though still discolored. The backboard was set so that he was sitting up almost straight.

"You lie here in the dark, night and day," she said. "It must be strange. Sensory deprivation. How do you pass the time?" She heard the cold sharpness of her voice.

"I sleep," he said. "I think."

"Therefore you are… Do you recite slogans? Onward, upward, forward? Reactionary thought is the defeated enemy?"

He said nothing.

A book lay beside the bed pad. She picked it up. It was a schoolbook, a collection of poems, stories, exemplary lives, and so on, for children of ten or so. It took her some moments to realise that it was printed in ideograms, not in alphabet. She had practically forgotten that in the Monitor’s world, in modern Aka, everything was in alphabet, that the ideograms were banned, illegal, unused, forgotten.

"Can you read this?" she demanded, startled and somehow unnerved.

"Odiedin Manma gave it to me."

"Can you read it?"

"Slowly."

"When did you learn to read rotten-corpse primitive antiscientific writing, Monitor?"

"When I was a boy."

"Who taught you?"

"The people I lived with."

"Who were they?"

"My mother’s parents."

His answers came always after a pause, and spoken low, almost mumbled, like the replies of a humiliated schoolboy to a goading questioner. Sutty was abruptly overcome with shame. She felt her cheeks burn, her head swim.

Wrong again. Worse than wrong.

After a prolonged silence she said, "I beg your pardon for the way I’ve been talking to you. I disliked your manner to me, on the boat and in Okzat-Ozkat. I came to hate you when I thought you responsible for destroying Maz Sotyu Ang’s herbary, his lifework, his life. And for hounding my friends. And hounding me. I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I’ll try not to hate you."

"Why?" he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.

"Hate eats the hater," she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.

He sat impassive, tense as always. She, however, began to relax. Her confession had relieved not only her shame but also the resentful oppression she had felt in his presence. She got her legs into a more comfortable semilotus, straightened her back. She was able to look at him instead of sneaking glances. She watched his rigid face for a while. He would not or could not say anything, but she could.

"They want me to talk to you," she said. "They want me to tell you what life is like on Terra. The sad and ugly truths you’ll find at the end of the March to the Stars. So that maybe you’ll begin to ask yourself that fatal question: Do I know what I’m doing? But you probably don’t want to… Also I’m curious about what life’s like for someone like you. What makes a man a Monitor. Will you tell me? Why did you live with your grandparents? Why did you learn to read the old writing? You’re about forty, I should think. It was already banned when you were a child, wasn’t it?"

He nodded. She had put the book back down. He picked it up, seeming to study the flowing calligraphy of the title on the cover: JEWEL FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LEARNING.

"Tell me," she said. "Where were you born?"

"Bolov Yeda. On the western coast."

"And they named you Yara — ’Strong.’"

He shook his head. "They named me Azyaru," he said.

Azya Aru. She had been reading about them just a day or so ago in a History of the Western Lands, which Unroy showed her in one of their forays into the Library. A maz couple of two centuries ago, Azya and Aru had been the chief founders and apostles of the Telling in Dovza. The first boss maz. Dovzan culture heroes, until the secularisation. Under the Corporation, they had no doubt become culture villains, until they could be totally erased, whited out, deleted.

"Were your parents maz, then?"

"My grandparents." He held the book as if it were a talisman. "The first thing I remember is my grandfather showing me how to write the word ’tree.’" His finger on the cover of the book sketched the two-stroke ideogram. "We were sitting on the porch, in the shade, where we could see the sea. The fishing boats were coming in. Bolov Yeda is on hills above a bay. The biggest city on the coast. My grandparents had a beautiful house. There was a vine growing over the porch, up to the roof, with a thick trunk and yellow flowers. They held the Telling in the house every day. They went to the umyazu in the evenings."

He used the forbidden pronoun, he/she/they. He was not aware of it, Sutty thought. His voice had become soft, husky, easy.

"My parents were schoolteachers. They taught the new writing at the Corporation school. I learned it, but I liked the old writing better. I was interested in writing, in books. In the things my grandparents taught me. They thought I was born to be a maz. Grandmother would say, ’Oh, Kiem, let the child go play!’ But Grandfather would want me to stay and learn one more set of characters, and I always wanted to please him. To do better… Grandmother taught me the spoken things, the things children learned of the Telling. But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful."

"So you went to live with your grandparents, to study with them?"

He answered with the same quietness and almost dreamy ease. "When I was a little child, we lived there all together. Then my father became a school administrator. And my mother entered the Ministry of Information. They were transferred to Tambe, and then to Dovza City. My mother had to travel a great deal. They both rose very quickly in the Corporation. They were valuable officials. Very active. My grandparents said it would be better if I stayed home with them, while my parents were moving about and working so hard. So I did."

"And you wanted to stay with them?"

"Oh, yes," he said, with complete simplicity. "I was happy."

The word seemed to echo in his mind, to jar him out of the quietness from which he had been speaking. He turned his head away from Sutty, an abrupt movement that brought vividly to her mind the moment on the street in Okzat-Ozkat when he said to her with passionate anger and pleading, "Do not betray us!"

They sat a while without speaking. No one else was moving about or talking in the Tree Cave. Deep silence in the Lap of Silong.

"I grew up in a village," Sutty said. "With my uncle and aunt. Really my great-uncle and great-aunt. Uncle Hurree was thin and quite dark-skinned, with white bristly hair and eyebrows — terrible eyebrows. I thought he frowned lightning out of them, when I was little. Aunty was a tremendous cook and manager. She could organise anybody. I learned to cook before I learned how to read. But Uncle did teach me, finally. He’d been a professor at the University of Calcutta. A great city in my part of Terra. He taught literature. We had five rooms in the house in the village, and they were all full of books, except the kitchen. Aunty wouldn’t allow books in the kitchen. But they were piled all over my room, all around the walls, under the bed and the table. When I first saw the Library caves here, I thought of my room at home."

"Did your uncle teach in the village?"

"No. He hid there. We hid. My parents were hiding in a different place. Lying low. There was a kind of revolution going on. Like yours here, but the other way round. People who … But I’d rather listen to you than talk about that. Tell me what happened. Did you have to leave your grandparents? How old were you?"

"Eleven," he said.

She listened. He spoke.

"My grandparents were very active too," he said. His tone had become leaden, labored, though he did not hesitate for words. "But not as loyal producer-consumers. They were leaders of a band of underground reactionary activists. Fomenting cult activities and teaching antiscience. I didn’t understand that. They took me to the meetings they organised. I didn’t know they were illegal meetings. The umyazu was closed, but they didn’t tell me that the police had closed it. They didn’t send me to Corporation school. They kept me home and taught me only superstition and deviant morality. Finally my father realised what they were doing. He and my mother had separated. He hadn’t been to see me for two years, but he sent for me. A man came. He came at night. I heard my grandmother talking very loudly, angrily. I’d never heard her talk that way. I got up and came into the front room. My grandfather was sitting in his chair, just sitting, he didn’t look at me or say anything. Grandmother and a man were facing each other across the table. They looked at me, and then the man looked at her. She said, ’Go get dressed, Azyaru, your father wants you to come see ’ him.’ I went and got dressed. When I came out again, they were still just the way they had been, exactly the same: Grandfather sitting like an old, deaf, blind man staring at nothing, and Grandmother standing with her hands in fists on the table, and the man standing there. I began crying. I said, ’I don’t want to go, I want to stay here.’ Then Grandmother came and held my shoulders, but she pushed me. She pushed me at the man. He said, ’Come on.’ And she said, ’Go, Azyaru!’ And I… went with him."

"Where did you go?" Sutty asked in a whisper.

"To my father in Dovza City. I went to school there." A long silence. He said, "Tell me about… your village. Why you were hiding."

"Fair’s fair," Sutty said. "But it’s a long story."

"All stories are long," he murmured. The Fertiliser had said something like that once. Short stories are only pieces of the long one, he had said.

"What’s hard to explain is about God, on my world," she said.

"I know God," Yara said.

That made her smile. It lightened her for a moment. "I’m sure you do," she said. "But what might be hard to understand, here, is what God is, there. Here, it’s a word and not much else. In your state theism, it seems to mean what’s good. What’s right. Is that right?"

"God is Reason, yes," he said, rather uncertainly.

"Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation."

He looked intent but puzzled.

"Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ’Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ’Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ’No, Shiva’s.’

"All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ’Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’

"And Uncle was listening, and he said, ’Because Sati is Shiva, and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’

"So I decided if I had to be Sutty, it was all right, so long as I could be Shiva too…"

She looked at Yara. He was absorbed and utterly bewildered.

"Well, never mind about that. It is terribly complicated. But all the same, when you have a lot of Gods, maybe it’s easier than having one. We had a God rock among the roots of a big tree near the road. People in the village painted it red and fed it butter, to please it, to please themselves. Aunty put marigolds at Ganesh’s feet every day. He was a little bronze God with an animal nose in the back room. He was Shiva’s son, actually. Much kinder than Shiva. Aunty recited things and sang to him. Doing pooja. I used to help her do pooja. I could sing some of the songs. I liked the incense and the marigolds… But these people I have to tell you about, the people we were hiding from, they didn’t have any little Gods. They hated them. They only had one big one. A big boss God. Whatever they said God said to do was right. Whoever didn’t do what they said God said to do was wrong. A lot of people believed this. They were called Unists. One God, one Truth, one Earth. And they… They made a lot of trouble."

The words came out foolish, babyish, primer words for the years of agony.

"You see, my people, I mean all of us on Earth, had done a lot of damage to our world, fought over it, used it up, wasted it. There’d been plagues, famines, misery for so long. People wanted comfort and help. They wanted to believe they were doing something right. I guess if they joined the Unists, they could believe everything they did was right."

He nodded. That he understood.

"The Unist Fathers said that what they called evil knowledge had brought all this misery. If there was no evil knowledge, people would be good. Unholy knowledge should be destroyed to make room for holy belief. They opposed science, all learning, everything except what was in their own books."

"Like the maz."

"No. No, I think that’s a mistake, Yara. I can’t see that the Telling excludes any knowledge, or calls any knowledge evil, or anything unholy. It doesn’t include anything of what Aka has learned in the last century from contact with other civilisations — that’s true. But I think that’s only because the maz didn’t have time to start working all that new information into the Telling before the Corporation State took over as your central social institution. It replaced the maz with bureaucrats, and then criminalised the Telling. Pushed it underground, where it couldn’t develop and grow. Called it unholy knowledge, in fact. What I don’t understand is why the Corporation thought such violence, such brutal use of power, was necessary."

"Because the maz had had all the wealth, all the power. They kept the people ignorant, drugged with rites and superstitions."

"But they didn’t keep the people ignorant! What is the Telling but teaching whatever’s known to whoever will listen?"

He hesitated, rubbed his hand over his mouth. "Maybe that was the old way," he said. "Maybe once. But it wasn’t like that. In Dovza the maz were oppressors of the poor. All the land belonged to the umyazu. Their schools taught only fossilised, useless knowledge. They refused to let people have the new justice, the new learning-"

"Violently?"

Again he hesitated.

"Yes. In Belsi the reactionary mob killed two officials of the Corporation State. There was disobedience everywhere. Defiance of the law."

He rubbed his hand hard over his face, though it must have hurt the sore, discolored temple and cheek.

"This is how it was," he said. "Your people came here and they brought a new world with them. A promise of our own world made greater, made better. They wanted to give us that. But the people who wanted to accept that world were stopped, prevented, by the old ways. The old ways of doing everything. The maz mumbling forever about things that happened ten thousand years ago, claiming they knew everything about everything, refusing to learn anything new, keeping people poor, holding us back. They were wrong. They were selfish. Usurers of knowledge. They had to be pushed aside, to make way for the future. And if they kept standing in the way, they had to be punished. We had to show people that they were wrong. My grandparents were wrong. They were enemies of the state. They would not admit it. They refused to change."

He had begun talking evenly, but by the end he was breathing in gasps, staring ahead of him, his hand clenched on the little primer.

"What happened to them?"

"They were arrested soon after I came to live with my father. They were in prison for a year in Tambe." A long pause. "A great number of recalcitrant reactionary leaders were brought to Dovza City for a just public trial. Those who recanted were allowed to do rehabilitative work on the Corporate Farms." His voice was colorless. "Those who did not recant were executed by the producer-consumers of Aka."

"They were shot?"

"They were brought into the Great Square of Justice." He stopped short.

Sutty remembered the place, a plain of pavement surrounded by the four tall, ponderous buildings housing the Central Courts. It was usually jammed with stalled traffic and hurrying pedestrians.

Yara began to talk again, still looking straight ahead at what he was telling.

"They all stood in the middle of the square, inside a rope, with police guarding them. People had come from all over to see justice done. There were thousands of people in the square. All around the criminals. And in all the streets leading to the square. My father brought me to see. We stood in a high window in the Supreme Court building. He put me in front of him so that I could see. There were piles of stones, building stones from umyazu that had been pulled down, big piles at the corners of the square. I didn’t know what they were for. Then the police gave an order, and everybody pushed in toward the middle of the square where the criminals were. They began to beat them with the stones. Their arms went up and down and … They were supposed to throw the rocks, to stone the criminals, but there were too many people. It was too crowded. Hundreds of police, and all the people. So they beat them to death. It went on for a long time."

"You had to watch?"

"My father wanted me to see that they had been wrong."

He spoke quite steadily, but his hand, his mouth gave him away. He had never left that window looking down into the square. He was twelve years old and stood there watching for the rest of his life.

So he saw his grandparents had been wrong. What else could he have seen?

Again a long silence. Shared.

To bury pain so deep, so deep you never need feel it. Bury it under anything, everything. Be a good son. A good girl. Walk over the graves and never look down. Keep far the Dog that’s friend to men… But there were no graves. Smashed faces, splintered skulls, blood-clotted grey hair in a heap in the middle of a square.

Fragments of bone, tooth fillings, a dust of exploded flesh, a whiff of gas. The smell of burning in the ruins of a building in the rain.

"So after that you lived in Dovza City. And entered the Corporation. The Sociocultural Bureau."

"My father hired tutors for me. To remedy my education. I qualified well in the examinations."

"Are you married, Yara?"

"I was. For two years."

"No child?"

He shook his head.

He continued to gaze straight ahead. He sat stiffly, not moving. His sleeping bag was tented up over one knee on a kind of frame Tobadan had made to immobilise the knee and relieve the pain. The little book lay by his hand, JEWEL FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LEARNING.

Sutty bent forward to loosen her shoulder muscles, sat up straight again.

"Goiri asked me to tell you about my world. Maybe I can, because my life hasn’t been so different from yours, in some ways… I told you about the Unists. After they took over the government of our part of the country, they started having what they called cleansings in the villages. It got more and more unsafe for us. People told us we should hide our books, or throw them in the river. Uncle Hurree was dying then. His heart was tired, he said. He told Aunty she should get rid of his books, but she wouldn’t. He died there with them around him.

"After that, my parents were able to get Aunty and me out of India. Clear across the world, to another continent, in the north, to a city where the government wasn’t religious. There were some cities like that, mostly where the Ekumen had started schools that taught the Hainish learning. The Unists hated the Ekumen and wanted to keep all the extraterrestrials off Earth, but they were afraid to try to do it directly. So they encouraged terrorism against the Pales and the ansible installations and anything else the alien demons were responsible for."

She used the English word demon, there being no such word in Dovzan. She paused a while, took a deep, conscious breath. Yara sat in the intense silence of the listener.

"So I went to high school and college there, and started training to work for the Ekumen. About that time, the Ekumen sent a new Envoy to Terra, a man called Dalzul, who’d grown up on Terra. He came to have a great deal of influence among the Unist Fathers. Before very long they were giving him more and more control, taking orders from him. They said he was an angel — that’s a messenger from God. Some of them began to say he was going to save all mankind and bring them to God, and so …" But there was no Akan word for worship. "They lay down on the ground in front of him and praised him and begged him to be kind to them. And they did whatever he told them to do, because that was their idea of how to do right — to obey orders from God. And they thought Dalzul spoke for God. Or was God. So within a year he got them to dismantle the theocratic regime. In the name of God.

"Most of the old regions or states were going back to democratic governments, choosing their leaders by election, and restoring the Terran Commonwealth, and welcoming people from the other worlds of the Ekumen. It was an exciting time. It was wonderful to watch Unism fall to pieces, crumble into fragments. More and more of the believers believed Dalzul was God, but also more and more of them decided that he was the… opposite of God, entirely wicked. There was one kind called the Repentants, who went around in processions throwing ashes on their heads and whipping each other to atone for having misunderstood what God wanted. And a lot of them broke off from all the others and set up some man, a Unist Father or a terrorist leader, as a Savior of their own, and took orders from him. They were all dangerous, they were all violent. The Dalzulites had to protect Dalzul from the anti-Dalzulites. They wanted to kill him. They were always planting bombs, trying suicide raids. All of them. They’d always used violence, because their belief justified it. It told them that God rewards those who destroy unbelief and the unbeliever. But mostly they were destroying each other, tearing each other to pieces. They called it the Holy Wars. It was a frightening time, but it seemed as if there was no real problem for the rest of us — Unism was just taking itself apart.

"Well, before it got as far as that, when the Liberation was just beginning, my city was set free. And we danced in the streets. And I saw a woman dancing. And I fell in love with her."

She stopped.

It had all been easy enough, to this point. This point beyond which she had never gone. The story that she had told only to herself, only in silence, before sleep, stopped here. Her throat began to tighten.

"I know you think that’s wrong," she said.

After a hesitation, he said, "Because no children can be born of such union, the Committee on Moral Hygiene declared—"

"Yes, I know. The Unist Fathers declared the same thing. Because God created women to be vessels for men’s semen. But after freedom we didn’t have to hide for fear of being sent to revival camps. Like your maz couples who get sent to rehabilitation centers." She looked at him, challenging.

But he did not take the challenge. He accepted what she said and waited, listening.

She could not talk her away around it or away from it. She had to talk her way through it. She had to tell it.

"We lived together for two years," she said. Her voice came out so softly that he turned a little toward her to hear. "She was much prettier than me, and much more intelligent. And kinder. And she laughed. Sometimes she laughed in her sleep. Her name was Pao."

With the name came the tears, but she held them back.

"I was two years older and a year ahead of her in our training. I stayed back a year to be with her in Vancouver. Then I had to go and begin training in the Ekumenical Center, in Chile. A long way south. Pao was going to join me when she graduated from the university. We were going to study together and be a team, an Observer team. Go to new worlds together. We cried a lot when I had to leave for Chile, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. It wasn’t bad at all, really, because we could talk all the time on the phone and the net and we knew we’d see each other in the winter, and then after the spring she’d come down and we’d be together forever. We were together. We were like maz. We were two that weren’t two, but one. It was a kind of pleasure or joy, missing her, because she was there, she was there to miss. And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me…"

She had begun crying, but the tears were easy, not hard. Only she had to stop and sniff and wipe her eyes and nose.

"So I flew back to Vancouver for the holiday. It was summer in Chile, but winter there. And we … we hugged and kissed and cooked dinner. And we went to see my parents, and Pao’s parents, and walked in the park, where there were big trees, old trees. It was raining. It rains a lot there. I love the rain."

Her tears had stopped.

"Pao went to the library, downtown, to look up something for the examinations she’d be taking after the holiday. I was going to go with her, but I had a cold, and she said, ’Stay here, you’ll just get soaked,’ and I felt like lying around being lazy, so I stayed in our apartment, and fell asleep.

"There was a Holy War raid. It was a group called the Purifiers of Earth. They believed that Dalzul and the Ekumen were servants of the anti-God and should be destroyed. A lot of them had been in the Unist military forces. They had some of the weapons the Unist Fathers had stockpiled. They used them against the training schools."

She heard her voice, as flat as his had been.

"They used drones, unmanned bombers. From hundreds of kilos away, in the Dakotas. They hid underground and pressed a button and sent the drones. They blew up the college, the library, blocks and blocks of the downtown. Thousands of people were killed. Things like that happened all the time in the Holy Wars. She was just one person. Nobody, nothing, one person. I wasn’t there. I heard the noise."

Her throat ached, but it always did. It always would.

She could not say anything more for a while.

Yara asked softly, "Were your parents killed?"

The question touched her. It moved her to a place where she could respond. She said, "No. They were all right. I went to stay with them. After that I went back to Chile."

They sat quietly. Inside the mountain, in the caves full of being. Sutty was weary, spent. She could see in Yara’s face and hands that he was tired and still in pain. The silence they shared after their words was peaceful, a blessing earned. .

After a long time she heard people talking, and roused herself from that silence.

She heard Odiedin’s voice, and presently he spoke outside the tent: "Yara?"

"Come in," Yara said. Sutty pulled the flap aside.

"Ah," said Odiedin. In the weak light of the lantern his dark, high-cheekboned face peering in at them was an amiable goblin mask.

"We’ve been talking," Sutty said. She emerged from the tent, stood beside Odiedin, stretched.

"I came for your exercises," Odiedin said to Yara, kneeling at the entrance.

"Will he be on his feet soon?" she asked Odiedin.

"Using crutches is hard because of the way his back was hurt," he answered. "Some of the muscles haven’t reattached. We keep working on it."

He went into the tent on his knees.

She turned away, then turned back and looked in. To leave without a word, after such a conversation as they had had, was wrong.

"I’ll come again tomorrow, Yara," she said. He made some soft reply. She stood up, looking at the cave in the faint glow reflected from the sides of the other tents. She could not see the carving of the Tree on the high back wall, only one or two of the tiny, winking jewels in its foliage.

The Tree Cave had an exit to the outside, not far from Yara’s tent. It led through a smaller cave to a short passage that ended in an arch so low that one had to crawl out into the light of day.

She emerged from that and stood up. She had pulled out her dark goggles, expecting to be dazzled, but the sun, hidden all afternoon by the great bulk of Silong, was setting or had set. The light was gentle, with a faint violet tinge. A little snow had fallen during the last few hours. The broad half circle of the cirque, like a stage seen from the backdrop, stretched away pale and untrodden to its outer edge. The air was quiet here under the wall of the mountain, but there at the edge, a hundred meters or so away, wind picked up and dropped the fine, dry snow in thin flurries and skeins, forever restless.

Sutty had been out to the edge only once. The cliff beneath it was sheer, slightly undercut, a mile-deep gulf. It had made her head swim, and as she stood there, the wind had tugged at her, gusting treacherously.

She gazed now over that small, ceaseless dance of the blown snow, across the emptiness of twilit air to Zubuam. The slopes of the Thunderer were vague, pale, remote in evening. She stood a long time watching the light die.

She went to talk with Yara most afternoons now, after she had explored another section of the Library and had worked with the maz who were cataloguing it. She and he never came back directly to what they had told each other of their lives, though it underlay everything they said, a dark foundation.

She asked him once if he knew why the Corporation had granted Tong’s request, allowing an offworlder outside the information-restricted, controlled environment of Dovza City. "Was I a test case?" she asked. "Or a lure?"

It was not easy for him to overcome the habit of his official life, of all official lives: to protect and aggrandise his power by withholding information, and to let silence imply he had information even when he didn’t. He had obeyed that rule all his adult life and probably could not have broken from it now, if he had not lived as a child within the Telling. As it was, he struggled visibly to answer. Sutty saw that struggle with compunction. Lying here, a prisoner of his injuries, dependent on his enemies, he had no power at all except in silence. To give it up, to let it go, to speak, took valor. It cost him all he had left.

"My department was not informed," he began, then stopped, and began again: "I believe that there have," and finally, doggedly, he started over, forcing himself through the jargon of his calling: "There have been high-level discussions concerning foreign policy for several years. Since an Akan ship is on its way to Hain, and being informed that an Ekumenical ship is scheduled to arrive next year, some elements within the Council have advocated a more relaxed policy. It was said that there might be profit if some doors were opened to an increase of mutual exchange of information. Others involved in decisions on these matters took the view that Corporation control of dissidence is still far too incomplete for any laxity to be advisable. A… a form of compromise was eventually attained among the factions of opinion on the matter."

When Yara had run out of passive constructions, Sutty made a rough mental translation and said, "So I was the compromise? A test case, then. And you were assigned to watch me and report."

"No," Yara said with sudden bluntness. "I asked to. Was allowed to. At first. They thought when you saw the poverty and backwardness of Rangma, you’d go back quickly to the city. When you settled in Okzat-Ozkat, the Central Executive didn’t know how to exert control without giving offense. My department was overruled again. I advised that you be sent back to the capital. Even my superiors within the department ignored my reports. They ordered me back to the capital. They won’t listen. They won’t believe the strength of the maz in the towns and the countryside. They think the Telling is over!"

He spoke with intense and desolate anger, caught in the trap of his complex, insoluble pain. Sutty could think of nothing to say to him.

They sat there in a silence that gradually became more peaceful as they listened and surrendered to the pure silence of the caves.

"You were right," she said at last.

He shook his head, contemptuous, impatient. But when she left, saying she would look in again tomorrow, he muttered, "Thank you, yoz Sutty." Servile address, meaningless ritual phraseology. From the heart.

After that their conversations were easier. He wanted her to tell him about Earth, but it was hard for him to understand, and often, though she thought he did understand, he denied it. He protested: "All you tell me is about destruction, cruel actions, how things went badly. You hate your Earth."

"No," she said. She looked up at the tent wall. She saw the curve in the road just as you came to the village, and the roadside dust she and Moti played in. Red dust. Moti showed her how to make little villages out of mud and pebbles, planting flowers all around them. He was a whole year older than she was. The flowers wilted at once in the hot, hot sun of endless summer. They curled up and lay down and went back into the dark red mud that dried to silken dust.

"No, no," she said. "My world’s beautiful beyond telling, and I love it, Yara. I’m telling you propaganda. I’m trying to tell you why, before your government started imitating what we do, they’d have done better to look at who we are. And at what we did to ourselves."

"But you came here. And you had so much knowledge we didn’t have."

"I know. I know. The Hainish did the same thing to us. We’ve been trying to copy the Hainish, to catch up to the Hainish, ever since they found us. Maybe Unism was a protest against that as much as anything. An assertion of our God-given right to be self-righteous, irrational fools in our own particularly bloody way and not in anybody else’s."

He pondered this. "But we need to learn. And you said that the Ekumen thinks it wrong to withhold any knowledge."

"I did. But the Historians study the way knowledge should be taught, so that what people learn is genuine knowledge, not a bit here and a bit there that don’t fit together. There’s a Hainish parable of the Mirror. If the glass is whole, it reflects the whole world, but broken, it shows only fragments, and cuts the hand that holds it. What Terra gave Aka is a splinter of the mirror."

"Maybe that’s why the Executives sent the Legates back."

"The Legates?"

"The men on the second ship from Terra."

"Second ship?" Sutty said, startled and puzzled. "There was only one ship from Terra, before the one I came on."

But as she spoke, she remembered her last long conversation with Tong Ov. He had asked her if she thought the Unist Fathers, acting on their own without informing the Ekumen, might have sent missionaries to Aka.

"Tell me about it, Yara! I don’t know anything about that ship."

She could see him physically draw back very slightly, struggling with his immediate reluctance to answer. This had been classified information, she thought, known only to the upper echelons, not part of official Corporation history. Though they no doubt assumed we knew it.

"A second ship came and was sent back to Terra?" she asked.

"It appears so."

She sent an exasperated silent message at his rigid profile: Oh, don’t come the tight-lipped bureaucrat on me now! She said nothing. After a pause, he spoke again.

"There were records of the visit. I never saw them."

"What were you told about ships from Terra — can you tell me?"

He brooded a bit. "The first one came in the year Redan Thirty. Seventy-two years ago. It landed near Abazu, on the eastern coast. There were eighteen men and women aboard." He glanced at her to check this for accuracy, and she nodded. "The provincial governments that were still in power then in the east decided to let the aliens go wherever they liked. The aliens said they’d come to learn about us, and to invite us to join in the Ekumen. Whatever we asked them about Terra and the other worlds they’d tell us, but they came, they said, not as tellers but as listeners. As yoz, not maz. They stayed five years. A ship came for them, and on the ship’s ansible they sent a telling of what they’d learned here back to Terra." Again he looked at her for confirmation.

"Most of that telling was lost," Sutty said.

"Did they get back to Terra?"

"I don’t know. I left Terra sixty years ago, sixty-one years now. If they got back during the Unist rule, or during the Holy Wars, they might have been silenced, or jailed, or shot… But there was a second ship?"

"Yes."

"The Ekumen sponsored that first ship. But it didn’t sponsor another expedition from Terra, because the Unists had taken over. They cut communication with the Ekumen to a bare minimum. They kept closing ports and teaching centers, threatening aliens with expulsion, letting terrorists cripple the facilities, keeping them powerless. If a second ship came from Terra, the Unists sent it. I never heard anything about it, Yara. It certainly wasn’t announced to the common people."

Accepting this, he said, "It came two years after the first ship left. There were fifty people on it, with a boss maz, a leader. His name was Fodderdon. It landed in Dovza, south of the capital. Its people got in touch with the Corporation Executives at once. They said Terra was going to give all its knowledge to Aka. They brought all kinds of information, technological information. They showed us how we’d have to stop doing things in the old, ignorant ways and change our thinking, to learn what they could teach us. They brought plans, and books, and engineers and theorists to teach us the techniques. They had an ansible on their ship, so that information could come from Terra as soon as we needed it."

"A great big box of toys," Sutty whispered.

"It changed everything. It strengthened the Corporation tremendously. It was the first step in the March to the Stars. Then … I don’t know what happened. All we were told was that Fodderdon and the others gave us information freely at first, but then began to withhold it and to demand an unfair price for it."

"I can imagine what price," Sutty said.

He looked his question.

"Your immortal part," she said. There was no Akan word for soul. Yara waited for her to explain. "I imagine he said: You must believe. You must believe in the One God. You must believe that I alone, Father John, am God’s voice on Aka. Only the story I tell is true. If you obey God and me, we’ll tell you all the wonderful things we know. But the price of our Telling is high. More than any money."

Yara nodded dubiously, and pondered. "Fodderdon did say that the Executive Council would have to follow his orders. That’s why I called him a boss maz."

"That’s what he was."

"I don’t know about the rest. We were told that there were policy disagreements, and the ship and the Legates were sent back to Terra. However… I’m not certain that that’s what happened." He looked uncomfortable, and deliberated for a long time over what he was going to say. "I knew an engineer in New Alyuna who worked on the Aka One." He meant the NAFAL ship now on its way from Aka to Hain, the pride of the Corporation. "He said they’d used the Terran ship as a model. He may have meant they had the plans for it. But he made it sound as if he’d actually been in the ship. He was drunk. I don’t know."

The fifty Unist missionary-conquistadors had very likely died in Corporation labor camps. But Sutty saw now how Dovza itself had been betrayed into betraying the rest of Aka.

It saddened her heart, this story. All the old mistakes, made over and over. She gave a deep sigh. "So, having no way to distinguish Unist Legates from Ekumenical Observers, you’ve handled us ever since with extreme distrust… You know, Yara, I think your Executives were wise in refusing the bargain Father John offered. Though probably they saw it simply as a power struggle. What’s harder to see is that even the gift of knowledge itself had a price attached. And still does."

"Yes, of course it does," Yara said. "Only we don’t know what it is. Why do your people hide the price?" She stared at him, nonplussed. "I don’t know," she said. "I didn’t realise… I have to think about that."

Yara sat back, looking tired. He rubbed his eyes and closed them. He said softly, "The gift is lightning," evidently quoting some line of the Telling.

Sutty saw beautiful, arching ideograms, high on a shadowy white wall: the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth. She saw Sotyu Ang’s worn, dark hands meet in the shape of a mountain peak above his heart. The price is nothing…

They sat in the silence, following their thoughts.

After a long time, she asked, "Yara, do you know the story about Dear Takieki?"

He stared at her and then nodded. It was a memory from childhood, evidently, that required some retrieval. After a bit longer he said definitely, "Yes."

"Was Dear Takieki really a fool? I mean, it was his mother who gave him the bean meal. Maybe he was right not to give it away, no matter what they offered him."

Yara sat pondering. "My grandmother told me that story. I remember I thought I’d like to be able to walk anywhere, the way he did, without anybody looking after me. I was still little, my grandparents didn’t let me go off by myself. So I said he must have wanted to go on walking. Not stay at a farm. And Grandmother asked, ’But what will he do when he runs out of food?’ And I said, ’Maybe he can bargain. Maybe he can give the maz some of the bean meal and keep some, and take just a few of the gold coins. Then he could go on walking, and still buy food to eat when winter comes.’"

He smiled faintly, remembering, but his face remained troubled.

It was always a troubled face. She remembered it when it was hard, cold, closed. It had been beaten open.

He was worried for good reason. He was not progressing well with walking. His knee would still not bear weight for longer than a few minutes, and his back injury prevented him from using crutches without pain and risk of further damage. Odiedin and To-badan worked with him daily, endlessly patient. Yara responded to them with his own dogged patience, but the look of trouble never left him.

Two groups had already left the Lap of Silong, slipping away in the dawn light, a few people, a couple of minule, heavy-laden. No bannered caravans.

Life in the caves was managed almost wholly by custom and consensus. Sutty had noted the conscious avoidance of hierarchy. People scrupulously did not pull rank. She mentioned this to Unroy, who said, "That was what went wrong in the century before the Ekumen came."

"Boss maz," Sutty said tentatively.

"Boss maz," Unroy confirmed, grinning. She was always tickled by Sutty’s slang and her Rangma archaisms. "The Dovzan Reformation. Power hierarchies. Power struggles. Huge, rich umyazu taxing the villages. Fiscal and spiritual usury! Your people came at a bad time, yoz."

"The ships always come to the new world at a bad time," Sutty said. Unroy glanced at her with a little wonder.

In so far as any person or couple was in charge of things at the Lap of Silong, it was the maz Igneba and Ikak. After general consensus was established, specific decisions and responsibilities were made by them. The order and times at which people were to depart was one such decision. Ikak came to Sutty at dinnertime one night. "Yoz Sutty, if you have no objection, your group will leave four days from now."

"All of us from Okzat-Ozkat?"

"No. You, Maz Odiedin Manma, Long, and Ieyu, we thought. A small group, with one minule. You should be able to travel fast and get down into the hills before the autumn weather."

"Very well, maz," Sutty said. "I hate to leave the books unread."

"Maybe you can come back. Maybe you can save them for our children."

That burning, yearning hope they all shared, that hope in her and in the Ekumen: it frightened Sutty every time she saw its intensity.

"I will try to do that, maz," she said. Then — "But what about Yara?"

"He’ll have to be carried. The healers say he won’t be able to walk any long distance before the weather changes. Your two young ones will be in the group with him, and Tobadan Siez, and two of our guides, and three minule with a handler. A large party, but it has to be so. They’ll go tomorrow morning, while this good weather holds. I wish we’d known the man would be unable to walk. We’d have sent them earlier. But they’ll take the Reban Path, the easiest."

"What becomes of him when you reach Amareza?"

Ikak spread out her hands. "What can we do with him? Keep him prisoner! We have to! He could tell the police exactly where the caves are. They’d send people as soon as they could, plant explosives, destroy it. The way they destroyed the Great Library of Marang, and all the others. The Corporation hasn’t changed their policy. Unless you can persuade them to change it, yoz Sutty. To let the books be, to let the Ekumen come and study them and save them. If that happened, we’d let him go, of course. But if we do, his own people will arrest and imprison him for unauthorised actions. Poor man, he hasn’t a very bright future."

"It’s possible that he won’t tell the police."

Ikak, surprised, looked her question.

"I know he’d made it a personal mission to find the Library and destroy it. An obsession, in fact. But he … He was brought up by maz. And …"

She hesitated. She could not tell Ikak his grave-secret any more than she could tell her own.

"He had to become what he was," she said finally. "But I think all that really makes sense to him is the Telling. I think he’s come back to that. I know he feels no enmity toward Odiedin or anybody here. Maybe he could stay with people in Amareza without being kept prisoner. Just keep out of sight."

"Maybe," Ikak said, not unsympathetic but unconvinced. "Except it’s very hard to hide somebody like that, yoz Sutty. He has an implanted ZIL. And he was a fairly high official, assigned to watch an Observer of the Ekumen. They’ll be looking for him. Once they get him, I’m afraid, whatever he feels, they can make him tell them anything he knows."

"He could stay hidden in a village through the winter, maybe. Not go down into Amareza at all. I will need time, Maz Ikak Igneba — the Envoy will need time — to talk to people in Dovza. And if a ship comes next year, as it’s due to, then we can talk on the ansible with the Stabiles of the Ekumen about these matters. But it will take time."

Ikak nodded. "I’ll speak with the others about it We’ll do what we can."

Sutty went immediately after dinner to Yara’s tent.

Both Akidan and Odiedin were already there, Akidan with the warm clothing Yara would need for the journey, Odiedin to reas-sure him about making it. Akidan was excited about leaving. Sutty was touched to see how kindly he spoke to Yara, his handsome young face alight. "Don’t worry, yoz," he said earnestly, "it’s an easy path and we’ve got a very strong group. We’ll be down in the hills in a week."

"Thank you," Yara said, expressionless. His face had closed.

"Tobadan Siez will be with you," Odiedin said.

Yara nodded. "Thank you," he said again.

Kieri arrived with a thermal poncho Akidan had forgotten, and came crowding in with it, talking away. The tent was too full. Sutty knelt in the entrance and put her hand on Yara’s hand. She had never touched him before.

"Thank you for telling me what you told me, Yara," she said, feeling hurried and self-conscious. "And for letting me tell you. I hope you — I hope things work out. Goodbye."

Looking up at her, he gave his brief nod, and turned his head away.

She went back to her tent, anxious yet also relieved.

The tent was a mess: Kieri had thrown around everything she owned in preparation for packing it. Sutty looked forward to sharing a tent with Odiedin again, to order, silence, celibacy.

She had spent a long day working on the catalogue, tiring, tricky work with the balky and laborious Akan programs. She went to bed, intending to get up very early and see her friends off. She slept at once. Kieri’s return and the fuss of her packing scarcely disturbed her. It seemed about five minutes before the lamp was on again and Kieri was up, dressed, leaving. Sutty struggled out of her sleeping bag and said, "I’ll be at breakfast with you."

But when she got to the kitchen, the people of the departing group weren’t there having the hot meal that would start them on their way. Nobody was there but Long, who was on cooking duty.

"Where is everybody, Long?" she asked, alarmed. "They haven’t left already, have they?"

"No," Long said.

"Is something wrong?"

"I think so, yoz Sutty." His face was distressed. He nodded toward the outer caves. She went to the entrance that led to them. She met Odiedin coming in.

"What’s wrong?"

"Oh Sutty," Odiedin said. He made an incomplete, hopeless gesture.

"What is it?"

"Yara."

"What?"

"Come with me."

She followed him into the Tree Cave. He walked past Yara’s tent. There were a lot of people around it, but she did not see Yara. Odiedin strode on through the small cave with a rough floor, and from that to the short passage that led to the outside by the doorway arch they could get through only on hands and knees.

Odiedin stood up just outside it. Sutty emerged beside him. It was far from sunrise still, but the high pallor of the sky seemed wonderfully radiant and vast after the spaceless darkness of the caves.

"See where he went," Odiedin said.

She looked down from the light to where he pointed. Snow lay ankle deep on the floor of the cirque. From the arch where they stood, boot tracks led straight out to the edge and back, tracks of three or four people, she thought.

"Not the tracks," Odiedin said. "Those are ours. He was on hands and knees. He couldn’t walk. I don’t know how he could crawl on that knee. It’s a long way."

She saw, now, the marks in the snow, heavy, dragging furrows. All the boot tracks kept to the left of them.

"Nobody heard him. Sometime after midnight, he must have crept out."

Looking down, quite close to the arch, where the snow was thin on the black rock, she saw a blurred handprint.

"Out there at the edge," Odiedin said, "he stood up. So that he could leap."

Sutty made a little noise. She sank down squatting, rocking her body a little. No tears came, but her throat was tight, she could not breathe.

"Penan Teran," she said. Odiedin did not understand her. "Onto the wind," she said.

"He didn’t have to do this." Odiedin’s voice was fierce, desolate. "It was wrong."

"He thought it was right," Sutty said.