The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  "The bark," Sutty repeated.

  He smiled and, setting down the spoon, smoothed one hand over the back of the other.

  "The body is like a tree?"

  "Ah," he said, the way Akidan had said, "Ah." It was a sound of assent, but qualified. It was yes but not quite yes. Or yes but we don't use that word. Or yes but we don't need to talk about that. Yes with a loophole.

  "In the dark cloud descending out of the sky ... the forked ... the twice-forked... ?" Sutty said, trying to read a faded but magnificently written inscription high on the wall.

  The proprietor slapped one hand loudly on the counter and the other over his mouth.

  Sutty jumped.

  They stared at each other. The old man lowered his hand. He seemed undisturbed, despite his startling reaction. He was perhaps smiling. "Not aloud, yoz," he murmured.

  Sutty went on staring for a moment, then shut her mouth.

  "Just old decorations," the proprietor said. "Old-fashioned wallpaper. Senseless dots and lines. Old-fashioned people live around here. They leave these old decorations around instead of painting walls clean and white. White and silent. Silence is snowfall. Now, yoz and honored customer, this ointment permits the skin to breathe mildly. Will you try it?"

  She dipped a finger in the pot and spread the dab of pale cream on her hands. "Oh, very nice. And what a pleasant smell. What is it called?"

  "The scent is the herb immimi, and the ointment is my secret, and the price is nothing."

  Sutty had picked up the pot and was admiring it; it was surely an old piece, enamel on heavy glass, with an elegantly fitted cap, a little jewel. "Oh, no, no, no," she said, but the old man raised his clasped hands as Iziezi had done and bowed his head with such dignity that further protest was impossible. She repeated his gesture. Then she smiled and said, "Why?"

  "...the twice-forked lightning-tee grows up from earth," he said almost inaudibly.

  After a moment she looked back up at the inscription and saw that it ended with the words he had spoken. Their eyes met again. Then he melted into the dim back part of the room and she was out on the street, blinking in the glare, clutching the gift.

  Walking back down the steep, complicated streets to her inn, she pondered. It seemed that first the Mobile, then the Monitor, and now the Fertiliser, or whatever he was, had promptly and painlessly co-opted her, involving her in their intentions without telling her what they were. Go find the people who know the stories and report back to me, Tong said. Avoid dissident reactionaries and report back to me, said the Monitor. As for the Fertiliser, had he bribed her to be silent or rewarded her for speaking? The latter, she thought. But all she was certain of was that she was far too ignorant to do what she was doing without danger to herself or others.

  The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past. She did not underestimate the enmity of the Akan Corporation State toward the "old decorations" and what they meant. To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried. The writing that had preserved them was to be erased.

  If the educational tapes and historical neareal dramas she had studied in the capital were factual, as she thought they were at least in part, within the lifetime of people now living, men and women had been crushed under the walls of temples, burned alive with books they tried to save, imprisoned for life for teaching anachronistic sedition and reactionary ideology. The tapes and dramas glorified this war against the past, relating the bombings, burnings, bulldozings in sternly heroic terms. Brave young men and women broke free from stupid parents, conniving priests, teachers of superstition, fomentors of reaction, and unflinchingly burned the pestilential forests of error, planting healthy orchards in their place—denounced the wicked professor who had hidden a dictionary of ideograms under his bed—blew up the monstrous hives where the poison of ignorance was stored—drove tractors through the flimsy rituals of superstition—and then, hand in hand, led their fellow producer-consumers to join the March to the Stars.

  Behind the glib and bloated rhetoric lay real suffering, real passion. On both sides. Sutty knew that. She was a child of violence, as Tong Ov had said. Still she found it hard to keep in mind, and bitterly ironical, that here it was all the reverse of what she had known, the negative: that here the believers weren't the persecutors but the persecuted.

  But they were all true believers, both sides. Secular terrorists or holy terrorists, what difference?

  The only thing she had found at all unusual in the endless propaganda from the Ministries of Information and Poetry was that the heroes of the exemplary tales usually came in pairs—a brother and sister, or a betrothed or married couple. If a sexual pair, heterosexual, always. The Akan government was obsessive in its detestation of 'deviance.' Tong had warned her about it as soon as she arrived: "We must conform. No discussion, no question is possible. Anything that can be seen and reported as a sexual advance to a person of the same sex is a capital offense. So tiresome, so sad. These poor people!" He sighed for the sufferings of bigots and puritans, the sufferings and cruelties.

  She had scarcely needed his warning, since she had so little contact with people as individuals, but she had of course heeded it; and it had been an element of her early, severe disappointment, her discouragement. The old Akan usages and language she had learned on Earth had led her to think she was coming to a sexually easygoing society with little or no gender hierarchy. The society of her native corner of Earth had still been cramped by social and gender caste, further rigidified by Unist misogyny and intolerance. No place on Earth had been entirely out from under that shadow, not even the Pales. One of the reasons she had specialised in Aka, had learned the languages, was that she and Pao had read in the First Observers' reports that Akan society was not hierarchically gendered and that heterosexuality was not compulsory, not even privileged. But all that had changed, changed utterly, during the years of her flight from Earth to Aka. Arriving here, she had had to go back to circumspection, caution, self-suppression. And danger.

  So, then, why did they all so promptly try to enlist her, to use her? She was scarcely a jewel in anybody's crown.

  Tong's reasons were superficially plain: he'd jumped at the first chance to send somebody out unsupervised, and chose her because she knew the old writing and language and would know what she found when she found it. But if she found it, what was she supposed to do with it? It was contraband. Illicit goods. Anti-Corporation sedition. Tong had said she was right to delete the fragments of the old books from the ansible transmission. Yet now he wanted her to record such material?

  As for the Monitor, he was playing power games. It must be a thrill for a middle-weight supervisor of cultural correctness to find a genuine alien, an authentic Observer of the Ekumen, to give orders to: Don't talk to social parasites—don't leave town without permission—report to the boss man, me.

  What about the Fertiliser? She could not shake the impression that he knew who she was, and that his gift had some meaning beyond courtesy to a stranger. No telling what.

  Given her ignorance, if she let any of them control her, she might do harm. But if she tried to do anything bold and decisive on her own, she would almost certainly do harm. She must go slow, wait, watch, learn.

  Tong had given her a code word to use in a message in case of trouble: 'devolve.' But he hadn't really expected trouble. The Akans loved their alien guests, the cows from whom they milked the milk of high technology. They wouldn't let her get into danger. She mustn't paralyse herself with caution.

  The Monitor's rumbling about brutal tribespeople was bogey talk. Okzat-Ozkat was a safe, a touchingly safe place to live. It was a small, poor, provincial city, dragged along in the rough wake of Akan progress, far enough behind that it still held tattered remnants of the old way of life—the old civilisation. Probably the Corporation
had consented to let an offworlder come here because it was so very out of the way, a harmless, picturesque bywater. Tong had sent her here to follow up a hunch or hope of finding under the monolithic, univocal success story of modern Aka some traces of what the Ekumen treasured: the singular character of a people, their way of being, their history. The Akan Corporation State wanted to forget, hide, ban, bury all that, and if she learned anything here, it would not please them. But the days of burying and burning alive were over. Weren't they? The Monitor would bluster and bully, but what could he do?

  Nothing much to her. A good deal, perhaps, to those who talked to her.

  Hold still, she told herself. Listen. Listen to what they have to tell.

  The air was dry at this altitude, cold in the shadow, hot in the sun. She stopped at a cafeteria near the Teachers' College to buy a bottle of fruit juice and sat with it at a table outdoors. Cheery music, exhortations, news about crops, production statistics, health programs blared across the square from the loudspeakers as always. Somehow she had to learn to listen through that noise to what it hid, the meaning under it.

  Was its ceaselessness its meaning? Were the Akans afraid of silence?

  Nobody about her seemed to be afraid of anything. They were students in green-and-rust Education uniforms. Many had the padded cheekbones and delicate bone structure of the old street people here, but they were plump and shiny with youth and confidence, chattering and shouting across her without seeing her. Any woman over thirty was an alien to them.

  They were eating the kind of food she had eaten in the capital, high-protein, sweet-salt packaged stuff, and drinking akakafi, a native hot drink rebaptized with a semi-Terran name. The Corporation brand of akakafi was called Starbrew and was ubiquitous. Bittersweet, black, it contained a remarkable mixture of alkaloids, stimulants, and depressants. Sutty loathed the taste, and it made her tongue furry, but she had learned to swallow it, since sharing akakafi was one of the few rituals of social bonding the people of Dovza City allowed themselves, and therefore very important to them. "A cup of akakafi?" they cried as soon as you came into the house, the office, the meeting. To refuse was to offer a rebuff, even an insult. Much small talk centered around akakafi: where to go for the best powder (not Starbrew, of course), where it was grown and processed, how to brew it. People boasted about how many cups they drank a day, as if the mild addiction were somehow praiseworthy. These young Educators were drinking it by the liter.

  She listened to them dutifully, hearing chatter about examinations, prize lists, vacation travel. Nobody talked about reading or course material except two students nearby arguing about teaching preschoolers to use the toilet. The boy insisted that shame was the best incentive. The girl said, "Wipe it up and smile," which annoyed the boy into giving quite a lecture on peer adjustment, ethical goal setting, and hygienic laxity.

  Walking home, Sutty wondered if Aka was a guilt culture, a shame culture, or something all its own. How was it that everybody in the world was willing to move in the same direction, talk the same language, believe the same things? Fear of being evil, or fear of being different?

  There she was, back with fear. Her problem, not theirs.

  Her crippled hostess was sitting in the doorway when she got home. They greeted each other shyly with illegal civilities. Making conversation, Sutty said, "I like the teas you serve so much. Much better than akakafi."

  Iziezi didn't slap one hand down and the other across her mouth, but her hands did move abruptly, and she said, "Ah," exactly as the Fertiliser had said it. Then, after a long pause, cautiously, shortening the invented word, she said, "But akafi comes from your country."

  "Some people on Terra drink something like it. My people don't."

  Iziezi looked tense. The subject was evidently fraught.

  If every topic was a minefield, there was nothing to do but talk on through the blasts, Sutty thought. She said, "You don't like it either?"

  Iziezi screwed up her face. After a nervous silence she said earnestly, "It's bad for people. It dries up the sap and disorders the flow. People who drink akafi, you can see their hands tremble and their heart jump. That's what they used to say, anyhow. The old-time people. A long time ago. My grandmother. Now everybody drinks it. It was one of those old rules, you know. Not modern. Modern people like it."

  Caution; confusion; conviction.

  "I didn't like the breakfast tea at first, but then I did. What is it? What does it do?"

  Iziezi's face smoothed out. "That's bezit. It starts the flow and reunites. It refreshes the liver a little, too."

  "You're a ... herb teacher," Sutty said, not knowing the word for herbalist.

  "Ah!"

  A small mine going off. A small warning.

  "Herb teachers are respected and honored in my homeland," Sutty said. "Many of them are doctors."

  Iziezi said nothing, but gradually her face smoothed out again.

  As Sutty turned to enter the house, the crippled woman said, "I'm going to exercise class in a few minutes."

  Exercises? Sutty thought, glancing at the immobile stick-shins that hung from Iziezi's knees.

  "If you haven't found a class and would care to come...."

  The Corporation was very strong on gymnastics. Everybody in Dovza City belonged to a gymnogroup and went to fitness classes. Several times a day brisk music and shouts of One! Two! blared from the loudspeakers, and whole factories and office buildings poured their producer-consumers out into streets and courtyards to jump and punch and bend and swing in vigorous unison. As a foreigner, Sutty had mostly succeeded in evading these groups; but she looked at Iziezi's worn face and said, "I'd like to come."

  She went in to find a place of honor in her bathroom for the Fertiliser's beautiful pot and to change from leggings into loose pants. When she came back out, Iziezi was transferring herself on crutches to a small powered wheelchair, Corporation issue, Starflight model. Sutty praised its design. Iziezi said dismissively, "It's all right in flat places," and took off, jolting and lurching up the steep, uneven street. Sutty walked alongside, lending a hand when the chair bucked and stuck, which it did about every two meters. They arrived at a low building with windows under the eaves and a high double door. One flap had been red and the other blue, with some kind of red-and-blue cloud motif painted above, now showing ghostly pink and grey through coats of whitewash. Iziezi headed her chair straight for the doors and barged them open. Sutty followed.

  It seemed pitch-black inside. Sutty was getting used to these transitions from inside dark to outside dazzle and back, but her eyes weren't. Just inside the door, Iziezi paused for Sutty to take her shoes off and set them on a shelf at the end of a dim row of shoes, all black canvas StarMarch issue, of course. Then Iziezi steered her chair at a fearless clip down a long ramp, parked it behind a bench, and levered herself around onto the bench. It seemed to be at the edge of a large matted area, beyond which all was velvet gloom.

  Sutty was able to make out shadowy figures sitting here and there cross-legged on the mat. Near Iziezi on the bench sat a man with one leg. Iziezi got herself arranged, set down her crutches, and looked up at Sutty. She made a little patting gesture at the mat near her. The door had opened briefly as someone came in, and in the brief grey visibility, Sutty saw Iziezi smile. It was a lovely and touching sight.

  Sutty sat down on the mat cross-legged with her hands in her lap. For a long time nothing else happened. It was, she thought, certainly unlike any exercise class she had ever seen, and far more to her taste. People came in silently, one or two at a time. As her eyes adjusted fully, she saw the room was vast. It must be almost entirely dug into the ground. Its long, low windows, right up where the wall met the ceiling, were of a thick bluish glass that let in only diffuse light. Above them the ceiling went on up in a low dome or series of arches; she could just make out dark, branching beams. She restrained her curious eyes and tried to sit, breathe, and not fall asleep.

  Unfortunately, in her experience, sitting med
itation and sleep had always tended to converge. When the man sitting nearest her began to swell and shrink like the ideograms on the Fertiliser's shop wall, it roused only a dreamy interest in her. Then, sitting up a little straighter, she saw that he was raising his outstretched arms till the backs of his hands met above his head and then lowering them in a very slow, regular breath-rhythm. Iziezi and some others were doing the same, in more or less the same rhythm. The serene, soundless movements were like the pulsing of jellyfish in a dim aquarium. Sutty joined the pulsation.

  Other motions were introduced here and there, one at a time, all arm movements, all in slow breath-rhythm. There would be periods of rest, and then the peaceful swelling and shrinking—stretch and relax, pulse out, draw in—would begin again, first one vague figure then another. A soft, soft sound accompanied the movements, a wordless rhythmic murmur, breath-music seemingly without source. Across the room one figure grew slowly up and up, whitish, undulant: a man or woman was afoot, making the arm gestures while bending forward or back or sideways from the waist. Two or three others rose in the same bonelessly supple way and stood reaching and swaying, never lifting a foot from the ground, more than ever like rooted sea creatures, anemones, a kelp forest, while the almost inaudible, ceaseless chanting pulsed like the sea swell, lifting and sinking...

  Light, noise—a hard, loud, white blast as if the roof had been blown off. Bare square bulbs glared dangling from dusty vaultings. Sutty sat aghast as all around her people leapt to their feet and began to prance, kick, do jumping jacks, while a harsh voice shouted, "One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!" She stared round at Iziezi, who sat on her bench, jerking like a marionette, punching the air with her fists, one, two, one, two. The one-legged man next to her shouted out the beat, slamming his crutch against the bench in time.

  Catching Sutty's eye, Iziezi gestured, Up!

  Sutty stood up, obedient but disgusted. To achieve such a beautiful group meditation and then destroy it with this stupid muscle building—what kind of people were these?