The Telling

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Two women in blue and tan were striding down the ramp after a man in blue and tan. The Monitor. His eyes went straight to her.

  She stood among the others, who were all motionless now, except for the quick rise and fall of breath.

  Nobody said anything.

  The ban on servile address, on greetings, goodbyes, any phrase acknowledging presence or departure, left holes in the texture of social process, gaps crossed only by a slight effort, a recurrent strain. City Akans had grown up with the artificiality and no doubt did not feel it, but Sutty still did, and it seemed these people did too. The stiff silence enforced by the three standing on the ramp put the others at a disadvantage. They had no way to defuse it. The one-legged man at last cleared his throat and said with some bravado, "We are performing hygienic aerobic exercises as prescribed in the Health Manual for Producer-Consumers of the Corporation."

  The two women with the Monitor looked at each other, bored, sour, I-told-you-so. The Monitor spoke to Sutty across the air between them as if no one else were there: "You came here to practice aerobics?"

  "We have very similar exercises in my homeland," she said, her dismay and indignation concentrating itself on him in a burst of eloquence. "I'm very glad to find a group here to practice them with. Exercise is often most profitable when performed with a sincerely interested group. Or so we believe in my homeland on Terra. And of course I hope to learn new exercises from my kind hosts here."

  The Monitor, with no acknowledgment of any kind except a moment's pause, turned and followed the blue-and-tan women up the ramp. The women went out. He turned and stood just inside the doors, watching.

  "Continue!" the one-legged man shouted. "One! Two! One! Two!" Everybody punched and kicked and bounced furiously for the next five or ten minutes. Sutty's fury was genuine at first; then it boiled off with the silly exercises, and she wanted to laugh, to laugh off the shock.

  She pushed Iziezi's chair up the ramp, found her shoes among the row of shoes. The Monitor still stood there. She smiled at him. "You should join us," she said.

  His gaze was impersonal, appraising, entirely without response. The Corporation was looking at her.

  She felt her face change, felt her eyes flick over him with dismissive incredulity as if seeing something small, uncouth, a petty monster. Wrong! wrong! But it was done. She was past him, outside in the cold evening air.

  She kept hold of the chair back to help Iziezi zigzag bumpily down the street and to distract herself from the crazy surge of hatred the Monitor had roused in her. "I see what you mean about level ground," she said.

  "There's no—level—ground," Iziezi jerked out, holding on, but lifting one hand for a moment toward the vast verticalities of Silong, flaring white-gold over roofs and hills already drowned in dusk.

  Back in the front hallway of the inn, Sutty said, "I hope I may join your exercise class again soon."

  Iziezi made a gesture that might have been polite assent or hopeless apology.

  "I preferred the quieter part," Sutty said. Getting no smile or response, she said, "I really would like to learn those movements. They're beautiful. They felt as if they had a meaning in them."

  Iziezi still said nothing.

  "Is there a book about them, maybe, that I could study?" The question seemed absurdly cautious yet foolishly rash.

  Iziezi pointed into the common sitting room, where a vid/ neareal monitor sat blank in one corner. Stacks of Corporation-issue tapes were piled next to it. In addition to the manuals, which everybody got a new set of annually, new tapes were frequently delivered to one's door, informative, educational, admonitory, inspirational. Employees and students were frequently examined on them in regular and special sessions at work and in college. Illness does not excuse ignorance! blared the rich Corporational voice over vids of hospitalised workmen enthusiastically partissing in a neareal about plastic molding. Wealth is work and work is wealth! sang the chorus for the Capital-Labor instructional vid. Most of the literature Sutty had studied consisted of pieces of this kind in the poetic and inspirational style. She looked with malevolence at the piles of tapes.

  "The health manual," Iziezi murmured vaguely.

  "I was thinking of something I could read in my room at night. A book."

  "Ah!" The mine went off very close this time. Then silence. "Yoz Sutty," the crippled woman whispered, "books..."

  Silence, laden.

  "I don't mean to put you at any risk."

  Sutty found herself, ridiculously, whispering.

  Iziezi shrugged. Her shrug said, Risk, so, everything's a risk.

  "The Monitor seems to be following me."

  Iziezi made a gesture that said, No, no. "They come often to the class. We have a person to watch the street, turn the lights on. Then we..." Tiredly, she punched the air, One! Two!

  "Tell me the penalties, yoz Iziezi."

  "For doing the old exercises? Get fined. Maybe lose your license. Maybe you just have to go to the Prefecture or the High School and study the manuals."

  "For a book? Owning it, reading it?"

  "An ... old book?"

  Sutty made the gesture that said, Yes.

  Iziezi was reluctant to answer. She looked down. She said finally, in a whisper, "Maybe a lot of trouble."

  Iziezi sat in her wheelchair. Sutty stood. The light had died out of the street entirely. High over the roofs the barrier wall of Silong glowed dull rust-orange. Above it, far and radiant, the peak still burned gold.

  "I can read the old writing. I want to learn the old ways. But I don't want you to lose your inn license, yoz Iziezi. Send me to somebody who isn't her nephew's sole support."

  "Akidan?" Iziezi said with new energy. "Oh, he'd take you right up to the Taproot!" Then she slapped one hand on the wheelchair arm and put the other over her mouth. "So much is forbidden," she said from behind her hand, with a glance up at Sutty that was almost sly.

  "And forgotten?"

  "People remember.... People know, yoz. But I don't know anything. My sister knew. She was educated. I'm not. I know some people who are ... educated.... But how far do you want to go?"

  "As far as my guides lead me in kindness," Sutty said. It was a phrase not from the Advanced Exercises in Grammar for Barbarians but from the fragment of a book, the damaged page that had had on it the picture of a man fishing from a bridge and four lines of a poem:

  Where my guides lead me in kindness

  I follow, follow lightly,

  and there are no footprints

  in the dust behind us.

  "Ah," Iziezi said, not a land mine, but a long sigh.

  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 expecta
tion.

  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!"

  "Where to?"

  "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:

  God will bless thee, loving mother

  Of thy faithful husband's child,

  Cling to him and know no other,

  Living pure and undefiled.

  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.