“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 bel
ief 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 c
ompunction. 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.
The Telling Page 17