The Telling (22 page)

"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.