The Telling (20 page)

And what would she say to Tong Ov when and if she ever did talk to him again? He had sent her to find Aka's history, its lost, outlawed past, its true being, and she had found it. But then what?

What the maz wanted of her was clear and urgent: they wanted her to save their treasure. It was the only thing clear to her in the obscure turmoil of her thoughts and feelings since she had talked to the Monitor.

What she herself wanted—would have wanted, if it had been possible—was to stay here. To live in the caves of being, to read, to hear the Telling, here where it was still complete or nearly complete, still one unbroken story. To live in the forest of words. To listen. That was what she was fitted for, what she longed to do, and could not.

As the maz longed to do and could not.

"We were stupid, yoz Sutty," said Goiri Engnake, a maz from the great city of Kangnegne in the center of the continent, a scholar of philosophy who had served fourteen years in an agricultural labor camp for disseminating reactionary ideology. She was a worn, tough, abrupt woman. "Carrying everything up here. We should have left it all over the place. Left the books with whoever had the books, and made copies. Spent our time copying, instead of bringing everything we have together where they can destroy it all at once. But you see we're old-fashioned. People thought about how long it takes to copy, how dangerous it is to try to print. They didn't look at the machines the Corporation started making, the ways to copy things in an instant, to put whole libraries into a computer. Now we've got our treasure where we can't use those technologies. We can't bring a computer up here, and if we could, how would we power it? And how long would it take to put all this into it?"

"With Akan technology, years," Sutty said. "With what's available to the Ekumen, a summer, maybe."

Looking at Goiri's face, she added, slowly, "If we were authorised to do so. By the Corporation of Aka. And by the Stabiles of the Ekumen."

"I understand."

They were in the 'kitchen,' the cave where they cooked and ate. It was sealed to the extent that it could be kept habitably warm, and was the gathering place, at all hours, for discussions and conversations. They had eaten breakfast and were each nursing along a cup of very weak bezit tea.
It starts the flow and reunites,
Iziezi murmured in her mind.

"Would you ask the Envoy to request such authorisation, yoz?"

"Yes, of course," Sutty said. After a pause, "That is, I would ask him if he considered it feasible, or wise. If such a request indicated to your government that this place exists, we'd have blown your cover, maz."

Goiri grinned at Sutty's choice of words. They were of course speaking in Dovzan. "But maybe the fact that you know about it, that the Ekumen is interested in it, would protect the Library," she said. "Prevent them from sending the police here to destroy it."

"Maybe."

"The Executives of the Corporation hold the Ekumen in very high respect."

"Yes. They also hold its Envoys completely out of touch with everybody on Aka except ministers and bureaucrats. The Corporation has been given a great deal of useful information. In return, the Ekumen has been given a great deal of useless propaganda."

Goiri pondered this, and asked at last, "If you know that, why do you allow it?"

"Well, Maz Goiri, the Ekumen takes a very long view. So long that it's often hard for a short-lived being to live with. The principle we work on is that withholding knowledge is always a mistake—in the long run. So if asked to tell what we know, we tell it. To that extent, we're like you, maz."

"No longer," Goiri said bitterly. "All we know, we hide."

"You have no choice. Your bureaucrats are dangerous people. They're believers." Sutty sipped her tea. Her throat was dry. "On my world, when I was growing up, there was a powerful group of believers. They believed that their beliefs should prevail absolutely, that no other way of thinking should exist. They sabotaged the information storage networks and destroyed libraries and schools all over the world. They didn't destroy everything, of course. It can be pieced back together. But ... damage was done. That kind of damage is something like a stroke. One recovers, almost. But you know all that."

She stopped. She was talking too much. Her voice was shaking. She was getting too close to it. Far too close to it. Wrong.

Goiri looked shaken too. "All I know of your world, yoz..."

"Is that we fly around in space ships bringing enlightenment to lesser, backward worlds," Sutty said. Then she slapped one hand on the table and the other across her mouth.

Goiri stared.

"It's a way the Rangma have of reminding themselves to shut up," Sutty said. She smiled, but her hands were shaking now.

They were both silent for a while.

"I thought of you ... of all the people of the Ekumen, as very wise, above error. How childish," Goiri said. "How unfair."

Another silence.

"I'll do what I can, maz," Sutty said. "If and when I get back to Dovza City. It might not be safe to try to get in touch with the Mobile by telephone from Amareza. I could say, for the wiretappers, that we got lost trying to hike up to Silong and found an eastern path out of the mountains. But if I turn up in Amareza, where I wasn't authorised to go, they'll ask questions. I can clam up, but I don't think I can lie. I mean, not well.... And there's the problem of the Monitor."

"Yes. I wish you would talk to him, yoz Sutty."

Et tu, Brute?
said Uncle Hurree, his eyebrows sarcastic.

"Why, Maz Goiri?"

"Well, he is—as you call it—a believer. And as you say, that's dangerous. Tell him what you told me about your Earth. Tell him more than you told me. Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals."

Sutty drank the last of her tea. The taste was bitter, delicate. "I can't remember where I heard that. Not in a book. I heard it told."

"Teran said it to Penan. After he was wounded fighting the barbarians."

Sutty remembered now: the circle of mourners in the green valley under the great slopes of stone and snow, the body of the young man covered with thin, ice-white cloth, the voice of the maz telling the story.

Goiri said, "Teran was dying. He said, 'My brother, my husband, my love, my self, you and I believed that we would defeat our enemy and bring peace to our land. But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.' Then he died in Penan's arms."

The grave, yoz. Where it begins.

"I can carry that message," Sutty said finally. "Though bigots have small ears."

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."