The Telling (5 page)

Still in the passive trance of the journey, curious, nervous, alert, she wandered through the streets near the river till her shoulder bag began to drag her down and she felt the knife edge of the wind. In a dark, small street that ran uphill she stopped at a doorway. The house door was open, and a woman sat in a chair in the yellow light from within the house as if enjoying a balmy summer evening.

"Can you tell me where I might find an inn?"

"Here," the woman said. She was crippled, Sutty saw now, with legs like sticks. "Ki!" she called.

A boy of fifteen or so appeared. Wordlessly he invited Sutty into the house. He showed her to a high-ceilinged, big, dark room on the ground floor, furnished with a rug. It was a magnificent rug, crimson eberdin wool with severe, complex, concentric patterns in black and white. The only other thing in the room was the light fixture, a peculiar, squarish bulb, quite dim, fixed between two high-set, horizontal windows. Its cord came snaking in one of the windows.

"Is there a bed?"

The boy gestured shyly to a curtain in the shadows of the far corner.

"Bath?"

He ducked his head toward a door. Sutty went and opened it. Three tiled steps went down to a little tiled room in which were various strange but interpretable devices of wood, metal, and ceramic, shining in the warm glow of an electric heater.

"It looks very nice," she said. "How much is it?"

"Eleven haha," the boy murmured.

"The night?"

"For a week." The Akan week was ten days.

"Oh, that's very nice," Sutty said. "Thank you."

Wrong. She should not have thanked him. Thanks were "servile address." Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you're welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy—all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers. She had learned that lesson, in those terms, almost as soon as she arrived. She had trained herself quite out of any such bad habits acquired on Earth. What had made the uncouth thanks jump now from her mouth?

The boy only murmured something which she had to ask him to repeat: an offer of dinner. She accepted without thanks.

In half an hour he brought a low table into her room, set with a figured cloth and dishes of dark-red porcelain. She had found cushions and a fat bedroll behind the curtain; had hung up her clothes on the bar and pegs also behind the curtain; had set her books and notebooks on the polished floor under the single light; and now sat on the carpet doing nothing. She liked the extraordinary sense of room in this room—space, height, stillness.

The boy served her a dinner of roast poultry, roast vegetables, a white grain that tasted like corn, and lukewarm, aromatic tea. She sat on the silky rug and ate it all. The boy looked in silently a couple of times to see if she needed anything.

"Tell me the name of this cereal, please." No. Wrong. "But first, tell me your name."

"Akidan," he whispered. "That's tuzi."

"It's very good. I never ate it before. Does it grow here?"

Akidan nodded. He had a strong, sweet face, still childish, but the man visible. "It's good for the wood," he murmured.

Sutty nodded sagely. "And delicious."

"Thank you, yoz." Yoz: a term defined by the Corporation as servile address and banned for the last fifty years at least. It meant, more or less, fellow person. Sutty had never heard the word spoken except on the tapes from which she had learned Akan languages back on Earth. And 'good for the wood,' was that an evil fossil of some kind too? She might find out tomorrow. Tonight she'd have a bath, unroll her bed, and sleep in the dark, blessed silence of this high place.

***

A gentle knock, presumably by Akidan, guided her to breakfast waiting on the tray-table outside her door. There was a big piece of cut and seeded fruit, bits of something yellow and pungent in a saucer, a crumbly greyish cake, and a handleless mug of lukewarm tea, this time faintly bitter, with a taste she disliked at first but found increasingly satisfying. The fruit and bread were fresh and delicate. She left the yellow pickled bits. When the boy came to remove the tray, she asked the name of everything, for this food was entirely different from anything she had eaten in the capital, and it had been presented with significant care. The pickled thing was abid, Akidan said. "It's for the early morning," he said, "to help the sweet fruit."

"So I should eat it?"

He smiled, embarrassed. "It helps to balance."

"I see. I'll eat it, then." She ate it. Akidan seemed pleased. "I come from very far away, Akidan," she said.

"Dovza City."

"Farther. Another world. Terra of the Ekumen."

"Ah."

"So I'm ignorant about how to live here. I'd like to ask you lots of questions. Is that all right?"

He gave a little shrug-nod, very adolescent. Shy as he was, he was self-possessed. Whatever it meant to him, he accepted with aplomb the fact that an Observer of the Ekumen, an alien whom he could have expected to see only as an electronic image sent from the capital, was living in his house. Not a trace of the xenophobia she had diagnosed in the disagreeable man on the boat.

Akidan's aunt, the crippled woman, who looked as if she was in constant low-level pain, spoke little and did not smile, but had the same tranquil, acceptant manner. Sutty arranged with her to stay two weeks, possibly longer. She had wondered if she was the only guest at the inn; now, finding her way about the house, she saw there was only one guest room.

In the city, at every hotel and apartment house, restaurant, shop, store, office, or bureau, every entrance and exit ran an automatic check of your personal ID chip, the all-important ZIL, the warranty of your existence as a producer-consumer entered in the data banks of the Corporation. Her ZIL had been issued her during the lengthy formalities of entrance at the spaceport. Without it, she had been warned, she had no identity on Aka. She could not hire a room or a robocab, buy food at a market or in a restaurant, or enter any public building without setting off an alarm. Most Akans had their chip embedded in the left wrist. She had taken the option of wearing hers in a fitted bracelet. Speaking with Akidan's aunt in the little front office, she found herself looking around for the ZIL scanner, holding her left arm ready to make the universal gesture. But the woman pivoted her chair to a massive desk with dozens of small drawers in it. After quite a few tranquil mistakes and pauses to ponder, she found the drawer she wanted and extracted a dusty booklet of forms, one of which she tore off. She pivoted the chair back round and handed the form to Sutty to fill out by hand. It was so old that the paper was crumbly, but it did have a space for the ZIL code.

"Please, yoz, tell me how to address you," Sutty said, another sentence from the
Advanced Exercises.

"My name is Iziezi. Please tell me how to address you, yoz and deyberienduin."

Welcome-my-roof-under. A nice word. "My name is Sutty, yoz and kind innkeeper." Invented for the occasion, but it seemed to serve the purpose. Iziezi's thin, drawn face warmed faintly. When Sutty gave her the form back, she drew her clasped hands against her breastbone with a slight but very formal inclination of the head. A banned gesture if ever there was one. Sutty returned it.

As she left, Iziezi was putting the form book and the form Sutty had filled out into a desk drawer, not the same one. It looked as if the Corporation State was not going to know, for a few hours anyhow, exactly where individual /EX/HH 440 T 386733849 H 4/4939 was staying.

I've escaped the net, Sutty thought, and walked out into the sunshine.

Inside the house it was rather dim, all the horizontal windows being set very high up in the wall so that they showed nothing but fierce blue sky. Coming outdoors, she was dazzled. White house walls, glittering roof tiles, steep streets of dark slate flashing back the light. Above the roofs westward, as she began to be able to see again, she saw the highest of the white walls—immensely high—a wrinkled curtain of light halfway up the sky. She stood blinking, staring. Was it a cloud? A volcanic eruption? The Northern Lights in daytime?

"Mother," said a small, toothless, dirt-colored man with a three-wheeled barrow, grinning at her from the street.

Sutty blinked at him.

"Ereha's mother," he said, and gestured at the wall of light. "Silong. Eh?"

Mount Silong. On the map, the highest point of the Headwaters Range and of the Great Continent of Aka. Yes. As they came up the river, the rise of the land had kept it hidden. Here you could see perhaps the upper half of it, a serrated radiance above which floated, still more remote, immense, ethereal, a horned peak half dissolved in golden light. From the summit streamed the thin snow-banners of eternal wind.

As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all knew what Silong looked like and therefore could help her see it. They said its name and called it Mother, pointing to the glitter of the river down at the foot of the street. One of them said, "You might go to Silong, yoz?"

They were small, thin people, with the padded cheeks and narrow eyes of hill dwellers, bad teeth, patched clothes, thin, fine hands and feet coarsened by cold and injury. They were about the same color of brown she was.

"Go there?" She looked at them all smiling and could not help smiling. "Why?"

"On Silong you live forever," said a gnarly woman with a backpack full of what looked like pumice rock.

"Caves," said a man with a yellowish, scarred face. "Caves full of being."

"Good sex!" said the barrow man, and everybody laughed. "Sex for three hundred years!"

"Its too high," Sutty said, "how could anybody go there?"

They all grinned and said, "Fly!"

"Could a plane land on that?"

Cackles, headshakes. The gnarly woman said, "Nowhere," the yellow man said, "No planes," and the barrow man said, "After three-hundred-year sex, anybody can fly!" And then as they were all laughing they stopped, they wavered like shadows, they vanished, and nobody was there except the barrow man trundling his barrow halfway down the street, and Sutty staring at the Monitor.

On the ship she had not seen him as a big man, but here he loomed. His skin, his flesh, were different from that of the people here, smooth, tough, and even, like plastic. His blue-and-tan tunic and leggings were clean and smooth and like uniforms everywhere on every world, and he didn't belong in Okzat-Ozkat any more than she did. He was an alien.

"Begging is illegal," he said.

"I wasn't begging."

After a slight pause he said, "You misunderstand. Do not encourage beggars. They are parasites on the economy. Alms-giving is illegal."

"No one was begging."

He gave his short nod—all right then, consider yourself warned—and turned away.

"Thank you so much for your charm and courtesy!" Sutty said in her native language. Oh, wrong, wrong. She had no business being sarcastic in any language, even if the Monitor paid no attention. He was insufferable, but that did not excuse her. If she was to obtain any information here, she must stay in the good graces of local officialdom; if she was to learn anything here, she must not be judgmental. The old farfetchers' motto:
Opinion ends reception.
Maybe those people had in fact been beggars, working her. How did she know? She knew nothing, nothing about this place, these people.

She set off to learn her way around Okzat-Ozkat with the humble determination not to have any opinions about it at all.

The modern buildings—prison, district and civic prefectures, agricultural, cultural, and mining agencies, teachers' college, high school—looked like all such buildings in the other cities she'd seen: plain, massive blocks. Here they were only two or three stories high, but they loomed, the way the Monitor did. The rest of the city was small, subtle, dirty, fragile. Low house walls washed red or orange, horizontal windows set high under the eaves, roofs of red or olive-green tile with curlicues running up the angles and fantastic ceramic animals pulling up the corners in their toothy mouths; little shops, their outer and inner walls entirely covered with writing in the old ideographs, whitewashed over but showing through with a queer subliminal legibility. Steep slate-paved streets and steps leading up to locked doors painted red and blue and whitewashed over. Work yards where men made rope or cut stone. Narrow plots between houses where old women dug and hoed and weeded and changed the flow patterns of miniature irrigation systems. A few cars down by the docks and parked by the big white buildings, but the street traffic all on foot and by barrow and handcart. And, to Sutty's delight, a caravan coming in from the country: big eberdin pulling two-wheeled carts with green-fringed tent tops, and two even bigger eberdin, the size of ponies, with bells tied in the creamy wool of their necks, each ridden by a woman in a long red coat sitting impassive in the high, horned saddle.

The caravan passed the facade of the District Prefecture, a tiny, jaunty, jingling scrap of the past creeping by under the blank gaze of the future. Inspirational music interspersed with exhortations blared from the roof of the Prefecture. Sutty followed the caravan for several blocks and watched it stop at the foot of one of the long flights of steps. People in the street also stopped, with that same amiable air of helping her watch, though they said nothing to her. People came out the high red and blue doors and down the steps to welcome the riders and carry in the luggage. A hotel? The owners' townhouse?

She climbed back up to one of the shops she had passed in the higher part of town. If she had understood the signs around the door, the shop sold lotions, unguents, smells, and fertiliser. A purchase of hand cream might give her time to read some of the inscriptions that covered every wall from floor to ceiling, all in the old, the illegal writing. On the facade of the shop the inscriptions had been whitewashed out and painted over with signs in the modern alphabet, but these had faded enough that she could make out some of the underlying words. That was where she had made out "smells and fertiliser." Probably perfumes and—what? Fertility? Fertility drugs, maybe? She went in.