The Telling (7 page)

Her crippled hostess was sitting in the doorway when she got home. They greeted each other shyly with illegal civilities. Making conversation, Sutty said, "I like the teas you serve so much. Much better than akakafi."

Iziezi didn't slap one hand down and the other across her mouth, but her hands did move abruptly, and she said, "Ah," exactly as the Fertiliser had said it. Then, after a long pause, cautiously, shortening the invented word, she said, "But akafi comes from your country."

"Some people on Terra drink something like it. My people don't."

Iziezi looked tense. The subject was evidently fraught.

If every topic was a minefield, there was nothing to do but talk on through the blasts, Sutty thought. She said, "You don't like it either?"

Iziezi screwed up her face. After a nervous silence she said earnestly, "It's bad for people. It dries up the sap and disorders the flow. People who drink akafi, you can see their hands tremble and their heart jump. That's what they used to say, anyhow. The old-time people. A long time ago. My grandmother. Now everybody drinks it. It was one of those old rules, you know. Not modern. Modern people like it."

Caution; confusion; conviction.

"I didn't like the breakfast tea at first, but then I did. What is it? What does it do?"

Iziezi's face smoothed out. "That's bezit. It starts the flow and reunites. It refreshes the liver a little, too."

"You're a ... herb teacher," Sutty said, not knowing the word for herbalist.

"Ah!"

A small mine going off. A small warning.

"Herb teachers are respected and honored in my homeland," Sutty said. "Many of them are doctors."

Iziezi said nothing, but gradually her face smoothed out again.

As Sutty turned to enter the house, the crippled woman said, "I'm going to exercise class in a few minutes."

Exercises? Sutty thought, glancing at the immobile stick-shins that hung from Iziezi's knees.

"If you haven't found a class and would care to come...."

The Corporation was very strong on gymnastics. Everybody in Dovza City belonged to a gymnogroup and went to fitness classes. Several times a day brisk music and shouts of One! Two! blared from the loudspeakers, and whole factories and office buildings poured their producer-consumers out into streets and courtyards to jump and punch and bend and swing in vigorous unison. As a foreigner, Sutty had mostly succeeded in evading these groups; but she looked at Iziezi's worn face and said, "I'd like to come."

She went in to find a place of honor in her bathroom for the Fertiliser's beautiful pot and to change from leggings into loose pants. When she came back out, Iziezi was transferring herself on crutches to a small powered wheelchair, Corporation issue, Starflight model. Sutty praised its design. Iziezi said dismissively, "It's all right in flat places," and took off, jolting and lurching up the steep, uneven street. Sutty walked alongside, lending a hand when the chair bucked and stuck, which it did about every two meters. They arrived at a low building with windows under the eaves and a high double door. One flap had been red and the other blue, with some kind of red-and-blue cloud motif painted above, now showing ghostly pink and grey through coats of whitewash. Iziezi headed her chair straight for the doors and barged them open. Sutty followed.

It seemed pitch-black inside. Sutty was getting used to these transitions from inside dark to outside dazzle and back, but her eyes weren't. Just inside the door, Iziezi paused for Sutty to take her shoes off and set them on a shelf at the end of a dim row of shoes, all black canvas StarMarch issue, of course. Then Iziezi steered her chair at a fearless clip down a long ramp, parked it behind a bench, and levered herself around onto the bench. It seemed to be at the edge of a large matted area, beyond which all was velvet gloom.

Sutty was able to make out shadowy figures sitting here and there cross-legged on the mat. Near Iziezi on the bench sat a man with one leg. Iziezi got herself arranged, set down her crutches, and looked up at Sutty. She made a little patting gesture at the mat near her. The door had opened briefly as someone came in, and in the brief grey visibility, Sutty saw Iziezi smile. It was a lovely and touching sight.

Sutty sat down on the mat cross-legged with her hands in her lap. For a long time nothing else happened. It was, she thought, certainly unlike any exercise class she had ever seen, and far more to her taste. People came in silently, one or two at a time. As her eyes adjusted fully, she saw the room was vast. It must be almost entirely dug into the ground. Its long, low windows, right up where the wall met the ceiling, were of a thick bluish glass that let in only diffuse light. Above them the ceiling went on up in a low dome or series of arches; she could just make out dark, branching beams. She restrained her curious eyes and tried to sit, breathe, and not fall asleep.

Unfortunately, in her experience, sitting meditation and sleep had always tended to converge. When the man sitting nearest her began to swell and shrink like the ideograms on the Fertiliser's shop wall, it roused only a dreamy interest in her. Then, sitting up a little straighter, she saw that he was raising his outstretched arms till the backs of his hands met above his head and then lowering them in a very slow, regular breath-rhythm. Iziezi and some others were doing the same, in more or less the same rhythm. The serene, soundless movements were like the pulsing of jellyfish in a dim aquarium. Sutty joined the pulsation.

Other motions were introduced here and there, one at a time, all arm movements, all in slow breath-rhythm. There would be periods of rest, and then the peaceful swelling and shrinking—stretch and relax, pulse out, draw in—would begin again, first one vague figure then another. A soft, soft sound accompanied the movements, a wordless rhythmic murmur, breath-music seemingly without source. Across the room one figure grew slowly up and up, whitish, undulant: a man or woman was afoot, making the arm gestures while bending forward or back or sideways from the waist. Two or three others rose in the same bonelessly supple way and stood reaching and swaying, never lifting a foot from the ground, more than ever like rooted sea creatures, anemones, a kelp forest, while the almost inaudible, ceaseless chanting pulsed like the sea swell, lifting and sinking...

Light, noise—a hard, loud, white blast as if the roof had been blown off. Bare square bulbs glared dangling from dusty vaultings. Sutty sat aghast as all around her people leapt to their feet and began to prance, kick, do jumping jacks, while a harsh voice shouted, "One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!" She stared round at Iziezi, who sat on her bench, jerking like a marionette, punching the air with her fists, one, two, one, two. The one-legged man next to her shouted out the beat, slamming his crutch against the bench in time.

Catching Sutty's eye, Iziezi gestured, Up!

Sutty stood up, obedient but disgusted. To achieve such a beautiful group meditation and then destroy it with this stupid muscle building—what kind of people were these?

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.

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.