The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The chief of the village and his headmen and foremen and honorary sons, all the hierarchy and government of the village, were suspicious and not pleased by my teaching, yet did not want to forbid me. The government of Yotebber Region had sent word that they were establishing country schools, where village children were to be sent for half the year. The village men knew that their sons would be advantaged if they could already read and write when they went there.

  The Chosen Son, a big, mild, pale man, blind in one eye from a war wound, came to me at last. He wore his coat of office, a tight, long coat such as Werelian owners had worn three hundred years ago. He told me that I should not teach girls to read, only boys.

  I told him I would teach all the children who wanted to learn, or none of them.

  “Girls do not want to learn this,” he said.

  “They do. Fourteen girls have asked to be in my class. Eight boys. Do you say girls do not need religious training, Chosen Son?”

  This gave him pause. “They should learn the life of the Merciful Lady,” he said.

  “I will write the Life of Tual for them,” I said at once. He walked away, saving his dignity.

  I had little pleasure in my victory, such as it was. At least I went on teaching.

  Tualtak was always at me to run away, run away to the city downriver. She had grown very thin, for she could not digest the heavy food. She hated the work and the people. “It’s all right for you, you were a plantation pup, a dusty, but I never was, my mother was a rentswoman, we lived in fine rooms on Haba Street, I was the brightest trainee they ever had in the laboratory,” and on and on, over and over, living in the world she had lost.

  Sometimes I listened to her talk about running away. I tried to remember the maps of Yeowe in my lost books. I remembered the great river, the Yot, running from far inland three thousand kilos to the South Sea. But where were we on its vast length, how far from Yotebber City on its delta? Between Hagayot and the city might be a hundred villages like this one. “Have you been raped?” I asked Tualtak.

  She took offense. “I’m a rentswoman, not a use-woman,” she snapped.

  I said, “I was a use-woman for two years. If I was raped again I would kill the man or kill myself. I think two Werelian women walking alone here would be raped. I can’t do it, Tualtak.”

  “It can’t all be like this place!” she cried, so desperate that I felt my own throat close up with tears.

  “Maybe when they open the schools—there will be people from the cities then—” It was all I had to offer her, or myself, as hope. “Maybe if the harvest’s good this year, if we can get our money, we can get on the train.…”

  That indeed was our best hope. The problem was to get our money from the chief and his cohorts. They kept the cooperative’s income in a stone hut that they called the Bank of Hagayot, and only they ever saw the money. Each individual had an account, and they kept tally faithfully, the old Banker Headman scratching your account out in the dirt if you asked for it. But women and children could not withdraw money from their account. All we could get was a kind of scrip, clay pieces marked by the Banker Headman, good to buy things from one another, things people in the village made, clothes, sandals, tools, bead necklaces, rice beer. Our real money was safe, we were told, in the bank. I thought of that old lame bondsman at Shomeke, jigging and singing, “Money in the bank, Lord! Money in the bank!”

  Before we ever came, the women had resented this system. Now there were nine more women resenting it.

  One night I asked my friend Seugi, whose hair was as white as her skin, “Seugi, do you know what happened at a place called Nadami?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The women opened the door. All the women rose up and then the men rose up against the Bosses. But they needed weapons. And a woman ran in the night and stole the key from the owner’s box and opened the door of the strong place where the Bosses kept their guns and bullets, and she held it open with the strength of her body, so that the slaves could arm themselves. And they killed the Corporations and made that place, Nadami, free.”

  “Even on Werel they tell that story,” I said. “Even there women tell about Nadami, where the women began the Liberation. Men tell it too. Do men here tell it? Do they know it?”

  Seugi and the other women nodded.

  “If a woman freed the men of Nadami,” I said, “maybe the women of Hagayot can free their money.”

  Seugi laughed. She called out to a group of grandmothers, “Listen to Rakam! Listen to this!”

  After plenty of talk for days and weeks, it ended in a delegation of women, thirty of us. We crossed the ditch bridge onto the men’s side and ceremoniously asked to see the chief. Our principal bargaining counter was shame. Seugi and other village women did the speaking, for they knew how far they could shame the men without goading them into anger and retaliation. Listening to them, I heard dignity speak to dignity, pride speak to pride. For the first time since I came to Yeowe I felt I was one of these people, that this pride and dignity were mine.

  Nothing happens fast in a village. But by the next harvest, the women of Hagayot could draw their own earned share out of the bank in cash.

  “Now for the vote,” I said to Seugi, for there was no secret ballot in the village. When there was a regional election, even in the worldwide Ratification of the Constitution, the chiefs polled the men and filled out the ballots. They did not even poll the women. They wrote in the votes they wanted cast.

  But I did not stay to help bring about that change at Hagayot. Tualtak was really ill, and half crazy with her longing to get out of the marshes, to the city. And I too longed for that. So we took our wages, and Seugi and other women drove us in an ox cart on the causeway across the marshes to the freight station. There we raised the flag that signaled the next train to stop for passengers.

  It came along in a few hours, a long train of boxcars loaded with marsh rice, heading for the mills of Yotebber City. We rode in the crew car with the train crew and a few other passengers, village men. I had a big knife in my belt, but none of the men showed us any disrespect. Away from their compounds they were timid and shy. I sat up in my bunk in that car watching the great, wild, plumy marshes whirl by, and the villages on the banks of the wide river, and wished the train would go on forever.

  But Tualtak lay in the bunk below me, coughing and fretful. When we got to Yotebber City she was so weak I knew I had to get her to a doctor. A man from the train crew was kind, telling us how to get to the hospital on the public cars. As we rattled through the hot, crowded city streets in the crowded car, I was still happy. I could not help it.

  At the hospital they demanded our citizens’ registration papers.

  I had never heard of such papers. Later I found that ours had been given to the chiefs at Hagayot, who had kept them, as they kept all “their” women’s papers. At the time, all I could do was stare and say, “I don’t know anything about registration papers.”

  I heard one of the women at the desk say to the other, “Lord, how dusty can you get?”

  I knew what we looked like. I knew we looked dirty and low. I knew I seemed ignorant and stupid. But when I heard that word “dusty” my pride and dignity woke up again. I put my hand into my pack and brought out my freedom paper, that old paper with Erod’s writing on it, all crumpled and folded, all dusty.

  “This is my Citizen’s Registration paper,” I said in a loud voice, making those women jump and turn. “My mother’s blood and my grandmother’s blood is on it. My friend here is sick. She needs a doctor. Now bring us to a doctor!”

  A thin little woman came forward from the corridor. “Come on this way,” she said. One of the deskwomen started to protest. This little woman give her a look.

  We followed her to an examination room.

  “I’m Dr. Yeron,” she said, then corrected herself. “I’m serving as a nurse,” she said. “But I am a doctor. And you—you come from the Old World? from Werel? Sit down there, now, child, take off your shirt.
How long have you been here?”

  Within a quarter of an hour she had diagnosed Tualtak and got her a bed in a ward for rest and observation, found out our histories, and sent me off with a note to a friend of hers who would help me find a place to live and a job.

  “Teaching!” Dr. Yeron said. “A teacher! Oh, woman, you are rain to the dry land!”

  Indeed the first school I talked to wanted to hire me at once, to teach anything I wanted. Because I come of a capitalist people, I went to other schools to see if I could make more money at them. But I came back to the first one. I liked the people there.

  Before the War of Liberation, the cities of Yeowe, which were cities of Corporation-owned assets who rented their own freedom, had had their own schools and hospitals and many kinds of training programs. There was even a University for assets in the Old Capital. The Corporations, of course, had controlled all the information that came to such institutions, and watched and censored all teaching and writing, keeping everything aimed toward the maximization of their profits. But within that narrow frame the assets had been free to use the information they had as they pleased, and city Yeowans had valued education deeply. During the long war, thirty years, all that system of gathering and teaching knowledge had broken down. A whole generation grew up learning nothing but fighting and hiding, famine and disease. The head of my school said to me, “Our children grew up illiterate, ignorant. Is it any wonder the plantation chiefs just took over where the Corporation Bosses left off? Who was to stop them?”

  These men and women believed with a fierce passion that only education would lead to freedom. They were still fighting the War of Liberation.

  Yotebber City was a big, poor, sunny, sprawling city with wide streets, low buildings, and huge old shady trees. The traffic was mostly afoot, with cycles tinging and public cars clanging along among the slow crowds. There were miles of shacks and shanties down in the old floodplain of the river behind the levees, where the soil was rich for gardening. The center of the city was on a low rise, the mills and train yards spreading out from it. Downtown it looked like the City of Voe Deo, only older and poorer and gentler. Instead of big stores for owners, people bought and sold everything from stalls in open markets. The air was soft, here in the south, a warm, soft sea air full of mist and sunlight. I stayed happy. I have by the grace of the Lord a mind that can leave misfortune behind, and I was happy in Yotebber City.

  Tualtak recovered her health and found a good job as a chemist in a factory. I saw her seldom, as our friendship had been a matter of necessity, not choice. Whenever I saw her she talked about Haba Street and the laboratory on Werel, and complained about her work and the people here.

  Dr. Yeron did not forget me. She wrote a note and told me to come visit her, which I did. Presently, when I was settled, she asked me to come with her to a meeting of an educational society. This, I found, was a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who sought to work against the autocratic power of the tribal and regional Chiefs under the new Constitution, and to counteract what they called the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy that I had encountered in Hagayot. My experience was useful to them, for they were all city people who had met the slave mind only when they found themselves governed by it. The women of the group were the angriest. They had lost the most at Liberation, and now had less to lose. In general the men were gradualists, the women ready for revolution. As a Werelian, ignorant of politics on Yeowe, I listened and did not talk. It was hard for me not to talk. I am a talker, and sometimes I had plenty to say. But I held my tongue and heard them. They were people worth hearing.

  Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. Though the Chief, the President of Yotebber Region, elected by a manipulated ballot, might not understand our counter-manipulations of the school curriculum, he did not waste much energy trying to control the schools. He sent his Inspectors to meddle with our classes and censor our books. But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know: that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?

  “Literacy is irrelevant,” one of our group said sorrowfully. “The Chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology.”

  I brooded over that, hating her fancy words, irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was right.

  To the next meeting of our group, to my surprise, an Alien came: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen. He was supposed to be a great feather in our Chief’s cap, sent down from the Old Capital apparently to support the Chief’s stand against the World Party, which was still strong down here and still clamoring that Yeowe should keep out all foreigners. I had heard vaguely that such a person was here, but I had not expected to meet him at a gathering of subversive school teachers.

  He was a short man, red-brown, with white corners to his eyes, but handsome if one could ignore that. He sat in the seat in front of me. He sat perfectly still, as if accustomed to sitting still, and listened without speaking as if accustomed to listening. At the end of the meeting he turned around and his queer eyes looked straight at me.

  “Radosse Rakam?” he said.

  I nodded, dumb.

  “I’m Yehedarhed Havzhiva,” he said, “I have some books for you from old music.”

  I stared. I said, “Books?”

  “From old music,” he said again. “Esdardon Aya, on Werel.”

  “My books?” I said.

  He smiled. He had a broad, quick smile.

  “Oh, where?” I cried.

  “They’re at my house. We can get them tonight, if you like. I have a car.” There was something ironic and light in how he said that, as if he was a man who did not expect to have a car, though he might enjoy it.

  Dr. Yeron came over. “So you found her,” she said to the Sub-Envoy. He looked at her with such a bright face that I thought, these two are lovers. Though she was much older than he there was nothing unlikely in the thought. Dr. Yeron was a magnetic woman. It was odd to me to think it, though, for my mind was not given to speculating about people’s sexual affairs. That was no interest of mine.

  He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of private understanding that lovers often give each other.

  He and I rode in his government electric car, his two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name, he explained to me, meant Old Music. I told him how Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here. He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him. I said, “I was sick to leave my books, and I’ve thought about them, missing them, as if they were my family. But I think maybe I’m a fool to feel that way.”

  “Why a fool?” he asked. He had a foreign accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his voice was beautiful, low and warm.

  I tried to explain everything at once: “Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world—the worlds— But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it’s just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go toward the future. And we’ll never change people’s minds just with words.”

  He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, “But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true.… I didn’t read till I was an adult, either.”

 
; “You didn’t?”

  “I knew how, but I didn’t. I lived in a village. It’s cities that have to have books,” he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. “If they don’t, we keep on starting over every generation. It’s a waste. You have to save the words.”

  When we got to his house, up at the top end of the old part of town, there were four crates of books in the entrance hall.

  “These aren’t all mine!” I said.

  “Old Music said they were yours,” Mr. Yehedarhed said, with his quick smile and quick glance at me. You can tell where an Alien is looking much better than you can tell with us. With us, except for a few people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye.

  “I haven’t got anywhere to put so many,” I said, amazed, realizing how that strange man, Old Music, had helped me to freedom yet again.

  “At your school, maybe? The school library?”

  It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the Chief’s inspectors pawing through them, perhaps confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the Sub-Envoy said, “What if I present them as gift from the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the inspectors.”

  “Oh,” I said, and burst out, “Why are you so kind? You, and he— Are you Hainish too?”

  “Yes,” he said, not answering my other question. “I was. I hope to be Yeowan.”

  He asked me to sit down and drink a little glass of wine with him before his guard drove me home. He was easy and friendly, but a quiet man. I saw he had been hurt. There were newly healed scars on his face, and his hair was half grown out where he had had a head injury. He asked me what my books were, and I said, “History.”