The Telling

by Ursula Le Guin

  God will bless thee, loving mother

  Of thy faithful husband’s child,

  Cling to him and know no other,

  Living pure and undefiled.

  Pao knew a lot of Unist hymns, and had one for most occasions.

  Sutty got the flu. Flu was a frightening thing, so many strains of it were fatal. She remembered vividly her terror, standing in the crowded streetcar while the headache got worse and worse, and when she got home and couldn’t focus her eyes on Pao’s face. Pao cared for her night and day and when the fever went down made her drink Chinese medicinal teas that tasted like piss and mildew. She was weak for days and days, lying there on the futons staring at the dingy ceiling, weak and stupid, peaceful, coming back to life.

  But in that epidemic little Aunty found her way back to the village. The first time Sutty was strong enough to visit home, it was strange to be there with Mother and Father and not with Aunty. She kept turning her head, thinking Aunty was standing in the doorway or sitting in her chair in the other room in her ragged blanket cocoon. Mother gave Sutty Aunty’s bangles, the six everyday brass ones, the two gold ones for dressing up, tiny, frail circlets through which Sutty’s hands would never pass. She gave them to Lakshmi for her baby girl to wear when she got bigger. “Don’t hold on to things, they weigh you down. Keep in your head what’s worth keeping,” Uncle Hurree had said, preaching what he’d had to practice; but Sutty kept the red-and-orange saree of cotton gauze, which folded up into nothing and could not weigh her down. It was in the bottom of her suitcase here, in Okzat-Ozkat. Someday maybe she would show it to Iziezi. Tell her about Aunty. Show her how you wore a saree. Most women enjoyed that and liked to try it on themselves. Pao had tried on Sutty’s old grey-and-silver saree once, to entertain Sutty while she was convalescing, but she said it felt too much like skirts, which of course she had been forced to wear in public all her life because of the Unist clothing laws, and she couldn’t get the trick of securing the top. “My tits are going to pop out!” she cried, and then, encouraging them to do so, had performed a remarkable version of what she called Indian classical dance all over the futons.

  Sutty had been frightened again, very badly frightened, when she discovered that everything she’d learned in the months before she got the flu—the Ekumenical history, the poems she’d memorised, even simple words of Hainish she had known for years—seemed to have been wiped out. “What will I do, what will I do, if I can’t keep things even in my head?” she whispered to Pao, when she finally broke down and confessed to the terror that had been tormenting her for a week. Pao hadn’t comforted her much, just let her tell her fear and misery, and finally said, “I think that will wear off. I think you’ll find it all coming back.” And of course she was right. Talking about it changed it. The next day, as Sutty was riding the streetcar, the opening lines of The Terraces of Darranda suddenly flowered out in her mind like great fireworks, the marvelous impetuous orderly fiery words; and she knew that all the other Words were there, not lost, waiting in the darkness, ready to come when she called them. She bought a huge bunch of daisies and took them home for Pao. They put them in the one vase they had, black plastic, and they looked like Pao, black and white and gold. With the vision of those flowers an intense and complete awareness of Pao’s body and presence filled her now, here in the high quiet room on another world, as it had filled her constantly there, then, when she was with Pao, and when she wasn’t with her, but there was no time that they weren’t together, no time that they were truly apart, not even that long, long flight down all the coast of the Americas had separated them. Nothing had separated them. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment…“O my true mind,” she whispered in the dark, and felt the warm arms holding her before she slept.

  Tong Ov’s brief reply came, a printout, received at a bureau of the District Prefecture and hand-delivered, after inspection of her ZIL bracelet, by a uniformed messenger. Observer Sutty Dass: Consider your holiday the beginning of a field trip. Continue research and recording personal observations as you see fit.

  So much for the Monitor! Surprised and jubilant, Sutty went outdoors to look up at the bannered peak of Silong and think where to start.

  She had gathered in her mind innumerable things to learn about: the meditation exercises; the double-cloud doors, which she had found all over the city, always whitewashed or painted over; the inscriptions in shops; the tree metaphors she kept hearing in talk about food or health or anything to do with the body; the possible existence of banned books; the certain existence of a web or net of information, subtler than the electronic one and uncontrolled by the Corporation, that kept people all over the city in touch and aware at all times of, for instance, Sutty: who she was, where she was, what she wanted. She saw this awareness in the eyes of street people, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, the old women who dug in the little gardens, the old men who sat in the sun on barrels on street corners. She felt it as uninvasive, as if she walked among faint lines of guidance, not bonds, not constraints, but reassurances. That she had not first entered either Iziezi’s or the Fertiliser’s door entirely by chance now seemed probable, though she could not explain it, and acceptable, though she did not know why.

  Now that she was free, she wanted to go back to the Fertiliser’s shop. She went up into the hills of the city, began to climb that narrow street. Halfway up it she came face to face with the Monitor.

  Released from concern about either obeying or evading him, she looked at him as she had at first on the river journey, not as the object of bureaucratic control looks at the bureaucrat, but humanly. He had a straight back and good features, though ambition, anxiety, authority had made his face hard, tight. Nobody starts out that way, Sutty thought. There are no hard babies. Magnanimous, she greeted him, “Good morning, Monitor!”

  Her cheery, foolish voice rang in her own ears. Wrong, wrong. To him such a greeting was mere provocation. He stood silent, facing her.

  He cleared his throat and said, “I have been ordered to withdraw my request to you to inform my office of your contacts and travel plans. Since you did not comply with it, I attempted to keep some protective surveillance over you. I am informed that you complained of this. I apologise for any annoyance or inconvenience caused you by myself or my staff.”

  His tone was cold and dour but he had some dignity, and Sutty, ashamed, said, “No—I’m sorry, I—”

  “I warn you,” he said, paying no attention, his voice more intense, “that there are people here who intend to use you for their own ends. These people are not picturesque relics of a time gone by. They are not harmless. They are vicious. They are the dregs of a deadly poison—the drug that stupefied my people for ten thousand years. They seek to drag us back into that paralysis, that mindless barbarism. They may treat you kindly, but I tell you they are ruthless. You are a prize to them. They’ll flatter you, teach you lies, promise you miracles. They are the enemies of truth, of science. Their so-called knowledge is rant, superstition, poetry. Their practices are illegal, their books and rites are banned, and you know that. Do not put my people into the painful position of finding a scientist of the Ekumen in possession of illegal materials—participating in obscene, unlawful rites. I ask this of you—as a scientist of the Ekumen—” He had begun to stammer, groping for words.

  Sutty looked at him, finding his emotion unnerving, grotesque. She said drily, “I am not a scientist. I read poetry. And you need not tell me the evils religion can do. I know them.”

  “No,” he said, “you do not.” His hands clenched and unclenched. “You know nothing of what we were. How far we have come. We will never go back to barbarism.”

  “Do you know anything at all about my world?” she said with incredulous scorn. Then none of this talk seemed worthwhile to her, and she only wanted to get away from the zealot. “I assure you that no representative of the Ekumen will interfere in Akan concerns unless explicitly asked to do so,” she said.

  He looked straight
at her and spoke with extraordinary passion. “Do not betray us!”

  “I have no intention—”

  He turned his head aside as if in denial or pain. Abruptly he walked on past her, down the street.

  She felt a wave of hatred for him that frightened her.

  She turned and went on, telling herself that she should be sorry for him. He was sincere. Most bigots are sincere. The stupid, arrogant fool, trying to tell her that religion was dangerous! But he was merely parroting Dovzan propaganda. Trying to frighten her, angry because his superiors had put him in the wrong. That he couldn’t control her was so intolerable to him that he’d lost control of himself. There was absolutely no need to think about him any more.

  She walked on up the street to the little shop to ask the Fertiliser what the double-cloud doors were, as she had intended.

  When she entered, the high dim room with its word-covered walls seemed part of a different reality altogether. She stood there for a minute, letting that reality become hers. She looked up at the inscription: In the dark cloud’s descent from sky the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth.

  The elegant little pot the Fertiliser had given her bore a motif that she had taken to be a stylised shrub or tree before she saw that it might be a variation on the cloud-door shape. She had sketched the design from the pot. When the Fertiliser materialised from the dark backward and abysm of his shop, she put her sketch down on the counter and said, “Please, yoz, can you tell me what this design is?”

  He studied the drawing. He observed in his thin, dry voice, “It’s a very pretty drawing.”

  “It’s from the gift you gave me. Has the design a meaning, a significance?”

  “Why do you ask, yoz?”

  “I’m interested in old things. Old words, old ways.”

  He watched her with age-faded eyes and said nothing.

  “Your government”—she used the old word, biedins, ‘system of officials,’ rather than the modern vizdestit, ‘joint business’ or ‘corporation’—“Your government, I know, prefers that its people learn new ways, not dwelling on their past.” Again she used the old word for people, not riyingdutey, producer-consumers. “But the historians of the Ekumen are interested in everything that our member worlds have to teach, and we believe that a useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past.”

  The Fertiliser listened, affably impassive.

  She forged ahead. “I’ve been asked by the official senior to me in the capital to learn what I can about some of the old ways that no longer exist in the capital, the arts and beliefs and customs that flourished on Aka before my people came here. I’ve received assurance from a Sociocultural Monitor that his office won’t interfere with my studies.” She said the last sentence with a certain vengeful relish. She still felt shaken, sore, from her confrontation with the Monitor. But the peacefulness in this place, the dim air, the faint scents, the half-visible ancient writings, made all that seem far away.

  A pause. The old man’s thin forefinger hovered over the design she had drawn. “We do not see the roots,” he said.

  She listened.

  “The trunk of the tree,” he said, indicating the element of the design that, in a building, was the double-leafed door. “The branches and foliage of the tree, the crown of leaves.” He indicated the five-lobed ‘cloud’ that rose above the trunk. “Also this is the body, you see, yoz.” He touched his own hips and sides, patted his head with a certain leafy motion of the fingers, and smiled a little. “The body is the body of the world. The world’s body is my body. So, then, the one makes two.” His finger showed where the trunk divided. “And the two bear each three branches, that rejoin, making five.” His finger moved to the five lobes of foliage. “And the five bear the myriad, the leaves and flowers that die and return, return and die. The beings, creatures, stars. The being that can be told. But we don’t see the roots. We cannot tell them.”

  “The roots are in the ground…?”

  “The mountain is the root.” He made a beautiful formal gesture, the backs of his fingers touching at the tip to shape a peak, then moving in to touch his breast over his heart.

  “The mountain is the root,” she repeated. “These are mysteries.”

  He was silent.

  “Can you tell me more? Tell me about the two, and the three, and the five, yoz.”

  “These are things that take a long time to tell, yoz.”

  “My time is all for listening. But I don’t want to waste yours, or intrude on it. Or ask you to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me, anything better kept secret.”

  “Everything’s kept secret now,” he said in that papery voice. “And yet it’s all in plain sight.” He looked round at the cases of little drawers and the walls above them entirely covered with words, charms, poems, formulas. Today in Sutty’s eyes the ideograms did not swell and shrink, did not breathe, but rested motionless on the high, dim walls. “But to so many they aren’t words, only old scratches. So the police leave them alone…In my mother’s time, all children could read. They could begin to read the story. The telling never stopped. In the forests and the mountains, in the villages and the cities, they were telling the story, telling it aloud, reading it aloud. Yet it was all secret then too. The mystery of the beginning, of the roots of the world, the dark. The grave, yoz. Where it begins.”

  So her education began. Though later she thought it had truly begun when she sat at the little tray-table in her room in Iziezi’s house, with the first taste of that food on her tongue.

  One of the historians of Darranda said: To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.

  A yielding, an obedience, a willingness to accept these notes as the right notes, this pattern as the true pattern, is the essential gesture of performance, translation, and understanding. The gesture need not be permanent, a lasting posture of the mind or heart; yet it is not false. It is more than the suspension of disbelief needed to watch a play, yet less than a conversion. It is a position, a posture in the dance. So Sutty’s teachers, gathered from many worlds to the city Valparaíso de Chile, had taught her, and she had had no cause to question their teaching.

  She had come to Aka to learn how to sing this world’s tune, to dance its dance; and at last, she thought, away from the city’s endless noise, she was beginning to hear the music and to learn how to move to it.

  Day after day she recorded her notes, observations that stumbled over each other, contradicted, amplified, backtracked, speculated, a wild profusion of information on all sorts of subjects, a jumbled and jigsawed map that for all its complexity represented only a rough sketch of one corner of the vastness she had to explore: a way of thinking and living developed and elaborated over thousands of years by the vast majority of human beings on this world, an enormous interlocking system of symbols, metaphors, correspondences, theories, cosmology, cooking, calisthenics, physics, metaphysics, metallurgy, medicine, physiology, psychology, alchemy, chemistry, calligraphy, numerology, herbalism, diet, legend, parable, poetry, history, and story.

  In this vast mental wilderness she looked for paths and signs, institutions that could be described, ideas that could be defined. Instinctively she avoided great cloudy concepts and sought tangibilities, such as architecture. The buildings in Okzat-Ozkat with the double doors that represented the Tree had been temples, umyazu, a word now banned, a nonword. Nonwords were useful markers of paths that might lead through the wilderness. Was ‘temple’ the best translation? What had gone on in the umyazu?

  Well, people said, people used to go there and listen.

  To what?

  Oh, well, the stories, you know.

  Who told the stories?

  Oh, the maz did. They lived there. Some of them.

  Sutty gathered that the umyazu had been something like monasteries, something like churches, and very much like libraries: places where professionals gathered and kept books and people came to learn to read them, to read them, and to hear
them read. In richer areas, there had been great, rich umyazu, to which people went on pilgrimage to see the treasures of the library and ‘hear the Telling.’ These had all been destroyed, pulled down or blown up, except the oldest and most famous of all, the Golden Mountain, far to the east.

  From an official neareal she had partissed in while she was in Dovza City, she knew that the Golden Mountain had been made into a Corporate Site for the worship of the God of Reason: an artificial cult that had no existence except at this tourist center and in slogans and vague pronouncements of the Corporation. The Golden Mountain had been gutted, first, however. The neareal showed scenes of books being removed from a great underground archive by machinery, big scoops shoveling books up like dirt into dump trucks, backhoes ramming and scraping books into a landfill. The viewer of the neareal partissed in the operation of one of these machines, while lively, bouncy music played. Sutty had stopped the neareal in the midst of this scene and disconnected the vr-proprios from the set. After that she had watched and listened to Corporation neareals but never partissed in one again, though she reconnected the vr-p modules every day when she left her special research cubicle at the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art.

  Memories such as that inclined her to some sympathy with this religion, or whatever it was she was studying, but caution and suspicion balanced her view. It was her job to avoid opinion and theory, stick to evidence and observation, listen and record what she was told.