The Telling

by Ursula Le Guin

  They sat there in a silence that gradually became more peaceful as they listened and surrendered to the pure silence of the caves.

  “You were right,” she said at last.

  He shook his head, contemptuous, impatient. But when she left, saying she would look in again tomorrow, he muttered, “Thank you, yoz Sutty.” Servile address, meaningless ritual phraseology. From the heart.

  After that their conversations were easier. He wanted her to tell him about Earth, but it was hard for him to understand, and often, though she thought he did understand, he denied it. He protested: “All you tell me is about destruction, cruel actions, how things went badly. You hate your Earth.”

  “No,” she said. She looked up at the tent wall. She saw the curve in the road just as you came to the village, and the roadside dust she and Moti played in. Red dust. Moti showed her how to make little villages out of mud and pebbles, planting flowers all around them. He was a whole year older than she was. The flowers wilted at once in the hot, hot sun of endless summer. They curled up and lay down and went back into the dark red mud that dried to silken dust.

  “No, no,” she said. “My world’s beautiful beyond telling, and I love it, Yara. I’m telling you propaganda. I’m trying to tell you why, before your government started imitating what we do, they’d have done better to look at who we are. And at what we did to ourselves.”

  “But you came here. And you had so much knowledge we didn’t have.”

  “I know. I know. The Hainish did the same thing to us. We’ve been trying to copy the Hainish, to catch up to the Hainish, ever since they found us. Maybe Unism was a protest against that as much as anything. An assertion of our God-given right to be self-righteous, irrational fools in our own particularly bloody way and not in anybody else’s.”

  He pondered this. “But we need to learn. And you said that the Ekumen thinks it wrong to withhold any knowledge.”

  “I did. But the Historians study the way knowledge should be taught, so that what people learn is genuine knowledge, not a bit here and a bit there that don’t fit together. There’s a Hainish parable of the Mirror. If the glass is whole, it reflects the whole world, but broken, it shows only fragments, and cuts the hand that holds it. What Terra gave Aka is a splinter of the mirror.”

  “Maybe that’s why the Executives sent the Legates back.”

  “The Legates?”

  “The men on the second ship from Terra.”

  “Second ship?” Sutty said, startled and puzzled. “There was only one ship from Terra, before the one I came on.”

  But as she spoke, she remembered her last long conversation with Tong Ov. He had asked her if she thought the Unist Fathers, acting on their own without informing the Ekumen, might have sent missionaries to Aka.

  “Tell me about it, Yara! I don’t know anything about that ship.”

  She could see him physically draw back very slightly, struggling with his immediate reluctance to answer. This had been classified information, she thought, known only to the upper echelons, not part of official Corporation history. Though they no doubt assumed we knew it.

  “A second ship came and was sent back to Terra?” she asked.

  “It appears so.”

  She sent an exasperated silent message at his rigid profile: Oh, don’t come the tight-lipped bureaucrat on me now! She said nothing. After a pause, he spoke again.

  “There were records of the visit. I never saw them.”

  “What were you told about ships from Terra—can you tell me?”

  He brooded a bit. “The first one came in the year Redan Thirty. Seventy-two years ago. It landed near Abazu, on the eastern coast. There were eighteen men and women aboard.” He glanced at her to check this for accuracy, and she nodded. “The provincial governments that were still in power then in the east decided to let the aliens go wherever they liked. The aliens said they’d come to learn about us, and to invite us to join in the Ekumen. Whatever we asked them about Terra and the other worlds they’d tell us, but they came, they said, not as tellers but as listeners. As yoz, not maz. They stayed five years. A ship came for them, and on the ship’s ansible they sent a telling of what they’d learned here back to Terra.” Again he looked at her for confirmation.

  “Most of that telling was lost,” Sutty said.

  “Did they get back to Terra?”

  “I don’t know. I left Terra sixty years ago, sixty-one years now. If they got back during the Unist rule, or during the Holy Wars, they might have been silenced, or jailed, or shot…But there was a second ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Ekumen sponsored that first ship. But it didn’t sponsor another expedition from Terra, because the Unists had taken over. They cut communication with the Ekumen to a bare minimum. They kept closing ports and teaching centers, threatening aliens with expulsion, letting terrorists cripple the facilities, keeping them powerless. If a second ship came from Terra, the Unists sent it. I never heard anything about it, Yara. It certainly wasn’t announced to the common people.”

  Accepting this, he said, “It came two years after the first ship left. There were fifty people on it, with a boss maz, a leader. His name was Fodderdon. It landed in Dovza, south of the capital. Its people got in touch with the Corporation Executives at once. They said Terra was going to give all its knowledge to Aka. They brought all kinds of information, technological information. They showed us how we’d have to stop doing things in the old, ignorant ways and change our thinking, to learn what they could teach us. They brought plans, and books, and engineers and theorists to teach us the techniques. They had an ansible on their ship, so that information could come from Terra as soon as we needed it.”

  “A great big box of toys,” Sutty whispered.

  “It changed everything. It strengthened the Corporation tremendously. It was the first step in the March to the Stars. Then…I don’t know what happened. All we were told was that Fodderdon and the others gave us information freely at first, but then began to withhold it and to demand an unfair price for it.”

  “I can imagine what price,” Sutty said.

  He looked his question.

  “Your immortal part,” she said. There was no Akan word for soul. Yara waited for her to explain. “I imagine he said: You must believe. You must believe in the One God. You must believe that I alone, Father John, am God’s voice on Aka. Only the story I tell is true. If you obey God and me, we’ll tell you all the wonderful things we know. But the price of our Telling is high. More than any money.”

  Yara nodded dubiously, and pondered. “Fodderdon did say that the Executive Council would have to follow his orders. That’s why I called him a boss maz.”

  “That’s what he was.”

  “I don’t know about the rest. We were told that there were policy disagreements, and the ship and the Legates were sent back to Terra. However…I’m not certain that that’s what happened.” He looked uncomfortable, and deliberated for a long time over what he was going to say. “I knew an engineer in New Alyuna who worked on the Aka One.” He meant the NAFAL ship now on its way from Aka to Hain, the pride of the Corporation. “He said they’d used the Terran ship as a model. He may have meant they had the plans for it. But he made it sound as if he’d actually been in the ship. He was drunk. I don’t know.”

  The fifty Unist missionary-conquistadors had very likely died in Corporation labor camps. But Sutty saw now how Dovza itself had been betrayed into betraying the rest of Aka.

  It saddened her heart, this story. All the old mistakes, made over and over. She gave a deep sigh. “So, having no way to distinguish Unist Legates from Ekumenical Observers, you’ve handled us ever since with extreme distrust…You know, Yara, I think your Executives were wise in refusing the bargain Father John offered. Though probably they saw it simply as a power struggle. What’s harder to see is that even the gift of knowledge itself had a price attached. And still does.”

  “Yes, of course it does,” Yara said. “Only we do
n’t know what it is. Why do your people hide the price?”

  She stared at him, nonplussed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t realise…I have to think about that.”

  Yara sat back, looking tired. He rubbed his eyes and closed them. He said softly, “The gift is lightning,” evidently quoting some line of the Telling.

  Sutty saw beautiful, arching ideograms, high on a shadowy white wall: the twice-forked lightning-tee grows up from earth. She saw Sotyu Ang’s worn, dark hands meet in the shape of a mountain peak above his heart. The price is nothing…

  They sat in the silence, following their thoughts.

  After a long time, she asked, “Yara, do you know the story about Dear Takieki?”

  He stared at her and then nodded. It was a memory from childhood, evidently, that required some retrieval. After a bit longer he said definitely, “Yes.”

  “Was Dear Takieki really a fool? I mean, it was his mother who gave him the bean meal. Maybe he was right not to give it away, no matter what they offered him.”

  Yara sat pondering. “My grandmother told me that story. I remember I thought I’d like to be able to walk anywhere, the way he did, without anybody looking after me. I was still little, my grandparents didn’t let me go off by myself. So I said he must have wanted to go on walking. Not stay at a farm. And Grandmother asked, ‘But what will he do when he runs out of food?’ And I said, ‘Maybe he can bargain. Maybe he can give the maz some of the bean meal and keep some, and take just a few of the gold coins. Then he could go on walking, and still buy food to eat when winter comes.’”

  He smiled faintly, remembering, but his face remained troubled.

  It was always a troubled face. She remembered it when it was hard, cold, closed. It had been beaten open.

  He was worried for good reason. He was not progressing well with walking. His knee would still not bear weight for longer than a few minutes, and his back injury prevented him from using crutches without pain and risk of further damage. Odiedin and Tobadan worked with him daily, endlessly patient. Yara responded to them with his own dogged patience, but the look of trouble never left him.

  Two groups had already left the Lap of Silong, slipping away in the dawn light, a few people, a couple of minule, heavy-laden. No bannered caravans.

  Life in the caves was managed almost wholly by custom and consensus. Sutty had noted the conscious avoidance of hierarchy. People scrupulously did not pull rank. She mentioned this to Unroy, who said, “That was what went wrong in the century before the Ekumen came.”

  “Boss maz,” Sutty said tentatively.

  “Boss maz,” Unroy confirmed, grinning. She was always tickled by Sutty’s slang and her Rangma archaisms. “The Dovzan Reformation. Power hierarchies. Power struggles. Huge, rich umyazu taxing the villages. Fiscal and spiritual usury! Your people came at a bad time, yoz.”

  “The ships always come to the new world at a bad time,” Sutty said. Unroy glanced at her with a little wonder.

  In so far as any person or couple was in charge of things at the Lap of Silong, it was the maz Igneba and Ikak. After general consensus was established, specific decisions and responsibilities were made by them. The order and times at which people were to depart was one such decision. Ikak came to Sutty at dinnertime one night. “Yoz Sutty, if you have no objection, your group will leave four days from now.”

  “All of us from Okzat-Ozkat?”

  “No. You, Maz Odiedin Manma, Long, and Ieyu, we thought. A small group, with one minule. You should be able to travel fast and get down into the hills before the autumn weather.”

  “Very well, maz,” Sutty said. “I hate to leave the books unread.”

  “Maybe you can come back. Maybe you can save them for our children.”

  That burning, yearning hope they all shared, that hope in her and in the Ekumen: it frightened Sutty every time she saw its intensity.

  “I will try to do that, maz,” she said. Then—“But what about Yara?”

  “He’ll have to be carried. The healers say he won’t be able to walk any long distance before the weather changes. Your two young ones will be in the group with him, and Tobadan Siez, and two of our guides, and three minule with a handler. A large party, but it has to be so. They’ll go tomorrow morning, while this good weather holds. I wish we’d known the man would be unable to walk. We’d have sent them earlier. But they’ll take the Reban Path, the easiest.”

  “What becomes of him when you reach Amareza?”

  Ikak spread out her hands. “What can we do with him? Keep him prisoner! We have to! He could tell the police exactly where the caves are. They’d send people as soon as they could, plant explosives, destroy it. The way they destroyed the Great Library of Marang, and all the others. The Corporation hasn’t changed their policy. Unless you can persuade them to change it, yoz Sutty. To let the books be, to let the Ekumen come and study them and save them. If that happened, we’d let him go, of course. But if we do, his own people will arrest and imprison him for unauthorised actions. Poor man, he hasn’t a very bright future.”

  “It’s possible that he won’t tell the police.”

  Ikak, surprised, looked her question.

  “I know he’d made it a personal mission to find the Library and destroy it. An obsession, in fact. But he…He was brought up by maz. And…”

  She hesitated. She could not tell Ikak his grave-secret any more than she could tell her own.

  “He had to become what he was,” she said finally. “But I think all that really makes sense to him is the Telling. I think he’s come back to that. I know he feels no enmity toward Odiedin or anybody here. Maybe he could stay with people in Amareza without being kept prisoner. Just keep out of sight.”

  “Maybe,” Ikak said, not unsympathetic but unconvinced. “Except it’s very hard to hide somebody like that, yoz Sutty. He has an implanted ZIL. And he was a fairly high official, assigned to watch an Observer of the Ekumen. They’ll be looking for him. Once they get him, I’m afraid, whatever he feels, they can make him tell them anything he knows.”

  “He could stay hidden in a village through the winter, maybe. Not go down into Amareza at all. I will need time, Maz Ikak Igneba—the Envoy will need time—to talk to people in Dovza. And if a ship comes next year, as it’s due to, then we can talk on the ansible with the Stabiles of the Ekumen about these matters. But it will take time.”

  Ikak nodded. “I’ll speak with the others about it. We’ll do what we can.”

  Sutty went immediately after dinner to Yara’s tent.

  Both Akidan and Odiedin were already there, Akidan with the warm clothing Yara would need for the journey, Odiedin to reassure him about making it. Akidan was excited about leaving. Sutty was touched to see how kindly he spoke to Yara, his handsome young face alight. “Don’t worry, yoz,” he said earnestly, “it’s an easy path and we’ve got a very strong group. We’ll be down in the hills in a week.”

  “Thank you,” Yara said, expressionless. His face had closed.

  “Tobadan Siez will be with you,” Odiedin said.

  Yara nodded. “Thank you,” he said again.

  Kieri arrived with a thermal poncho Akidan had forgotten, and came crowding in with it, talking away. The tent was too full. Sutty knelt in the entrance and put her hand on Yara’s hand. She had never touched him before.

  “Thank you for telling me what you told me, Yara,” she said, feeling hurried and self-conscious. “And for letting me tell you. I hope you—I hope things work out. Goodbye.”

  Looking up at her, he gave his brief nod, and turned his head away.

  She went back to her tent, anxious yet also relieved.

  The tent was a mess: Kieri had thrown around everything she owned in preparation for packing it. Sutty looked forward to sharing a tent with Odiedin again, to order, silence, celibacy.

  She had spent a long day working on the catalogue, tiring, tricky work with the balky and laborious Akan programs. She went to bed, inten
ding to get up very early and see her friends off. She slept at once. Kieri’s return and the fuss of her packing scarcely disturbed her. It seemed about five minutes before the lamp was on again and Kieri was up, dressed, leaving. Sutty struggled out of her sleeping bag and said, “I’ll be at breakfast with you.”

  But when she got to the kitchen, the people of the departing group weren’t there having the hot meal that would start them on their way. Nobody was there but Long, who was on cooking duty.

  “Where is everybody, Long?” she asked, alarmed. “They haven’t left already, have they?”

  “No,” Long said.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I think so, yoz Sutty.” His face was distressed. He nodded toward the outer caves. She went to the entrance that led to them. She met Odiedin coming in.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Oh Sutty,” Odiedin said. He made an incomplete, hopeless gesture.

  “What is it?”

  “Yara.”

  “What?”

  “Come with me.”

  She followed him into the Tree Cave. He walked past Yara’s tent. There were a lot of people around it, but she did not see Yara. Odiedin strode on through the small cave with a rough floor, and from that to the short passage that led to the outside by the doorway arch they could get through only on hands and knees.

  Odiedin stood up just outside it. Sutty emerged beside him. It was far from sunrise still, but the high pallor of the sky seemed wonderfully radiant and vast after the spaceless darkness of the caves.

  “See where he went,” Odiedin said.

  She looked down from the light to where he pointed. Snow lay ankle deep on the floor of the cirque. From the arch where they stood, boot tracks led straight out to the edge and back, tracks of three or four people, she thought.

  “Not the tracks,” Odiedin said. “Those are ours. He was on hands and knees. He couldn’t walk. I don’t know how he could crawl on that knee. It’s a long way.”

  She saw, now, the marks in the snow, heavy, dragging furrows. All the boot tracks kept to the left of them.