The Telling

ONE

When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the Pale.

Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day. A whiff of asafetida. The brook-babble of Aunty gossiping with Moti’s mother on the verandah. Uncle Hurree’s dark hand lying still on a white page. Ganesh’s little piggy kindly eye. A match struck and the rich grey curl of incense smoke: pungent, vivid, gone. Scents, glimpses, echoes that drifted or glimmered through her mind when she was walking the streets, or eating, or taking a break from the sensory assault of the neareals she had to partiss in, in the daytime, under the other sun.

But night is the same on any world. Light’s absence is only that. And in the darkness, it was the Pale she was in. Not in dream, never in dream. Awake, before she slept, or when she woke from dream, disturbed and tense, and could not get back to sleep. A scene would begin to happen, not in sweet, bright bits but in full recall of a place and a length of time; and once the memory began, she could not stop it. She had to go through it until it let her go. Maybe it was a kind of punishment, like the lovers’ punishment in Dante’s Hell, to remember being happy. But those lovers were lucky, they remembered it together.

The rain. The first winter in Vancouver rain. The sky like a roof of lead weighing down on the tops of buildings, flattening the huge black mountains up behind the city. Southward the rain-rough grey water of the Sound, under which lay Old Vancouver, drowned by the sea rise long ago. Black sleet on shining asphalt streets. Wind, the wind that made her whimper like a dog and cringe, shivering with a scared exhilaration, it was so fierce and crazy, that cold wind out of the Arctic, ice breath of the snow bear. It went right through her flimsy coat, but her boots were warm, huge ugly black plastic boots splashing in the gutters, and she’d soon be home. It made you feel safe, that awful cold. People hurried past not bothering each other, all their hates and passions frozen. She liked the North, the cold, the rain, the beautiful, dismal city.

Aunty looked so little, here, little and ephemeral, like a small butterfly. A red-and-orange cotton saree, thin brass bangles on insect wrists. Though there were plenty of Indians and Indo-Canadians here, plenty of neighbors, Aunty looked small even among them, displaced, misplaced. Her smile seemed foreign and apologetic. She had to wear shoes and stockings all the time. Only when she got ready for bed did her feet reappear, the small brown feet of great character which had always, in the village, been a visible part of her as much as her hands, her eyes. Here her feet were put away in leather cases, amputated by the cold. So she didn’t walk much, didn’t run about the house, bustle about the kitchen. She sat by the heater in the front room, wrapped up in a pale ragged knitted woollen blanket, a butterfly going back into its cocoon. Going away, farther away all the time, but not by walking.

Sutty found it easier now to know Mother and Father, whom she had scarcely known for the last fifteen years, than to know Aunty, whose lap and arms had been her haven. It was delightful to discover her parents, her mother’s good-natured wit and intellect, her father’s shy, unhandy efforts at showing affection. To converse with them as an adult while knowing herself unreasonably beloved as a child — it was easy, it was delightful. They talked about everything, they learned one another. While Aunty shrank, fluttered away very softly, deviously, seeming not to be going anywhere, back to the village, to Uncle Hurree’s grave.

Spring came, fear came. Sunlight came back north here long and pale like an adolescent, a silvery shadowy radiance. Small pink plum trees blossomed all down the side streets of the neighborhood. The Fathers declared that the Treaty of Beijing contravened the Doctrine of Unique Destiny and must be abrogated. The Pales were to be opened, said the Fathers, their populations allowed to receive the Holy Light, their schools cleansed of unbelief, purified of alien error and deviance. Those who clung to sin would be re-educated.

Mother was down at the Link offices every day, coming home late and grim. This is their final push, she said; if they do this, we have nowhere to go but underground.

In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God flew from Colorado to the District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. Washington was not a Pale, but the beautiful old building, though often closed and kept locked, under guard, had never been attacked; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back at the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out!

But the new Envoy who had arrived from Hain last year, Dalzul, was talking with the Fathers. They had admitted Dalzul to the Sanctum. There were neareals and holos and 2Ds of him in the net and Godsword. It seemed that the Commander-General of the Hosts had not received orders from the Fathers to destroy the Library of Washington. The error was not the Commander-General’s, of course. Fathers made no errors. The pilots’ zeal had been excessive, their action unauthorised. Word came from the Sanctum: the pilots were to be punished. They were led out in front of the ranks and the crowds and the cameras, publicly stripped of their weapons and white uniforms. Their hoods were taken off, their faces were bared. They were led away in shame to re-education.

All that was on the net, though Sutty could watch it without having to partiss in it, Father having disconnected the vr-proprios. Godsword was full of it, too. And full of the new Envoy, again. Dalzul was a Terran. Born right here on God’s Earth, they said. A man who understood the men of Earth as no alien ever could, they said. A man from the stars who came to kneel at the feet of the Fathers and to discuss the implementation of the peaceful intentions of both the Holy Office and the Ekumen.

"Handsome fellow," Mother said, peering. "What is he? A white man?"

"Inordinately so," Father said.

"Wherever is he from?"

But no one knew. Iceland, Ireland, Siberia, everybody had a different story. Dalzul had left Terra to study on Hain, they all agreed on that. He had qualified very quickly as an Observer, then as a Mobile, and then had been sent back home: the first Terran Envoy to Terra.

"He left well over a century ago," Mother said. "Before the Unists took over East Asia and Europe. Before they even amounted to much in Western Asia. He must find his world quite changed."

Lucky man, Sutty was thinking. Oh lucky, lucky man! He got away, he went to Hain, he studied at the School on Ve, he’s been where everything isn’t God and hatred, where they’ve lived a million years of history, where they understand it all!

That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training School, to try to qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found them undismayed, not even surprised. "This seems a rather good world to get off of, at present," Mother said.

They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don’t they realise, if I qualify and get sent to one of the other worlds, they’ll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred, hundreds, round trips in space were seldom less, often more. Didn’t they care? It was only later that evening, when she was watching her father’s profile at table, full lips, hook nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it occurred to her that if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had thought about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had ever had. And made the best of it.

"Eat, Aunty," Mother said, but Aunty only patted her piece of naan with her little ant-antenna fingers and did not pick it up.

"Nobody could make good bread with such flour," she said, exonerating the baker.

"You were spoiled, living in the village," Mother teased her. "This is the best quality anybody can get in Canada. Best quality chopped straw and plaster dust."

"Yes, I was spoiled," Aunty said, smiling from a far country.

The older slogans were carved into facades of buildings: FORWARD TO THE FUTURE. PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Newer ones ran across the buildings in bands of dazzling electronic display: REACTIONARY THOUGHT IS THE DEFEATED ENEMY. When the displays malfunctioned, the messages became cryptic: OD IS ON. The newest ones hovered in holopro above the streets: PURE SCIENCE DESTROYS CORRUPTION. UPWARD ONWARD FORWARD. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multivoiced, crowding the air. "Onward, onward to the stars!" an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where Sutty’s robocab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. "Superstition is a rotting corpse," the sound system said in a rich, attractive male voice. "Superstitious practices defile youthful minds. It is the responsibility of every citizen, whether adult or student, to report reactionary teachings and to bring teachers who permit sedition or introduce irrationality and superstition in their classroom to the attention of the authorities. In the light of Pure Science we know that the ardent cooperation of all the people is the first requisite of—" Sutty turned the sound down as far as it would go. The choir burst forth, "To the stars! To the stars!" and the robocab jerked forward about half its length. Two more jerks and it might get through the intersection at the next flowchange.

Sutty felt in her jacket pockets for an akagest, but she’d eaten them all. Her stomach hurt. Bad food, she’d eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments, stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake every other population in FF-tech mode had ever made. Wrong.

Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice. Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn’t her world.

But she was on it, in it, how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she’d come to observe.

The fact was, she was not suited to be an Observer here. In other words, she had failed on her first assignment. She knew that the Envoy had summoned her to tell her so.

She was already nearly late for the appointment. The robocab made another jerk forward, and its sound system came up loud for one of the Corporation announcements that overrode low settings. There was no off button. "An announcement from the Bureau of Astronautics!" said a woman’s vibrant, energy-charged, self-confident voice, and Sutty put her hands over her ears and shouted, "Shut up!"

"Doors of vehicle are closed," the robocab said in the flat mechanical voice assigned to mechanisms responding to verbal orders. Sutty saw that this was funny, but she couldn’t laugh. The announcement went on and on while the shrill voices in the air sang, "Ever higher, ever greater, marching to the stars!"

The Ekumenical Envoy, a doe-eyed Chiffewarian named Tong Ov, was even later than she for their appointment, having been delayed at the exit of his apartment house by a malfunction of the ZIL-screening system, which he laughed about. "And the system here has mislaid the microrec I wanted to give you," he said, going through files in his office. "I coded it, because of course they go through my files, and my code confused the system. But I know it’s in here… So, meanwhile, tell me how things have been going."

"Well," Sutty said, and paused. She had been speaking and thinking in Dovzan for months. She had to go through her own files for a moment: Hindi no, English no, Hainish yes. "You asked me to prepare a report on contemporary language and literature. But the social changes that took place here while I was in transit… Well, since it’s against the law, now, to speak or study any language but Dovzan and Hainish, I can’t work on the other languages. If they still exist. As for Dovzan, the First Observers did a pretty thorough linguistic survey. I can only add details and vocabulary."

"What about literature?" Tong asked.

"Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don’t know what it is, because the Ministry doesn’t allow access to it. So all I was able to work on is modern aural literature. All written to Corporation specifications. It tends to be very-to be standardised."

She looked at Tong Ov to see if her whining bored him, but though still looking for the mislaid file, he seemed to be listening with lively interest. He said, "All aural, is it?"

"Except for the Corporation manuals hardly anything’s printed, except printouts for the deaf, and primers to accompany sound texts for early learners… The campaign against the old ideographic forms seems to have been very intense. Maybe it made people afraid to write — made them distrust writing in general. Anyway, all I’ve been able to get hold of by way of literature is sound tapes and neareals. Issued by the World Ministry of Information and the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art. Most of the works are actually information or educational material rather than, well, literature or poetry as I understand the terms. Though a lot of the neareals are dramatisations of practical or ethical problems and solutions…" She was trying so hard to speak factually, unjudgmentally, without prejudice, that her voice was totally toneless.

"Sounds dull," said Tong, still flitting through files.

"Well, I’m, I think I’m insensitive to this aesthetic. It is so deeply and, and, and flatly political. Of course every art is political. But when it’s all didactic, all in the service of a belief system, I resent, I mean, I resist it. But I try not to. Maybe, since they’ve essentially erased their history— Of course there was no way of knowing they were on the brink of a cultural revolution, at the time I was sent here— But anyhow, for this particular Observer-ship, maybe a Terran was a bad choice. Given that we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied their past."

She stopped short, appalled at everything she had said.

Tong looked round at her, unappalled. He said, "I don’t wonder that you feel that what you’ve been trying to do can’t be done. But I needed your opinion. So it was worth it to me. But tiresome for you. A change is in order." There was a gleam in his dark eyes. "What do you say to going up the river?"

"The river?"

"It’s how they say ’into the backwoods,’ isn’t it? But in fact I meant the Ereha."

When he said the name, she remembered that a big river ran through the capital, partly paved over and so hidden by buildings and embankments that she couldn’t remember ever having seen it except on maps.

"You mean go outside Dovza City?"

"Yes," Tong said. "Outside the city! And not on a guided tour! For the first time in fifty years!" He beamed like a child revealing a hidden present, a beautiful surprise. "I’ve been here two years, and I’ve put in eighty-one requests for permission to send a staff member to live or stay somewhere outside Dovza City or Kangnegne or

Ert. Politely evaded, eighty times, with offers of yet another guided tour of the space-program facilities or the beauty of spring in the Eastern Isles. I put in such requests by habit, by rote. And suddenly one is granted! Yes! A member of your staff is authorised to spend a month in Okzat-Ozkat.’ Or is it Ozkat-Okzat? It’s a small city, in the foothills, up the river. The Ereha rises in the High Headwaters Range, about fifteen hundred kilos inland. I asked for that area, Rangma, never expecting to get it, and I got it!" He beamed.

"Why there?"

"I heard about some people there who sound interesting."

"An ethnic fragment population?" she asked, hopeful. Early in her stay, when she first met Tong Ov and the other two Observers presently in Dovza City, they had all discussed the massive monoculturalism of modern Aka in its large cities, the only places the very few offworlders permitted on the planet were allowed to live. They were all convinced that Akan society must have diversities and regional variations and frustrated that they had no way to find out.

"Sectarians, I suspect, rather than ethnic. A cult. Possibly remnants in hiding of a banned religion."

"Ah," she said, trying to preserve her expression of interest.

Tong was still searching his files. "I’m looking for the little I’ve gathered on the subject. Sociocultural Bureau reports on surviving criminal antiscientific cult activities. And also a few rumors and tales. Secret rites, walking on the wind, miraculous cares, predictions of the future. The usual."

To fall heir to a history of three million years was to find little in human behavior or invention that could be called unusual. Though the Hainish bore it lightly, it was a burden on their various descendants to know that they would have a hard time finding a new thing, even an imaginary new thing, under any sun.

Sutty said nothing.

"In the material the First Observers here sent to Terra," Tong pursued, "did anything concerning religions get through?"

"Well, since nothing but the language report came through undamaged, information about anything was pretty much only what we could infer from vocabulary."

"All that information from the only people ever allowed to study Aka freely-lost in a glitch," said Tong, sitting back and letting a search complete itself in his files. "What terrible luck! Or was it a glitch?"

Like all Chiffewarians, Tong was quite hairless — a chihuahua, in the slang of Valparaiso. To minimize his outlandishness here, where baldness was very uncommon, he wore a hat; but since the Akans seldom wore hats, he looked perhaps more alien with it than without it. He was a gentle-mannered man, informal, straightforward, putting Sutty as much at her ease as she was capable of being; yet he was so uninvasive as to be, finally, aloof. Himself uninvadable, he offered no intimacy. She was grateful that he accepted her distance. Up to now, he had kept his. But she felt his question as disingenuous. He knew, surely, that the loss of the transmission had been no accident. Why should she have to explain it? She had made it clear that she was traveling without luggage, just as Observers and Mobiles who’d been in space for centuries did. She was not answerable for the place she had left sixty light-years behind her. She was not responsible for Terra and its holy terrorism.

But the silence went on, and she said at last, "The Beijing ansible was sabotaged."

"Sabotaged?"

She nodded.

"By the Unists?"

"Toward the end of the regime there were attacks on most of the Ekumenical installations and the treaty areas. The Pales."

"Were many of them destroyed?"

He was trying to draw her out. To get her to talk about it. Anger flooded into her, rage. Her throat felt tight. She said nothing, because she was unable to say anything.

A considerable pause. "Nothing but the language got through, then," Tong said.

"Almost nothing."

"Terrible luck!" he repeated energetically. "That the First Observers were Terran, so they sent their report to Terra instead of Hain — not unnaturally, but still, bad luck. And even worse, maybe, that ansible transmissions sent from Terra all got through. All the technical information the Akans asked for and Terra sent, without any question or restriction…Why, why would the First Observers have agreed to such a massive cultural intervention?"

"Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the Unists sent it."

"Why would the Unists start Aka marching to the stars?"

She shrugged. "Proselytising."

"You mean, persuading others to believe what they believed? Was industrial technological progress incorporated as an element of the Unist religion?"

She kept herself from shrugging.

"So during that period when the Unists refused ansible contact with the Stabiles on Hain, they were … converting the Akans? Sutty, do you think they may have sent, what do you call them, missionaries, here?"

"I don’t know."

He was not probing her, not trapping her. Eagerly pursuing his own thoughts, he was only trying to get her, a Terran, to explain to him what the Terrans had done and why. But she would not and could not explain or speak for the Unists.

Picking up her refusal to speculate, he said, "Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Of course you were scarcely in the confidence of the Unist leaders! But I’ve just had an idea, you see— If they did send missionaries, and if they transgressed Akan codes in some way, you see? — that might explain the Limit Law." He meant the abrupt announcement, made fifty years ago and enforced ever since, that only four offworlders would be allowed on Aka at a time, and only in the cities. "And it could explain the banning of religion a few years later!" He was carried away by his theory. He beamed, and then asked her almost pleadingly, "You never heard of a second group sent here from Terra?"

"No."

He sighed, sat back. After a minute he dismissed his speculations with a little flip of his hand. "We’ve been here seventy years," he said, "and all we know is the vocabulary."

She relaxed. They were off Terra, back on Aka. She was safe. She spoke carefully, but with the fluency of relief. "In my last year in training, some facsimile artifacts were reconstituted from the damaged records. Pictures, a few fragments of books. But not enough to extrapolate any major cultural elements from. And since the Corporation State was in place when I arrived, I don’t know anything about what it replaced. I don’t even know when religion was outlawed here. About forty years ago?" She heard her voice: placating, false, forced. Wrong.

Tong nodded. "Thirty years after the first contact with the Ekumen. The Corporation put out the first decree declaring ’religious practice and teaching’ unlawful. Within a few years they were announcing appalling penalties… But what’s odd about it, what made me think the impetus might have come from offworld, is the word they use for religion."

"Derived from Hainish," Sutty said, nodding.

"Was there no native word? Do you know one?"

"No," she said, after conscientiously going through not only her Dovzan vocabulary but several other Akan languages she had studied at Valparaiso. "I don’t."

A great deal of the recent vocabulary of Dovzan of course came from offworld, along with the industrial technologies; but that they should borrow a word for a native institution in order to outlaw it? Odd indeed. And she should have noticed it. She would have noticed it, if she had not tuned out the word, the thing, the subject, whenever it came up. Wrong. Wrong.

Tong had become a bit distracted; the item he had been searching for had turned up at last, and he set his noter to retrieve and decode. This took some time. "Akan microfiling leaves something to be desired," he said, poking a final key.

"’Everything breaks down on schedule,’" Sutty said. "That’s the only Akan joke I know. The trouble with it is, it’s true."

"But consider what they’ve accomplished in seventy years!" The Envoy sat back, warmly discursive, his hat slightly askew. "Rightly or wrongly, they were given the blueprint for a G86." G86 was Hainish historians’ shorthand jargon for a society in fast-forward industrial technological mode. "And they devoured that information in one gulp. Remade their culture, established the Corporate worldstate, got a spaceship off to Hain — all in a single human lifetime! Amazing people, really. Amazing unity of discipline!"

Sutty nodded dutifully.

"But there must have been resistance along the way. This anti-religious obsession… Even if we triggered it along with the technological expansion…"

It was decent of him, Sutty thought, to keep saying "we," as if the Ekumen had been responsible for Terra’s intervention in Aka. That was the underlying Hainish element in Ekumenical thinking: Take responsibility.

The Envoy was pursuing his thought. "The mechanisms of control are so pervasive and effective, they must have been set up in response to something powerful, don’t you think? If resistance to the Corporate State centered in a religion — a well-established, widespread religion — that would explain the Corporation’s suppression of religious practices. And the attempt to set up national theism as a replacement. God as Reason, the Hammer of Pure Science, all that. In the name of which to destroy the temples, ban the preachings. What do you think?"

"I think it understandable," Sutty said.

It was perhaps not the response he had expected. They were silent for a minute.

"The old writing, the ideograms," Tong said, "you can read them fluently?"

"It was all there was to learn when I was in training. It was the only writing on Aka, seventy years ago."

"Of course," he said, with the disarming Chiffewarian gesture that signified Please forgive the idiot. "Coming from only twelve years’ distance, you see, I learned only the modern script."

"Sometimes I’ve wondered if I’m the only person on Aka who can read the ideograms. A foreigner, an offworlder. Surely not."

"Surely not. Although the Dovzans are a systematic people. So systematic that when they banned the old script, they also systematically destroyed whatever was written in it — poems, plays, history, philosophy. Everything, you think?"

She remembered the increasing bewilderment of her early weeks in Dovza City: her incredulity at the scant and vapid contents of what they called libraries, the blank wall that met all her attempts at research, when she had still believed there had to be some remnants, somewhere, of the literature of an entire world.

"If they find any books or texts, even now, they destroy them," she said. "One of the principal bureaus of the Ministry of Poetry is the Office of Book Location. They find books, confiscate them, and send them to be pulped for building material. Insulating material. The old books are referred to as pulpables. A woman there told me that she was going to be sent to another bureau because there were no more pulpables in Dovza. It was clean, she said. Cleansed."

She heard her voice getting edgy. She looked away, tried to ease the tension in her shoulders.

Tong Ov remained calm. "An entire history lost, wiped out, as if by a terrible disaster," he said. "Extraordinary!"

"Not that unusual," she said, very edgily— Wrong. She rearranged her shoulders again, breathed in once and out once, and spoke with conscious quietness. "The few Akan poems and drawings that were reconstructed at the Terran Ansible Center would be illegal here. I had copies with me in my noter. I erased them."

"Yes. Yes, quite right. We can’t introduce anything that they don’t want to have lying about."

"I hated to do it. I felt I was colluding."

"The margin between collusion and respect can be narrow," Tong said. "Unfortunately, we exist in that margin, here."

For a moment she felt a dark gravity in him. He was looking away, looking far away. Then he was back with her, genial and serene.

"But then," he said, "there are a good many scraps of the old calligraphy painted up here and there around the city, aren’t there? No doubt it’s considered harmless since no one now can read it… And things tend to survive in out-of-the-way places. I was down in the river district one evening — it’s quite disreputable,

I shouldn’t have been there, but now and then one can wander about in a city this size without one’s hosts knowing it. At least I pretend they don’t. At any rate, I heard some unusual music. Wooden instruments. Illegal intervals."

She looked her question.

"Composers are required by the Corporation State to use what I know as the Terran octave."

Sutty looked stupid.

Tong sang an octave.

Sutty tried to look intelligent.

"They call it the Scientific Scale of Intervals, here," Tong said. And still seeing no great sign of understanding, he asked, smiling, "Does Akan music sound rather more familiar to you than you had expected?"

"I hadn’t thought about it — I don’t know. I can’t carry a tune. I don’t know what keys are."

Tong’s smile grew broad. "To my ear Akan music sounds as if none of them knew what a key is. Well, what I heard down in the river district wasn’t like the music on the loudspeakers at all. Different intervals. Very subtle harmonies. ’Drug music,’ the people there called it. I gathered that drug music is played by faith healers, witch doctors. So one way and another I managed eventually to arrange a chat with one of these doctors. He said, ’We know some of the old songs and medicines. We don’t know the stories.

We can’t tell them. The people who told the stories are gone.’ I pressed him a little, and he said, ’Maybe some of them are still up the river there. In the mountains.’" Tong Ov smiled again, but wistfully. "I longed for more, but of course my presence there put him at risk." He made rather a long pause. "One has this sense, sometimes, that…"

"That it’s all our fault."

After a moment he said, "Yes. It is. But since we’re here, we have to try to keep our presence light."

Chiffewarians took responsibility, but did not cultivate guilt the way Terrans did. She knew she had misinterpreted him. She knew he was surprised by what she had said. But she could not keep anything light. She said nothing.

"What do you think the witch doctor meant, about stories and the people who told them?"

She tried to get her mind around the question but couldn’t. She could not follow him any further. She knew what the saying meant: to come to the end of your tether. Her tether choked her, tight around her throat.

She said, "I thought you sent for me to tell me you were transferring me."

"Off the planet? No! No, no," Tong said, with surprise and a quiet kindness.

"I shouldn’t have been sent here."

"Why do you say that?"

"I trained as a linguist and in literature. Aka has one language left and no literature. I wanted to be a historian. How can I, on a world that’s destroyed its history?"

"It’s not easy," Tong said feelingly. He got up to check the file recorder. He said, "Please tell me, Sutty, is the institutionalised homophobia very difficult for you?"

"I grew up with it."

"Under the Unists."

"Not only the Unists."

"I see," Tong said. Still standing, he spoke carefully, looking at her; she looked down. "I know that you lived through a great religious upheaval. And I think of Terra as a world whose history has been shaped by religions. So I see you as the best fitted of us to investigate the vestiges, if they exist, of this world’s religion. Ki Ala has no experience of religion, you see, and Garru has no detachment from it." He stopped again. She made no response. "Your experience," he said, "may have been of a kind that would make detachment difficult for you. To have lived all your life under theocratic repression, and the turmoil and violence of the last years of Unism…"

She had to speak. She said coldly, "I believe my training will allow me to observe another culture without excessive prejudice."

"Your training and your own temperament: yes. I believe so too. But the pressures of an aggressive theocracy, the great weight of it all through your life, may well have left you a residue of distrust, of resistance. If I’m asking you — again! — to observe something you detest, please tell me that."

After a few seconds which seemed long to her she said, "I ’ really am no good at all with music."

"I think the music is a small element of something very large," said Tong, doe-eyed, implacable.

"I see no problem, then," she said. She felt cold, false, defeated. Her throat ached.

Tong waited a little for her to say more, and then accepted her word. He picked up the microcrystal record and gave it to her. She took it automatically.

"Read this and listen to the music here in the library, please, and then erase it," he said. "Erasure is an art we must learn from the Akans. Seriously! I mean it. The Hainish want to hang on to everything. The Akans want to throw everything away. Maybe there’s a middle way? At any rate, we have our first chance to get into an area where maybe history wasn’t erased so thoroughly."

"I don’t know if I’ll know what I’m seeing when I see it. Ki Ala’s been here ten years. You’ve had experience on four other worlds." She had told him there was no problem. She had said she could do what he asked. Now she heard herself still trying to whine her way out of it. Wrong. Shameful.

"I’ve never lived through a great social revolution," Tong said. "Nor has Ki Ala. We’re children of peace, Sutty. I need a child of conflict. Anyhow, Ki Ala is illiterate. I am illiterate. You can read."

"Dead languages in a banned script."

Tong looked at her again for a minute in silence, with an intellectual, impersonal, real tenderness. "I believe you tend to undervalue your capacities, Sutty," he said. "The Stabiles chose you to be one of the four representatives of the Ekumen on Aka. I need you to accept the fact that your experience and your knowledge are essential to me, to our work here. Please consider that."

He waited until she said, "I will."

"Before you go up to the mountains, if you do, I also want you to consider the risks. Or rather to consider the fact that we don’t know what the risks may be. The Akans seem not to be a violent people; but that’s hard to judge from our insulated position. I don’t know why they’ve suddenly given us this permission. Surely they have some reason or motive, but we can find what it is only by taking advantage of it." He paused, his eyes still on her. "There’s no mention of your being accompanied, of having guides, watchdogs. You may be quite on your own. You may not. We don’t know. None of us knows what life is like outside the cities. Every difference or sameness, everything you see, everything you read, everything you record, will be important. I know already that you’re a sensitive and impartial observer. And if there’s any history left on Aka, you’re the member of my crew here best suited to find it. To go look for these ’stories,’ or the people who know them. So, please, listen to these songs, and then go home and think about it, and tell me your decision tomorrow. O.K.?"

He said the old Terran phrase stiffly, with some pride in the accomplishment. Sutty tried to smile. "O.K.," she said.