The Telling

FIVE

Winter came without much snow but bitterly cold, winds knifing down out of the immense wilderness of mountains to the west and north. Iziezi took Sutty to a secondhand clothing store to buy a worn but sturdy leather coat lined with its own silky fleece. The hood lining was the feathery fur of some mountain animal of which Iziezi said, "All gone now. Too many hunters." She said the leather was not eberdin, as Sutty had thought, but minule, from the high mountains. The coat came below her knees and was met by light, fleece-lined boots. These were new, made of artificial materials, for mountain sports and hiking. The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one’s life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.

Sutty tramped around the icy streets in her old coat and her new boots. In winter in Okzat-Ozkat everybody looked alike in their old leather coats and fleecy hoods, except for the uniformed bureaucrats, who all looked alike in their coats and hoods of artificial fabrics in bright uniform colors, purple, rust, and blue. The merciless cold gave a kind of fellowship of anonymity. When you got indoors the warmth was an unfailing source of relief, pleasure, companionly feeling. On a bitter blue evening, to struggle up the steep streets to some small, stuffy, dim-lit room and gather with the others at the hearth — an electric heater, for there was little wood here near timberline, and all warmth was generated by the ice-cold energy of the Ereha — and to take your mittens off and rub your hands, which seemed so naked and delicate, and look round at the other windburned faces and ice-dewed eyelashes, and hear the little drum go tabatt, tabatt, and the soft voice begin to speak, listing the names of the rivers of Hoying and how each flowed into the next, or telling the story of Ezid and Inamema on the Mountain of Gam, or describing how the Council of Mez raised an army against the western barbarians — that was a solid, enduring, reliable pleasure to Sutty, all winter long.

The western barbarians, she now knew, were the Dovzans. Almost everything the maz taught, all their legends and history and philosophy, came from the center and east of the great continent, and from past centuries, past millennia. Nothing came from Dovza but the language they spoke; and here that was full of words from the original language of this area, Rangma, and other tongues.

Words. A world made of words.

There was music. Some of the maz sang healing chants like those Tong Ov had recorded in the city; some played string instruments, plucked or bowed, to accompany narrative ballads and songs. Sutty recorded them when she could, though her musical stupidity kept her from appreciating them. There had been art, carvings and paintings and tapestries, using the symbols of the Tree and the Mountain and figures and events from the legends and histories. There had been dance, and there were still the various forms of exercise and moving meditation. But first and last there were the words.

When the maz put the mantle of their office — a flimsy length of red or blue cloth — over their shoulders, they were perceived as owning a sacred authority or power. What they said then was part of the Telling.

When they took the scarf off they returned to ordinary status, claiming no personal spiritual authority at all; what they said then weighed no more than what anybody said. Some people of course insisted on ascribing permanent authority to them. Like the people of Sutty’s own tribe, many Akans longed to follow a leader, turn earned payment into tribute, load responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders. But if the maz had one quality in common, it was a stubborn modesty. They were not in the charisma business. Maz Imyen Katyan was as gentle a man as she had ever met, but when a woman called him by a reverent title, munan, used for famous maz in the stories and histories, he turned on her with real rage — "How dare you call me that?" — and then, having regained his calm, "When I’ve been dead a hundred years, yoz."

Sutty had assumed that since everything the maz did professionally was in defiance of the law, at real personal risk, some of this modest style, this very low profile, was a recent thing. But when she said so, Maz Ottiar Uming shook her head.

"Oh, no," the old woman said. "We have to hide, to keep everything secret, yes. But in my grandparents’ time I think most of the maz lived the way we do. Nobody can wear the scarf all the time! Not even Maz Elyed Oni… Of course it was different in the umyazu."

"Tell me about the umyazu, maz."

"They were places built so the power could gather in them. Places full of being. Full of people telling and listening. Full of books."

"Where were they?"

"Oh, everywhere. Here in Okzat-Ozkat there was one up where the High School is now, and one where the pumice works is now. And all the way to Silong, in the high valleys, on the trade roads, there were umyazu for the pilgrims. And down where the land’s rich, there were huge, great umyazu, with hundreds of maz living in them, and visiting from one to another all their lives. They kept books, and wrote them, and made records, and kept on telling. They could give their whole life to it, you see. They could always be there where it was. People would go visit them to hear the telling and read the books in the libraries. People went in processions, with red and blue flags. They’d go and stay all winter, sometimes. Save up for years so they could pay the maz and pay for their lodging. My grandmother told me about going to the Red Umyazu of Tenban. She was eleven or twelve years old. It took them nearly the whole year to go and stay and come back. They were pretty wealthy, my grandmother’s family, so they could ride all the way, the whole family, with eberdin pulling the wagon. They didn’t have the cars and planes then, you know. Nobody did. Most people just walked. But everybody had flags and wore ribbons. Red and blue." Ottiar Uming laughed with pleasure at the thought of those processions. "My mother’s mother wrote the story of that journey. I’ll get it out and tell it sometime."

Her partner, Uming Ottiar, was unfolding a big, stiff square of paper on the table in the back room of their grocery shop. Ottiar Uming went to help him, setting a polished black stone on each curling corner to keep it flat. Then they invited their five listeners to come forward, salute the paper with the mountain-heart gesture, and study the chart and inscriptions on it. They displayed it thus every three weeks, and Sutty had come each time all winter. It had been her first formal introduction to the thought system of the Tree. The couple’s most precious possession, given them fifty years ago by their teacher-maz, it was a marvelously painted map or mandala of the One that is Two giving rise to the Three, to the Five, to the Myriad, and the Myriad again to the Five, the Three, the Two, the One… A Tree, a Body, a Mountain, inscribed within the circle that was everything and nothing. Delicate little figures, animals, people, plants, rocks, rivers, lively as flickering flames, made up each of the greater forms, which divided, rejoined, transformed each into the others and into the whole, the unity made up of infinite variety, the mystery plain as day.

Sutty loved to study it and try to make out the inscriptions and poems surrounding it. The painting was beautiful, the poetry was splendid and elusive, the whole chart was a work of high art, absorbing, enlightening. Maz Uming sat down and after a few knocks on his drum began intoning one of the interminable chants that accompanied the rituals and many of the tellings. Maz Ottiar read and discussed some of the inscriptions, which were four or five hundred years old. Her voice was soft, full of silences.

Softly and hesitantly, the students asked questions. She answered them the same way.

Then she drew back and sat down and took up the chant in a gnat voice, and old Uming, half blind, his speech thickened by a stroke, got up and talked about one of the poems.

"That’s by Maz Niniu Raying, five, six, seven hundred years back, eh? It’s in The Arbor. Somebody wrote it here, a good calligrapher, because it talks about how the leaves of the Tree perish but always return so long as we see them and say them. See, here it says: ‘Word, the gold beyond the fall, returns the glory to the branch.’ And underneath it here, see, somebody later on wrote, ‘Mind’s life is memory.’" He smiled round at them, a kind, lopsided smile. "Remember that, eh? ‘Mind’s life is memory.’ Don’t forget!" He laughed, they laughed. All the while, out front in the grocery shop, the maz’ grandson kept the volume turned up high on the audio system, cheery music, exhortations, and news announcements blaring out to cover the illicit poetry, the forbidden laughter.

It was a pity, but no surprise, Sutty told her noter, that an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline should contain a large proportion of superstition and verge over into what she labeled in her noter HP, hocus-pocus. The great jungle of significance had its swamps and morasses, and she had at last stumbled into some of them. She met a few maz who claimed arcane knowledge and supernal powers. Boring as she found all such claims, she knew she could not be sure of what was valuable and what was drivel, and painstakingly recorded whatever information she could buy from these maz concerning alchemy, numerology, and literal readings of symbolic texts. They sold her bits of texts and snippets of methodology at a fairly stiff price, grudgingly, hedging the transactions with portentous warnings about the danger of this powerful knowledge.

She particularly detested the literal readings. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. But she put it all into her noter-which she had now had to unload into crystal storage twice, for she could not transmit any of the treasure-and-trash she was amassing.

At this distance, with all means of communication monitored, there was no way to consult with Tong Ov as to what she should or he intended to do with all this material. She couldn’t even tell him she’d found it. The problem remained, and grew.

Among the HP she came on a brand that was, as far as she knew, unique to Aka: a system of arcane significances attached to the various strokes that composed the ideogrammatic characters and the further strokes and dots that qualified them with verbal tense and mode and nominal case and with Action or Element (for everything, literally every thing, could be categorised under the Four Actions and the Five Elements). Every character of the old writing thus became a code to be interpreted by specialists, who functioned much as horoscope readers had in Sutty’s homeland. She discovered that many people in Okzat-Ozkat, including officials of the Corporation, would undertake nothing of importance without calling in a ’sign reader’ to write out their name and other relevant words and, after poring over these and referring to impressively elaborate charts and diagrams, to advise and foretell. "This is the kind of thing that makes me sympathise with the Monitor," she told her noter. Then she said, "No. It’s what the Monitor wants from his own kind of HP. Political HP. Everything locked in place, on course, under control. But he’s handed over the controls just as much as they have."

Many of the practices she learned about had equivalents on Earth. The exercises, like yoga and tai chi, were physical-mental, a lifelong discipline, leading toward mindfulness, or toward a trance state, or toward martial vigor and readiness, depending on the style and the practitioner’s desire. Trance seemed to be sought for its own sake as an experience of essential stillness and balance rather than as satori or revelation. Prayer… Well, what about prayer?

The Akans did not pray.

That seemed so strange, so unnatural, that as soon as she had the thought, she qualified it: it was very possible that she didn’t properly understand what prayer was.

If it meant asking for something, they didn’t do it. Not even to the extent that she did. She knew that when she was very startled she cried, "O Ram!" and when she was very frightened she whispered, "O please, please." The words were strictly meaningless, yet she knew they were a kind of prayer. She had never heard an Akan say anything of the kind. They could wish one another well — "May you have a good year, may your venture prosper" — just as they could curse one another — "May your sons eat stones," she had heard Diodi the barrow man murmur as a blue-and-tan stalked by. But those were wishes, not prayers. People didn’t ask God to make them good or to destroy their enemy. They didn’t ask the gods to win them the lottery or cure their sick child. They didn’t ask the clouds to let the rain fall or the grain grow. They wished, they willed, they hoped, but they didn’t pray.

If prayer was praise, then perhaps they did pray. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertiliser’s pharmacopoeia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. They described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything.

Nor did they sacrifice anything. Except money.

To get money, you had to give money: that was a firm and universal principle. Before any business undertaking, they buried silver and brass coins, or threw them into the river, or gave them to beggars. They pounded out gold coins into airy, translucent gold leaf with which they decorated niches, columns, even whole walls of buildings, or had them spun into thread and woven into gorgeous shawls and scarves to give away on New Year’s Day. Silver and gold coins were hard to come by, as the Corporation, detesting this extravagant waste, had gone over mostly to paper; so people burned paper money like incense, made paper boats of it and sailed them off on the river, chopped it up fine and ate it with salad. The practice was pure HP, but Sutty found it irresistible. Slaughtering goats or one’s firstborn to placate the supernatural seemed to her the worst kind of perversity, but she saw a gambler’s gallantry in this money sacrifice. Easy come, easy go. At the New Year, when you met a friend or acquaintance, you each lighted a one-ha bill and waved it about like a little torch, wishing each other health and prosperity. She saw even employees of the Corporation doing this. She wondered if the Monitor had ever done it. The more naive people that she came to know at the tellings and in the classes, and Diodi and other friendly acquaintances of the streets, all believed in sign reading and alchemical marvels and talked about diets that let you live forever, exercises that had given the ancient heroes the strength to withstand whole armies. Even Iziezi held firmly by sign reading. But most of the maz, the educated, the teachers, claimed no special powers or attainments at all. They lived firmly and wholly in the real world. Spiritual yearning and the sense of sacredness they knew, but they did not know anything holier than the world, they did not seek a power greater than nature. Sutty was certain of that. No miracles! she told her noter, jubilant.

She coded her notes, got into her coat and boots, and set off through the vicious early-spring wind for Maz Odiedin Manma’s exercise class. Silong was visible for the first time in weeks, not the barrier wall but only the peak above it, standing like a silver horn over dark storm clouds.

She went regularly to exercise with Iziezi now, often staying on to watch Akidan and other adolescents and young people do "two-one," an athletic form performed in pairs, with spectacular feints and falls. Odiedin Manma, the teller of the strange story about the man who dreamed he could fly, was much admired by these young people, and some of them had first taken Sutty to his class. He taught an austere, very beautiful form of exercise-meditation. He had invited her to join his group.

They met in an old warehouse down by the river, a less safe place than the umyazu-turned-gymnasium she went to with Iziezi, where legitimate health-manual gymnastics did take place and served as cover for the illegal ones. The warehouse was lighted only by dirty slit windows high up under the eaves. Nobody spoke above the barest whisper. There was no hocus-pocus about Odiedin, but Sutty found the class, the silent, slow movements in darkness, hauntingly strange, sometimes disturbing; it had entered into her dreams.

A man sitting near Sutty this morning stared at her as she took her place on the mat. While the group went through the first part of the form, he kept staring, winking, gesturing, grinning at her. Nobody behaved like that. She was annoyed and embarrassed until, during a long-held pose, she got a look at the man and realised that he was half-witted.

When the group began a set of movements she wasn’t yet familiar with, she watched and followed along as best she could. Her mistakes and omissions upset her neighbor. He kept trying to show her when and how to move, pantomiming, exaggerating gestures. When they stood up, she stayed sitting, which was always permissible, but this distressed the poor fellow very much. He gestured, Up! up! He mouthed the word, and pointed upward. Finally, whispering, "Up — like this — see?," he took a step onto the air. He brought the other foot up on the invisible stair, and then climbed another step up the same way. He was standing barefoot half a meter above the floor, looking down at her, smiling anxiously and gesturing for her to join him. He was standing on the air.

Odiedin, a lithe, trim man of fifty with a scrap of blue cloth around his neck, came to him. All the others kept on steadily with the complex, swaying kelp-forest patterns. Odiedin murmured, "Come down, Uki." Reaching up, he took the man’s hand and led him down two nonexistent steps to the floor, patted his shoulder gently, and moved on. Uki joined in the pattern, swaying and . turning with flawless grace and power. He had evidently forgotten Sutty.

She could not bring herself to ask Odiedin any questions after the class. What would she ask? "Did you see what I saw? Did I?" That would be stupid. It couldn’t have happened, and so he’d no doubt merely answer her question with a question.

Or perhaps the reason she didn’t ask was that she was afraid he would simply answer, "Yes."

If a mime can make air into a box, if a fakir can climb a rope tied to air, maybe a poor fool can make air into a step. If spiritual strength can move mountains, maybe it can make stairs. Trance state. Hypnotic or hypnogogic suggestion.

She described the occurrence briefly in her daily notes, without comment. As she spoke into her noter, she became quite sure that there had in fact been some kind of step there that she hadn’t seen in the dim light, a block, a box perhaps, painted black. Of course there had been something there. She paused, but did not say anything more. She could see the block or box, now. But she had not seen it.

But often in her mind’s eye she saw those two callused, muscular, bare feet stepping up the absent mountain. She wondered what the air felt like on the soles of your feet when you walked on it. Cool? Resilient?

After that she made herself pay more attention to the old texts and tales that talked about walking on the wind, riding on clouds, traveling to the stars, destroying distant enemies with thunderbolts. Such feats were always ascribed to heroes and wise maz far away and long ago, even though a good many of them had been made commonplace fact by modern technologies. She still thought they were mythic, metaphoric, not meant to be taken literally. She arrived at no explanation.

But her attitude had been changed. She knew now that she’d still missed the point, a misunderstanding so gross and total that she couldn’t see it.

A telling is not an explaining.

Can’t see the forest for the trees, the pedants, the pundits, Uncle Hurree growled in her mind. Poetry, girl, poetry. Read the Mahabharata. Everything’s there.

"Maz Elyed," she asked, "what is it you do?"

"I tell, yoz Sutty."

"Yes. But the stories, all the things you tell, what do they do?"

"They tell the world."

"Why, maz?"

"That’s what people do, yoz. What we’re here for."

Maz Elyed, like many of the maz, talked softly and rather hesitantly, pausing, starting up again about the time you thought she’d stopped. Silence was part of all she said.

She was small, lame, and very wrinkled. Her family owned a little hardware shop in the poorest district of the city, where many houses were not built of stone and wood but were tents or yurts of felt and canvas patched with plastic, set on platforms of beaten clay. Nephews and grandnieces abounded in the hardware shop. A very small great-grandnephew staggered about it, his goal in life to eat screws and washers. An old 2D photograph of Elyed with her partner Oni hung on the wall behind the counter: Oni Elyed tall and dreamy-eyed, Elyed Oni tiny, vivid, beautiful. Thirty years ago they had been arrested for sexual deviance and teaching rotten-corpse ideology. They were sent to a re-education camp on the west coast. Oni had died there. Elyed came back after ten years, lame, with no teeth: knocked out or lost to scurvy, she never said. She did not talk about herself or her wife or her age or her concerns. Her days were spent in an unbroken ritual continuity that included all bodily needs and functions, preparing and eating meals, sleeping, teaching, but above all reading and telling, a soft, endless repetition of the texts she had been learning her whole life long.

At first Elyed had appeared unearthly, inhuman to Sutty, as indifferent and inaccessible as a cloud, a domestic saint living entirely inside the ritual system, a sort of automaton of recitation without emotion or personality. Sutty had feared her. She was afraid that this woman who embodied the system fully, who lived it totally, would force her to admit that it was hysterical, obsessional, absolutist, everything she hated and feared and wanted it not to be. But as she listened to Elyed’s tellings, she heard a disciplined, reasoning mind, though it spoke of what was unreasonable.

Elyed used that word often, unreasonable, in a literal sense: what cannot be understood by thinking. Once when Sutty was trying to find a coherent line of thought connecting several different tellings, Elyed said, "What we do is unreasonable, yoz."

"But there is a reason for it"

"Probably."

"What I don’t understand is the pattern. The place, the importance of things in the pattern. Yesterday you were telling the story about Iaman and Deberren, but you didn’t finish it, and today you read the descriptions of the leaves of the trees of the grove at the Golden Mountain. I don’t understand what they have to do with each other. Or is it that on certain days a certain kind of material is proper? Or are my questions just stupid?"

"No," the maz said, and laughed her small laugh that had no teeth to show. "I get tired remembering. So I read. It doesn’t matter. It’s all the leaves of the tree."

"So… anything-anything that’s in the books is equally important?"

Elyed considered. "No," she said. "Yes." She drew a shaky breath. She tired quickly when she could not rest in the stream of ritual act and language, but she never dismissed Sutty, never evaded her questions. "It’s all we have. You see? It’s the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don’t have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. We’d tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment. We’d be like a baby. A baby can do it, but we’d drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there’s nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is."

"Memory?" Sutty said. "History?"

Elyed nodded, dubious, not satisfied by these terms. She sat thinking for some time and finally said, "We’re not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is there in our world?"

She was trembling, little spasms of the hands and mouth that she tried to conceal. Sutty thanked her with the mountain-heart gesture, apologised for wearing her out with talk. Elyed gave her small, black laugh. "Oh, yoz, I keep going with talk. Just the way the world does," she said.

Sutty went away and brooded. All this about language. It always came back to words. Like the Greeks with their Logos, the Hebrew Word that was God. But this was words. Not the Logos, the Word, but words. Not one but many, many… Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened in it? Anything, everything-tales of heroes, maps of the stars, love songs, lists of the shapes of leaves… For a moment she thought she understood.

She brought this half-formed understanding to Maz Ottiar Uming, who was easier to talk with than Elyed, wanting to try to put it into words. But Ottiar was busy with a chant, so Sutty talked to Uming, and somehow her words got contorted and pedantic. She couldn’t speak her intuition.

As they struggled to understand each other, Uming Ottiar showed a bitterness, almost the first Sutty had met with among these soft-voiced teachers. Despite his impediment he was a fluent talker, and he got going, mildly enough at first: "Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we’re animals with no nature. Eh? Animals with no nature! That’s strange! We’re so strange! We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. Eh? We’re born to be reasonable, so we’re born ignorant. You see? If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost on the mountain, doesn’t it?

And dies in the night, in the cold. So. So." He rocked his body a little.

Maz Ottiar, across the little room, knocked on the drum, murmuring some long chronicle of ancient days to a single, sleepy, ten-year-old listener.

Maz Uming rocked and frowned. "So, without the telling, the rocks and plants and animals go on all right. But the people don’t. People wander around. They don’t know a mountain from its reflection in a puddle. They don’t know a path from a cliff. They hurt themselves. They get angry and hurt each other and the other things. They hurt animals because they’re angry. They make quarrels and cheat each other. They want too much. They neglect things. Crops don’t get planted. Too many crops get planted. Rivers get dirty with shit. Earth gets dirty with poison. People eat poison food. Everything is confused. Everybody’s sick. Nobody looks after the sick people, the sick things. But that’s very bad, very bad, eh? Because looking after things, that’s our job, eh? Looking after things, looking after each other. Who else would do it? Trees? Rivers? Animals? They just do what they are. But we’re here, and we have to learn how to be here, how to do things, how to keep things going the way they need to go. The rest of the world knows its business. Knows the One and the Myriad, the Tree and the Leaves. But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world. We’re lost in it, we die. But we have to tell it right, tell it truly. Eh? Take care and tell it truly. That’s what went wrong. Down there, down there in Dovza, when they started telling lies. Those false maz, those big munan, those boss maz. Telling people that nobody knew the truth but them, nobody could speak but them, everybody had to tell the same lies they told. Traitors, usurers! Leading people astray for money! Getting rich off their lies, bossing people! No wonder the world stopped going around! No wonder the police took over!"

The old man was dark red in the face, shaking his good hand as if he held a stick in it. His wife got up, came over, and put the drum and drumstick into his hands, all the time going on with her droning recitation. Uming bit his lip, shook his head, fretted a bit, knocked the drum rather hard, and took up the recitation on the next line.

"I’m sorry," Sutty said to Ottiar as the old woman went with her to the door. "I didn’t mean to upset Maz Uming."

"Oh, it’s all right," Ottiar said. "All that was before I/we were born. Down in Dovza."

"You weren’t part of Dovza, up here?"

"We’re mostly Rangma here. My/our people all talked Rangma. The grandparents didn’t know how to talk much Dovzan till after the Corporation police came and made everybody talk it. They hated it! They kept the worst accents they could!"

She had a merry smile, and Sutty smiled back; but she walked down the hill-street in a maze of thoughts. Uming’s tirade against the ’boss maz’ had been about the period before the Dovzan Corporation ruled the world, before ’the police came,’ possibly before the First Observers of the Ekumen came. As he spoke, it had occurred to her that of the hundreds of stories and histories she had heard in the tellings, none had to do with events in Dovza, or any events of the last five or six decades except very local ones. She had never heard a maz tell a tale about the coming of the offworlders, the rise of the Corporation State, or any public event of the last seventy years or more.

"Iziezi," she said that night, "who were the boss maz?"

She was helping Iziezi peel a kind of fungus that had just come into season up on the hills where the snow was melting at the edge of thawing drifts. It was called demyedi, first-of-spring, tasted like snow, and was good for balancing the peppery banam shoots and the richness of oilfish, thus keeping the sap thin and the heart easy. Whatever else she had missed and misunderstood in this world, she had learned when, and why, and how to cook its food.

"Oh, that was a long time ago," said Iziezi. "When they started bossing everybody around, down in Dovza."

"A hundred years ago?"

"Maybe that long ago."

"Who are ’the police?"

"Oh, you know. The blue-and-tans."

"Just them?" ’

"Well, I guess we call all those people the police. From down there. Dovzans… First they used to arrest the boss maz. Then they started to arrest all the maz. When they sent soldiers up here to arrest people in the umyazu, that’s when people started calling them police. And people call skuyen the police, too. Or they say, ’They’re working for the police.’"

"Skuyen?"

"People who tell the blue-and-tans about illegal things. Books, tellings, anything… For money. Or for hatred." Iziezi’s mild voice changed on the last words. Her face had closed into its tight look of pain.

Books, tellings, anything. What you cooked. Who you made love with. How you wrote the word for tree. Anything.

No wonder the system was incoherent, fragmented. No wonder Uming’s world had stopped going around. The wonder was that anything remained of it at all.

As if her realisations had summoned him out of nothingness, the Monitor passed her on the street next morning. He did not look at her.

A few days later she went to visit Maz Sotyu Ang. His shop was closed. It had never been closed before. She asked a neighbor sweeping his front step if he would be back soon. "I think the producer-consumer is away," the man said vaguely.

Maz Elyed had lent her a beautiful old book-lent or given, she was not sure. "Keep it, it’s safe with you," Elyed had said. It was an ancient anthology of poems from the Eastern Isles, an inexhaustible treasure. She was deep in studying and transferring it into her noter. Several days passed before she thought to visit her old friend the Fertiliser again. She walked up the steep street that shone blinding black in the sunshine. Spring came late but fast to these foothills of the great range. The air blazed with light. She walked past the shop without recognising it.

She was disoriented, turned back, found the shop. It was all white: whitewashed, a blank front. All the signs, the bold characters, the old words gone. Silenced. Snowfall… The door stood ajar. She looked in. The counters and the walls of tiny drawers had been torn out. The room was empty, dirty, ransacked. The walls where she had seen the living words, the breathing words, had been smeared over with brown paint.

The twice-forked lightning tree. …

The neighbor had come out when she passed. He was sweeping his step again. She began to speak to him and then did not. Skuyen? How did you know?

She started back home and then, seeing the river glittering at the foot of the streets, turned and went along the hillside out of town to a path that led down to and followed the river. She had hiked that path all one day, one of those days long, long ago in the early autumn when she was waiting for the Envoy to tell her to go back to the city.

She set off upriver beside thickets of newly leafed-out shrubs and the dwarfed frees that grew here not far from timberline. The Ereha ran milky blue with the first glacier melt. Ice crunched in the ruts of the road, but the sun was hot on her head and back. Her mouth was still dry with shock. Her throat ached.

Go back to the city. She should go back to the city. Now. With the three record crystals and the noter full of stuff, full of poetry. Get it all to Tong Ov before the Monitor got it.

There was no way to send it. She must take it. But travel must be authorised. O Ram! where was her ZIL? She hadn’t worn it for months. Nobody here used ZILs, only if you worked for the Corporation or had to go to one of the bureaus. It was in her briefcase, in her room. She’d have to use her ZIL at the telephone on Dock Street, get through to Tong, ask him to get her an authorisation to come to the city. By plane. Take the riverboat down to Eltli and fly from there. Do it all out in the open, let them all know, so they couldn’t stop her privately, trick her somehow. Confiscate her records. Silence her. Where was Maz Sotyu? What were they doing to him? Was it her fault?

She could not think about that now. What she had to do was save what she could of what Sotyu had given her. Sotyu and Ottiar and Uming and Odiedin and Elyed and Iziezi, dear Iziezi. She could not think about that now.

She turned round, walked hurriedly back along the river into town, found her ZIL bracelet in her briefcase in her room, went to Dock Street, and put in a call to Tong Ov at the Ekumenical Office in Dovza City.

His Dovzan secretary answered and said superciliously that he was in a meeting. "I must speak to him, now," Sutty said and was not surprised when the secretary said in a meek tone that she would call him.

When Sutty heard his voice she said, in Hainish, hearing the words as foreign and strange, "Envoy, I’ve been out of touch for so long, I feel as if we needed to talk."

"I see," Tong said, and a few other meaningless things, while she and probably he tried to figure out how to say anything meaningful. If only he knew any of her languages, if only she knew his! But their only common languages were Hainish and Dovzan.

"Nothing devolving in particular?" he inquired. , "No, no, not really. But I’d like to bring you the material I’ve been collecting," she said. "Just notes on daily life in Okzat-Ozkat."

"I was hoping to come see you there, but that seems to be contraindicated at present," Tong said. "With a window just wide enough for one, of course it’s a pity to close the blinds. But I know how much you love Dovza City and must have been missing it. I’m equally sure that you’ve found nothing much interesting up there. So, if your work’s all done, by all means come on back and enjoy yourself here."

Sutty groped and stammered, and finally said, "Well, as you know it’s a very, the Corporation State is a very homogeneous culture, very powerful and definitely in control, very successful. So everything here is, yes, is very much the same here as there. But maybe I should stay on and finish the, finish the tapes before I bring them? They’re not very interesting."

"Here, as you know," said Tong, "our hosts share all kinds of information with us. And we share ours with them. Everybody here is getting loads of fresh material, very educational and inspiring. So what you’re doing there isn’t really all that important. Don’t worry about it. Of course I’m not at all uneasy about you. And have no need to be. Do I?"

"No, yes, of course not," she said. "Honestly."

She left the telephone office, showing her ZIL at the door, and hurried back to her inn, her home. She thought she had followed Tong’s backward talk, but it destroyed itself in her memory. She thought he had been trying to tell her to stay there, not to try to bring what she had to him, because he would have to show it to officials there and it would be confiscated, but she was not sure that was what he had meant. Maybe he truly meant it was not all that important. Maybe he meant he could not help her at all.

Helping Iziezi prepare dinner, she was sure that she had panicked, had been stupid to call Tong, thus bringing attention to herself and her friends and informants here. Feeling that she must be careful, cautious, she said nothing about the desecrated shop.

Iziezi had known Maz Sotyu Ang for years, but she said nothing about him either. She showed no sign of anything being wrong. She showed Sutty how to slice the fresh numiem, thin and on the bias, to bring the flavor out.

It was one of Elyed’s teaching nights. After she and Akidan and Iziezi had eaten, Sutty took her leave and went down River Street into the poor part of town, the yurt city, where the Corporation had not brought electric enlightenment and there were only the tiny gleams of oil lamps inside the shacks and tents. It was cold, but not the bone-dry, blade-keen cold of winter. A damp, spring-smelling cold, full of life. But Sutty’s heart swelled with dread as she came near Elyed’s shop: to find it all whited out, gutted, raped…

The great-grandnephew was screaming bloody murder as somebody separated him from a screwdriver, and nieces smiled at Sutty as she went through the shop to the back room. She was early for the teaching hour. Nobody was in the little room but the maz and an unobtrusive grandnephew setting up chairs.

"Maz Elyed Oni, do you know Maz Sotyu Ang — the herbalist — his shop—" She could not keep the words from bursting out.

"Yes," the old woman said.

"He’s staying with his daughter."

"The shop, the herbary—"

"That is gone."

"But—"

Her throat ached. She struggled with tears of rage and outrage that wanted to be cried, here with this woman who could be her grandmother, who was her grandmother.

"It was my fault."

"No," Elyed said. "You did no wrong. Sotyu Ang did no wrong. There is no fault. Things are going badly. It’s not possible always to do right when things are difficult."

Sutty stood silent. She looked around the small, high-ceilinged room, its red rug almost hidden by chairs and cushions; everything poor, clean; a bunch of paper flowers stuck in an ugly vase on the low table; the grandnephew gently rearranging floor cushions; the old, old woman lowering herself carefully, painfully onto a thin pillow near the table. On the table, a book. Old, worn, many times read.

"I think maybe, yoz Sutty, it was the other way round. Sotyu told us last summer that he thought a neighbor had informed the police about his herbary. Then you came, and nothing happened."

Sutty forced herself to understand what Elyed had said. "I was a safeguard?"

"I think so."

"Because they don’t want me to see… what they do? But then why did they — now— ?"

Elyed drew her thin shoulders together. "They don’t study patience," she said.

"Then I should stay here," Sutty said slowly, trying to under-ittnd. "I thought it would be better for you if I left."

"I think you might go to Silong."

Her mind was clouded. "To Silong?"

"The last umyazu is there."

Sutty said nothing, and after a while Elyed added, scrupulous of fact, "The last I know of. Maybe some are left in the east, in the Isles. But here in the west they say the Lap of Silong is the last. Many, many books have been sent there. For many years now. It must be a great library. Not like the Golden Mountain, not like the Red Umyazu, not like Atangen. But what has been saved, most of it is there."

She looked at Sutty, her head a little on one side, a small old bird, keen-eyed. She had completed her cautious journey down onto the cushion, and now arranged her black wool vest, a bird getting its feathers straight. "You want to learn the Telling, I know that. You should go there," she said. "Here, nothing much is here. Bits and pieces. What I have, what a few maz have. Not much. Always less. Go to Silong, daughter Sutty. Maybe you can find a partner. Be a maz. Eh?" Her face creased up in a sudden, tremendous smile, toothless and radiant. She jiggled gently with laughter.

"Go to Silong…"

Other people were coming in. Elyed put her hands in her lap and began to chant softly, "The two from one, the one from two…"