And she realised, slowly, because it took her by surprise, that they didn't know she was an alien. They all knew there were Observers from the Ekumen on Aka; they'd seen them on the neareals, four infinitely remote, meaningless figures among the ministers and executives, stuffed aliens among the stuffed shirts; but they had no expectation of meeting one among ordinary people.
She had expected not only to be recognised but to be set apart and kept at a remove wherever she traveled. But no guides had been offered and no supervisors were apparent. It seemed that the Corporation had decided to let her be genuinely on her own. She had been on her own in the city, but in the fish tank, a bubble of isolation.
The bubble had popped. She was outside. It was a little frightening when she thought about it, but she didn't think much about it, because it was such a pleasure. She was accepted —one of the travelers, one of the crowd. She didn't have to explain, didn't have to evade explanation, because they didn't ask. She spoke Dovzan with no more accent, indeed less, than many Akans from regions other than Dovza.
People assumed from her physical type —short, slight, dark-skinned —that she came from the east of the continent. She heard about them, their cousins, their families, their jobs, their opinions, their houses, their hernias. People with pets traveled by riverboat, she discovered, petting a woman's furry and affable kittypup. People who disliked or feared flying took the boat, as a chatty old gentleman told her in vast detail. People not in a hurry went by boat and told each other their stories.
Sutty got told even more stories than most, because she listened without interrupting, except to say, Really? What happened then? She listened with greed, tireless. These dull and fragmentary relations of ordinary lives could not bore her.
Everything she had missed in Dovza City, everything the official literature, the heroic propaganda left out, they told. If she had to choose between heroes and hernias, it was no contest. As they got farther upstream, deeper inland, passengers of a different kind began to come aboard. Country people used the riverboat as the simplest and cheapest way to get from one town to another —walk onto the boat here and get off it there. The towns were smaller now, without tall buildings.
By the seventh day, passengers were boarding not with pets and luggage but with fowls in baskets, goats on leashes. They weren't exactly goats, or deer or cows or any other earthly thing; they were eberdin; but they blatted, and had silky hair, and in Sutty's mental ecology they occupied the goat niche. They were raised for milk, meat, and the silky hair.
In the old days, according to a bright-colored page of a picture book that had survived the lost transmission, eberdin had pulled carts and even carried riders. She wondered if it had been a fantasy for children, or a larger breed of eberdin. Nobody could ride these; they were only about knee-high. By the eighth day they were coming aboard in flocks.
The aft deck was knee-deep in eberdin. The city folk with pets and the aerophobes had all disembarked early that morning at Eltli, a big town that ran a railway line up into the South Headwaters Range resort country. Near Eltli the Ereha went through three locks, one very deep. Above them it was a different river —wilder, narrower, faster, its water not cloudy blue-brown but airy blue-green.
Long conversations also ended at Eltli. The country folk now on the boat were not unfriendly but were shy of strangers, talking mostly to their own acquaintances, in dialect.
Sutty welcomed her recovered solitude, which left her eyes to see. Off to the left as the stream bent north, mountain peaks spired up one after another, black rock, white glaciers.
Ahead of the boat, upstream, no peaks were visible, nothing dramatic; the land just went slowly up, and up, and up. And Ferry Eight, now full of blat-ting and squawking and the quiet, intermittent voices of the country people, and smelling of manure, fried bread, fish, and sweet melons, moved slowly, her silent engines working hard against the drastic current, between wide rocky shores and treeless plains of thin, pale, plumy grass.
Curtains of rain swept across the land, dropping from vast, quick clouds, and trailed off leaving sunlight, diamond air, the fragrance of the soil. Night was silent, cold, starlit. Sutty stayed up late and waked early.
She came out on deck. The east was brightening. Over the shadowy western plains, dawn lit the far peaks one by one like matches. The boat stopped where no town or village was, no sign of habitation. A woman in fleece tunic and felt hat crowded her flock onto the gangplank, and they ran ashore, she running with them, shouting curses at them and raucous goodbyes to friends aboard.
From the aft rail Sutty watched the flock for miles, a shrinking pale blot on the greygold plain. All that ninth day passed in a trance of light. The boat moved slowly. The river, now clear as the wind, rushed by so silently that the boat seemed to float above it, between two airs. All around them were levels of rock and pale grass, pale distances. The mountains were lost, hidden by the vast swell of rising land.
Land, and sky, and the river crossing from one to the other. This is a longer journey, Sutty thought, standing again at the rail that evening, than my journey from Earth to Aka. And she thought of Tong Ov, who might have made this journey himself and had given it to her to make, and wondered how to thank him.
By seeing, by describing, by recording, yes. But she could not record her happiness. The word itself destroyed it. She thought: Pao should be here. By me. She would have been here. We would have been happy. The air darkened, the water held the light. One other person was on deck. He was the only other passenger who had been on the boat all the way from the capital, a silent, fortyish man, a Corporation official in blue and tan. Uniforms were ubiquitous on Aka.
Schoolchildren wore scarlet shorts and tunics: masses and lines and little hopping dots of brilliant red all over the streets of the cities, a startling, cheerful sight.
College students wore green and rust. Sutty was very familiar with blue and tan. Poets wore blue and tan —official poets, at any rate —and producers of tapes and neareals, and librarians, and bureaucrats in branches of the bureau with which Sutty was less familiar, such as Ethical Purity. The insignia on this man's jacket identified him as a Monitor, fairly high in the hierarchy. When she was first aboard, expecting some kind of official presence or supervision, some watchdog watching her excursion, Sutty had waited for him to show some attention to her or evidence of keeping an eye on her.
She saw nothing of the kind. If he knew who she was, nothing in his demeanor showed it. He had been entirely silent and aloof, ate at the captain's table at meals, communicated only with his noter, and avoided the groups of talkers that she always joined.
Now he came to stand at the rail not far from her. She nodded and ignored him, which was what he had always appeared to want. But he spoke, breaking the intense silence of the vast dusk landscape, where only the water murmured its resistance quietly and fiercely to the boat's prow and sides. His voice roused a young eberdin tied to a stanchion nearby.
It bleated softly, Ma-ma! Are you interested in lovers' eyes? Gems, jewels. Imagined resemblance. In so far as she had thought anything about him at all, she had thought him stiff and dull, a little ego-crat. The cold keenness of his look surprised her. Only there," he said, pointing upstream, "and only on this planet. I take it some other interest brought you here. And from his manner, he wished her to know that he disapproved of her being on the loose, on her own. I received permission to do some sightseeing.
He waited for more. She felt a pressure from him, an expectancy, as if he considered her accountable to him. She resisted. He gazed at the purplish plains fading into night and then down at the water that seemed still to hold some transparency of light within it. He said, "Dovza is a land of beautiful scenery. Rich farmlands, prosperous industries, delightful resorts in the South Headwaters Range. Having seen nothing of that, why did you choose to visit this desert?
That shut him up for a bit. Much of it is still barren. We have misused it badly It's a whole world, Monitor. With room enough for a lot of variety. Just as here. This was suspicion, distrust. He was telling her that aliens should not be allowed to wander about alone. The first xenophobia she'd met on Aka. Austere but beautiful. Don't you? No disagreement allowed. The corporate, official voice. Are you looking for lovers' eyes? He didn't. Vizdiat, the ultimate Akan justification, the inarguable aim, the bottom line.
I hope you have no intention of traveling out of town into the high country. Where education has not yet reached, the natives are brutal and dangerous. In so far as I have jurisdiction in this area, I must ask you to remain in touch with my office at all times, to report any evidence of illegal practices, and to inform us if you plan to travel.
The Monitor nodded once, his eyes on the slowly passing, slowly darkening shore. When she looked again where he had stood he was gone. On the map the town had been a dot at the edge of an endless tangle of isobars, the High Headwaters Range. In the late evening it was a blur of whitish walls in the clear, cold darkness, dim horizontal windows set high, smells of dust and dung and rotten fruit and a dry sweetness of mountain air, a singsong of voices, the clatter of shod feet on stone.
Scarcely any wheeled traffic. A gleam of rusty light shone on some kind of high, pale, distant wall, faintly visible above ornate roofs, against the last greenish clarity of the western sky. Corporation announcements and music blared across the wharfs. That noise after ten days of quiet voices and river silence drove Sutty straight away.
No tour guide was waiting for her. Nobody followed her. Nobody asked her to show her ZIL. Still in the passive trance of the journey, curious, nervous, alert, she wandered through the streets near the river till her shoulder bag began to drag her down and she felt the knife edge of the wind. In a dark, small street that ran uphill she stopped at a doorway. The house door was open, and a woman sat in a chair in the yellow light from within the house as if enjoying a balmy summer evening. She was crippled, Sutty saw now, with legs like sticks.
A boy of fifteen or so appeared. Wordlessly he invited Sutty into the house. He showed her to a high-ceilinged, big, dark room on the ground floor, furnished with a rug. It was a magnificent rug, crimson eberdin wool with severe, complex, concentric patterns in black and white.
The only other thing in the room was the light fixture, a peculiar, squarish bulb, quite dim, fixed between two high-set, horizontal windows. Its cord came snaking in one of the windows. Sutty went and opened it. Three tiled steps went down to a little tiled room in which were various strange but interpretable devices of wood, metal, and ceramic, shining in the warm glow of an electric heater. She should not have thanked him.
Thanks were "servile address. She had learned that lesson, in those terms, almost as soon as she arrived. She had trained herself quite out of any such bad habits acquired on Earth. What had made the uncouth thanks jump now from her mouth? The boy only murmured something which she had to ask him to repeat: an offer of dinner. She accepted without thanks. In half an hour he brought a low table into her room, set with a figured cloth and dishes of dark-red porcelain.
She had found cushions and a fat bedroll behind the curtain; had hung up her clothes on the bar and pegs also behind the curtain; had set her books and notebooks on the polished floor under the single light; and now sat on the carpet doing nothing.
She liked the extraordinary sense of room in this room —space, height, stillness. The boy served her a dinner of roast poultry, roast vegetables, a white grain that tasted like corn, and lukewarm, aromatic tea.
She sat on the silky rug and ate it all. The boy looked in silently a couple of times to see if she needed anything. I never ate it before.
Does it grow here? He had a strong, sweet face, still childish, but the man visible. Sutty nodded sagely. It meant, more or less, fellow person. Sutty had never heard the word spoken except on the tapes from which she had learned Akan languages back on Earth. And 'good for the wood,' was that an evil fossil of some kind too? She might find out tomorrow. Tonight she'd have a bath, unroll her bed, and sleep in the dark, blessed silence of this high place.
A gentle knock, presumably by Akidan, guided her to breakfast waiting on the tray-table outside her door. There was a big piece of cut and seeded fruit, bits of something yellow and pungent in a saucer, a crumbly greyish cake, and a handleless mug of lukewarm tea, this time faintly bitter, with a taste she disliked at first but found increasingly satisfying.
The fruit and bread were fresh and delicate. She left the yellow pickled bits. When the boy came to remove the tray, she asked the name of everything, for this food was entirely different from anything she had eaten in the capital, and it had been presented with significant care.
The pickled thing was abid, Akidan said. I'll eat it, then. Akidan seemed pleased. Another world. Terra of the Ekumen. I'd like to ask you lots of questions. Is that all right? Shy as he was, he was self-possessed. Whatever it meant to him, he accepted with aplomb the fact that an Observer of the Ekumen, an alien whom he could have expected to see only as an electronic image sent from the capital, was living in his house.
Not a trace of the xenophobia she had diagnosed in the disagreeable man on the boat. Akidan's aunt, the crippled woman, who looked as if she was in constant low-level pain, spoke little and did not smile, but had the same tranquil, acceptant manner. Sutty arranged with her to stay two weeks, possibly longer. She had wondered if she was the only guest at the inn; now, finding her way about the house, she saw there was only one guest room. In the city, at every hotel and apartment house, restaurant, shop, store, office, or bureau, every entrance and exit ran an automatic check of your personal ID chip, the allimportant ZIL, the warranty of your existence as a producer-consumer entered in the data banks of the Corporation.
Her ZIL had been issued her during the lengthy formalities of entrance at the spaceport. Without it, she had been warned, she had no identity on Aka. She could not hire a room or a robocab, buy food at a market or in a restaurant, or enter any public building without setting off an alarm. Most Akans had their chip embedded in the left wrist. She had taken the option of wearing hers in a fitted bracelet. Speaking with Akidan's aunt in the little front office, she found herself looking around for the ZIL scanner, holding her left arm ready to make the universal gesture.
But the woman pivoted her chair to a massive desk with dozens of small drawers in it. After quite a few tranquil mistakes and pauses to ponder, she found the drawer she wanted and extracted a dusty booklet of forms, one of which she tore off. She pivoted the chair back round and handed the form to Sutty to fill out by hand. It was so old that the paper was crumbly, but it did have a space for the ZIL code.
Please tell me how to address you, yoz and deyberienduin. A nice word. Iziezi's thin, drawn face warmed faintly. When Sutty gave her the form back, she drew her clasped hands against her breastbone with a slight but very formal inclination of the head. A banned gesture if ever there was one. Sutty returned it. As she left, Iziezi was putting the form book and the form Sutty had filled out into a desk drawer, not the same one.
I've escaped the net, Sutty thought, and walked out into the sunshine. Inside the house it was rather dim, all the horizontal windows being set very high up in the wall so that they showed nothing but fierce blue sky. Coming outdoors, she was dazzled.
White house walls, glittering roof tiles, steep streets of dark slate flashing back the light. Above the roofs westward, as she began to be able to see again, she saw the highest of the white walls — immensely high — a wrinkled curtain of light halfway up the sky.
She stood blinking, staring. Was it a cloud? A volcanic eruption? The Northern Lights in daytime? Sutty blinked at him. As they came up the river, the rise of the land had kept it hidden. Here you could see perhaps the upper half of it, a serrated radiance above which floated, still more remote, immense, ethereal, a horned peak half dissolved in golden light.
From the summit streamed the thin snow-banners of eternal wind. As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all knew what Silong looked like and therefore could help her see it. They said its name and called it Mother, pointing to the glitter of the river down at the foot of the street. One of them said, "You might go to Silong, yoz?
They were about the same color of brown she was. The gnarly woman said, "Nowhere," the yellow man said, "No planes," and the barrow man said, "After three-hundred-year sex, anybody can fly! On the ship she had not seen him as a big man, but here he loomed. His skin, his flesh, were different from that of the people here, smooth, tough, and even, like plastic.
His blue-and-tan tunic and leggings were clean and smooth and like uniforms everywhere on every world, and he didn't belong in Okzat-Ozkat any more than she did. He was an alien. Do not encourage beggars. They are parasites on the economy. Alms-giving is illegal. Oh, wrong, wrong. She had no business being sarcastic in any language, even if the Monitor paid no attention.
He was insufferable, but that did not excuse her. If she was to obtain any information here, she must stay in the good graces of local officialdom; if she was to learn anything here, she must not be judgmental. The old farfetchers' motto: Opinion ends reception.
Maybe those people had in fact been beggars, working her. How did she know? She knew nothing, nothing about this place, these people. She set off to learn her way around Okzat-Ozkat with the humble determination not to have any opinions about it at all.
The modern buildings —prison, district and civic prefectures, agricultural, cultural, and mining agencies, teachers' college, high school —looked like all such buildings in the other cities she'd seen: plain, massive blocks. Here they were only two or three stories high, but they loomed, the way the Monitor did. The rest of the city was small, subtle, dirty, fragile. Low house walls washed red or orange, horizontal windows set high under the eaves, roofs of red or olive-green tile with curlicues running up the angles and fantastic ceramic animals pulling up the corners in their toothy mouths; little shops, their outer and inner walls entirely covered with writing in the old ideographs, whitewashed over but showing through with a queer subliminal legibility.
Steep slate-paved streets and steps leading up to locked doors painted red and blue and whitewashed over. Work yards where men made rope or cut stone. Narrow plots between houses where old women dug and hoed and weeded and changed the flow patterns of miniature irrigation systems.
A few cars down by the docks and parked by the big white buildings, but the street traffic all on foot and by barrow and handcart. And, to Sutty's delight, a caravan coming in from the country: big eberdin pulling two-wheeled carts with green-fringed tent tops, and two even bigger eberdin, the size of ponies, with bells tied in the creamy wool of their necks, each ridden by a woman in a long red coat sitting impassive in the high, horned saddle.
The caravan passed the facade of the District Prefecture, a tiny, jaunty, jingling scrap of the past creeping by under the blank gaze of the future. Inspirational music interspersed with exhortations blared from the roof of the Prefecture. Sutty followed the caravan for several blocks and watched it stop at the foot of one of the long flights of steps.
People in the street also stopped, with that same amiable air of helping her watch, though they said nothing to her. People came out the high red and blue doors and down the steps to welcome the riders and carry in the luggage. A hotel? The owners' townhouse? She climbed back up to one of the shops she had passed in the higher part of town. If she had understood the signs around the door, the shop sold lotions, unguents, smells, and fertiliser.
A purchase of hand cream might give her time to read some of the inscriptions that covered every wall from floor to ceiling, all in the old, the illegal writing. On the facade of the shop the inscriptions had been whitewashed out and painted over with signs in the modern alphabet, but these had faded enough that she could make out some of the underlying words.
That was where she had made out "smells and fertiliser. Fertility drugs, maybe? She went in. She was at once engulfed in the smells —powerful, sweet, sharp, strange. A dim, pungent air. She had the curious sensation that the pictographs and ideograms that covered the walls with bold black and dark-blue shapes were moving, not jumpily like half-seen print but evenly, regularly, expanding and shrinking very gently, as if they were breathing.
The room was high, lighted by the usual high-set windows, and lined with cabinets full of little drawers. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that a thin old man stood behind a counter to her left. Behind his head two characters stood out quite clearly on the wall. The proprietor nodded pleasantly and began seeking among his thousand little drawers with an air of peaceful certainty of eventually finding what he wanted, like Iziezi at her desk.
This gave Sutty time to read the walls, but that distracting illusion of movement continued, and she could not make much sense of the writings. They seemed not to be advertisements as she had assumed, but recipes, or charms, or quotations. A lot about branches and roots. A character she knew as blood, but written with a different Elemental qualifier, which might make it mean lymph, or sap.
Formulas like "the five from the three, the three from the five. Medicine, prescriptions, charms? All she knew was that these were old words, old rneanings, that for the first time she was reading Aka's past. And it made no sense. To judge by his expression, the proprietor had found a drawer he liked. He gazed into it for some while with a satisfied look before he took an unglazed clay jar out of it and put it down on the counter. Then he went back to seeking gently among the rows of unlabeled drawers until he found another one he approved of.
He opened it and gazed into it and, after a while, took out a gold-paper box. With this he disappeared into an inner room. Presently he came back with the box, a small, brightly glazed pot, and a spoon. He set them all down on the counter in a row. He spooned out something from the unglazed pot into the glazed pot, wiped the spoon with a red cloth he took from under the counter, mixed two spoonfuls of a fine, talc-like powder from the gold box into the glazed pot, and began to stir the mixture with the same unhurried patience.
He smiled and, setting down the spoon, smoothed one hand over the back of the other. It was yes but not quite yes. Or yes but we don't use that word. Or yes but we don't need to talk about that. Yes with a loophole. The proprietor slapped one hand loudly on the counter and the other over his mouth. Sutty jumped. They stared at each other.
The old man lowered his hand. He seemed undisturbed, despite his startling reaction. He was perhaps smiling. Sutty went on staring for a moment, then shut her mouth.
Senseless dots and lines. Old-fashioned people live around here. They leave these old decorations around instead of painting walls clean and white. White and silent. Silence is snowfall. Now, yoz and honored customer, this ointment permits the skin to breathe mildly. Will you try it? And what a pleasant smell. What is it called? She repeated his gesture. Then she smiled and said, "Why? After a moment she looked back up at the inscription and saw that it ended with the words he had spoken.
Their eyes met again. Then he melted into the dim back part of the room and she was out on the street, blinking in the glare, clutching the gift. Walking back down the steep, complicated streets to her inn, she pondered. It seemed that first the Mobile, then the Monitor, and now the Fertiliser, or whatever he was, had promptly and painlessly co-opted her, involving her in their intentions without telling her what they were.
Go find the people who know the stories and report back to me, Tong said. Avoid dissident reactionaries and report back to me, said the Monitor. As for the Fertiliser, had he bribed her to be silent or rewarded her for speaking? The latter, she thought. But all she was certain of was that she was far too ignorant to do what she was doing without danger to herself or others. The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past. She did not underestimate the enmity of the Akan Corporation State toward the "old decorations" and what they meant.
To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried.
The writing that had preserved them was to be erased. If the educational tapes and historical neareal dramas she had studied in the capital were factual, as she thought they were at least in part, within the lifetime of people now living, men and women had been crushed under the walls of temples, burned alive with books they tried to save, imprisoned for life for teaching anachronistic sedition and reactionary ideology.
The tapes and dramas glorified this war against the past, relating the bombings, burnings, bulldozings in sternly heroic terms. Brave young men and women broke free from stupid parents, conniving priests, teachers of superstition, fomentors of reaction, and unflinchingly burned the pestilential forests of error, planting healthy orchards in their place —denounced the wicked professor who had hidden a dictionary of ideograms under his bed—blew up the monstrous hives where the poison of ignorance was stored — drove tractors through the flimsy rituals of superstition — and then, hand in hand, led their fellow producer-consumers to join the March to the Stars.
Behind the glib and bloated rhetoric lay real suffering, real passion. On both sides. Sutty knew that. She was a child of violence, as Tong Ov had said. Still she found it hard to keep in mind, and bitterly ironical, that here it was all the reverse of what she had known, the negative: that here the believers weren't the persecutors but the persecuted.
But they were all true believers, both sides. Secular terrorists or holy terrorists, what difference? The only thing she had found at all unusual in the endless propaganda from the Ministries of Information and Poetry was that the heroes of the exemplary tales usually came in pairs —a brother and sister, or a betrothed or married couple. If a sexual pair, heterosexual, always. The Akan government was obsessive in its detestation of 'deviance. I will definitely recommend this book to science fiction, fiction lovers.
Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Le Guin Submitted by: Jane Kivik. Read Online Download. Great book, The Telling pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Always Coming Home. Santa Barbara: Capra P, Dispossessed, The.
New York: Avon, New York: HarperPrism, Lathe of Heaven, The. New York: Scribner's, New York: Ace, Only in Utopia section. In "'A War without End.
Boston: Shambhala, New York and London: Routledge, Barbour, Douglas. Le Guin. Bogel, Fredric V. Ithaca: Cornell UP, Bittner, James W. U of Wisconsin, Cogell, Elizabeth Cummins.
Joe De Bolt. Erlich, Richard D. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. New York: Atheneum, Satire: An Anthology. Ashley Brown and John L. Galbreath, Robert. Gates of Repentance, The. Griffin, Dustin. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky, High Holiday Prayer Book. Morris Silverman, compiler and arranger. Satire: Modern Essays in Criticism.
Ronald Paulson. Lindow, Sandra J. Said, Edward S. New York: Vintage, Welch, Holmes. Boston: Beacon, Study Guide for Ursula K.
0コメント