The Telling Read online

  On the long climb up the stairs to her apartment she wept again. There was no reason to cry. There had to be a reason. She must be sick. The misery she felt was fear, a wretched panic of fear. Dread. Terror. It was crazy to send her off on her own. Tong was crazy to think of it. She could never handle it. She sat down at her workdesk to send him a formal request for return to Terra. The Hainish words would not come. They were all wrong.

  Her head ached. She got up to find something to eat. There was nothing in her foodstorage, nothing at all. When had she eaten last? Not at midday. Not in the morning. Not last night.

  "What's wrong with me?" she said to the air. No wonder her stomach hurt. No wonder she had fits of weeping and panic. She had never in her life forgotten to eat. Even in that time, the time after, when she went back to Chile, even then she had cooked food and eaten it, forcing food salty with tears down her throat day after day after day.

  "I won't do this," she said. She didn't know what she meant. She refused to go on crying.

  She walked back down the stairs, flashed her ZIL at the exit, walked ten blocks to the nearest Corp-Star foodshop, flashed her ZIL at the entrance. All the foods were packaged, processed, frozen, convenient; nothing fresh, nothing to cook. The sight of the wrapped rows made her tears break out again. Furious and humiliated, she bought a hot stuffed roll at the Eat Quick counter. The man serving was too busy to look at her face.

  She stood outside the shop on the street, turned away from people passing by, and crammed the food into her mouth, salty with tears, forced herself to swallow, just like back then, back there. Back then she had known she had to live. It was her job. To live life after joy. Leave love and death behind her. Go on. Go alone and work. And now she was going to ask to get sent back to Earth? Back to death?

  She chewed and swallowed. Music and slogans blared in broken bursts from passing vehicles. The light at a crossing four blocks away had failed, and robocab horns outblared the music. People on foot, the producer-consumers of the Corporation State, in uniforms of rust, tan, blue, green, or in Corporation-made standard trousers, tunics, jackets, all wearing canvas StarMarch shoes, came crowding past, coming up from the underground garages, hurrying toward one apartment house or another.

  Sutty chewed and swallowed the last tough, sweet-salt lump of food. She would not go back. She would go on. Go alone and work. She went back to her apartment house, flashed her ZIL at the entrance, and climbed the eight flights of stairs. She had been given a big, flashy, top-floor apartment because it was considered suitable for an honored guest of the Corporation State. The elevator had not been working for a month.

  ***

  She nearly missed the boat. The robocab got lost trying to find the river. It took her to the Aquarium, then to the Bureau of Water Resources and Processing, then to the Aquarium again. She had to override it and reprogram it three times. As she scurried across the wharf, the crew of Ereha River Ferry Eight was just pulling in the gangway. She shouted, they shoved the gangway back down, she scrambled aboard. She tossed her bags into her tiny cabin and came out on deck to watch the city go by.

  It showed a dingier, quieter side down here on the water, far under the canyon walls of the blocks and towers of business and government. Beneath huge concrete embankments were wooden docks and warehouses black with age, a water-beetle come-and-go of little boats on errands that were no doubt beneath the notice of the Ministry of Commerce, and houseboat communities wreathed in flowering vines, flapping laundry, and the stink of sewage.

  A stream ran through a concrete ditch between high dark walls to join the great river. Above it a fisherman leaned on the rail of a humpback bridge: a silhouette, simple, immobile, timeless—the image of a drawing in one of the Akan books they had partially salvaged from the lost transmission.

  How reverently she had handled those few pages of images, lines of poems, fragments of prose, how she had pored over them, back in Valparaiso, trying to feel from them what these people of another world were like, longing to know them. It had been hard to erase the copies from her noter, here, and no matter what Tong said, she still felt it as a wrong, a capitulation to the enemy. She had studied the copies in her noter one last time, lovingly, painfully, trying to hold on to them before she deleted them. And there are no footprints in the dust behind us.... She had shut her eyes as she deleted that poem. Doing so, she felt that she was erasing all her yearning hope that when she came to Aka she'd learn what it was about.

  But she remembered the four lines of the poem, and the hope and yearning were still there.

  The quiet engines of Ferry Eight drummed softly. Hour by hour the embankments grew lower, older, more often broken by stairs and landings. At last they sank away altogether into mud and reeds and shrubby banks, and the Ereha spread itself out wider and wider and amazingly wider across a flatness of green and yellow-green fields.

  For five days the boat, moving steadily eastward on that steady breadth of water through mild sunshine and mild starry darkness, was the tallest thing in sight. Now and then it came to a riverside city where it would tie up at an old dock dwarfed under high new office and apartment towers and take on supplies and passengers.

  Sutty found it amazingly easy to talk to people on the boat. In Dovza City everything had conspired to keep her reserved and silent. Though the four offworlders were given apartments and a certain freedom of movement, the Corporation scheduled their lives very closely with appointments, programming and supervising their work and amusements. Not that they were the only ones so controlled: Aka's abrupt and tremendous technological advance was sustained by rigid discipline universally enforced and self-enforced. It seemed that everybody in the city worked hard, worked long hours, slept short hours, ate in haste. Every hour was scheduled. Everybody she'd been in touch with in the Ministries of Poetry and of Information knew exactly what they wanted her to do and how she should do it, and as soon as she started doing as they directed, they hurried off about their business, leaving her to hers.

  Though the technologies and achievements of the Ekumenical worlds were held as the shining model for everything on Aka, the four visitors from the Ekumen were kept, as Tong said, in a fish tank. From time to time they were put on display to the public and in the neareals, smiling figures sitting at a Corporation banquet or somewhere near the chief of a bureau giving a speech; but they were not asked to speak. Only to smile. Possibly the ministers did not trust them to say exactly what they ought to say. Possibly the ministers found them rather flat, dull examples of the superior civilisations Aka was striving so hard to emulate. Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.

  Though Sutty had met many Akans and disliked few of them, after a half year on the planet she had scarcely had anything deserving the name of a conversation with any one of them. She had seen nothing of Akan private life except the stiff dinner parties of upper-level bureaucrats and Corporation officials. No personal friendship had ever come even remotely into view. No doubt the people she met had been advised not to talk with her more than necessary, so that the Corporation could remain in full control of the information she received. But even with people she saw constantly, intimacy did not grow. She did not feel this distance as prejudice, xenophobia; the Akans were remarkably unconcerned about foreignness as such. It was that they were all so busy, and all bureaucrats. Conversation went by program. At the banquets people talked business, sports, and technology. Waiting in lines or at the laundry, they talked sports and the latest neareals. They avoided the personal and, in public, repeated the Corporation line on all matters of policy and opinion, to the point of contradicting her when her description of her world didn't tally with what they had been taught about wonderful, advanced, resourceful Terra.

  But on the riverboat, people talked. They talked personally, intimately, and exhaustively. They leaned on the railing talking, sat around on the deck talking, stayed at the dinner table with a glass of wine talking.

  A w
ord or smile from her was enough to include her in their talk. 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. "You're from the east, aren't you?" they said. "My cousin Muniti married a man from Turu," and then they went on talking about themselves.

  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? and How wonderful! or How terrible! 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 remembered the blue-and-red banners on the cart, and the inscription under the picture: SETTING OFF FOR THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN. 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 blatting 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 grey-gold 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. Blue and tan was the Sociocultural Bureau, which included the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art and the World Ministry of Information. 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. "A dreary country," the Monitor said.

  His voice roused a young eberdin tied to a stanchion nearby. It bleated softly, Ma-ma! and shook its head.

  "Barren," the man said. "Backward. Are you interested in lovers' eyes?"

  Ma-ma! said the little eberdin.

  "Excuse me?" said Sutty.

  "Lovers' eyes. Gems, jewels."

  "Why are they called that?"

  "Primitive fancy. Imagined resemblance." The man's glance crossed hers for a moment. 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.

  "They're found along stream banks, in the high country. Only there," he said, pointing upst
ream, "and only on this planet. I take it some other interest brought you here."

  He did know who she was, then. And from his manner, he wished her to know that he disapproved of her being on the loose, on her own.

  "In the short time I've been on Aka, I've seen only Dovza City. I received permission to do some sightseeing."

  "To go upriver," the man said with a tight pseudo-smile. 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?"

  "I come from a desert," Sutty said.

  That shut him up for a bit.

  "We know that Terra is a rich, progressive world." His voice was dark with disapproval.

  "Some of my world is fertile. 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."

  She heard the note of challenge in her voice.

  "Yet you prefer barren places and backward methods of travel?"

  This was not the exaggerated respect shown her by people in Dovza City, who had treated her as a fragile exotic that must be sheltered from reality. 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.

  "I like boats," she said, with care, pleasantly. "And I find this country beautiful. Austere but beautiful. Don't you?"

  "No," he said, an order. No disagreement allowed. The corporate, official voice.

  "So what brings you up the river? Are you looking for lovers' eyes?" She spoke lightly, even a bit flirtily, allowing him to change tone and get out of the challenge-response mode if he wanted to.