The Telling (19 page)

Odiedin visited him daily. Sutty had not yet brought herself to do so.

"His name is Yara," Odiedin told her.

"His name is Monitor," she said, contemptuous.

"Not any longer," Odiedin said drily. "His pursuit of us was unauthorised. If he goes back to Dovza, he'll be sent to a rehabilitation center."

"A forced labor camp? Why?"

"Officials must not exceed their orders or take unauthorised action."

"That wasn't a Corporation helicopter?"

Odiedin shook his head. "The pilot owned it. Used it to bring supplies to mountain climbers in the South Range. Yara hired him. To look for us."

"How strange," Sutty said. "Was he after me, then?"

"As a guide."

"I was afraid of that."

"I was not." Odiedin sighed. "The Corporation is so big, its apparatus is so clumsy, we little people in these big hills are beneath their notice. We slip through the mesh. Or we've done so for many years. So I didn't worry. But he wasn't the Corporation police. He was one man. One fanatic."

"Fanatic?" She laughed. "He believes slogans? He loves the Corporation?"

"He hates us. The maz, the Telling. He fears you."

"As an alien?"

"He thinks you'll persuade the Ekumen to side with the maz against the Corporation."

"What makes him think that?"

"I don't know. He's a strange man. I think you should talk with him."

"What for?"

"To hear what he has to tell," Odiedin said.

***

She put it off, but conscience pushed her. Odiedin was no scholar, no sage like these maz from the lowlands, but he had a clear mind and a clear heart. On their long trek she had come to trust him entirely, and when she saw him crying over the books in the Library, she knew she loved him. She wanted to do what he asked her to do, even if it was to hear what the Monitor had to tell.

Maybe she could also tell the Monitor a little of what he ought to hear. In any case, sooner or later she'd have to face him. And the question of what to do about him. And the question of her responsibility for his being there.

Before the evening meal the next day, she went to the big cave where they had put him. A couple of minule handlers were gambling, tossing marked sticks, by lantern light. On the inner wall of the cave, a pure black concave curve ten meters high, the figure of the Tree had been incised by the dwellers here in centuries past: the single trunk, the two branches, the five lobes of foliage. Gold leaf still glittered in the lines of the drawing, and bits of crystal, jet, and moonstone winked among the carved leaves. Her eyes were well used to darkness now. The glow of a small electric light in a tent close under the back wall seemed as bright as sunlight.

"The Dovzan?" she asked the gamblers. One nodded with his chin toward the lighted tent.

The door flap was closed. She stood outside a while and finally said, "Monitor?"

The flap opened. She looked in cautiously. The small interior of the tent was warm and bright. They had fixed the injured man a bed pad with a slanted back support so he need not lie entirely flat. The cord of the door flap, a hand-crank-powered electric lamp, a tiny oil heater, a bottle of water, and a small noter lay within his reach.

He had been terribly bruised in the crash, and the bruising was still livid: blue-black-green all down the right side of his face, the right eye swollen half shut, both arms spotted with great brown-blue marks. Two fingers of his left hand were lightly splinted. But Sutty's eyes were on the little device, the noter.

She entered the tent on her knees, and kneeling in the narrow clear space, picked up the device and studied it.

"It doesn't transmit," the man said.

"So you say," Sutty said, beginning to play with it, to run it through its paces. After a while she said, ironically, "Apologies for going through your private files, Monitor. I'm not interested in them. But I have to test this things capacities."

He said nothing.

The device was a recorder notebook, rather flashily designed but with several serious design flaws, like so much Akan technology—undigested techshit, she thought. It had no sending or receiving functions. She set it back down where he could reach it.

That alarm relieved, she was aware of her embarrassment and intense discomfort at being shut in this small space with this man. She wanted nothing but distance from him. The only way to make it was with words.

"What were you trying to do?"

"Follow you."

"Your government had ordered you not to."

After a pause he said, "I could not accept that."

"So the cog is wiser than the wheel?"

He said nothing. He had not moved at all since opening the door flap. The rigidity of his body probably signified pain. She observed it with no feeling.

"If you hadn't crashed, what would you have done? Flown back to Dovza and reported—what? Some cave mouths?"

He said nothing.

"What do you know about this place?"

As she asked the question, she realised that he had seen nothing of it but this one cave, a few hostlers, a few maz. He need never learn what it was. They could blindfold him—probably no need even for that: just get him out, get him away as soon as he could be moved. He had seen nothing but a travelers' resting place. He had nothing to report.

"This is the Lap of Silong," he said. "The last Library."

"What makes you think that?" she said, made angry by disappointment.

"This is where you were coming. The Office of Ethical Purity has been looking for it for a long time. The place where they hide the books. This is it."

"Who are 'they,' Monitor?"

"The enemies of the state."

"O Ram!" she said. She sat back, as far from him as she could get, and hugged her knees. She spoke slowly, stopping after each sentence. "You people have learned everything we did wrong, and nothing we did right. I wish we'd never come to Aka. But since in our own stupid intellectual hubris we did so, we should either have refused you the information you demanded, or taught you Terran history. But of course you wouldn't have listened. You don't believe in history. You threw out your own history like garbage."

"It was garbage."

His brown skin was greyish where it wasn't black-and-blue. His voice was hoarse and dogged. The man is hurt and helpless, she thought with neither sympathy nor shame.

"I know who you are," she said. "You're my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn't get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it?"

"They sent you to the mountains," he said. He had been looking straight forward, but he turned his head stiffly now to meet her eyes. "To a place where you would meet the maz. I did not wish any harm to you, yoz."

After a moment she said, "Yoz!"

He had looked away again. She watched his swollen, unreadable face.

He reached out his good hand and began to pump the hand crank of his lamp up and down. The little square bulb inside it immediately brightened. For the hundredth time in a corner of her mind Sutty wondered why the Akans made their lightbulbs square. But the rest of her mind was full of shadows, anger, hate, contempt.

"Did your people let me go to Okzat-Ozkat as a decoy? A tool of your official ideologues? Were they hoping I'd lead them here?"

"I thought so," he said after a pause.

"But you told me to keep away from the maz!"

"I thought they were dangerous."

"To whom?"

"To ... the Ekumen. And my government." He used the old word, and corrected it: "The Corporation."

"You don't make sense, Monitor."

He had stopped cranking the lamp. He looked straight ahead again.

"The pilot said, 'There they are,' and we came up alongside the path," he said. "And he shouted, and I saw your group on the path. And smoke, behind you, smoke coming out of the rocks. But we were being thrown sideways, into the mountain. Into the rocks. The helicopter was thrown. Pushed."

He held his injured left hand with his right hand, stiffly. He was controlling his shivering.

"Catabatic winds, yoz," Sutty said after a while, softly. "And very high altitude for a helicopter."

He nodded. He had told himself the same thing. Many times, no doubt.

"They hold this place sacred," she said.

Where did that word come from? Not a word she used. Why was she tormenting him? Wrong, wrong.

"Listen, Yara—that's your name?—don't let rotten-corpse superstition get hold of you. I don't think Mother Silong pays any attention to us at all."

He shook his head, mute. Maybe he had told himself that, too.

She did not know what else to say to him. After a long silence, he spoke.

"I deserve punishment," he said.

That shook her.

"Well, you got it," she said finally. "And you'll probably get more, one way or another. What are we going to do with you? That has to be decided. It's getting on into late summer. They're talking of leaving in a few weeks. So, until then you might as well take it easy. And get walking again. Because wherever you go from here, I don't think you'll be flying on the south wind."

He looked at her again. He was unmistakably frightened. By what she had said? By whatever guilt had made him say, "I deserve punishment"? Or merely because lying helpless among the enemy was a frightening job?

He gave his stiff, painful, single nod and said, "My knee will be healed soon."

As she went back through the caves, she thought that, grotesque as it seemed, there was something childlike about the man, something simple and pure. Then she said to herself, Simplistic, not simple, and what the hell does pure mean? Saintly, holy, all that stuff? (
Don't Mother-Teresa me, girl,
Uncle Hurree muttered in her mind.) He was simpleminded, with his 'enemy of the state' jargon. And single-minded. A fanatic, as Odiedin had said. In fact, a terrorist. Pure and simple.

Talking with him had soured her. She wished she had not done it, had not seen him. Anxiety and frustration made her impatient with her friends.

Kieri, with whom she still shared the tent, though not lately the sleeping bag, was cheerful and affectionate, but her self-confidence was impervious. Kieri knew all she wanted to know. All she wanted of the Telling was stories and superstitions. She had no interest in learning from the maz here and never went into the caves of books. She had come for the mere adventure.

Akidan, on the other hand, was in a state of hero worship fatally mixed with lust. The guide Shui had gone back to her village soon after they came to the caves, leaving Akidan in his tent alone, and he had immediately fallen in love with Maz Unroy Kigno. He stuck to her like a minule kid to its mother, gazed at her with worshiping eyes, memorised her every word. Unfortunately, the only people under the old system whose sexual life was strictly regulated were the maz. Lifelong monogamy was their rule, whether they were or were not with their partner. The maz Sutty had known, as far as she could see, lived by this rule. And Akidan, a gentle-natured young man, had no real intention of questioning or testing it. He was simply smitten, head over heels, a pitiful victim of hormone-driven hagiolatry.

Unroy was sorry for him but did not let him know it. She discouraged him harshly, challenging his self-discipline, his learning, his capacity to become a maz. When he made his infatuation too clear, she turned on him and quoted a well-known tag from
The Arbor,
"The two that are one are not two, but the one that is two is one...." It seemed a fairly subtle reproof, but Akidan turned pale with shame and slunk away. He had been miserable ever since. Kieri talked with him a good deal and seemed inclined to comfort him. Sutty rather wished she would. She didn't want the seethe and sway of adolescent emotions; she wanted adult counsel, mature certainty. She felt that she must go forward and was at a dead end; must decide and did not know what was to be decided.

The Lap of Silong was wholly cut off from the rest of the world. No radios or any kind of communicators were ever brought there, lest signals be traced. News could come only up the northeastern paths or along the long, difficult way Sutty's party had come from the southeast. This late in the summer, it was most unlikely that anyone else would arrive; indeed, as she had told the Monitor, the people here were already talking of leaving.

She listened to them discuss their plans. It was their custom to depart a few at a time and take different ways where the paths diverged. As soon as they could do so, they would join with the small caravans of summer-village people going down to the foothills. Thus the pilgrimage, the way to the caves, had been kept invisible for forty years.

It was already too late, Odiedin told her, to go back the way their group had come, on the southeast trail. The guides from the deep village had left for home promptly, and even so expected to meet storm and snow on Zubuam. The rest of them would have to go down into Amareza, the hill region northeast of Silong, and work their way around the end of the Headwaters Range and back up through the foothills to Okzat-Ozkat. On foot it would take a couple of months. Odiedin thought they could get lifts on trucks through the hill country, though they would have to split up into pairs to do so.

It all sounded frightening and improbable to Sutty. To follow her guides up into the mountains, to follow a hidden way through the clouds to a secret, sacred place, was one thing; to wander like a beggar, to hitchhike, anonymous and unprotected, in the vast countrysides of an alien world, was another thing altogether. She trusted Odiedin, yes, but she wanted very badly to get in touch with Tong Ov.

And what were they going to do with the Monitor? Let him loose to run and blab to the bureaus and the ministries about the last great cache of banned books? He might be in terminal disgrace, but before his bosses sent him off to the salt mines, they'd hear what he had to report.