The Telling (24 page)

"See where he went," Odiedin said.

She looked down from the light to where he pointed. Snow lay ankle deep on the floor of the cirque. From the arch where they stood, boot tracks led straight out to the edge and back, tracks of three or four people, she thought.

"Not the tracks," Odiedin said. "Those are ours. He was on hands and knees. He couldn't walk. I don't know how he could crawl on that knee. It's a long way."

She saw, now, the marks in the snow, heavy, dragging furrows. All the boot tracks kept to the left of them.

"Nobody heard him. Sometime after midnight, he must have crept out."

Looking down, quite close to the arch, where the snow was thin on the black rock, she saw a blurred handprint.

"Out there at the edge," Odiedin said, "he stood up. So that he could leap."

Sutty made a little noise. She sank down squatting, rocking her body a little. No tears came, but her throat was tight, she could not breathe.

"Penan Teran," she said. Odiedin did not understand her. "Onto the wind," she said.

"He didn't have to do this." Odiedin's voice was fierce, desolate. "It was wrong."

"He thought it was right," Sutty said.

THE CORPORATION AIRPLANE
that flew her from Soboy in Amareza to Dovza City gained altitude over the eastern Headwaters Range. Looking out the small window, due west, she saw a great, rough, rocky, bulky mountain: Zubuam. And then, soaring up behind it, the whiteness of the barrier wall, hiding somewhere in its luminous immensity the cirque and the caves of being. Above the serrate rim of the barrier, level with her eye, the horn of Silong soared white-gold against blue. She saw it whole, entire, this one time. The thin, eternal banner blew northward from the summit.

The trek south had been hard, two long weeks, on a good path but with bad weather along much of the way; and she had had no rest in Soboy. The Corporation had their police watching every road out of the Headwaters Range. Officials, very polite, very tense, had met her party just inside the city. "The Observer is to be flown at once to the capital."

She had demanded to speak to the Envoy by telephone, and they had put the call through for her at the airfield. "Come along, as soon as you can," Tong Ov said. "There's been much alarm. We all rejoice at your safe return. Akan and alien alike. Though especially this alien."

She said, "I have to make sure my friends are all right."

"Bring them with you," Tong said.

So Odiedin and the two guides from the village in the foothills west of Okzat-Ozkat were sitting together in the three seats behind hers. What Long and Ieyu made of it all she had no idea. Odiedin had explained or reassured them a little, and they had climbed aboard quite impassively. All four of them were tired, muzzy-headed, worn out.

The plane turned eastward. When she next looked down, she saw the yellow of snowless foothills, the silver thread of a river. The Ereha. Daughter of the Mountain. They followed the silver thread as it broadened and dulled to grey all the way down to Dovza City.

***

"The base culture, under the Dovzan overlay, is not vertical, not militant, not aggressive, and not progressive," Sutty said. "It's level, mercantile, discursive, and homeostatic. In crisis I think they fall back on it. I think we can bargain with them."

Napoleon Buonaparte called the English a nation of shopkeepers,
Uncle Hurree said in her mind.
Maybe not altogether a bad thing?

Too much was in her mind. Too much to tell Tong; too much to hear from him. They had had little over an hour to talk, and the Executives and Ministers were due to arrive any minute.

"Bargain?" asked the Envoy. They were speaking in Dovzan, since Odiedin was present.

"They owe us," Sutty said.

"Owe us?"

Chiffewar was neither a militant nor a mercantile culture. There were concepts that Chiffewarians, for all their breadth and subtlety of mind, had trouble understanding.

"You'll have to trust me," Sutty said.

"I do," said the Envoy. "But please explain, however cryptically, what this bargain is."

"Well, if you agree that we should try to preserve the Library at Silong...

"Yes, of course, in principle. But if it involves interference with Akan policy—"

"We've been interfering with Aka for seventy years."

"But how could we arbitrarily refuse them information—since we couldn't undo that first tremendous gift of technological specifics?"

"I think the point is that it wasn't a gift. There was a price on it: spiritual conversion."

"The missionaries," Tong said, nodding. Earlier in their hurried talk, he had shown the normal human pleasure at having his guess confirmed.

Odiedin listened, grave and intent.

"The Akans saw that as usury. They refused to pay it. Ever since then, we've actually given them more information than they asked for."

"Trying to show them that there are less exploitive modes—yes."

"The point is that we've always given it freely, offered it to them."

"Of course," Tong said.

"But Akans pay for value received. In cash, on the spot. As they see it, they didn't pay for all the blueprints for the March to the Stars, or anything since. They've been waiting for decades for us to tell them what they owe us. Till we do, they'll distrust us."

Tong removed his hat, rubbed his brown, satiny head, and replaced the hat a little lower over his eyes. "So we ask them for information in return?"

"Exactly. We've given them a treasure. They have a treasure we want. Tit for tat, as we say in English."

"But to them it's not a treasure. It's sedition and a pile of rotten-corpse superstition. No?"

"Well, yes and no. I think they know it's a treasure. If they didn't, would they bother blowing it up?"

"Then we don't have to persuade them that the Library of Silong is valuable?"

"Well, we do want them to be aware that it's worth fully as much as any information we gave them. And that its value depends on our having free access to it. Just as they have free access to all the information we give them."

"Tat for tit," Tong said, absorbing the concept if not quite the phrase.

"And another thing—very important—That it's not just the books in the Lap of Silong that we're talking about, but all the books, everywhere, and all the people who read the books. The whole system. The Telling. They'll have to decriminalise it."

"Sutty, they're not going to agree to that."

"Eventually they must. We have to try." She looked at Odiedin, who was sitting erect and alert beside her at the long table. "Am I right, maz?"

"Maybe not everything all at once, yoz Sutty," Odiedin said. "One thing at a time. So there's more to keep bargaining with. And for."

"A few gold coins, for some of the bean meal?"

It took Odiedin a while. "Something like that," he said at last, rather dubiously.

"Bean meal?" the Envoy inquired, looking from one to the other.

"It's a story we'll have to tell you," Sutty said.

But the first Executives were coming into the conference room. Two men and two women, all in blue and tan. There were, of course, no formalities of greeting, no servile addresses; but there had to be introductions. Sutty looked into each face as the names were named. Bureaucrat faces. Government faces. Self-assured, smooth, solid. Closed. Endlessly repeatable variations on the Monitor's face. But it was not the Monitor's, it was Yara's face that she held in her mind as the bargaining began.

His life, that was what underwrote her bargaining. His life, Pao's life. Those were the intangible, incalculable stakes. The money burned to ashes, the gold thrown away. Footsteps on the air.