Ursula Le Guin: The Telling

That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training School, to try to qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found them undismayed, not even surprised. "This seems a rather good world to get off of, at present," Mother said.

They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don’t they realise, if I qualify and get sent to one of the other worlds, they’ll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred, hundreds, round trips in space were seldom less, often more. Didn’t they care? It was only later that evening, when she was watching her father’s profile at table, full lips, hook nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it occurred to her that if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had thought about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had ever had. And made the best of it.

"Eat, Aunty," Mother said, but Aunty only patted her piece of naan with her little ant-antenna fingers and did not pick it up.

"Nobody could make good bread with such flour," she said, exonerating the baker.

"You were spoiled, living in the village," Mother teased her. "This is the best quality anybody can get in Canada. Best quality chopped straw and plaster dust."

"Yes, I was spoiled," Aunty said, smiling from a far country.

The older slogans were carved into facades of buildings: FORWARD TO THE FUTURE. PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Newer ones ran across the buildings in bands of dazzling electronic display: REACTIONARY THOUGHT IS THE DEFEATED ENEMY. When the displays malfunctioned, the messages became cryptic: OD IS ON. The newest ones hovered in holopro above the streets: PURE SCIENCE DESTROYS CORRUPTION. UPWARD ONWARD FORWARD. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multivoiced, crowding the air. "Onward, onward to the stars!" an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where Sutty’s robocab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. "Superstition is a rotting corpse," the sound system said in a rich, attractive male voice. "Superstitious practices defile youthful minds. It is the responsibility of every citizen, whether adult or student, to report reactionary teachings and to bring teachers who permit sedition or introduce irrationality and superstition in their classroom to the attention of the authorities. In the light of Pure Science we know that the ardent cooperation of all the people is the first requisite of—" Sutty turned the sound down as far as it would go. The choir burst forth, "To the stars! To the stars!" and the robocab jerked forward about half its length. Two more jerks and it might get through the intersection at the next flowchange.

Sutty felt in her jacket pockets for an akagest, but she’d eaten them all. Her stomach hurt. Bad food, she’d eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments, stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake every other population in FF-tech mode had ever made. Wrong.

Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice. Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn’t her world.

But she was on it, in it, how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she’d come to observe.

The fact was, she was not suited to be an Observer here. In other words, she had failed on her first assignment. She knew that the Envoy had summoned her to tell her so.

She was already nearly late for the appointment. The robocab made another jerk forward, and its sound system came up loud for one of the Corporation announcements that overrode low settings. There was no off button. "An announcement from the Bureau of Astronautics!" said a woman’s vibrant, energy-charged, self-confident voice, and Sutty put her hands over her ears and shouted, "Shut up!"

"Doors of vehicle are closed," the robocab said in the flat mechanical voice assigned to mechanisms responding to verbal orders. Sutty saw that this was funny, but she couldn’t laugh. The announcement went on and on while the shrill voices in the air sang, "Ever higher, ever greater, marching to the stars!"

The Ekumenical Envoy, a doe-eyed Chiffewarian named Tong Ov, was even later than she for their appointment, having been delayed at the exit of his apartment house by a malfunction of the ZIL-screening system, which he laughed about. "And the system here has mislaid the microrec I wanted to give you," he said, going through files in his office. "I coded it, because of course they go through my files, and my code confused the system. But I know it’s in here… So, meanwhile, tell me how things have been going."

"Well," Sutty said, and paused. She had been speaking and thinking in Dovzan for months. She had to go through her own files for a moment: Hindi no, English no, Hainish yes. "You asked me to prepare a report on contemporary language and literature. But the social changes that took place here while I was in transit… Well, since it’s against the law, now, to speak or study any language but Dovzan and Hainish, I can’t work on the other languages. If they still exist. As for Dovzan, the First Observers did a pretty thorough linguistic survey. I can only add details and vocabulary."

"What about literature?" Tong asked.

"Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don’t know what it is, because the Ministry doesn’t allow access to it. So all I was able to work on is modern aural literature. All written to Corporation specifications. It tends to be very-to be standardised."

She looked at Tong Ov to see if her whining bored him, but though still looking for the mislaid file, he seemed to be listening with lively interest. He said, "All aural, is it?"

"Except for the Corporation manuals hardly anything’s printed, except printouts for the deaf, and primers to accompany sound texts for early learners… The campaign against the old ideographic forms seems to have been very intense. Maybe it made people afraid to write — made them distrust writing in general. Anyway, all I’ve been able to get hold of by way of literature is sound tapes and neareals. Issued by the World Ministry of Information and the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art. Most of the works are actually information or educational material rather than, well, literature or poetry as I understand the terms. Though a lot of the neareals are dramatisations of practical or ethical problems and solutions…" She was trying so hard to speak factually, unjudgmentally, without prejudice, that her voice was totally toneless.

"Sounds dull," said Tong, still flitting through files.

"Well, I’m, I think I’m insensitive to this aesthetic. It is so deeply and, and, and flatly political. Of course every art is political. But when it’s all didactic, all in the service of a belief system, I resent, I mean, I resist it. But I try not to. Maybe, since they’ve essentially erased their history— Of course there was no way of knowing they were on the brink of a cultural revolution, at the time I was sent here— But anyhow, for this particular Observer-ship, maybe a Terran was a bad choice. Given that we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied their past."

She stopped short, appalled at everything she had said.