Ursula Le Guin: The Telling

Tong looked round at her, unappalled. He said, "I don’t wonder that you feel that what you’ve been trying to do can’t be done. But I needed your opinion. So it was worth it to me. But tiresome for you. A change is in order." There was a gleam in his dark eyes. "What do you say to going up the river?"

"The river?"

"It’s how they say ’into the backwoods,’ isn’t it? But in fact I meant the Ereha."

When he said the name, she remembered that a big river ran through the capital, partly paved over and so hidden by buildings and embankments that she couldn’t remember ever having seen it except on maps.

"You mean go outside Dovza City?"

"Yes," Tong said. "Outside the city! And not on a guided tour! For the first time in fifty years!" He beamed like a child revealing a hidden present, a beautiful surprise. "I’ve been here two years, and I’ve put in eighty-one requests for permission to send a staff member to live or stay somewhere outside Dovza City or Kangnegne or

Ert. Politely evaded, eighty times, with offers of yet another guided tour of the space-program facilities or the beauty of spring in the Eastern Isles. I put in such requests by habit, by rote. And suddenly one is granted! Yes! A member of your staff is authorised to spend a month in Okzat-Ozkat.’ Or is it Ozkat-Okzat? It’s a small city, in the foothills, up the river. The Ereha rises in the High Headwaters Range, about fifteen hundred kilos inland. I asked for that area, Rangma, never expecting to get it, and I got it!" He beamed.

"Why there?"

"I heard about some people there who sound interesting."

"An ethnic fragment population?" she asked, hopeful. Early in her stay, when she first met Tong Ov and the other two Observers presently in Dovza City, they had all discussed the massive monoculturalism of modern Aka in its large cities, the only places the very few offworlders permitted on the planet were allowed to live. They were all convinced that Akan society must have diversities and regional variations and frustrated that they had no way to find out.

"Sectarians, I suspect, rather than ethnic. A cult. Possibly remnants in hiding of a banned religion."

"Ah," she said, trying to preserve her expression of interest.

Tong was still searching his files. "I’m looking for the little I’ve gathered on the subject. Sociocultural Bureau reports on surviving criminal antiscientific cult activities. And also a few rumors and tales. Secret rites, walking on the wind, miraculous cares ,predictions of the future. The usual."

To fall heir to a history of three million years was to find little in human behavior or invention that could be called unusual. Though the Hainish bore it lightly, it was a burden on their various descendants to know that they would have a hard time finding a new thing, even an imaginary new thing, under any sun.

Sutty said nothing.

"In the material the First Observers here sent to Terra," Tong pursued, "did anything concerning religions get through?"

"Well, since nothing but the language report came through undamaged, information about anything was pretty much only what we could infer from vocabulary."

"All that information from the only people ever allowed to study Aka freely-lost in a glitch," said Tong, sitting back and letting a search complete itself in his files. "What terrible luck! Or was it a glitch?"

Like all Chiffewarians, Tong was quite hairless — a chihuahua, in the slang of Valparaiso. To minimize his outlandishness here, where baldness was very uncommon, he wore a hat; but since the Akans seldom wore hats, he looked perhaps more alien with it than without it. He was a gentle-mannered man, informal, straightforward, putting Sutty as much at her ease as she was capable of being; yet he was so uninvasive as to be, finally, aloof. Himself uninvadable, he offered no intimacy. She was grateful that he accepted her distance. Up to now, he had kept his. But she felt his question as disingenuous. He knew, surely, that the loss of the transmission had been no accident. Why should she have to explain it? She had made it clear that she was traveling without luggage, just as Observers and Mobiles who’d been in space for centuries did. She was not answerable for the place she had left sixty light-years behind her. She was not responsible for Terra and its holy terrorism.

But the silence went on, and she said at last, "The Beijing ansible was sabotaged."

"Sabotaged?"

She nodded.

"By the Unists?"

"Toward the end of the regime there were attacks on most of the Ekumenical installations and the treaty areas. The Pales."

"Were many of them destroyed?"

He was trying to draw her out. To get her to talk about it. Anger flooded into her, rage. Her throat felt tight. She said nothing, because she was unable to say anything.

A considerable pause. "Nothing but the language got through, then," Tong said.

"Almost nothing."

"Terrible luck!" he repeated energetically. "That the First Observers were Terran, so they sent their report to Terra instead of Hain — not unnaturally, but still, bad luck. And even worse, maybe, that ansible transmissions sent from Terra all got through. All the technical information the Akans asked for and Terra sent, without any question or restriction…Why, why would the First Observers have agreed to such a massive cultural intervention?"

"Maybe they didn’t. Maybe the Unists sent it."

"Why would the Unists start Aka marching to the stars?"

She shrugged. "Proselytising."

"You mean, persuading others to believe what they believed? Was industrial technological progress incorporated as an element of the Unist religion?"

She kept herself from shrugging.

"So during that period when the Unists refused ansible contact with the Stabiles on Hain, they were … converting the Akans? Sutty, do you think they may have sent, what do you call them, missionaries, here?"

"I don’t know."

He was not probing her, not trapping her. Eagerly pursuing his own thoughts, he was only trying to get her, a Terran, to explain to him what the Terrans had done and why. But she would not and could not explain or speak for the Unists.

Picking up her refusal to speculate, he said, "Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Of course you were scarcely in the confidence of the Unist leaders! But I’ve just had an idea, you see— If they did send missionaries, and if they transgressed Akan codes in some way, you see? — that might explain the Limit Law." He meant the abrupt announcement, made fifty years ago and enforced ever since, that only four offworlders would be allowed on Aka at a time, and only in the cities. "And it could explain the banning of religion a few years later!" He was carried away by his theory. He beamed, and then asked her almost pleadingly, "You never heard of a second group sent here from Terra?"

"No."

He sighed, sat back. After a minute he dismissed his speculations with a little flip of his hand. "We’ve been here seventy years," he said, "and all we know is the vocabulary."

She relaxed. They were off Terra, back on Aka. She was safe. She spoke carefully, but with the fluency of relief. "In my last year in training, some facsimile artifacts were reconstituted from the damaged records. Pictures, a few fragments of books. But not enough to extrapolate any major cultural elements from. And since the Corporation State was in place when I arrived, I don’t know anything about what it replaced. I don’t even know when religion was outlawed here. About forty years ago?" She heard her voice: placating, false, forced. Wrong.

Tong nodded. "Thirty years after the first contact with the Ekumen. The Corporation put out the first decree declaring ’religious practice and teaching’ unlawful. Within a few years they were announcing appalling penalties… But what’s odd about it, what made me think the impetus might have come from offworld, is the word they use for religion."