Ursula Le Guin: The Telling

"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.

[THE END]