Ursula Le Guin: The Telling

"I shouldn’t have been sent here."

"Why do you say that?"

"I trained as a linguist and in literature. Aka has one language left and no literature. I wanted to be a historian. How can I, on a world that’s destroyed its history?"

"It’s not easy," Tong said feelingly. He got up to check the file recorder. He said, "Please tell me, Sutty, is the institutionalised homophobia very difficult for you?"

"I grew up with it."

"Under the Unists."

"Not only the Unists."

"I see," Tong said. Still standing, he spoke carefully, looking at her; she looked down. "I know that you lived through a great religious upheaval. And I think of Terra as a world whose history has been shaped by religions. So I see you as the best fitted of us to investigate the vestiges, if they exist, of this world’s religion. Ki Ala has no experience of religion, you see, and Garru has no detachment from it." He stopped again. She made no response. "Your experience," he said, "may have been of a kind that would make detachment difficult for you. To have lived all your life under theocratic repression, and the turmoil and violence of the last years of Unism…"

She had to speak. She said coldly, "I believe my training will allow me to observe another culture without excessive prejudice."

"Your training and your own temperament: yes. I believe so too. But the pressures of an aggressive theocracy, the great weight of it all through your life, may well have left you a residue of distrust, of resistance. If I’m asking you — again! — to observe something you detest, please tell me that."

After a few seconds which seemed long to her she said, "I ’ really am no good at all with music."

"I think the music is a small element of something very large," said Tong, doe-eyed, implacable.

"I see no problem, then," she said. She felt cold, false, defeated. Her throat ached.

Tong waited a little for her to say more, and then accepted her word. He picked up the microcrystal record and gave it to her. She took it automatically.

"Read this and listen to the music here in the library, please, and then erase it," he said. "Erasure is an art we must learn from the Akans. Seriously! I mean it. The Hainish want to hang on to everything. The Akans want to throw everything away. Maybe there’s a middle way? At any rate, we have our first chance to get into an area where maybe history wasn’t erased so thoroughly."

"I don’t know if I’ll know what I’m seeing when I see it. Ki Ala’s been here ten years. You’ve had experience on four other worlds." She had told him there was no problem. She had said she could do what he asked. Now she heard herself still trying to whine her way out of it. Wrong. Shameful.

"I’ve never lived through a great social revolution," Tong said. "Nor has Ki Ala. We’re children of peace, Sutty. I need a child of conflict. Anyhow, Ki Ala is illiterate. I am illiterate. You can read."

"Dead languages in a banned script."

Tong looked at her again for a minute in silence, with an intellectual, impersonal, real tenderness. "I believe you tend to undervalue your capacities, Sutty," he said. "The Stabiles chose you to be one of the four representatives of the Ekumen on Aka. I need you to accept the fact that your experience and your knowledge are essential to me, to our work here. Please consider that."

He waited until she said, "I will."

"Before you go up to the mountains, if you do, I also want you to consider the risks. Or rather to consider the fact that we don’t know what the risks may be. The Akans seem not to be a violent people; but that’s hard to judge from our insulated position. I don’t know why they’ve suddenly given us this permission. Surely they have some reason or motive, but we can find what it is only by taking advantage of it." He paused, his eyes still on her. "There’s no mention of your being accompanied, of having guides, watchdogs. You may be quite on your own. You may not. We don’t know. None of us knows what life is like outside the cities. Every difference or sameness, everything you see, everything you read, everything you record, will be important. I know already that you’re a sensitive and impartial observer. And if there’s any history left on Aka, you’re the member of my crew here best suited to find it. To go look for these ’stories,’ or the people who know them. So, please, listen to these songs, and then go home and think about it, and tell me your decision tomorrow. O.K.?"

He said the old Terran phrase stiffly, with some pride in the accomplishment. Sutty tried to smile. "O.K.," she said.

On the way home, in the monorail, she suddenly broke into tears. Nobody noticed. Crowded in the car, people tired from work and dulled by the long rocking ride all sat watching the holopro above the aisle: children doing gymnastics, hundreds of tiny children in red uniforms kicking and jumping in unison to shrill cheery music in the air.

On the long climb up the stairs to her apartment she wept again. There was no reason to cry. There had to be a reason. She must be sick. The misery she felt was fear, a wretched panic of fear. Dread. Terror. It was crazy to send her off on her own. Tong was crazy to think of it. She could never handle it. She sat down at her workdesk to send him a formal request for return to Terra. The Hainish words would not come. They were all wrong.

Her head ached. She got up to find something to eat. There was nothing in her foodstorage, nothing at all. When had she eaten last? Not at midday. Not in the morning. Not last night.

"What’s wrong with me?" she said to the air. No wonder her stomach hurt. No wonder she had fits of weeping and panic. She had never in her life forgotten to eat. Even in that time, the time after, when she went back to Chile, even then she had cooked food and eaten it, forcing food salty with tears down her throat day after day after day.

"I won’t do this," she said. She didn’t know what she meant. She refused to go on crying.

She walked back down the stairs, flashed her ZIL at the exit, walked ten blocks to the nearest Corp-Star foodshop, flashed her ZIL at the entrance. All the foods were packaged, processed, frozen, convenient; nothing fresh, nothing to cook. The sight of the wrapped rows made her tears break out again. Furious and humiliated, she bought a hot stuffed roll at the Eat Quick counter. The man serving was too busy to look at her face.

She stood outside the shop on the street, turned away from people passing by, and crammed the food into her mouth, salty with tears, forced herself to swallow, just like back then, back there. Back then she had known she had to live. It was her job. To live life after joy. Leave love and death behind her. Go on. Go alone and work. And now she was going to ask to get sent back to Earth? Back to death?

She chewed and swallowed. Music and slogans blared in broken bursts from passing vehicles. The light at a crossing four blocks away had failed, and robocab horns outblared the music. People on foot, the producer-consumers of the Corporation State, in uniforms of rust, tan, blue, green, or in Corporation-made standard trousers, tunics, jackets, all wearing canvas StarMarch shoes, came crowding past, coming up from the underground garages, hurrying toward one apartment house or another.

Sutty chewed and swallowed the last tough, sweet-salt lump of food. She would not go back. She would go on. Go alone and work. She went back to her apartment house, flashed her ZIL at the entrance, and climbed the eight flights of stairs. She had been given a big, flashy, top-floor apartment because it was considered suitable for an honored guest of the Corporation State. The elevator had not been working for a month.

She nearly missed the boat. The robocab got lost trying to find the river. It took her to the Aquarium, then to the Bureau of Water Resources and Processing, then to the Aquarium again. She had to override it and reprogram it three times. As she scurried across the wharf, the crew of Ereha River Ferry Eight was just pulling in the gangway. She shouted, they shoved the gangway back down, she scrambled aboard. She tossed her bags into her tiny cabin and came out on deck to watch the city go by.