Ursula Le Guin: The Telling

He didn’t. "Business," he said. Vizdiat, the ultimate Akan justification, the inarguable aim, the bottom line. "There are pockets of cultural fossilisation and recalcitrant reactionary activity in this area. I hope you have no intention of traveling out of town into the high country. Where education has not yet reached, the natives are brutal and dangerous. In so far as I have jurisdiction in this area, I must ask you to remain in touch with my office at all times, to report any evidence of illegal practices, and to inform us if you plan to travel."

"I appreciate your concern and shall endeavor to comply with your request," Sutty said, straight out of Advanced Exercises in Dovzan Usage and Locutions for Barbarians.

The Monitor nodded once, his eyes on the slowly passing, slowly darkening shore. When she looked again where he had stood he was gone.

The wonderful voyage of a ship climbing a river through a desert ended on the tenth day at Okzat-Ozkat. On the map the town had been a dot at the edge of an endless tangle of isobars, the High Headwaters Range. In the late evening it was a blur of whitish walls in the clear, cold darkness, dim horizontal windows set high, smells of dust and dung and rotten fruit and a dry sweetness of mountain air, a singsong of voices, the clatter of shod feet on stone. Scarcely any wheeled traffic. A gleam of rusty light shone on some kind of high, pale, distant wall, faintly visible above ornate roofs, against the last greenish clarity of the western sky.

Corporation announcements and music blared across the wharfs. That noise after ten days of quiet voices and river silence drove Sutty straight away.

No tour guide was waiting for her. Nobody followed her. Nobody asked her to show her ZIL.

Still in the passive trance of the journey, curious, nervous, alert, she wandered through the streets near the river till her shoulder bag began to drag her down and she felt the knife edge of the wind. In a dark, small street that ran uphill she stopped at a doorway. The house door was open, and a woman sat in a chair in the yellow light from within the house as if enjoying a balmy summer evening.

"Can you tell me where I might find an inn?"

"Here," the woman said. She was crippled, Sutty saw now, with legs like sticks. "Ki!" she called.

A boy of fifteen or so appeared. Wordlessly he invited Sutty into the house. He showed her to a high-ceilinged, big, dark room on the ground floor, furnished with a rug. It was a magnificent rug, crimson eberdin wool with severe, complex, concentric patterns in black and white. The only other thing in the room was the light fixture, a peculiar, squarish bulb, quite dim, fixed between two high-set, horizontal windows. Its cord came snaking in one of the windows.

"Is there a bed?"

The boy gestured shyly to a curtain in the shadows of the far corner.

"Bath?"

He ducked his head toward a door. Sutty went and opened it. Three tiled steps went down to a little tiled room in which were various strange but interpretable devices of wood, metal, and ceramic, shining in the warm glow of an electric heater.

"It looks very nice," she said. "How much is it?"

"Eleven haha," the boy murmured.

"The night?"

"For a week." The Akan week was ten days.

"Oh, that’s very nice," Sutty said. "Thank you."

Wrong. She should not have thanked him. Thanks were "servile address." Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you’re welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy — all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers. She had learned that lesson, in those terms, almost as soon as she arrived. She had trained herself quite out of any such bad habits acquired on Earth. What had made the uncouth thanks jump now from her mouth?

The boy only murmured something which she had to ask him to repeat: an offer of dinner. She accepted without thanks.

In half an hour he brought a low table into her room, set with a figured cloth and dishes of dark-red porcelain. She had found cushions and a fat bedroll behind the curtain; had hung up her clothes on the bar and pegs also behind the curtain; had set her books and notebooks on the polished floor under the single light; and now sat on the carpet doing nothing. She liked the extraordinary sense of room in this room — space, height, stillness.

The boy served her a dinner of roast poultry, roast vegetables, a white grain that tasted like corn, and lukewarm, aromatic tea. She sat on the silky rug and ate it all. The boy looked in silently a couple of times to see if she needed anything.

"Tell me the name of this cereal, please." No. Wrong. "But first, tell me your name."

"Akidan," he whispered. "That’s tuzi."

"It’s very good. I never ate it before. Does it grow here?" Akidan nodded. He had a strong, sweet face, still childish, but the man visible. "It’s good for the wood," he murmured. Sutty nodded sagely. "And delicious."

"Thank you, yoz." Yoz: a term defined by the Corporation as servile address and banned for the last fifty years at least. It meant, more or less, fellow person. Sutty had never heard the word spoken except on the tapes from which she had learned Akan languages back on Earth. And ’good for the wood,’ was that an evil fossil of some kind too? She might find out tomorrow. Tonight she’d have a bath, unroll her bed, and sleep in the dark, blessed silence of this high place.

A gentle knock, presumably by Akidan, guided her to breakfast waiting on the tray-table outside her door. There was a big piece of cut and seeded fruit, bits of something yellow and pungent in a saucer, a crumbly greyish cake, and a handleless mug of lukewarm tea, this time faintly bitter, with a taste she disliked at first but found increasingly satisfying. The fruit and bread were fresh and delicate. She left the yellow pickled bits. When the boy came to remove the tray, she asked the name of everything, for this food was entirely different from anything she had eaten in the capital, and it had been presented with significant care. The pickled thing was abid, Akidan said. "It’s for the early morning," he said, "to help the sweet fruit."

"So I should eat it?"

He smiled, embarrassed. "It helps to balance."

"I see. I’ll eat it, then." She ate it. Akidan seemed pleased. "I come from very far away, Akidan," she said.

"Dovza City."

"Farther. Another world. Terra of the Ekumen."

“Ah."

"So I’m ignorant about how to live here. I’d like to ask you lots of questions. Is that all right?"

He gave a little shrug-nod, very adolescent. Shy as he was, he was self-possessed. Whatever it meant to him, he accepted with aplomb the fact that an Observer of the Ekumen, an alien whom he could have expected to see only as an electronic image sent from the capital, was living in his house. Not a trace of the xenophobia she had diagnosed in the disagreeable man on the boat.

Akidan’s aunt, the crippled woman, who looked as if she was in constant low-level pain, spoke little and did not smile, but had the same tranquil, acceptant manner. Sutty arranged with her to stay two weeks, possibly longer. She had wondered if she was the only guest at the inn; now, finding her way about the house, she saw there was only one guest room.

In the city, at every hotel and apartment house, restaurant, shop, store, office, or bureau, every entrance and exit ran an automatic check of your personal ID chip, the all-important ZIL, the warranty of your existence as a producer-consumer entered in the data banks of the Corporation. Her ZIL had been issued her during the lengthy formalities of entrance at the spaceport. Without it, she had been warned, she had no identity on Aka. She could not hire a room or a robocab, buy food at a market or in a restaurant, or enter any public building without setting off an alarm.