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.
Most Akans had their chip embedded in the left wrist. She had taken the option of wearing hers in a fitted bracelet. Speaking with Akidan’s aunt in the little front office, she found herself looking around for the ZIL scanner, holding her left arm ready to make the universal gesture. But the woman pivoted her chair to a massive desk with dozens of small drawers in it. After quite a few tranquil mistakes and pauses to ponder, she found the drawer she wanted and extracted a dusty booklet of forms, one of which she tore off. She pivoted the chair back round and handed the form to Sutty to fill out by hand. It was so old that the paper was crumbly, but it did have a space for the ZIL code.
"Please, yoz, tell me how to address you," Sutty said, another sentence from the Advanced Exercises.
"My name is Iziezi. Please tell me how to address you, yoz and deyberienduin."
Welcome-my-roof-under. A nice word. "My name is Sutty, yoz and kind innkeeper." Invented for the occasion, but it seemed to serve the purpose. Iziezi’s thin, drawn face warmed faintly. When Sutty gave her the form back, she drew her clasped hands against her breastbone with a slight but very formal inclination of the head. A banned gesture if ever there was one. Sutty returned it.
As she left, Iziezi was putting the form book and the form Sutty had filled out into a desk drawer, not the same one. It looked as if the Corporation State was not going to know, for a few hours anyhow, exactly where individual /EX/HH 440 T 386733849 H 4/4939 was staying.
I’ve escaped the net, Sutty thought, and walked out into the sunshine.
Inside the house it was rather dim, all the horizontal windows being set very high up in the wall so that they showed nothing but fierce blue sky. Coming outdoors, she was dazzled. White house walls, glittering roof tiles, steep streets of dark slate flashing back the light. Above the roofs westward, as she began to be able to see again, she saw the highest of the white walls — immensely high — a wrinkled curtain of light halfway up the sky. She stood blinking, staring. Was it a cloud? A volcanic eruption? The Northern Lights in daytime?
"Mother," said a small, toothless, dirt-colored man with a three-wheeled barrow, grinning at her from the street.
Sutty blinked at him.
"Ereha’s mother," he said, and gestured at the wall of light. "Silong. Eh?"
Mount Silong. On the map, the highest point of the Headwaters Range and of the Great Continent of Aka. Yes. As they came up the river, the rise of the land had kept it hidden. Here you could see perhaps the upper half of it, a serrated radiance above which floated, still more remote, immense, ethereal, a horned peak half dissolved in golden light. From the summit streamed the thin snow-banners of eternal wind.
As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all knew what Silong looked like and therefore could help her see it. They said its name and called it Mother, pointing to the glitter of the river down at the foot of the street. One of them said, "You might go to Silong, yoz?"
They were small, thin people, with the padded cheeks and narrow eyes of hill dwellers, bad teeth, patched clothes, thin, fine hands and feet coarsened by cold and injury. They were about the same color of brown she was.
"Go there?" She looked at them all smiling and could not help smiling. "Why?"
"On Silong you live forever," said a gnarly woman with a backpack full of what looked like pumice rock.
"Caves," said a man with a yellowish, scarred face. "Caves full of being."
"Good sex!" said the barrow man, and everybody laughed. "Sex for three hundred years!"
"It’s too high," Sutty said, "how could anybody go there?"
They all grinned and said, "Fly!"
"Could a plane land on that?"
Cackles, headshakes. The gnarly woman said, "Nowhere," the yellow man said, "No planes," and the barrow man said, "After three-hundred-year sex, anybody can fly!" And then as they were all laughing they stopped, they wavered like shadows, they vanished, and nobody was there except the barrow man trundling his barrow halfway down the street, and Sutty staring at the Monitor.
On the ship she had not seen him as a big man, but here he loomed. His skin, his flesh, were different from that of the people here, smooth, tough, and even, like plastic. His blue-and-tan tunic and leggings were clean and smooth and like uniforms everywhere on every world, and he didn’t belong in Okzat-Ozkat any more than she did. He was an alien.
"Begging is illegal," he said.
"I wasn’t begging."
After a slight pause he said, "You misunderstand. Do not encourage beggars. They are parasites on the economy. Alms-giving is illegal."
"No one was begging."
He gave his short nod — all right then, consider yourself warned — and turned away.
"Thank you so much for your charm and courtesy!" Sutty said in her native language. Oh, wrong, wrong. She had no business being sarcastic in any language, even if the Monitor paid no attention. He was insufferable, but that did not excuse her. If she was to obtain any information here, she must stay in the good graces of local officialdom; if she was to learn anything here, she must not be judgmental. The old farfetchers’ motto: Opinion ends reception. Maybe those people had in fact been beggars, working her. How did she know? She knew nothing, nothing about this place, these people.
She set off to learn her way around Okzat-Ozkat with the humble determination not to have any opinions about it at all.
The modern buildings — prison, district and civic prefectures, agricultural, cultural, and mining agencies, teachers’ college, high school — looked like all such buildings in the other cities she’d seen: plain, massive blocks. Here they were only two or three stories high, but they loomed, the way the Monitor did. The rest of the city was small, subtle, dirty, fragile. Low house walls washed red or orange, horizontal windows set high under the eaves, roofs of red or olive-green tile with curlicues running up the angles and fantastic ceramic animals pulling up the corners in their toothy mouths; little shops, their outer and inner walls entirely covered with writing in the old ideographs, whitewashed over but showing through with a queer subliminal legibility. Steep slate-paved streets and steps leading up to locked doors painted red and blue and whitewashed over. Work yards where men made rope or cut stone. Narrow plots between houses where old women dug and hoed and weeded and changed the flow patterns of miniature irrigation systems. A few cars down by the docks and parked by the big white buildings, but the street traffic all on foot and by barrow and handcart. And, to Sutty’s delight, a caravan coming in from the country: big eberdin pulling two-wheeled carts with green-fringed tent tops, and two even bigger eberdin, the size of ponies, with bells tied in the creamy wool of their necks, each ridden by a woman in a long red coat sitting impassive in the high, horned saddle.
The caravan passed the facade of the District Prefecture, a tiny, jaunty, jingling scrap of the past creeping by under the blank gaze of the future. Inspirational music interspersed with exhortations blared from the roof of the Prefecture. Sutty followed the caravan for several blocks and watched it stop at the foot of one of the long flights of steps. People in the street also stopped, with that same amiable air of helping her watch, though they said nothing to her. People came out the high red and blue doors and down the steps to welcome the riders and carry in the luggage. A hotel? The owners’ townhouse?
She climbed back up to one of the shops she had passed in the higher part of town. If she had understood the signs around the door, the shop sold lotions, unguents, smells, and fertiliser. A purchase of hand cream might give her time to read some of the inscriptions that covered every wall from floor to ceiling, all in the old, the illegal writing. On the facade of the shop the inscriptions had been whitewashed out and painted over with signs in the modern alphabet, but these had faded enough that she could make out some of the underlying words. That was where she had made out "smells and fertiliser." Probably perfumes and — what? Fertility? Fertility drugs, maybe? She went in.
She was at once engulfed in the smells — powerful, sweet, sharp, strange. A dim, pungent air. She had the curious sensation that the pictographs and ideograms that covered the walls with bold black and dark-blue shapes were moving, not jumpily like half-seen print but evenly, regularly, expanding and shrinking very gently, as if they were breathing.
The room was high, lighted by the usual high-set windows, and lined with cabinets full of little drawers. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that a thin old man stood behind a counter to her left. Behind his head two characters stood out quite clearly on the wall. She read them automatically, various of their various meanings arriving more or less at once: eminent / peak / felt hat / look down / start up, and two / duality / sides / loins / join / separate.
"Yoz and deyberienduin, may I be of use to you?" She asked if he had an unguent or lotion for dry skin. The proprietor nodded pleasantly and began seeking among his thousand little drawers with an air of peaceful certainty of eventually finding what he wanted, like Iziezi at her desk.
This gave Sutty time to read the walls, but that distracting illusion of movement continued, and she could not make much sense of the writings. They seemed not to be advertisements as she had assumed, but recipes, or charms, or quotations. A lot about branches and roots. A character she knew as blood, but written with a different Elemental qualifier, which might make it mean lymph, or sap. Formulas like "the five from the three, the three from the five." Alchemy? Medicine, prescriptions, charms? All she knew was that these were old words, old rneanings, that for the first time she was reading Aka’s past. And it made no sense.
To judge by his expression, the proprietor had found a drawer he liked. He gazed into it for some while with a satisfied look before he took an unglazed clay jar out of it and put it down on the counter. Then he went back to seeking gently among the rows of unlabeled drawers until he found another one he approved of. He opened it and gazed into it and, after a while, took out a gold-paper box. With this he disappeared into an inner room. Presently he came back with the box, a small, brightly glazed pot, and a spoon. He set them all down on the counter in a row. He spooned out something from the unglazed pot into the glazed pot, wiped the spoon with a red cloth he took from under the counter, mixed two spoonfuls of a fine, talc-like powder from the gold box into the glazed pot, and began to stir the mixture with the same unhurried patience. "It will make the bark quite smooth," he said softly.
"The bark," Sutty repeated.
He smiled and, setting down the spoon, smoothed one hand over the back of the other.
"The body is like a tree?"
"Ah," he said, the way Akidan had said, "Ah." It was a sound of assent, but qualified. It was yes but not quite yes. Or yes but we don’t use that word. Or yes but we don’t need to talk about that. Yes with a loophole.
"In the dark cloud descending out of the sky… the forked… the twice-forked…?" Sutty said, trying to read a faded but magnificently written inscription high on the wall.
The proprietor slapped one hand loudly on the counter and the other over his mouth.
Sutty jumped.
They stared at each other. The old man lowered his hand. He seemed undisturbed, despite his startling reaction. He was perhaps smiling. "Not aloud, yoz," he murmured.
Sutty went on staring for a moment, then shut her mouth.
"Just old decorations," the proprietor said. "Old-fashioned wallpaper. Senseless dots and lines. Old-fashioned people live around here. They leave these old decorations around instead of painting walls clean and white. White and silent. Silence is snowfall. Now, yoz and honored customer, this ointment permits the skin to breathe mildly. Will you try it?"
She dipped a finger in the pot and spread the dab of pale cream on her hands. "Oh, very nice. And what a pleasant smell. What is it called?"
"The scent is the herb immimi, and the ointment is my secret, and the price is nothing."
Sutty had picked up the pot and was admiring it; it was surely an old piece, enamel on heavy glass, with an elegantly fitted cap, a little jewel. "Oh, no, no, no," she said, but the old man raised his clasped hands as Iziezi had done and bowed his head with such dignity that further protest was impossible. She repeated his gesture. Then she smiled and said, "Why?"
"… the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth," he said almost inaudibly.
After a moment she looked back up at the inscription and saw that it ended with the words he had spoken. Their eyes met again. Then he melted into the dim back part of the room and she was out on the street, blinking in the glare, clutching the gift.
Walking back down the steep, complicated streets to her inn, she pondered. It seemed that first the Mobile, then the Monitor, and now the Fertiliser, or whatever he was, had promptly and painlessly co-opted her, involving her in their intentions without telling her what they were. Go find the people who know the stories and report back to me, Tong said. Avoid dissident reactionaries and report back to me, said the Monitor. As for the Fertiliser, had he bribed her to be silent or rewarded her for speaking? The latter, she thought. But all she was certain of was that she was far too ignorant to do what she was doing without danger to herself or others.
The government of this world, to gain technological power and intellectual freedom, had outlawed the past. She did not underestimate the enmity of the Akan Corporation State toward the "old decorations" and what they meant. To this government who had declared they would be free of tradition, custom, and history, all old habits, ways, modes, manners, ideas, pieties were sources of pestilence, rotten corpses to be burned or buried. The writing that had preserved them was to be erased.
If the educational tapes and historical neareal dramas she had studied in the capital were factual, as she thought they were at least in part, within the lifetime of people now living, men and women had been crushed under the walls of temples, burned alive with books they tried to save, imprisoned for life for teaching anachronistic sedition and reactionary ideology. The tapes and dramas glorified this war against the past, relating the bombings, burnings, bulldozings in sternly heroic terms. Brave young men and women broke free from stupid parents, conniving priests, teachers of superstition, fomentors of reaction, and unflinchingly burned the pestilential forests of error, planting healthy orchards in their place — denounced the wicked professor who had hidden a dictionary of ideograms under his bed-blew up the monstrous hives where the poison of ignorance was stored — drove tractors through the flimsy rituals of superstition — and then, hand in hand, led their fellow producer-consumers to join the March to the Stars.
Behind the glib and bloated rhetoric lay real suffering, real passion. On both sides. Sutty knew that. She was a child of violence, as Tong Ov had said. Still she found it hard to keep in mind, and bitterly ironical, that here it was all the reverse of what she had known, the negative: that here the believers weren’t the persecutors but the persecuted.
But they were all true believers, both sides. Secular terrorists or holy terrorists, what difference?
The only thing she had found at all unusual in the endless propaganda from the Ministries of Information and Poetry was that the heroes of the exemplary tales usually came in pairs — a brother and sister, or a betrothed or married couple. If a sexual pair, heterosexual, always. The Akan government was obsessive in its detestation of ’deviance.’ Tong had warned her about it as soon as she arrived: "We must conform. No discussion, no question is possible. Anything that can be seen and reported as a sexual advance to a person of the same sex is a capital offense. So tiresome, so sad. These poor people!" He sighed for the sufferings of bigots and puritans, the sufferings and cruelties.
She had scarcely needed his warning, since she had so little contact with people as individuals, but she had of course heeded it; and it had been an element of her early, severe disappointment, her discouragement. The old Akan usages and language she had learned on Earth had led her to think she was coming to a sexually easygoing society with little or no gender hierarchy. The society of her native corner of Earth had still been cramped by social and gender caste, further rigidified by Unist misogyny and intolerance. No place on Earth had been entirely out from under that shadow, not even the Pales. One of the reasons she had specialised in Aka, had learned the languages, was that she and Pao had read in the First Observers’ reports that Akan society was not hierarchically gendered and that heterosexuality was not compulsory, not even privileged. But all that had changed, changed utterly, during the years of her flight from Earth to Aka. Arriving here, she had had to go back to circumspection, caution, self-suppression. And danger.
So, then, why did they all so promptly try to enlist her, to use her? She was scarcely a jewel in anybody’s crown.
Tong’s reasons were superficially plain: he’d jumped at the first chance to send somebody out unsupervised, and chose her because she knew the old writing and language and would know what she found when she found it. But if she found it, what was she supposed to do with it? It was contraband. Illicit goods. Anti-Corporation sedition. Tong had said she was right to delete the fragments of the old books from the ansible transmission. Yet now he wanted her to record such material?
As for the Monitor, he was playing power games. It must be a thrill for a middle-weight supervisor of cultural correctness to find a genuine alien, an authentic Observer of the Ekumen, to give orders to: Don’t talk to social parasites — don’t leave town without permission — report to the boss man, me.
What about the Fertiliser? She could not shake the impression that he knew who she was, and that his gift had some meaning beyond courtesy to a stranger. No telling what.
Given her ignorance, if she let any of them control her, she might do harm. But if she tried to do anything bold and decisive on her own, she would almost certainly do harm. She must go slow, wait, watch, learn.
Tong had given her a code word to use in a message in case of trouble: ’devolve.’ But he hadn’t really expected trouble. The Akans loved their alien guests, the cows from whom they milked the milk of high technology. They wouldn’t let her get into danger. She mustn’t paralyse herself with caution.
The Monitor’s rumbling about brutal tribespeople was bogey talk. Okzat-Ozkat was a safe, a touchingly safe place to live. It was a small, poor, provincial city, dragged along in the rough wake of Akan progress, far enough behind that it still held tattered remnants of the old way of life — the old civilisation. Probably the Corporation had consented to let an offworlder come here because it was so very out of the way, a harmless, picturesque bywater. Tong had sent her here to follow up a hunch or hope of finding under the monolithic, univocal success story of modern Aka some traces of what the Ekumen treasured: the singular character of a people, their way of being, their history. The Akan Corporation State wanted to forget, hide, ban, bury all that, and if she learned anything here, it would not please them. But the days of burying and burning alive were over. Weren’t they? The Monitor would bluster and bully, but what could he do?
Nothing much to her. A good deal, perhaps, to those who talked to her.
Hold still, she told herself. Listen. Listen to what they have to tell.
The air was dry at this altitude, cold in the shadow, hot in the sun. She stopped at a cafeteria near the Teachers’ College to buy a bottle of fruit juice and sat with it at a table outdoors. Cheery music, exhortations, news about crops, production statistics, health programs blared across the square from the loudspeakers as always. Somehow she had to learn to listen through that noise to what it hid, the meaning under it.
Was its ceaselessness its meaning? Were the Akans afraid of silence?
Nobody about her seemed to be afraid of anything. They were students in green-and-rust Education uniforms. Many had the padded cheekbones and delicate bone structure of the old street people here, but they were plump and shiny with youth and confidence, chattering and shouting across her without seeing her. Any woman over thirty was an alien to them.
They were eating the kind of food she had eaten in the capital, high-protein, sweet-salt packaged stuff, and drinking akakafi, a native hot drink rebaptized with a semi-Terran name. The Corporation brand of akakafi was called Starbrew and was ubiquitous. Bittersweet, black, it contained a remarkable mixture of alkaloids, stimulants, and depressants. Sutty loathed the taste, and it made her tongue furry, but she had learned to swallow it, since sharing akakafi was one of the few rituals of social bonding the people of Dovza City allowed themselves, and therefore very important to them. "A cup of akakafi?" they cried as soon as you came into the house, the office, the meeting. To refuse was to offer a rebuff, even an insult. Much small talk centered around akakafi: where to go for the best powder (not Starbrew, of course), where it was grown and processed, how to brew it. People boasted about how many cups they drank a day, as if the mild addiction were somehow praiseworthy. These young Educators were drinking it by the liter.
She listened to them dutifully, hearing chatter about examinations, prize lists, vacation travel. Nobody talked about reading or course material except two students nearby arguing about teaching preschoolers to use the toilet. The boy insisted that shame was the best incentive. The girl said, "Wipe it up and smile," which annoyed the boy into giving quite a lecture on peer adjustment, ethical goal setting, and hygienic laxity.
Walking home, Sutty wondered if Aka was a guilt culture, a shame culture, or something all its own. How was it that everybody in the world was willing to move in the same direction, talk the same language, believe the same things? Fear of being evil, or fear of being different?
There she was, back with fear. Her problem, not theirs.
Her crippled hostess was sitting in the doorway when she got home. They greeted each other shyly with illegal civilities. Making conversation, Sutty said, "I like the teas you serve so much. Much better than akakafi."
Iziezi didn’t slap one hand down and the other across her mouth, but her hands did move abruptly, and she said, "Ah," exactly as the Fertiliser had said it. Then, after a long pause, cautiously, shortening the invented word, she said, "But akafi comes from your country."
"Some people on Terra drink something like it. My people don’t."
Iziezi looked tense. The subject was evidently fraught.
If every topic was a minefield, there was nothing to do but talk on through the blasts, Sutty thought. She said, "You don’t like it either?"
Iziezi screwed up her face. After a nervous silence she said earnestly, "It’s bad for people. It dries up the sap and disorders the flow. People who drink akafi, you can see their hands tremble and their heart jump. That’s what they used to say, anyhow. The old-time people. A long time ago. My grandmother. Now everybody drinks it. It was one of those old rules, you know. Not modern. Modern people like it."
Caution; confusion; conviction.
"I didn’t like the breakfast tea at first, but then I did. What is it? What does it do?"
Iziezi’s face smoothed out. "That’s bezit. It starts the flow and reunites. It refreshes the liver a little, too."
"You’re a … herb teacher," Sutty said, not knowing the word for herbalist.
"Ah!"
A small mine going off. A small warning.
"Herb teachers are respected and honored in my homeland," Sutty said. "Many of them are doctors."
Iziezi said nothing, but gradually her face smoothed out again.
As Sutty turned to enter the house, the crippled woman said, "I’m going to exercise class in a few minutes."
Exercises? Sutty thought, glancing at the immobile stick-shins that hung from Iziezi’s knees.
"If you haven’t found a class and would care to come…"
The Corporation was very strong on gymnastics. Everybody in Dovza City belonged to a gymnogroup and went to fitness classes.
Several times a day brisk music and shouts of One! Two! blared from the loudspeakers, and whole factories and office buildings poured their producer-consumers out into streets and courtyards to jump and punch and bend and swing in vigorous unison. As a foreigner, Sutty had mostly succeeded in evading these groups; but she looked at Iziezi’s worn face and said, "I’d like to come."
She went in to find a place of honor in her bathroom for the Fertiliser’s beautiful pot and to change from leggings into loose pants. When she came back out, Iziezi was transferring herself on crutches to a small powered wheelchair, Corporation issue, Starflight model. Sutty praised its design. Iziezi said dismissively, "It’s all right in flat places," and took off, jolting and lurching up the steep, uneven street. Sutty walked alongside, lending a hand when the chair bucked and stuck, which it did about every two meters. They arrived at a low building with windows under the eaves and a high double door. One flap had been red and the other blue, with some kind of red-and-blue cloud motif painted above, now showing ghostly pink and grey through coats of whitewash. Iziezi headed her chair straight for the doors and barged them open. Sutty followed.
It seemed pitch-black inside. Sutty was getting used to these transitions from inside dark to outside dazzle and back, but her eyes weren’t. Just inside the door, Iziezi paused for Sutty to take her shoes off and set them on a shelf at the end of a dim row of shoes, all black canvas StarMarch issue, of course. Then Iziezi steered her chair at a fearless clip down a long ramp, parked it behind a bench, and levered herself around onto the bench. It seemed to be at the edge of a large matted area, beyond which all was velvet gloom.
Sutty was able to make out shadowy figures sitting here and there cross-legged on the mat. Near Iziezi on the bench sat a man with one leg. Iziezi got herself arranged, set down her crutches, and looked up at Sutty. She made a little patting gesture at the mat near her. The door had opened briefly as someone came in, and in the brief grey visibility, Sutty saw Iziezi smile. It was a lovely and touching sight.
Sutty sat down on the mat cross-legged with her hands in her lap. For a long time nothing else happened. It was, she thought, certainly unlike any exercise class she had ever seen, and far more to her taste. People came in silently, one or two at a time. As her eyes adjusted fully, she saw the room was vast. It must be almost entirely dug into the ground. Its long, low windows, right up where the wall met the ceiling, were of a thick bluish glass that let in only diffuse light. Above them the ceiling went on up in a low dome or series of arches; she could just make out dark, branching beams. She restrained her curious eyes and tried to sit, breathe, and not fall asleep.
Unfortunately, in her experience, sitting meditation and sleep had always tended to converge. When the man sitting nearest her began to swell and shrink like the ideograms on the Fertiliser’s shop wall, it roused only a dreamy interest in her. Then, sitting up a little straighter, she saw that he was raising his outstretched arms till the backs of his hands met above his head and then lowering them in a very slow, regular breath-rhythm. Iziezi and some others were doing the same, in more or less the same rhythm. The serene, soundless movements were like the pulsing of jellyfish in a dim aquarium. Sutty joined the pulsation.
Other motions were introduced here and there, one at a time, all arm movements, all in slow breath-rhythm. There would be periods of rest, and then the peaceful swelling and shrinking— stretch and relax, pulse out, draw in — would begin again, first one vague figure then another. A soft, soft sound accompanied the movements, a wordless rhythmic murmur, breath-music seemingly without source. Across the room one figure grew slowly up and up, whitish, undulant: a man or woman was afoot, making the arm gestures while bending forward or back or sideways from the waist. Two or three others rose in the same bonelessly supple way and stood reaching and swaying, never lifting a foot from the ground, more than ever like rooted sea creatures, anemones, a kelp forest, while the almost inaudible, ceaseless chanting pulsed like the sea swell, lifting and sinking…
Light, noise — a hard, loud, white blast as if the roof had been blown off. Bare square bulbs glared dangling from dusty vaultings.
Sutty sat aghast as all around her people leapt to their feet and began to prance, kick, do jumping jacks, while a harsh voice shouted, "One! Two! One! Two! One! Two!" She stared round at Iziezi, who sat on her bench, jerking like a marionette, punching the air with her fists, one, two, one, two. The one-legged man next to her shouted out the beat, slamming his crutch against the bench in time.
Catching Sutty’s eye, Iziezi gestured, Up!
Sutty stood up, obedient but disgusted. To achieve such a beautiful group meditation and then destroy it with this stupid muscle building-what kind of people were these?
Two women in blue and tan were striding down the ramp after a man in blue and tan. The Monitor. His eyes went straight to her.
She stood among the others, who were all motionless now, except for the quick rise and fall of breath.
Nobody said anything.
The ban on servile address, on greetings, goodbyes, any phrase acknowledging presence or departure, left holes in the texture of social process, gaps crossed only by a slight effort, a recurrent strain. City Akans had grown up with the artificiality and no doubt did not feel it, but Sutty still did, and it seemed these people did too. The stiff silence enforced by the three standing on the ramp put the others at a disadvantage. They had no way to defuse it. The one— legged man at last cleared his throat and said with some bravado, "We are performing hygienic aerobic exercises as prescribed in the Health Manual for Producer-Consumers of the Corporation."
The two women with the Monitor looked at each other, bored, sour, I-told-you-so. The Monitor spoke to Sutty across the air between them as if no one else were there: "You came here to practice aerobics?"
"We have very similar exercises in my homeland," she said, her dismay and indignation concentrating itself on him in a burst of eloquence. "I’m very glad to find a group here to practice them with. Exercise is often most profitable when performed with a sincerely interested group. Or so we believe in my homeland on Terra. And of course I hope to learn new exercises from my kind hosts here."
The Monitor, with no acknowledgment of any kind except a moment’s pause, turned and followed the blue-and-tan women up the ramp. The women went out. He turned and stood just inside the doors, watching.
"Continue!" the one-legged man shouted. "One! Two! One! Two!" Everybody punched and kicked and bounced furiously for the next five or ten minutes. Sutty’s fury was genuine at first; then it boiled off with the silly exercises, and she wanted to laugh, to laugh off the shock.
She pushed Iziezi’s chair up the ramp, found her shoes among the row of shoes. The Monitor still stood there. She smiled at him. "You should join us," she said.
His gaze was impersonal, appraising, entirely without response. The Corporation was looking at her.
She felt her face change, felt her eyes flick over him with dismissive incredulity as if seeing something small, uncouth, a petty monster. Wrong! wrong! But it was done. She was past him, outside in the cold evening air.
She kept hold of the chair back to help Iziezi zigzag bumpily down the street and to distract herself from the crazy surge of hatred the Monitor had roused in her. "I see what you mean about level ground," she said.
"There’s no — level-ground," Iziezi jerked out, holding on, but lifting one hand for a moment toward the vast verticalities of Silong, flaring white-gold over roofs and hills already drowned in dusk.
Back in the front hallway of the inn, Sutty said, "I hope I may join your exercise class again soon."
Iziezi made a gesture that might have been polite assent or hopeless apology.
"I preferred the quieter part," Sutty said. Getting no smile or response, she said, "I really would like to learn those movements. They’re beautiful. They felt as if they had a meaning in them."
Iziezi still said nothing.
"Is there a book about them, maybe, that I could study?" The question seemed absurdly cautious yet foolishly rash.
Iziezi pointed into the common sitting room, where a vid/ neareal monitor sat blank in one corner. Stacks of Corporation-issue tapes were piled next to it. In addition to the manuals, which everybody got a new set of annually, new tapes were frequently delivered to one’s door, informative, educational, admonitory, inspirational. Employees and students were frequently examined on them in regular and special sessions at work and in college. Illness does not excuse ignorance! blared the rich Corporational voice over vids of hospitalised workmen enthusiastically partissing in a neareal about plastic molding. Wealth is work and work is wealth! sang the chorus for the Capital-Labor instructional vid. Most of the literature Sutty had studied consisted of pieces of this kind in the poetic and inspirational style. She looked with malevolence at the piles of tapes.
"The health manual," Iziezi murmured vaguely.
"I was thinking of something I could read in my room at night. A book."
"Ah!" The mine went off very close this time. Then silence. "Yoz Sutty," the crippled woman whispered, "books …"
Silence, laden. "I don’t mean to put you at any risk."
Sutty found herself, ridiculously, whispering.
Iziezi shrugged. Her shrug said, Risk, so, everything’s a risk.
"The Monitor seems to be following me."
Iziezi made a gesture that said, No, no. "They come often to the class. We have a person to watch the street, turn the lights on. Then we…" Tiredly, she punched the air, One! Two!
"Tell me the penalties, yoz Iziezi."
"For doing the old exercises? Get fined. Maybe lose your license. Maybe you just have to go to the Prefecture or the High School and study the manuals."
"For a book? Owning it, reading it?"
"An… old book?"
Sutty made the gesture that said, Yes.
Iziezi was reluctant to answer. She looked down. She said finally, in a whisper, "Maybe a lot of trouble."
Iziezi sat in her wheelchair. Sutty stood. The light had died out of the street entirely. High over the roofs the barrier wall of Silong glowed dull rust-orange. Above it, far and radiant, the peak still burned gold.
"I can read the old writing. I want to learn the old ways. But I don’t want you to lose your inn license, yoz Iziezi. Send me to somebody who isn’t her nephew’s sole support."
"Akidan?" Iziezi said with new energy. "Oh, he’d take you right up to the Taproot!" Then she slapped one hand on the wheelchair arm and put the other over her mouth. "So much is forbidden," she said from behind her hand, with a glance up at Sutty that was almost sly.
"And forgotten?"
"People remember… People know, yoz. But I don’t know anything. My sister knew. She was educated. I’m not. I know some people who are… educated. But how far do you want to go?"
"As far as my guides lead me in kindness," Sutty said. It was a phrase not from the Advanced Exercises in Grammar for Barbarians but from the fragment of a book, the damaged page that had had on it the picture of a man fishing from a bridge and four lines of a poem:
Where my guides lead me in kindness
I follow, follow lightly,
and there are no footprints
in the dust behind us.
"Ah," Iziezi said, not a land mine, but a long sigh.