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    The Telling
    The Telling
    The Telling
    Ebook225 pages4 hours

    The Telling

    By Ursula K. Le Guin

    4/5

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    Winner of the Locus Award • Winner of the Endeavor Award

    "[Le Guin] can lift fiction to the level of poetry and compress it to the density of allegory—in The Telling, she does both, gorgeously." —Jonathan Lethem

    Sutty, an Observer from Earth for the interstellar Ekumen, has been assigned to a new world—a world in the grips of a stern monolithic state, the Corporation. Embracing the sophisticated technology brought by other worlds and desiring to advance even faster into the future, the Akans recently outlawed the past, the old calligraphy, certain words, all ancient beliefs and ways; every citizen must now be a producer-consumer. Their state, not unlike the China of the Cultural Revolution, is one of secular terrorism.

    Traveling from city to small town, from loudspeakers to bleating cattle, Sutty discovers the remnants of a banned religion, a hidden culture. As she moves deeper into the countryside and the desolate mountains, she learns more about the Telling—the old faith of the Akans—and more about herself. With her intricate creation of an alien world, Ursula K. Le Guin compels us to reflect on our own recent history.

    Though The Telling is often considered the eighth book of the Hainish Cycle, Le Guin maintained that there is no particular cycle or order for the Ekumen novels.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateSep 11, 2000
    ISBN9780547545622
    Author

    Ursula K. Le Guin

    Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was a celebrated author whose body of work includes twenty-three novels, twelve volumes of short stories, eleven volumes of poetry, thirteen children’s books, five essay collections, and four works of translation. The breadth and imagination of her work earned her six Nebula Awards, seven Hugo Awards, and SFWA’s Grand Master, along with a PEN/Malamud Award and many others. In 2014, she was awarded the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and in 2016, she joined the short list of authors to be published in their lifetimes by the Library of America.

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    Reviews for The Telling

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    • 4/5
      I first started this book many years ago after picking it up from a library sale. I thought it was a standalone tale, and it largely is, but it takes place in a universe I knew little about, where other novels and stories had been written that introduced these concepts, peoples, and stories. I was very confused when I tried to read it back then and figured I needed to read the other books that came before it. I was a little like Sutty in this book, trying to figure out a story but not having the right context, so I stopped reading it. But now, I've read the first 4 or 5 Hainish cycle novels and have a feel for the universe now so it was time to tackle this book from the bottom of my TBR pile. In many respects it is very similar to the other Hainish cycle novels in that first contact always changes the two cultures involved, even if the aliens try to be as uninvolved as possible. Simply being there to observe changes what is being observed. And the native culture now knows that there are whole other worlds beyond their own which changes the trajectory of their development. In this case, the native culture places value on fair compensation for fair goods or services. When an alien culture arrives and starts giving the native culture information, the natives expect to pay for it, even if it doesn't happen right away. This changes the way their society develops and reacts to their previous ways. I enjoy the way that Le Guin wrote characters in the middle of conflicts that they might be ignorant of, and how they learn to adapt to the situation to resolve it. She was a master at the anthropological ramifications of certain types of societies. I really enjoy the Hainish cycle, although it can be a bit too cerebral at times.
    • 4/5
      An inriguing and well written story from LeGuin's Hainish Universe. A bit too much of background but the idea of a philosophy-religion from the stories we tell that in turn bind us rings true. She backed it up by demographics and geology as well. An easy and thoughtful read.
    • 4/5
      A quiet successor to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The ideas, the analogies, and the gentle people held me more than the plot, but that was just fine.
    • 2/5
      Another disappointment. Read like a thinly veiled, simplistic critique of China and the situation with Tibet.
    • 3/5
      [The Telling] is an exploration of cultural legacies and the violence of extremism and by extension colonialism. The first page paints a word picture of Sutty's childhood memories of living in her aunt and uncle's village in India then transitions on the next page to Sutty's youth in North America, reunited with her parents while the entire world is increasingly under the totalitarian control of the religious government of the Unists and its attacks on centers of learning and accumulated human knowledge and culture (Library of Congress, for example). This story is set in the Hainish universe, and Sutty flees the violence of Earth (Terra) to become a human Observer sent to the newly discovered planet Aka. The first Hainish Observers happened to be Terran, and their reports were sent to Earth instead Hain. Those initial reports were largely lost due to Unist sabotage of the ansible communication system, so that only the language report survived for Sutty to study in transit to her first Observer post. She is dismayed to find that she had left a planet and its societies being destroyed by religious fundamentalists to arrive at a planet that is under the totalitarian control of a corporate government destroying its societies in the name of anti-religious accelerated capitalism and industrialization in a "march to the stars" spurred by the transmission from Earth of all its technical knowledge. The literature and ideograms that Sutty had studied had been outlawed and destroyed as relics of a primitive past. Sutty is convinced that she is failing in her role because she is unable to be neutral, to be nonjudgmental of what's happening on Aka. As she put it, "maybe a Terran was a bad choice. Given that we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied the past...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?"Fifty years after first contact, Aka restricted offworld presence to four people who must stay in the main city. But then Sutty is given permission to travel up into the hills into a small village far from the city. Will she find relics of the suppressed indigenous culture and history and knowledge? Well, it wouldn't be much of a story if she didn't. Sutty settles into that distant village and begins learning the forbidden culture that can't be completely erased from hearts and minds and walls and more. The events of this story seem very reminiscent of China's Cultural Revolution, and the indigenous culture seems very much modeled on Taoism and associated traditional Chinese medicine, qigong, cuisine, calligraphy, etc.Sutty cannot flee her past, her own trauma and loss and grief. As she journeys first into the hills and later to the mountains she is shadowed by the Corporate Monitor, and eventually their journeys and their stories become intertwined. And the secret behind the rise of the Corporate State and the destruction of Akan religion and culture is revealed. Terra and Aka are dark reflections of the same human impulses of domination and resistance and the all too human cost of state violence and what it takes to survive.
    • 3/5
      I remember enjoying this, but skimming through now I can't remember anything about it, so I'm shelving it as a re-read. This is a late (2000) entry in the Hainish series of LeGuin's sci-fi.
    • 3/5
      So, I liked it. The main problem I felt it suffered from was that it was more of a political treatise than a novel, about how being militantly anti-religion is just as crappy as being militantly religious. I suppose.

      There's not really a LOT of conflict – there is some – and the novel all wraps up far too neatly, I feel. Mostly there are lots of spiritual stories. But I don't know, it intrigued me. I feel like with a rewrite, and some more conflict (for instance, the novel is set in a totalitarian state with menacing secret police (well they weren't very secret I guess, but certainly menacing), and maybe they could actually have done something to justify that reputation!), this could have been better.
    • 5/5
      If you like high-paced action packed SF you`ll be disappointed. But of course in this case you shouldn`t read Le Guin at all. But all the lovers of slower, philosophical stories about different cultures, traditions and religions will be in for a treat.
    • 5/5
      I've been going back through Le Guin on audiobooks this time, and she's always fantastic. The performer for this one was also good. The Daoist element is very clear in this book, and I appreciated the dreamlike quality of the narrative, in particular the shift here away from a dramatic plot. Some readers may find this a shift from the other books in the Hainish Cycle, but I liked it and found it worked particularly well for the audiobook format.
    • 4/5
      "Sutty, an Observer for the interstellar Ekumen, has been assigned to Aka, a world in the grip of a materialistic government. The monolithic Corporation State of Aka has outlawed all old customs and beliefs. Sutty herself, an Earthwoman, has fled from a similar monolithic state -- but one controlled by religious fundamentalists."Unexpectedly she received permission to leave the modern city where her movements were closely monitored. She travels up the river into the countryside, going from howling loudspeakers to bleating cattle, to seek the remnants of the banned culture of Aka. As she comes to know and love the people she lives with, she begins to learn their unique religion -- the Telling. Finally joining them on a trek into the high mountains to one of the last sacred places, she glimpses hope for the reconciliation of the warring ideologies that have filled their lives, and her own, with grief."The Telling is a reflection on the conflict of politics and religion in our modern world, and the story of a spiritual journey through a landscape that is at once very strange and very familiar."~~front flapUrsula Le Guin is probably my favorite author, and I have and cherish almost all the books she wrote (and am working on having them all.) I've noticed that as she grew older, her books became simpler, and yet more profound. The book is a thinly disguised warning about the consequences we would all suffer if any fundamental religion became the state.It's written with her usual spare, poetic language, and the trip into the mountains had echoes of Tibet: the country that has been taken over by China and has had its culture and religion banned. Our hearts bleed for Tibet, just as Sutty's heart grieved for Earth taken over by a fundamentalist religion, and for Aka, taken over by a materialistic state.The ending promises hope, but it's a slim one. Governments aren't generally willing to give up their power. Since the book was published in 2000, and is the last in the Hainish cycle, we'll never know if the promise came to fruition, or not.I miss her. Terribly.
    • 4/5
      I probably shouldn't have tried to read this before bed during a particularly exhausting time of the year, since I'm sure I missed some of the nuance, but this is still a lovely read in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle.
    • 3/5
      This is a new Hainish novel, about a young Observer for the Ekumen on her first assignment. Sutty grew up on an Earth dominated by a rigid, repressive religious authority; Aka, the world she is assigned to, is controlled by an extremely rationalistic government, dedicated to advancing as rapidly as possible to catch up with the other Ekumen worlds, and eliminating any remaining vestiges of "primitive" thinking. Sutty's not the only one who has to reexamine all her assumptions; she's just one of the first to realize it. This isn't as good as The Dispossessed, or The Left Hand of Darkness, but it is a good, satisfying story.
    • 5/5
      I still am thankful for the dedication LeGuin has to portraying societies living in balance with their world, which serve as an inspiration for those of us hoping to restore (or develop) the same balance here on Earth.On this second reading, I am more critical of the naivete of Sutty. Surely a highly developed confederacy would use people who were more self-aware, or had come to terms better with their childhood. But perhaps that was part of why she was brought to Aka where more experienced observers had been shut out by the local government, and her experiences as a member of a persecuted religion gave her insights into what was going on.Favorite quote is really 2 pages (134-5) where Maz Uming explains why people need to keep reminding themselves of the right way to live, i.e. why the Telling is so important in their culture.
    • 4/5
      An observer is sent from Earth to study a world whose official government has embraced a doctrine of progress and control, to the extent of erasing their own history and repudiating their traditions. But when she makes a visit to a rural mountain area, she discovers that there are people who preserve the old ways, practicing a gently spiritual form of religion that the new regime has not entirely wiped out.I can't exactly say that Le Guin's handling of these societies is heavy-handed or clunky. She's too good a writer for that, and she does make a point of adding in a bit of complexity. But, still, I could never quite manage to fully believe in either of these cultures, or to accept them on their own terms. It was never, ever far from my mind that the author had invented these societies to contrast with each other, to compare with our own societies on Earth, and to make some sort of point about what she believes to be good and bad in human civilizations, and that awareness made me feel a bit too detached from it all. I did find a few aspects of the traditional culture she describes to be interesting, appealing, even mildly insightful. But, for me, it just never quite came together into something satisfying or particularly profound.It wasn't an unpleasant read or anything, and I'm not sorry I picked it up. But it's definitely not the first Le Guin novel I would recommend to anyone.
    • 4/5
      Set in Le Guin's Hainish universe, a young woman from a future Earth, where she has lived underneath a repressive, fundamentalist religious government, travels to the planet of Aka, where religion has been outlawed by a different type of repressive government.I was so looking forward to reading this book, as it is the only one of the novels set in the Hainish universe that I had left to read, and I had highly enjoyed reading all of the previous novels. However, this one left me wanting. I will say that my expectations were high, and that Le Guin's writing, as always, is excellent. At no point did I want to abandon the story. However, there is very little happening in the book (but there is a lot of telling). The story is just so subtle that it almost seems slight.The novel is set on the planet of Aka, where a dystopian, corporatist society has been established in which all religion has been outlawed. The protagonist, Sutty, is an observer from Earth who feels somewhat untethered; the change in government occurred while she was traveling to Aka, so the planet she arrived at in no way matched the planet she had prepared to observe. After a while, she is able to escape government minders and travel to the country to get some insight into the religious culture of the Akans before it was forced underground. The primary expression of religion is through storytelling, in which stories are related over and over by knowledgeable "priests/priestesses" to all willing listeners in a process called the "telling." Eventually, Sutty journeys with some of these "priests" to see the last existing library, which is hidden in a remote mountain peak.Of course, I appreciated this appreciation of storytelling and oral history. But the contrast between the two forms of Akan culture seemed too stark; it was clear that the old way was Good and the new way was Bad. I expect more shades of gray, more ambiguity from Le Guin. Also, I was far more interested in the little snippets of Earth's future history that Sutty related than in what was happening on Aka. I was left wanting.Well, so-so Le Guin is better than the best of many other writers. This is not a bad book, by any means. It is no Left Hand of Darkness or Dispossessed either. I worry that there is so much in Le Guin's head that she is not letting out. I am so fascinated by this universe she has created. I want more!Read because I like the author, particularly her books set in the Hainish universe (2013).
    • 4/5
      Spare, thoughtful, and beautiful like all of her Hainish novels. Not heavy on plot, but a fascinating, organic world to explore.
    • 4/5
      Has much of the usual magnificence of LeGuin's writing, though with a tad too much Telling in the first half or so of the book. Nevertheless, a satisfying conclusion, and worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      After living through a series of tragedies on a future, dystopian Earth, Sutty plans to travel and study the history and literature of a newly contacted planet for the Ekumen. In the 70 years it takes Sutty to reach the planet, however, major social and governmental changes force the literature, history, and religion of the people underground. Sutty is able to travel deep into a rural area in the mountains where she tries to regain what has been lost.I was way more connected to Sutty than I have been to Le Guin's other protagonists that I have read. I to understand the Akans with her almost immediately. I enjoyed her growth and the Akan cultural system immensely.
    • 4/5
      Sutty is a Terran envoy of the Ekumen to the world of Aka. The Aka have suppressed and criminalized their ancient “religion” (it isn’t, but that’s the most expedient way to describe it. Think Buddhist.) in order to become Consumer-Producers of the Corporation State and bring their technology up to date with that of Earth and Hain. Sutty’s mission is to learn and preserve The Telling, which is made difficult by the Monitors of the Corporation State (thought police).I feel like LeGuin conceived of The Telling and wrote the plot around it in order to convey The Telling to us. Which, great. Frankly, I’d like to have heard more of it, but again, much more philosophical and thought-experiment-y than science fiction, per se. Fans of LeGuin will like it. Fans of more science-y, tech-y sci fi will probably not.
    • 4/5
      Le Guin continues her "Hainish" cycle in this work, which complements THE DISPOSSESSED and THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. The author's previous works often explore two colliding concepts, philosophies, or human conditions (e.g., in the LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS it is the concept/condition of gender). In this book, we have a Terran envoy (Sutty) coming from an Earth where fundamentalist religion controls society, to a world where a corporate state outlaws such "backward superstition." Unlike her earlier works, in this book she spends less time fleshing out the societies and characters, and focuses more on the central theme. For that, it is less satisfying than the two books previously mentioned. By not fleshing out her societies the reader is left with a more didactic novel than is the norm for Le Guin.I enjoyed the book, but must confess that I am a long-time Le Guin fan, and this is a work in a larger spectrum of life-long brilliant writing.
    • 3/5
      An interesting read, but not Le Guin's best work. There were too many plot threads and hints of depth that never really went anywhere, and I came away from the novel unsure of exactly what the author wanted to say.
    • 5/5
      Sutty, a young woman serving as an anthropological Observer for the benevolent governing body of the Ekumen, is assigned to the embassy on Aka, once a world adhering to a peaceful, all-encompassing belief system somewhat akin to earth’s Taoism. When she arrives, however, she finds that this belief system has been replaced with a form of corporate totalitarianism (that strongly reminds her of the religious totalitarian government of her own childhood) and that all traces of Aka’s cultural past are eradicated without mercy wherever they are found. Closely monitored by the government and frustrated in her mission to catalog and understand a culture which, to all appearances, no longer exists, Sutty is shocked when she suddenly receives permission to visit a small mountain village rumored to harbor the vestiges of the Akans’ former way of life.Dogged by an Akan Monitor who is fanatically devoted to the new way of life, Sutty nevertheless gains the trust of the traditional Akans in the mountains, and begins to immerse herself in their deeply beautiful, poetic, and all-pervasive ethos, which Sutty dubs the Telling. Deeply touched by this way of life, Sutty finds herself on a pilgrimage to the Akans’ most sacred site and simultaneously embroiled in the fight to preserve the Telling from the Monitor and those he serves.A parable for our own culture’s willingness to abandon its cultural heritage, “The Telling” is a lyrical and affecting examination of the conflict between traditional values and technological progress, with no clear winner on either side.
    • 3/5
      While this isn't nearly as engaging as much of LeGuin's other work, it is still worth the read. At the same time, it's one of those books that you'll read when you pick it up, but the characters don't drive you back to it as much as some others. If you've read her short stories, in some ways, this is reminiscent of "The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas" for me, though without the same narration. It's a fairly short quick read, but the drive to continue I feel has to come from the reader moreso than coming from the text, unlike most of her other works.
    • 4/5
      Sutty leaves the rigid book-burning theocracy of Terra to become an envoy to Aka. She studies the language and customs, but arrives a century later on a planet that in the grip of a rigid book-burning anti-religious state that considers the old ideograms that she learned to be a reactionary residue of superstitious times. Then she's unexpectedly given a chance to go into the country in search of the old religion and its last library.
    • 3/5
      A somewhat interesting anthropological "social SF" novel, in the vein of The Dispossessed, but inferior to most of Le Guin's better works. It's not offensively bad, but it's probably only for Le Guin diehards.

    Book preview

    The Telling - Ursula K. Le Guin

    Copyright © 2000 by Ursula K. Le Guin

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher

    For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

    hmhco.com

    The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

    Le Guin, Ursula K, 1929–

    The telling/Ursula Le Guin

    p cm.

    ISBN 0-15-100567-2

    I. Title.

    PS3562 E42 T45 2000

    813' 54—dc21 00-029574

    eISBN 9780547545622

    v2.0218

    The day I was born I made my first mistake,

    and by that path

    have I sought wisdom ever since.

    THE MAHABHARATA

    One

    WHEN SUTTY WENT back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the Pale.

    Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day. A whiff of asafetida. The brook-babble of Aunty gossiping with Moti’s mother on the verandah. Uncle Hurree’s dark hand lying still on a white page. Ganesh’s little piggy kindly eye. A match struck and the rich grey curl of incense smoke: pungent, vivid, gone. Scents, glimpses, echoes that drifted or glimmered through her mind when she was walking the streets, or eating, or taking a break from the sensory assault of the neareals she had to partiss in, in the daytime, under the other sun.

    But night is the same on any world. Light’s absence is only that. And in the darkness, it was the Pale she was in. Not in dream, never in dream. Awake, before she slept, or when she woke from dream, disturbed and tense, and could not get back to sleep. A scene would begin to happen, not in sweet, bright bits but in full recall of a place and a length of time; and once the memory began, she could not stop it. She had to go through it until it let her go. Maybe it was a kind of punishment, like the lovers’ punishment in Dante’s Hell, to remember being happy. But those lovers were lucky, they remembered it together.

    The rain. The first winter in Vancouver rain. The sky like a roof of lead weighing down on the tops of buildings, flattening the huge black mountains up behind the city. Southward the rain-rough grey water of the Sound, under which lay Old Vancouver, drowned by the sea rise long ago. Black sleet on shining asphalt streets. Wind, the wind that made her whimper like a dog and cringe, shivering with a scared exhilaration, it was so fierce and crazy, that cold wind out of the Arctic, ice breath of the snow bear. It went right through her flimsy coat, but her boots were warm, huge ugly black plastic boots splashing in the gutters, and she’d soon be home. It made you feel safe, that awful cold. People hurried past not bothering each other, all their hates and passions frozen. She liked the North, the cold, the rain, the beautiful, dismal city.

    Aunty looked so little, here, little and ephemeral, like a small butterfly. A red-and-orange cotton saree, thin brass bangles on insect wrists. Though there were plenty of Indians and Indo-Canadians here, plenty of neighbors, Aunty looked small even among them, displaced, misplaced. Her smile seemed foreign and apologetic. She had to wear shoes and stockings all the time. Only when she got ready for bed did her feet reappear, the small brown feet of great character which had always, in the village, been a visible part of her as much as her hands, her eyes. Here her feet were put away in leather cases, amputated by the cold. So she didn’t walk much, didn’t run about the house, bustle about the kitchen. She sat by the heater in the front room, wrapped up in a pale ragged knitted woollen blanket, a butterfly going back into its cocoon. Going away, farther away all the time, but not by walking.

    Sutty found it easier now to know Mother and Father, whom she had scarcely known for the last fifteen years, than to know Aunty, whose lap and arms had been her haven. It was delightful to discover her parents, her mother’s good-natured wit and intellect, her father’s shy, unhandy efforts at showing affection. To converse with them as an adult while knowing herself unreasonably beloved as a child—it was easy, it was delightful. They talked about everything, they learned one another. While Aunty shrank, fluttered away very softly, deviously, seeming not to be going anywhere, back to the village, to Uncle Hurree’s grave.

    Spring came, fear came. Sunlight came back north here long and pale like an adolescent, a silvery shadowy radiance. Small pink plum trees blossomed all down the side streets of the neighborhood. The Fathers declared that the Treaty of Beijing contravened the Doctrine of Unique Destiny and must be abrogated. The Pales were to be opened, said the Fathers, their populations allowed to receive the Holy Light, their schools cleansed of unbelief, purified of alien error and deviance. Those who clung to sin would be re-educated.

    Mother was down at the Link offices every day, coming home late and grim. This is their final push, she said; if they do this, we have nowhere to go but underground.

    In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God flew from Colorado to the District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. Washington was not a Pale, but the beautiful old building, though often closed and kept locked, under guard, had never been attacked; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war, breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms and mirror-masks, back at the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine out!

    But the new Envoy who had arrived from Hain last year, Dalzul, was talking with the Fathers. They had admitted Dalzul to the Sanctum. There were neareals and holos and 2Ds of him in the net and Godsword. It seemed that the Commander-General of the Hosts had not received orders from the Fathers to destroy the Library of Washington. The error was not the Commander-General’s, of course. Fathers made no errors. The pilots’ zeal had been excessive, their action unauthorised. Word came from the Sanctum: the pilots were to be punished. They were led out in front of the ranks and the crowds and the cameras, publicly stripped of their weapons and white uniforms. Their hoods were taken off, their faces were bared. They were led away in shame to re-education.

    All that was on the net, though Sutty could watch it without having to partiss in it, Father having disconnected the vr-proprios. Godsword was full of it, too. And full of the new Envoy, again. Dalzul was a Terran. Born right here on God’s Earth, they said. A man who understood the men of Earth as no alien ever could, they said. A man from the stars who came to kneel at the feet of the Fathers and to discuss the implementation of the peaceful intentions of both the Holy Office and the Ekumen.

    Handsome fellow, Mother said, peering. What is he? A white man?

    Inordinately so, Father said.

    Wherever is he from?

    But no one knew. Iceland, Ireland, Siberia, everybody had a different story. Dalzul had left Terra to study on Hain, they all agreed on that. He had qualified very quickly as an Observer, then as a Mobile, and then had been sent back home: the first Terran Envoy to Terra.

    He left well over a century ago, Mother said. Before the Unists took over East Asia and Europe. Before they even amounted to much in Western Asia. He must find his world quite changed.

    Lucky man, Sutty was thinking. Oh lucky, lucky man! He got away, he went to Hain, he studied at the School on Ve, he’s been where everything isn’t God and hatred, where they’ve lived a million years of history, where they understand it all!

    That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training School, to try to qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found them undismayed, not even surprised. This seems a rather good world to get off of, at present, Mother said.

    They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don’t they realise, if I qualify and get sent to one of the other worlds, they’ll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred, hundreds, round trips in space were seldom less, often more. Didn’t they care? It was only later that evening, when she was watching her father’s profile at table, full lips, hook nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it occurred to her that if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had thought about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had ever had. And made the best of it.

    Eat, Aunty, Mother said, but Aunty only patted her piece of naan with her little ant-antenna fingers and did not pick it up.

    Nobody could make good bread with such flour, she said, exonerating the baker.

    You were spoiled, living in the village, Mother teased her. This is the best quality anybody can get in Canada. Best quality chopped straw and plaster dust.

    Yes, I was spoiled, Aunty said, smiling from a far country.

    The older slogans were carved into facades of buildings: FORWARD TO THE FUTURE. PRODUCER-CONSUMERS OF AKA MARCH TO THE STARS. Newer ones ran across the buildings in bands of dazzling electronic display: REACTIONARY THOUGHT IS THE DEFEATED ENEMY. When the displays malfunctioned, the messages became cryptic: OD IS ON. The newest ones hovered in holopro above the streets: PURE SCIENCE DESTROYS CORRUPTION. UPWARD ONWARD FORWARD. Music hovered with them, highly rhythmic, multivoiced, crowding the air. Onward, onward to the stars! an invisible choir shrilled to the stalled traffic at the intersection where Sutty’s robocab sat. She turned up the cab sound to drown the tune out. Superstition is a rotting corpse, the sound system said in a rich, attractive male voice. Superstitious practices defile youthful minds. It is the responsibility of every citizen, whether adult or student, to report reactionary teachings and to bring teachers who permit sedition or introduce irrationality and superstition in their classroom to the attention of the authorities. In the light of Pure Science we know that the ardent cooperation of all the people is the first requisite of— Sutty turned the sound down as far as it would go. The choir burst forth, To the stars! To the stars! and the robocab jerked forward about half its length. Two more jerks and it might get through the intersection at the next flowchange.

    Sutty felt in her jacket pockets for an akagest, but she’d eaten them all. Her stomach hurt. Bad food, she’d eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments, stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake every other population in FF-tech mode had ever made.—Wrong.

    Judgmentalism. Wrong to let frustration cloud her thinking and perceptions. Wrong to admit prejudice. Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn’t her world.

    But she was on it, in it, how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she’d come to observe.

    The fact was, she was not suited to be an Observer here. In other words, she had failed on her first assignment. She knew that the Envoy had summoned her to tell her so.

    She was already nearly late for the appointment. The robocab made another jerk forward, and its sound system came up loud for one of the Corporation announcements that overrode low settings. There was no off button. An announcement from the Bureau of Astronautics! said a woman’s vibrant, energy-charged, self-confident voice, and Sutty put her hands over her ears and shouted, Shut up!

    Doors of vehicle are closed, the robocab said in the flat mechanical voice assigned to mechanisms responding to verbal orders. Sutty saw that this was funny, but she couldn’t laugh. The announcement went on and on while the shrill voices in the air sang, Ever higher, ever greater, marching to the stars!

    The Ekumenical Envoy, a doe-eyed Chiffewarian named Tong Ov, was even later than she for their appointment, having been delayed at the exit of his apartment house by a malfunction of the ZIL-screening system, which he laughed about. And the system here has mislaid the microrec I wanted to give you, he said, going through files in his office. I coded it, because of course they go through my files, and my code confused the system. But I know it’s in here. . . . So, meanwhile, tell me how things have been going.

    Well, Sutty said, and paused. She had been speaking and thinking in Dovzan for months. She had to go through her own files for a moment: Hindi no, English no, Hainish yes. You asked me to prepare a report on contemporary language and literature. But the social changes that took place here while I was in transit . . . Well, since it’s against the law, now, to speak or study any language but Dovzan and Hainish, I can’t work on the other languages. If they still exist. As for Dovzan, the First Observers did a pretty thorough linguistic survey. I can only add details and vocabulary.

    What about literature? Tong asked.

    Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don’t know what it is, because the Ministry doesn’t allow access to it. So all I was able to work on is modern aural literature. All written to Corporation specifications. It tends to be very—to be standardised.

    She looked at Tong Ov to see if her whining bored him, but though still looking for the mislaid file, he seemed to be listening with lively interest. He said, All aural, is it?

    Except for the Corporation manuals hardly anything’s printed, except printouts for the deaf, and primers to accompany sound texts for early learners. . . . The campaign against the old ideographic forms seems to have been very intense. Maybe it made people afraid to write—made them distrust writing in general. Anyway, all I’ve been able to get hold of by way of literature is sound tapes and neareals. Issued by the World Ministry of Information and the Central Ministry of Poetry and Art. Most of the works are actually information or educational material rather than, well, literature or poetry as I understand the terms. Though a lot of the neareals are dramatisations of practical or ethical problems and solutions— She was trying so hard to speak factually, unjudgmentally, without prejudice, that her voice was totally toneless.

    Sounds dull, said Tong, still flitting through files.

    "Well, I’m, I think I’m insensitive to this aesthetic. It is so deeply and, and, and flatly political. Of course every art is political. But when it’s all didactic, all in the service of a belief system, I resent, I mean, I resist it. But I try not to. Maybe, since they’ve essentially erased their history—Of course there was no way of knowing they were on the brink of a cultural revolution, at the time I was sent here—But anyhow, for this particular Observer-ship, maybe a Terran was a bad choice. Given that we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied their past."

    She stopped short, appalled at everything she had said.

    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,

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