The Telling

Ursula K. Le Guin

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780547545622
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

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.

Eight

HIS TENT WAS LIGHTED only by the faint glimmer of the heater. When she entered, he began pumping the little crank of the lantern. It took a long time to brighten, and the glow was small and feeble.

She sat down cross-legged in the empty half of the tent. As well as she could make out, his face was no longer swollen, though still discolored. The backboard was set so that he was sitting up almost straight.

“You lie here in the dark, night and day,” she said. “It must be strange. Sensory deprivation. How do you pass the time?” She heard the cold sharpness of her voice.

“I sleep,” he said. “I think.”

“Therefore you are. . . . Do you recite slogans? Onward, upward, forward? Reactionary thought is the defeated enemy?”

He said nothing.

A book lay beside the bed pad. She picked it up. It was a schoolbook, a collection of poems, stories, exemplary lives, and so on, for children of ten or so. It took her some moments to realise that it was printed in ideograms, not in alphabet. She had practically forgotten that in the Monitor’s world, in modern Aka, everything was in alphabet, that the ideograms were banned, illegal, unused, forgotten.

“Can you read this?” she demanded, startled and somehow unnerved.

“Odiedin Manma gave it to me.”

“Can you read it?”

“Slowly.”

“When did you learn to read rotten-corpse primitive antiscientific writing, Monitor?”

“When I was a boy.”

“Who taught you?”

“The people I lived with.”

“Who were they?”

“My mother’s parents.”

His answers came always after a pause, and spoken low, almost mumbled, like the replies of a humiliated schoolboy to a goading questioner. Sutty was abruptly overcome with shame. She felt her cheeks burn, her head swim.

Wrong again. Worse than wrong.

After a prolonged silence she said, “I beg your pardon for the way I’ve been talking to you. I disliked your manner to me, on the boat and in Okzat-Ozkat. I came to hate you when I thought you responsible for destroying Maz Sotyu Ang’s herbary, his lifework, his life. And for hounding my friends. And hounding me. I hate the bigotry you believe in. But I’ll try not to hate you.”

“Why?” he asked. His voice was cold, as she remembered it.

“Hate eats the hater,” she quoted from a familiar text of the Telling.

He sat impassive, tense as always. She, however, began to relax. Her confession had relieved not only her shame but also the resentful oppression she had felt in his presence. She got her legs into a more comfortable semilotus, straightened her back. She was able to look at him instead of sneaking glances. She watched his rigid face for a while. He would not or could not say anything, but she could.

“They want me to talk to you,” she said. “They want me to tell you what life is like on Terra. The sad and ugly truths you’ll find at the end of the March to the Stars. So that maybe you’ll begin to ask yourself that fatal question: Do I know what I’m doing? But you probably don’t want to. . . . Also I’m curious about what life’s like for someone like you. What makes a man a Monitor. Will you tell me? Why did you live with your grandparents? Why did you learn to read the old writing? You’re about forty, I should think. It was already banned when you were a child, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. She had put the book back down. He picked it up, seeming to study the flowing calligraphy of the title on the cover: JEWEL FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LEARNING.

“Tell me,” she said. “Where were you born?”

“Bolov Yeda. On the western coast.”

“And they named you Yara—’Strong.’”

He shook his head. “They named me Azyaru,” he said.

Azya Aru. She had been reading about them just a day or so ago in a History of the Western Lands, which Unroy showed her in one of their forays into the Library. A maz couple of two centuries ago, Azya and Aru had been the chief founders and apostles of the Telling in Dovza. The first boss maz. Dovzan culture heroes, until the secularisation. Under the Corporation, they had no doubt become culture villains, until they could be totally erased, whited out, deleted.

“Were your parents maz, then?”

“My grandparents.” He held the book as if it were a talisman. “The first thing I remember is my grandfather showing me how to write the word ‘tree.”‘ His finger on the cover of the book sketched the two-stroke ideogram. “We were sitting on the porch, in the shade, where we could see the sea. The fishing boats were coming in. Bolov Yeda is on hills above a bay. The biggest city on the coast. My grandparents had a beautiful house. There was a vine growing over the porch, up to the roof, with a thick trunk and yellow flowers. They held the Telling in the house every day. They went to the umyazu in the evenings.”

He used the forbidden pronoun, he/she/they. He was not aware of it, Sutty thought. His voice had become soft, husky, easy.

“My parents were schoolteachers. They taught the new writing at the Corporation school. I learned it, but I liked the old writing better. I was interested in writing, in books. In the things my grandparents taught me. They thought I was born to be a maz. Grandmother would say, ‘Oh, Kiem, let the child go play!’ But Grandfather would want me to stay and learn one more set of characters, and I always wanted to please him. To do better. . . . Grandmother taught me the spoken things, the things children learned of the Telling. But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful.”

“So you went to live with your grandparents, to study with them?”

He answered with the same quietness and almost dreamy ease. “When I was a little child, we lived there all together. Then my father became a school administrator. And my mother entered the Ministry of Information. They were transferred to Tambe, and then to Dovza City. My mother had to travel a great deal. They both rose very quickly in the Corporation. They were valuable officials. Very active. My grandparents said it would be better if I stayed home with them, while my parents were moving about and working so hard. So I did.”

“And you wanted to stay with them?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, with complete simplicity. “I was happy.”

The word seemed to echo in his mind, to jar him out of the quietness from which he had been speaking. He turned his head away from Sutty, an abrupt movement that brought vividly to her mind the moment on the street in Okzat-Ozkat when he said to her with passionate anger and pleading, “Do not betray us!”

They sat a while without speaking. No one else was moving about or talking in the Tree Cave. Deep silence in the Lap of Silong.

“I grew up in a village,” Sutty said. “With my uncle and aunt. Really my great-uncle and great-aunt. Uncle Hurree was thin and quite dark-skinned, with white bristly hair and eyebrows—terrible eyebrows. I thought he frowned lightning out of them, when I was little. Aunty was a tremendous cook and manager. She could organise anybody. I learned to cook before I learned how to read. But Uncle did teach me, finally. He’d been a professor at the University of Calcutta. A great city in my part of Terra. He taught literature. We had five rooms in the house in the village, and they were all full of books, except the kitchen. Aunty wouldn’t allow books in the kitchen. But they were piled all over my room, all around the walls, under the bed and the table. When I first saw the Library caves here, I thought of my room at home.”

“Did your uncle teach in the village?”

“No. He hid there. We hid. My parents were hiding in a different place. Lying low. There was a kind of revolution going on. Like yours here, but the other way round. People who . . . But I’d rather listen to you than talk about that. Tell me what happened. Did you have to leave your grandparents? How old were you?”

“Eleven,” he said.

She listened. He spoke.

“My grandparents were very active too,” he said. His tone had become leaden, labored, though he did not hesitate for words. “But not as loyal producer-consumers. They were leaders of a band of underground reactionary activists. Fomenting cult activities and teaching antiscience. I didn’t understand that. They took me to the meetings they organised. I didn’t know they were illegal meetings. The umyazu was closed, but they didn’t tell me that the police had closed it. They didn’t send me to Corporation school. They kept me home and taught me only superstition and deviant morality. Finally my father realised what they were doing. He and my mother had separated. He hadn’t been to see me for two years, but he sent for me. A man came. He came at night. I heard my grandmother talking very loudly, angrily. I’d never heard her talk that way. I got up and came into the front room. My grandfather was sitting in his chair, just sitting, he didn’t look at me or say anything. Grandmother and a man were facing each other across the table. They looked at me, and then the man looked at her. She said, ‘Go get dressed, Azyaru, your father wants you to come see him.’ I went and got dressed. When I came out again, they were still just the way they had been, exactly the same: Grandfather sitting like an old, deaf, blind man staring at nothing, and Grandmother standing with her hands in fists on the table, and the man standing there. I began crying. I said, ‘I don’t want to go, I want to stay here.’ Then Grandmother came and held my shoulders, but she pushed me. She pushed me at the man. He said, ‘Come on.’ And she said, ‘Go, Azyaru!’ And I . . . went with him.”

“Where did you go?” Sutty asked in a whisper.

“To my father in Dovza City. I went to school there.” A long silence. He said, “Tell me about . . . your village. Why you were hiding.”

“Fair’s fair,” Sutty said. “But it’s a long story.”

“All stories are long,” he murmured. The Fertiliser had said something like that once. Short stories are only pieces of the long one, he had said.

“What’s hard to explain is about God, on my world,” she said.

“I know God,” Yara said.

That made her smile. It lightened her for a moment. “I’m sure you do,” she said. “But what might be hard to understand, here, is what God is, there. Here, it’s a word and not much else. In your state theism, it seems to mean what’s good. What’s right. Is that right?”

“God is Reason, yes,” he said, rather uncertainly.

“Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation.”

He looked intent but puzzled.

“Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ‘Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ‘Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, ‘Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ‘No, Shiva’s.’

“All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ‘Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’

“And Uncle was listening, and he said, ‘Because Sati is Shiva, and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’

“So I decided if I had to be Sutty, it was all right, so long as I could be Shiva too. . . . ”

She looked at Yara. He was absorbed and utterly bewildered. “Well, never mind about that. It is terribly complicated. But all the same, when you have a lot of Gods, maybe it’s easier than having one. We had a God rock among the roots of a big tree near the road. People in the village painted it red and fed it butter, to please it, to please themselves. Aunty put marigolds at Ganesh’s feet every day. He was a little bronze God with an animal nose in the back room. He was Shiva’s son, actually. Much kinder than Shiva. Aunty recited things and sang to him. Doing pooja. I used to help her do pooja. I could sing some of the songs. I liked the incense and the marigolds. . . . But these people I have to tell you about, the people we were hiding from, they didn’t have any little Gods. They hated them. They only had one big one. A big boss God. Whatever they said God said to do was right. Whoever didn’t do what they said God said to do was wrong. A lot of people believed this. They were called Unists. One God, one Truth, one Earth. And they . . . They made a lot of trouble.”

The words came out foolish, babyish, primer words for the years of agony.

“You see, my people, I mean all of us on Earth, had done a lot of damage to our world, fought over it, used it up, wasted it. There’d been plagues, famines, misery for so long. People wanted comfort and help. They wanted to believe they were doing something right. I guess if they joined the Unists, they could believe everything they did was right.”

He nodded. That he understood.

“The Unist Fathers said that what they called evil knowledge had brought all this misery. If there was no evil knowledge, people would be good. Unholy knowledge should be destroyed to make room for holy belief. They opposed science, all learning, everything except what was in their own books.”

“Like the maz.”

“No. No, I think that’s a mistake, Yara. I can’t see that the Telling excludes any knowledge, or calls any knowledge evil, or anything unholy. It doesn’t include anything of what Aka has learned in the last century from contact with other civilisations...