I stayed happy. I have by the grace of the ford a mind that can leave misfortune behind, and I was happy in Yotebber City,
Tualtak recovered her health and found a good job as a chemist in a factory. I saw her seldom, as our friendship had been a matter of necessity, not choice. Whenever 1 saw her she talked about Haba Street and her laboratory on Werel and complained about her work and the people here.
Dr. Yeron did not forget me. She wrote a note and told me to come visit her, which I did. Presently, when I was settled, she asked me to come with her to a meeting of an educational society. This, I found, was a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who sought to work against the autocratic power of the tribal and regional chiefs under the new Constitution, and to counteract what they called the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy that I had encountered in Hagayot. My experience was useful to them, for they were all city people who had met the slave mind only when they found themselves governed by it. The women of the group were the angriest. They had lost the most at
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Liberation and now had less to lose. In general the men were gradualists, the women ready for revolution. As a Werelian, ignorant of politics on Yeowe, I listened and did not talk- It was hard for me not to talk. I am a talker, and sometimes I had plenty to say. But I held my tongue and heard them. They were people worth hearing.
Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy, as I well knew, can be shrewd. Though the Chief, the President of Yotebber Region, elected by a manipulated ballot, might not understand our countermanipulations of the school curriculum, he did not waste much energy trying to control the schools, merely sending his inspectors to meddle with our classes and censor our books. But what he saw as important was the fact that, just as the Corporations had, he controlled the net. The news, the information programs, the puppets of the neareals, all danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could a lot of teachers do? Parents .who had no schooling had children who entered the net to hear and see and feel what the Chief wanted them to know; that freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is violence, that manhood is domination. Against the enactment of such truths in daily life and in the heightened sensational experience of the neareals, what good were words?
"Literacy is irrelevant," one of our group said sorrowfully. "The chiefs have jumped right over our heads into the postliterate information technology."
I brooded over that, hating her fancy words, irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was right.
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prise, an Alien came: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen. He was supposed to be a great feather in our Chiefs cap, sent down from the Old Capital apparently to support the Chief's stand against the World Party, which was still strong down here and still clamoring that Yeowe should keep out all foreigners. I had heard vaguely that such a person was here, but I had
not expected to meet him at a gathering of subversive schoolteachers.
He was a short man, red-brown, with white corners to his eyes, but handsome if one could ignore that. He sat in the seat in front of me. He sat perfectly still, as if accustomed to sitting still, and listened without speaking, as if accustomed to listening. At the end of the meeting he turned around and his queer eyes looked straight at me.
"Radosse Rakam?" he said.
I nodded, dumb.
"I'm Yehedarhed Havzhiva," he said. "1 have some books for you from old music."
I stared. I said, "Books?"
"From old music," he said again. "Esdardon Aya, on Werel."
"My books?" I said.
He smiled. He had a broad, quick smile.
"Oh, where?" I cried.
"They're at my house. We can get them tonight, if you like. I have a car." There was something ironic and light in how he said that, as if he was a man who did not expect to have a car, though he might enjoy it.
Dr. Yeron came over, "So you found her," she said to the Sub-Envoy. He looked at her with such a bright face that I thought, these two are lovers.
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Though she was much older than he, there was nothing unlikely in the thought. Dr. Yeron was a magnetic woman. It was odd to me to think it, though, for my mind was not given to speculating about people's sexual affairs. That was no interest of mine.
He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and
I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of private understanding that lovers often give each other.
He and I rode in his government electric car, his two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name, he explained to me, meant Old Music-1 told him how Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here. He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him.
1 said, "I was sick to leave my books, and I've thought about them, missing them, as if they were my family. But 1 think maybe I'm a fool to feel that way."
"Why a fool?" he asked. He had a foreign accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his voice was beautiful, low and warm.
I tried to explain everything at once: "Well, they mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I came to the City, and it was the books that gave me freedom, gave me the world — the worlds — But now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals mean so much more to people, giving them the present time. Maybe it's just clinging to the past to cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the future. And we'll never change people's minds jim with words." ,ets,
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He listened intently, as he had done at the meeting, and then answered slowly, "But words are an essential way of thinking. And books keep the words true.... I didn't read till I was an adult, either."
"You didn't?"
"I knew how, but I didn't. I lived in a village. It's cities that have to have books," he said, quite decisively, as if he had thought about this matter. "If they don't, we keep on starting over every generation. It's a waste. You have to save the words."
When we got to his house, up at the top end of the old part of town, there were four crates of books in the entrance hall.
"These aren't all mine!" I said.
"Old Music said they were yours," Mr. Yehedarhed said, with his quick smile and a quick glance at me. You can tell where an Alien is looking much better than you can tell with us. With us, except for the few people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye.
"I haven't got anywhere to put so many," I said, amazed, realising how that strange man. Old Music, had helped me to freedom yet again.
"At your school, maybe? The school library?"
It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the Chief's inspectors pawing through them, perhaps confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the SubEnvoy said, "What if I present them as a gift from the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the inspectors."
"Oh," I said, and burst out, "Why are you so kind? You, and he — Are you Hainish too?"
"Yes," he said, not answering my other question. "I was. I hope to be Yeowan."
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