But nobody in one lifetime could read more than a fragment of what was here, this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted, immense story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.
Odiedin sat down on the floor in one of the silent, gleam-lit caves where the books stretched away from the entrance in rows, like rows of mown grass but dark, vanishing into darkness. He sat down between two rows on the stone floor, picked up a small book with a worn cloth cover, and held it in his lap. He bowed his head over it without opening it. Tears ran down his cheeks.
They were free to go into the book caves as they wanted. In the days that followed, Sutty went back and back, wandering with the small, keen beam of an oil lamp to guide her, settling down here and there to read. She had her noter with her and scanned into it what she read, often whole books she didn’t have time to read. She read the texts of blessings, the protocols of ceremonies, recipes, prescriptions for curing cold sores and for living to a great age, stories, legends, annals, lives of famous maz, lives of obscure merchants, testimonies of people who lived thousands of years ago and a few years ago, tales of travel, meditations of mystics, treatises of philosophy and of mathematics, herbals, bestiaries, anatomies, geometries both real and metaphysical, maps of Aka, maps of imaginary worlds, histories of ancient lands, poems. All the poems in the world were here.
She knelt at a wooden crate filled with papers and worn, handmade books, the salvage of some small umyazu or town, saved from the bulldozer and the bonfire, carried here up the long hard ways of the Mountain to be safe, to be kept, to tell. By the light of her lamp on the rock floor she opened one of the books, a child’s primer. The ideograms were written large and without any qualifiers of aspect, mood, number, and Element. On one page was a crude woodcut of a man fishing from a humpbacked bridge. THE MOUNTAIN IS THE MOTHER OF THE RIVER, said the ideograms beneath the picture.
She would stay in the caves reading till the words of the dead, the utter silence, the cold, the globe of darkness surrounding her, grew too strange, and she made her way back to daylight and the ’ sound of living voices.
She knew now that all she would ever know of the Telling was the least hint or fragment of what there was to know. But that was all right; that was how it was. So long as it was here.
One maz couple was making a catalogue of the books in their Akan version of Sutty’s noter. They had been coming up to the caves for twenty years, working on the catalogue. They discussed it with her eagerly, and she promised to try to link her noter with theirs to duplicate and transfer the information.
Though the maz treated her with unfailing courtesy and respect, conversations were mostly formal and often difficult. They all had to speak in a language not their own, Dovzan. Though the Akans spoke it in public in their lives ’down below,’ it was not the language in which they thought, and not the language of the Telling. It was the tongue of the enemy. It was a barrier. Sutty realized how much closer she had drawn to people in Okzat-Ozkat as she learned their Rangma speech. Several of the maz of the Library knew Hainish, which was taught in the Corporation universities as a mark of true education. It wasn’t of much use here, except perhaps in one conversation Sutty had with the young maz Unroy Kigno.
They went out together to enjoy the daylight for an hour and to sweep footsteps away. Since the helicopter had come so close, the first aircraft that had ever done so, the people of the Library took more care to sweep away paths or tracks in the snow that might lead an eye in the sky to the entrances of the caves. Sutty and Unroy had finished the rather pleasant job of throwing the light, dry snow about with brooms, and were taking a breather, sitting on boulders near the minules’ stable.
"What is history?" Unroy asked abruptly, using the Hainish word. "Who are historians? Are you one?"
"The Hainish say I am," Sutty said, and they launched into a long and intense linguistico-philosophical discussion about whether history and the Telling could be understood as the same thing, or similar things, or not alike at all; about what historians did, what maz did, and why.
"I think history and the Telling are the same thing," Unroy said at last. "They’re ways of holding and keeping things sacred."
"What is sacredness?"
"What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful."
"So the Telling tries to find the truth in events … or the pain, or the beauty?"
"No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred."
Her partner, Kigno, was in a prison camp in Doy. He had been arrested and sentenced for teaching atheist religion and reactionary antiscience dogma. Unroy knew where he was, a huge steel-mill complex manned by prisoners, but no communication was possible.
"There are hundreds of thousands of people in the rehabilitation centers," Unroy told Sutty. "The Corporation gets its labor cheap."
"What are you going to do with your prisoner here?"
Unroy shook her head. "I wish he’d been killed like the other one," she said. "He’s a problem we have no solution to."
Sutty agreed in bitter silence.
The Monitor was being well looked after; several of the maz were professional healers. They had put him in a small tent by himself and kept him warm and fed. His tent was in a big cave among seven or eight tents belonging to guides and minule hostlers. There was always somebody there with an ear and an eye, as they put it. In any case there was no danger of his trying to escape until his wrenched back and badly damaged knee mended.
Odiedin visited him daily. Sutty had not yet brought herself to do so.
"His name is Yara," Odiedin told her.
"His name is Monitor," she said, contemptuous.
"Not any longer," Odiedin said drily. "His pursuit of us was unauthorised. If he goes back to Dovza, he’ll be sent to a rehabilitation center."
"A forced labor camp? Why?"
"Officials must not exceed their orders or take unauthorised action."
"That wasn’t a Corporation helicopter?"
Odiedin shook his head. "The pilot owned it. Used it to bring supplies to mountain climbers in the South Range. Yara hired him. To look for us."
"How strange," Sutty said. "Was he after me, then?"
"As a guide."
"I was afraid of that."
"I was not." Odiedin sighed. "The Corporation is so big, its apparatus is so clumsy, we little people in these big hills are beneath their notice. We slip through the mesh. Or we’ve done so for many years. So I didn’t worry. But he wasn’t the Corporation police. He was one man. One fanatic."
"Fanatic?" She laughed. "He believes slogans? He loves the Corporation?"
"He hates us. The maz, the Telling. He fears you."
"As an alien?"
"He thinks you’ll persuade the Ekumen to side with the maz against the Corporation."
"What makes him think that?"
"I don’t know. He’s a strange man. I think you should talk with him."
"What for?"
"To hear what he has to tell," Odiedin said.
She put it off, but conscience pushed her. Odiedin was no scholar, no sage like these maz from the lowlands, but he had a clear mind and a clear heart. On their long trek she had come to trust him entirely, and when she saw him crying over the books in the Library, she knew she loved him. She wanted to do what he asked her to do, even if it was to hear what the Monitor had to tell.