Maybe she could also tell the Monitor a little of what he ought to hear. In any case, sooner or later she’d have to face him. And the question of what to do about him. And the question of her responsibility for his being there.
Before the evening meal the next day, she went to the big cave where they had put him. A couple of minule handlers were gambling, tossing marked sticks, by lantern light. On the inner wall of the cave, a pure black concave curve ten meters high, the figure of the Tree had been incised by the dwellers here in centuries past: the single trunk, the two branches, the five lobes of foliage. Gold leaf still glittered in the lines of the drawing, and bits of crystal, jet, and moonstone winked among the carved leaves. Her eyes were well used to darkness now. The glow of a small electric light in a tent close under the back wall seemed as bright as sunlight.
"The Dovzan?" she asked the gamblers. One nodded with his chin toward the lighted tent.
The door flap was closed. She stood outside a while and finally said, "Monitor?"
The flap opened. She looked in cautiously. The small interior of the tent was warm and bright. They had fixed the injured man a bed pad with a slanted back support so he need not lie entirely flat. The cord of the door flap, a hand-crank-powered electric lamp, a tiny oil heater, a bottle of water, and a small noter lay within his reach.
He had been terribly bruised in the crash, and the bruising was still livid: blue-black-green all down the right side of his face, the right eye swollen half shut, both arms spotted with great brown-blue marks. Two fingers of his left hand were lightly splinted. But Sutty’s eyes were on the little device, the noter.
She entered the tent on her knees, and kneeling in the narrow clear space, picked up the device and studied it.
"It doesn’t transmit," the man said.
"So you say," Sutty said, beginning to play with it, to run it through its paces. After a while she said, ironically, "Apologies for going through your private files, Monitor. I’m not interested in them. But I have to test this thing’s capacities."
He said nothing.
The device was a recorder notebook, rather flashily designed but with several serious design flaws, like so much Akan technology-undigested techshit, she thought. It had no sending or receiving functions. She set it back down where he could reach it.
That alarm relieved, she was aware of her embarrassment and intense discomfort at being shut in this small space with this man. She wanted nothing but distance from him. The only way to make it was with words.
"What were you trying to do?"
"Follow you."
"Your government had ordered you not to."
After a pause he said, "I could not accept that."
"So the cog is wiser than the wheel?"
He said nothing. He had not moved at all since opening the door flap. The rigidity of his body probably signified pain. She observed it with no feeling.
"If you hadn’t crashed, what would you have done? Flown back to Dovza and reported-what? Some cave mouths?"
He said nothing.
"What do you know about this place?"
As she asked the question, she realised that he had seen nothing of it but this one cave, a few hostlers, a few maz. He need never learn what it was. They could blindfold him — probably no need even for that: just get him out, get him away as soon as he could be moved. He had seen nothing but a travelers’ resting place. He had nothing to report.
"This is the Lap of Silong," he said. "The last Library."
"What makes you think that?" she said, made angry by disappointment.
"This is where you were coming. The Office of Ethical Purity has been looking for it for a long time. The place where they hide the books. This is it."
"Who are ’they,’ Monitor?"
"The enemies of the state."
"O Ram!" she said. She sat back, as far from him as she could get, and hugged her knees. She spoke slowly, stopping after each sentence. "You people have learned everything we did wrong, and nothing we did right. I wish we’d never come to Aka. But since in our own stupid intellectual hubris we did so, we should either have refused you the information you demanded, or taught you Terran history. But of course you wouldn’t have listened. You don’t believe in history. You threw out your own history like garbage."
"It was garbage."
His brown skin was greyish where it wasn’t black-and-blue. His voice was hoarse and dogged. The man is hurt and helpless, she thought with neither sympathy nor shame.
"I know who you are," she said. "You’re my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn’t get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it?"
"They sent you to the mountains," he said. He had been looking straight forward, but he turned his head stiffly now to meet her eyes. "To a place where you would meet the maz. I did not wish any harm to you, yoz."
After a moment she said, "Yoz!"
He had looked away again. She watched his swollen, unreadable face.
He reached out his good hand and began to pump the hand crank of his lamp up and down. The little square bulb inside it immediately brightened. For the hundredth time in a corner of her mind Sutty wondered why the Akans made their lightbulbs square. But the rest of her mind was full of shadows, anger, hate, contempt.
"Did your people let me go to Okzat-Ozkat as a decoy? A tool of your official ideologues? Were they hoping I’d lead them here?"
"I thought so," he said after a pause.
"But you told me to keep away from the maz!"
"I thought they were dangerous."
"To whom?"
"To… the Ekumen. And my government." He used the old word, and corrected it: "The Corporation."
"You don’t make sense, Monitor."
He had stopped cranking the lamp. He looked straight ahead again.
"The pilot said, There they are,’ and we came up alongside the path," he said. "And he shouted, and I saw your group on the path. And smoke, behind you, smoke coming out of the rocks. But we were being thrown sideways, into the mountain. Into the rocks. The helicopter was thrown. Pushed."
He held his injured left hand with his right hand, stiffly. He was controlling his shivering.
"Catabatic winds, yoz," Sutty said after a while, softly. "And very high altitude for a helicopter."
He nodded. He had told himself the same thing. Many times, no doubt.
"They hold this place sacred," she said.
Where did that word come from? Not a word she used. Why was she tormenting him? Wrong, wrong.
"Listen, Yara — that’s your name? — don’t let rotten-corpse superstition get hold of you. I don’t think Mother Silong pays any attention to us at all."
He shook his head, mute. Maybe he had told himself that, too.
She did not know what else to say to him. After a long silence, he spoke.
"I deserve punishment," he said.
That shook her.
"Well, you got it," she said finally. "And you’ll probably get more, one way or another. What are we going to do with you? That has to be decided. It’s getting on into late summer. They’re talking of leaving in a few weeks. So, until then you might as well take it easy. And get walking again. Because wherever you go from here, I don’t think you’ll be flying on the south wind."