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Goiri pondered this, and asked at last, "If you know that, why do you allow it?"

"Well, Maz Goiri, the Ekumen takes a very long view. So long that it’s often hard for a short-lived being to live with. The principle we work on is that withholding knowledge is always a mistake — in the long run. So if asked to tell what we know, we tell it. To that extent, we’re like you, maz."

"No longer," Goiri said bitterly. "All we know, we hide."

"You have no choice. Your bureaucrats are dangerous people. They’re believers." Sutty sipped her tea. Her throat was dry. "On my world, when I was growing up, there was a powerful group of believers. They believed that their beliefs should prevail absolutely, that no other way of thinking should exist. They sabotaged the information storage networks and destroyed libraries and schools all over the world. They didn’t destroy everything, of course. It can be pieced back together. But… damage was done. That kind of damage is something like a stroke. One recovers, almost. But you know all that."

She stopped. She was talking too much. Her voice was shaking. She was getting too close to it. Far too close to it. Wrong.

Goiri looked shaken too. "All I know of your world, yoz …"

"Is that we fly around in space ships bringing enlightenment to lesser, backward worlds," Sutty said. Then she slapped one hand on the table and the other across her mouth.

Goiri stared.

"It’s a way the Rangma have of reminding themselves to shut up," Sutty said. She smiled, but her hands were shaking now.

They were both silent for a while.

"I thought of you … of all the people of the Ekumen, as very wise, above error. How childish," Goiri said. "How unfair."

Another silence.

"I’ll do what I can, maz," Sutty said. "If and when I get back to Dovza City. It might not be safe to try to get in touch with the Mobile by telephone from Amareza. I could say, for the wiretap-pers, that we got lost trying to hike up to Silong and found an eastern path out of the mountains. But if I turn up in Amareza, where I wasn’t authorised to go, they’ll ask questions. I can clam up, but I don’t think I can lie. I mean, not well… And there’s the problem of the Monitor."

"Yes. I wish you would talk to him, yoz Sutty."

Et tu, Brute? said Uncle Hurree, his eyebrows sarcastic.

"Why, Maz Goiri?"

"Well, he is — as you call it — a believer. And as you say, that’s dangerous. Tell him what you told me about your Earth. Tell him more than you told me. Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals."

Sutty drank the last of her tea. The taste was bitter, delicate. "I can’t remember where I heard that. Not in a book. I heard it told."

"Teran said it to Penan. After he was wounded fighting the barbarians."

Sutty remembered now: the circle of mourners in the green valley under the great slopes of stone and snow, the body of the young man covered with thin, ice-white cloth, the voice of the maz telling the story.

Goiri said, "Teran was dying. He said, ‘My brother, my husband, my love, my self, you and I believed that we would defeat our enemy and bring peace to our land. But belief is the wound that knowledge heals, and death begins the Telling of our life.’ Then he died in Penan’s arms."

The grave, yoz. Where it begins.

"I can carry that message," Sutty said finally. "Though bigots have small ears."

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?"