The Telling Read Free Page A

regime there were attacks on most of the Ekumenical installations and the treaty areas. The Pales."
    "Were many of them destroyed?"
    He was trying to draw her out. To get her to talk about it. Anger flooded into her, rage. Her throat felt tight. She said nothing, because she was unable to say anything.
    A considerable pause.
    "Nothing but the language got through, then," Tong said.
    "Almost nothing."
    "Terrible luck!" he repeated energetically. "That the First Observers were Terran, so they sent their report to Terra instead of Hain—not unnaturally, but still, bad luck. And even worse, maybe, that ansible transmissions sent
from
Terra all got through. All the technical information the Akans asked for and Terra sent, without any question or restriction.... Why, why would the First Observers have agreed to such a massive cultural intervention?"
    "Maybe they didn't. Maybe the Unists sent it."
    "Why would the Unists start Aka marching to the stars?"
    She shrugged. "Proselytising."
    "You mean, persuading others to believe what they believed? Was industrial technological progress incorporated as an element of the Unist religion?"
    She kept herself from shrugging.
    "So during that period when the Unists refused ansible contact with the Stabiles on Hain, they were...
converting
the Akans? Sutty, do you think they may have sent, what do you call them, missionaries, here?"
    "I don't know."
    He was not probing her, not trapping her. Eagerly pursuing his own thoughts, he was only trying to get her, a Terran, to explain to him what the Terrans had done and why. But she would not and could not explain or speak for the Unists.
    Picking up her refusal to speculate, he said, "Yes, yes, I'm sorry. Of course you were scarcely in the confidence of the Unist leaders! But I've just had an idea, you see—If they did send missionaries, and if they transgressed Akan codes in some way, you see?—that might explain the Limit Law." He meant the abrupt announcement, made fifty years ago and enforced ever since, that only four offworlders would be allowed on Aka at a time, and only in the cities. "And it could explain the banning of religion a few years later!" He was carried away by his theory. He beamed, and then asked her almost pleadingly, "You never heard of a second group sent here from Terra?"
    "No."
    He sighed, sat back. After a minute he dismissed his speculations with a little flip of his hand. "We've been here seventy years," he said, "and all we know is the vocabulary."
    She relaxed. They were off Terra, back on Aka. She was safe. She spoke carefully, but with the fluency of relief. "In my last year in training, some facsimile artifacts were reconstituted from the damaged records. Pictures, a few fragments of books. But not enough to extrapolate any major cultural elements from. And since the Corporation State was in place when I arrived, I don't know anything about what it replaced. I don't even know when religion was outlawed here. About forty years ago?" She heard her voice: placating, false, forced. Wrong.
    Tong nodded. "Thirty years after the first contact with the Ekumen. The Corporation put out the first decree declaring 'religious practice and teaching' unlawful. Within a few years they were announcing appalling penalties.... But what's odd about it, what made me think the impetus might have come from offworld, is the word they use for religion."
    "Derived from Hainish," Sutty said, nodding.
    "Was there no native word? Do you know one?"
    "No," she said, after conscientiously going through not only her Dovzan vocabulary but several other Akan languages she had studied at Valparaíso. "I don't."
    A great deal of the recent vocabulary of Dovzan of course came from offworld, along with the industrial technologies; but that they should borrow a word for a native institution in order to outlaw it? Odd indeed. And she should have noticed it. She would have noticed it, if she had not tuned out the word, the thing, the subject,