The Telling Read Free Page B

whenever it came up. Wrong. Wrong.
    Tong had become a bit distracted; the item he had been searching for had turned up at last, and he set his noter to retrieve and decode. This took some time. "Akan microfiling leaves something to be desired," he said, poking a final key.
    "'Everything breaks down on schedule,'" Sutty said. "That's the only Akan joke I know. The trouble with it is, it's true."
    "But consider what they've accomplished in seventy years!" The Envoy sat back, warmly discursive, his hat slightly askew. "Rightly or wrongly, they were given the blueprint for a G86." G86 was Hainish historians' shorthand jargon for a society in fast-forward industrial technological mode. "And they devoured that information in one gulp. Remade their culture, established the Corporate worldstate, got a spaceship off to Hain—all in a single human lifetime! Amazing people, really. Amazing unity of discipline!"
    Sutty nodded dutifully.
    "But there must have been resistance along the way. This antireligious obsession.... Even if we triggered it along with the technological expansion...."
    It was decent of him, Sutty thought, to keep saying "we," as if the Ekumen had been responsible for Terra's intervention in Aka. That was the underlying Hainish element in Ekumenical thinking:
Take responsibility.
    The Envoy was pursuing his thought. "The mechanisms of control are so pervasive and effective, they must have been set up in response to something powerful, don't you think? If resistance to the Corporate State centered in a religion—a well-established, widespread religion—that would explain the Corporation's suppression of religious practices. And the attempt to set up national theism as a replacement. God as Reason, the Hammer of Pure Science, all that. In the name of which to destroy the temples, ban the preachings. What do you think?"
    "I think it understandable," Sutty said.
    It was perhaps not the response he had expected. They were silent for a minute.
    "The old writing, the ideograms," Tong said, "you can read them fluently?"
    "It was all there was to learn when I was in training. It was the only writing on Aka, seventy years ago."
    "Of course," he said, with the disarming Chiffewarian gesture that signified
Please forgive the idiot.
"Coming from only twelve years' distance, you see, I learned only the modern script."
    "Sometimes I've wondered if I'm the only person on Aka who can read the ideograms. A foreigner, an offworlder. Surely not."
    "Surely not. Although the Dovzans are a systematic people. So systematic that when they banned the old script, they also systematically destroyed whatever was written in it—poems, plays, history, philosophy. Everything, you think?"
    She remembered the increasing bewilderment of her early weeks in Dovza City: her incredulity at the scant and vapid contents of what they called libraries, the blank wall that met all her attempts at research, when she had still believed there had to be some remnants, somewhere, of the literature of an entire world.
    "If they find any books or texts, even now, they destroy them," she said. "One of the principal bureaus of the Ministry of Poetry is the Office of Book Location. They find books, confiscate them, and send them to be pulped for building material. Insulating material. The old books are referred to as pulpables. A woman there told me that she was going to be sent to another bureau because there were no more pulpables in Dovza. It was clean, she said. Cleansed."
    She heard her voice getting edgy. She looked away, tried to ease the tension in her shoulders.
    Tong Ov remained calm. "An entire history lost, wiped out, as if by a terrible disaster," he said. "Extraordinary!"
    "Not that unusual," she said, very edgily—Wrong. She rearranged her shoulders again, breathed in once and out once, and spoke with conscious quietness. "The few Akan poems and drawings that were reconstructed at the Terran Ansible Center would be illegal here. I had