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To fall heir to a history of three million years was to find little in human behavior or invention that could be called unusual. Though the Hainish bore it lightly, it was a burden on their various descendants to know that they would have a hard time finding a new thing, even an imaginary new thing, under any sun.
Maybe there’s a middle way?
As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all knew what Silong looked like and therefore could help her see it. They said its name and called it Mother, pointing to the glitter of the river down at the foot of the street.
“On Silong you live forever,” said a gnarly woman with a backpack full of what looked like pumice rock. “Caves,” said a man with a yellowish, scarred face. “Caves full of being.” “Good sex!” said the barrow man, and everybody laughed. “Sex for three hundred years!”
“After three-hundred-year sex, anybody can fly!”
He had a straight back and good features, though ambition, anxiety, authority had made his face hard, tight. Nobody starts out that way, Sutty thought. There are no hard babies.
To learn a belief without belief is to sing a song without the tune.
The maz, however, were mostly middle-aged or old, again not because they were dying out as a group, but because, as they said, it took a lifetime to learn how to walk in the forest.
The difference, Sutty told her noter, was between somebody sitting thinking after a good meal and somebody running furiously to catch the bus.
If telling was the skill of the maz, listening was the skill of the yoz. As they all liked to remark, neither one was any use without the other.
But first and last there were the words.
By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.
Spiritual yearning and the sense of sacredness they knew, but they did not know anything holier than the world, they did not seek a power greater than nature.
A very small great-grandnephew staggered about it, his goal in life to eat screws and washers.
The past has passed, and there’s nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is.”
“We’re not outside the world, yoz. You know? We are the world. We’re its language. So we live and it lives. You see? If we don’t say the words, what is there in our world?”
But all we know is how to learn.
“People who tell the blue-and-tans about illegal things. Books, tellings, anything. . . . For money. Or for hatred.” Iziezi’s mild voice changed on the last words. Her face had closed into its tight look of pain. Books, tellings, anything. What you cooked. Who you made love with. How you wrote the word for tree. Anything.
here with this woman who could be her grandmother, who was her grandmother.
Zubuam and Silong, they were two and one, too. Old maz mountains. Old lovers.
keep them hidden, keep them safe.
