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She had to go through it until it let her go. Maybe it was a kind of punishment, like the lovers’ punishment in Dante’s Hell, to remember being happy.
It made you feel safe, that awful cold. People hurried past not bothering each other, all their hates and passions frozen. She liked the North, the cold, the rain, the beautiful, dismal city.
The Pales were to be opened, said the Fathers, their populations allowed to receive the Holy Light, their schools cleansed of unbelief, purified of alien error and deviance. Those who clung to sin would be re-educated.
This is their final push, she said; if they do this, we have nowhere to go but underground.
The Commander-General of the Hosts of the Lord announced the bombing while it was in progress, as an educational action. Only one Word, only one Book. All other words, all other books were darkness, error.
he’s been where everything isn’t God and hatred,
Bad food, she’d eaten too much bad food for too long, processed stuff jacked up with proteins, condiments, stimulants, so you had to buy the stupid akagests. And the stupid unnecessary traffic jams because the stupid badly made cars broke down all the time, and the noise all the time, the slogans, the songs, the hype, a people hyping itself into making every mistake
Look, listen, notice: observe. That was her job. This wasn’t her world.
how could she observe it when there was no way to back off from it? Either the hyperstimulation of the neareals she had to study, or the clamor of the streets: nowhere to get away from the endless aggression of propaganda, except alone in her apartment, shutting out the world she’d come to observe.
“Everything that was written in the old scripts has been destroyed. Or if it exists, I don’t know what it is, because the Ministry doesn’t allow access to it. So all I was able to work on is modern aural literature. All written to Corporation specifications. It tends to be very—to be standardised.”
The campaign against the old ideographic forms seems to have been very intense.
It is so deeply and, and, and flatly political. Of course every art is political. But when it’s all didactic, all in the service of a belief system, I resent, I mean, I resist it.
we on Terra are living the future of a people who denied their past.”
they had all discussed the massive monoculturalism of modern Aka in its large cities, the only places the very few offworlders permitted on the planet were allowed to live.
“Sectarians, I suspect, rather than ethnic. A cult. Possibly remnants in hiding of a banned religion.”
Himself uninvadable, he offered no intimacy.
He knew, surely, that the loss of the transmission had been no accident.
Anger flooded into her, rage. Her throat felt tight. She said nothing, because she was unable to say anything.
only trying to get her, a Terran, to explain to him what the Terrans had done and why.
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.”
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, whenever it came up. Wrong. Wrong.
That was the underlying Hainish element in Ekumenical thinking: Take responsibility.
“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.
when they banned the old script, they also systematically destroyed whatever was written in it—poems, plays, history, philosophy. Everything, you think?”
“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.
“The margin between collusion and respect can be narrow,”
I gathered that drug music is played by faith healers, witch doctors.
He said, ‘We know some of the old songs and medicines. We don’t know the stories. We can’t tell them. The people who told the stories are gone.’
Chiffewarians took responsibility, but did not cultivate guilt the way Terrans did.
“I trained as a linguist and in literature. Aka has one language left and no literature. I wanted to be a historian. How can I, on a world that’s destroyed its history?”
I think of Terra as a world whose history has been shaped by religions. So I see you as the best fitted of us to investigate the vestiges, if they exist, of this world’s religion.
the pressures of an aggressive theocracy, the great weight of it all through your life, may well have left you a residue of distrust, of resistance. If I’m asking you—again!—to observe something you detest, please tell me that.”
“Erasure is an art we must learn from the Akans. Seriously! I mean it.
I also want you to consider the risks. Or rather to consider the fact that we don’t know what the risks may be.
I don’t know why they’ve suddenly given us this permission. Surely they have some reason or motive, but we can find what it is only by taking advantage of it.”
The misery she felt was fear, a wretched panic of fear. Dread. Terror. It was crazy to send her off on her own. Tong was crazy to think of it.
Back then she had known she had to live. It was her job. To live life after joy. Leave love and death behind her. Go on. Go alone and work. And now she was going to ask to get sent back to Earth? Back to death?
And there are no footprints in the dust behind us. . . . She had shut her eyes as she deleted that poem. Doing so, she felt that she was erasing all her yearning hope that when she came to Aka she’d learn what it was about. But she remembered the four lines of the poem, and the hope and yearning were still there.
Not that they were the only ones so controlled: Aka’s abrupt and tremendous technological advance was sustained by rigid discipline universally enforced and self-enforced. It seemed that everybody in the city worked hard, worked long hours, slept short hours, ate in haste. Every hour was scheduled.
the Akans were remarkably unconcerned about foreignness as such. It was that they were all so busy,
They avoided the personal and, in public, repeated the Corporation line on all matters of policy and opinion, to the point of contradicting her when her description of her world didn’t tally with what they had been taught about wonderful, advanced, resourceful Terra.
It seemed that the Corporation had decided to let her be genuinely on her own. She had been on her own in the city, but in the fish tank, a bubble of isolation.
If she had to choose between heroes and hernias, it was no contest.
But she could not record her happiness. The word itself destroyed it.
She thought: Pao should be here. By me. She would have been here. We would have been happy.
That noise after ten days of quiet voices and river silence drove Sutty straight away.
Thanks were “servile address.” Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you’re welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy—all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers.
What had made the uncouth thanks jump now from her mouth?
Yoz: a term defined by the Corporation as servile address and banned for the last fifty years at least. It meant, more or less, fellow person.
If she was to obtain any information here, she must stay in the good graces of local officialdom; if she was to learn anything here, she must not be judgmental.
