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If she carried the entire history of a people, not her own people, in her head, then if she forgot one word, one character, one diacritical mark, that much of all those lives, all those centuries of thought and feeling, would be lost forever. . . .
Yoz was a term indicating respectful equality; maz as an address indicated increased respect.
a function or profession that wasn’t definable as priest, teacher, doctor, or scholar, but contained aspects of them all.
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.
Sutty wanted to find out why the task of becoming educated was interminable; but the task of finding out seemed to be interminable itself. What was it these people believed? What was it they held sacred? She kept looking for the core of the matter, the words at the heart of the Telling, the holy books to study and memorise. She found them, but not it. No bible. No koran.
It was a vast compendium of sophisticated philosophical reasonings on being and becoming, form and chaos, mystical meditations on the Making and the Made, and beautiful, difficult, metaphysical poems concerning the One that is Two, the Two that are One, all interconnected, illuminated, and complicated by the commentaries and marginalia of all the centuries since.
Whatever it was she was trying to learn, the education she was trying to get, was not a religion with a creed and a sacred book. It did not deal in belief. All its books were sacred. It could not be defined by symbols and ideas, no matter how beautiful, rich, and interesting its symbols and ideas.
Because the maz were couples. They were always couples. A sexual partnership, heterosexual or homosexual, monogamous, lifelong. More than lifelong, for if widowed they never remarried. They took and kept each other’s name. The Fertiliser’s wife, Ang Sotyu, had been dead fifteen years, but he was still Sotyu Ang. They were two who were one, one who was two.
They performed, or enacted, or did, the Telling. They told.
The maz were professionals. They gave a major part of their life to acquiring and sharing what they told, and made their living by doing so.
the essential work of the maz, what gave them honor among the people, was telling: reading aloud, reciting, telling stories, and talking about the stories.
What they talked about depended on what they knew, what they possessed of the lore, what they invented on their own, and, evidently, what they felt like talking about at the moment.
How did it all hang together? Was there any relation at all among these disparate things?
So far she had met no arcane wisdoms in the Telling, no holy secrets that could be told only to adepts, no knowledge withheld to fortify the authority of the learned, magnify their sanctity, or increase their fees.
“Write down what I tell you!” all the maz kept saying. “Memorise it! Keep it to tell other people!”
many branches. The endless story-telling of the maz was about many, many things. All things, all the leaves of the immense foliage of the Tree. She could not give up the conviction that there must be some guiding motive, some central concern. The trunk of the Tree. Was it ethics? the right conduct of life?
Like the medicine, the ethic was pragmatic and preventive, and seemed to be pretty effective. It chiefly prescribed respect for your own and everybody else’s body, and chiefly proscribed usury.
The frequency with which excess profit making was denounced in the stories and in public opinion showed that the root of all evil went deep on Aka.
heroism was not earned by murder or slaughter. Heroes were those who atoned for violent acts, or those who died bravely.
The Corporation, of course, had introduced a new ethic, with new virtues such as public spirit and patriotism, and a vast new area of crime: participation in banned activities.
Maybe there had been no need for further sanctions. Maybe the system had been so universal that nobody could imagine living outside it, and only self-destructive insanity could subvert it.
“They agreed to deny their entire culture and impoverish their lives for the ‘March to the Stars’—an artificial, theoretical goal—an imitation of societies they assumed to be superior merely because they were capable of space flight. Why? There’s a step missing. Something happened to cause or catalyse this enormous change.
“Do not betray us!” the Monitor had said.
So the Akans had been their own conquerors.
If indeed this process had begun with first contact, perhaps it was by way of reparation that Tong Ov wanted to learn what could be learned of Aka before the First Observers came. Did he have some hope of eventually restoring to the Akans what they had thrown away?
if the Telling was a religion it was very different from Terran religions, since it entirely lacked dogmatic belief, emotional frenzy, deferral of reward to a future life, and sanctioned bigotry.
It was the Corporation State that was the religion.
tell him what a zealot he was, and what a fool, along with all the other bureaucrat-ideologues, for grasping after other people’s worthless goods while tossing his own treasure into the garbage.
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.
The people of the old way placidly accepted new technologies and products, so long as they worked better than the old ones and so long as using them did not require changing one’s life in any important way. To Sutty this seemed a profound but reasonable conservatism. But to an economy predicated on endless growth, it was anathema.
purple, rust, and blue. The merciless cold gave a kind of fellowship of anonymity.
Nothing came from Dovza but the language they spoke;
many Akans longed to follow a leader, turn earned payment into tribute, load responsibility onto somebody else’s shoulders.
“We have to hide, to keep everything secret, yes. But in my grandparents’ time I think most of the maz lived the way we do. Nobody can wear the scarf all the time!
People would go visit them to hear the telling and read the books in the libraries.
It had been her first formal introduction to the thought system of the Tree.
‘Word, the gold beyond the fall, returns the glory to the branch.’
‘Mind’s life is memory.’ Don’t forget!”
the illicit poetry, the forbidden laughter.
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.
Every character of the old writing thus became a code to be interpreted by specialists, who functioned much as horoscope readers had in Sutty’s homeland.
Political HP. Everything locked in place, on course, under control. But he’s handed over the controls just as much as they have.”
Trance seemed to be sought for its own sake as an experience of essential stillness and balance rather than as satori or revelation.
it was very possible that she didn’t properly understand what prayer was.
But those were wishes, not prayers. People didn’t ask God to make them good or to destroy their enemy. They didn’t ask the gods to win them the lottery or cure their sick child. They didn’t ask the clouds to let the rain fall or the grain grow. They wished, they willed, they hoped, but they didn’t pray.
They described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything. Nor did they sacrifice anything. Except money.
Slaughtering goats or one’s firstborn to placate the supernatural seemed to her the worst kind of perversity, but she saw a gambler’s gallantry in this money sacrifice. Easy come, easy go.
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.
He was standing barefoot half a meter above the floor, looking down at her,
What would she ask? “Did you see what I saw? Did I?” That would be stupid. It couldn’t have happened, and so he’d no doubt merely answer her question with a question. Or perhaps the reason she didn’t ask was that she was afraid he would simply answer, “Yes.”
