The Telling (Hainish Cycle, #8)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

She wondered what the air felt like on the soles of your feet when you walked on it. Cool? Resilient?

After that she made herself pay more attention to the old texts and tales that talked about walking on the wind, riding on clouds, traveling to the stars, destroying distant enemies with thunderbolts. Such feats were always ascribed to heroes and wise maz far away and long ago, even though a good many of them had been made commonplace fact by modern technologies.

A telling is not an explaining.

the stories, all the things you tell, what do they do?” “They tell the world.” “Why, maz?” “That’s what people do, yoz. What we’re here for.”

Silence was part of all she said.

a domestic saint living entirely inside the ritual system,

as she listened to Elyed’s tellings, she heard a disciplined, reasoning mind, though it spoke of what was unreasonable.

“It’s all we have. You see? It’s the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don’t have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of the river. We’d tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment. We’d be like a baby. A baby can do it, but we’d drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. 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?”

It always came back to words. Like the Greeks with their Logos, the Hebrew Word that was God. But this was words. Not the Logos, the Word, but words. Not one but many, many. . . . Nobody made the world, ruled the world, told the world to be. It was. It did. And human beings made it be, made it be a human world, by saying it? By telling what was in it and what happened in it? Anything, everything—tales of heroes, maps of the stars, love songs, lists of the shapes of leaves. . . . For a moment she thought she understood.

“Animals have no language. They have their nature. You see? They know the way, they know where to go and how to go, following their nature. But we’re animals with no nature. Eh? Animals with no nature! That’s strange! We’re so strange! We have to talk about how to go and what to do, think about it, study it, learn it. Eh? We’re born to be reasonable, so we’re born ignorant. You see? If nobody teaches us the words, the thoughts, we stay ignorant. If nobody shows a little child, two, three years old, how to look for the way, the signs of the path, the landmarks, then it gets lost on the mountain, doesn’t it? And dies in the night, in the cold.

“So, without the telling, the rocks and plants and animals go on all right. But the people don’t. People wander around. They don’t know a mountain from its reflection in a puddle. They don’t know a path from a cliff. They hurt themselves. They get angry and hurt each other and the other things. They hurt animals because they’re angry. They make quarrels and cheat each other. They want too much. They neglect things. Crops don’t get planted. Too many crops get planted. Rivers get dirty with shit. Earth gets dirty with poison. People eat poison food. Everything is confused. Everybody’s sick. Nobody looks after the sick people, the sick things. But that’s very bad, very bad, eh? Because looking after things, that’s our job, eh? Looking after things, looking after each other. Who else would do it? Trees? Rivers? Animals?

The rest of the world knows its business. Knows the One and the Myriad, the Tree and the Leaves. But all we know is how to learn. How to study, how to listen, how to talk, how to tell. If we don’t tell the world, we don’t know the world. We’re lost in it, we die.

That’s what went wrong. Down there, down there in Dovza, when they started telling lies. Those false maz, those big munan, those boss maz. Telling people that nobody knew the truth but them, nobody could speak but them, everybody had to tell the same lies they told. Traitors, usurers! Leading people astray for money! Getting rich off their lies, bossing people! No wonder the world stopped going around! No wonder the police took over!”

The grandparents didn’t know how to talk much Dovzan till after the Corporation police came and made everybody talk it. They hated it! They kept the worst accents they could!”

of the hundreds of stories and histories she had heard in the tellings, none had to do with events in Dovza, or any events of the last five or six decades except very local ones.

Whatever else she had missed and misunderstood in this world, she had learned when, and why, and how to cook its food.

“Skuyen?” “People who tell the blue-and-tans about illegal things. Books, tellings, anything. . . . For money. Or for hatred.”

Books, tellings, anything. What you cooked. Who you made love with. How you wrote the word for tree. Anything.

Go back to the city. She should go back to the city. Now. With the three record crystals and the noter full of stuff, full of poetry. Get it all to Tong Ov before the Monitor got it.

“You did no wrong. Sotyu Ang did no wrong. There is no fault. Things are going badly. It’s not possible always to do right when things are difficult.”

She believed him. She remembered the invisible web she had sensed when she first lived here. Odiedin was one of the spiders.

Sutty tried to leave no track, ‘no footprints in the dust.’ She sent no word to Tong except that she planned to do nothing much the next few months except a little hiking and climbing.

We all thought it was over, it would go back to being like it used to be. Then all of a sudden there were a lot of them. That’s how they are. All of a sudden. They said there were, you know, too many people here breaking the law, reading, telling. . . . They said they’d clean the city. They paid skuyen to inform on people.

She had resolved before they set out never to ask where they were, where they were going, or how far they had yet to go. She had held to that resolve the more easily as it left her childishly free.

She was living among people to whom the highest spiritual attainment was to speak the world truly, and who had been silenced. Here, in this greater silence, where they could speak, she wanted to learn to listen to them.

Sutty had been amazed to find how many people lived up here where it seemed there was nothing to live on but air and ice and rock.

As far as she could tell, the villagers could read only a few characters or none at all. They handled the written slips of paper with awe and deep satisfaction. They examined them for a long time from every direction, folded them carefully, slipped them into special pouches or finely decorated boxes in their house or tent. The maz had done a blessing or ingathering like this in every village they passed through that did not have a maz of its own.

these little red and blue record slips in them, tellings of lives present, lives past.

Why was Takieki ‘dear’? Sutty wondered. Because he was foolish? (Bare feet standing on air.) Because he was wise?

Or did it mean that a holy man, an ascetic, is a fool?

The people she had lived with this year honored self-restraint but did not admire self-deprivation. They had no strenuous notions of fasting, and saw no virtue whatever in discomfort, hunger, poverty.

But on Aka, reward, whether spiritual or fiscal, was immediate.

Aka was a cash, not a credit, economy. Therefore their hatred of usury. A fair bargain and payment on the spot.

a good deal depended on how aware Takieki was of his own simplicity. Did he know the girl might trick him? Did he know he wasn’t capable of managing a big farm? Maybe he did the right thing, hanging on to what his mother gave him. Maybe not.

Brutal people, primitive people, the Monitor had said, leaning on the rail of the riverboat, looking up the long dark rise of the land that hid the Mountain. He was right. They were primitive, dirty, illiterate, ignorant, superstitious. They refused progress, hid from it, knew nothing of the March to the Stars. They hung on to their sack of bean meal.

All Sutty’s dreams that night were of a voice she could hear but could not understand, a jewel she had found but could not touch.

Go back to go forward, fail to succeed. Go down to go upward, fail to succeed.

Where my guides lead me in kindness, I follow, follow lightly . . .

Like all the rites, it was a narrative.

a praise-song, gathering a life up into words, making it part of the endless telling.

“Before the Dovzans became so powerful . . . before they began changing everything, using machinery, making things in factories instead of by hand, making new laws—all that—” Odiedin nodded. “It was after people from the Ekumen came here that they began that. Only about a lifetime ago. What were the Dovzans before that?”

They’d rather make war than trade. When they traded, they made a war of it.

They always had headmen to whom they paid tribute, men who were rich, and passed power down to their sons.

when they began to have maz, they made the maz into bosses, with the power to rule and punish. Gave the maz the power to tax. They made them rich. They made the sons of maz all maz, by birth. They made the ordin...

“We tell what is right, what goes right, as it should go. Not what goes wrong.”

What’s the end of a story? When you begin telling it.

“So the events must be over before the telling begins?”

There’s nothing really in the world but stone and light. All the other things, all the things, dissolve back into the two, the stone, the light, and the two back into the one, the flying. . . . And then it will all be born again, it is born again, always, in every moment it’s being born,

Zubuam and Silong, they were two and one, too. Old maz mountains. Old lovers.