The Telling (Hainish Cycle, #8)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Caves full of being.

it was out there, coming up alongside the pass, coming after us, and then it seemed like a flaw of wind hit it, and tipped it sideways, and just threw it down between the rocks!”

She took Odiedin’s place, standing over the Monitor.

In the summer thirty or forty men and women stayed there, living in the caves. Some of them brought books, papers, texts of the Telling. They stayed to arrange and protect all the books already there, the thousands and thousands of volumes brought over the decades from all over the great continent. They stayed to read and study, to be with the books, to be in the caves full of being.

Winter food, though it was summer. Food for the roots, for endurance.

These maz were city people, far more learned and sophisticated than those of the little hill city Sutty knew.

heirs to a tradition vaster, even in its ruin and enforced secrecy, than she had ever conceived, they had an impersonality about them as well as great personal authority.

Now all they could do was lay plastic sheeting to keep the books from the dirt or bare rock, stack or arrange them as best they could, try to sort them to some degree, and keep them hidden, keep them safe. Protect them, guard them, and, when there was time, read them.

this broken labyrinth of words, this shattered, interrupted, immense story of a people and a world through the centuries, the millennia.

He bowed his head over it without opening it. Tears ran down his cheeks.

She had her noter with her and scanned into it what she read, often whole books she didn’t have time to read. She read the texts of blessings, the protocols of ceremonies, recipes, prescriptions for curing cold sores and for living to a great age, stories, legends, annals, lives of famous maz, lives of obscure merchants, testimonies of people who lived thousands of years ago and a few years ago, tales of travel, meditations of mystics, treatises of philosophy and of mathematics, herbals, bestiaries, anatomies, geometries both real and metaphysical, maps of Aka, maps of imaginary worlds, histories of ancient lands, poems. All the poems in the world were here.

She knew now that all she would ever know of the Telling was the least hint or fragment of what there was to know.

They all had to speak in a language not their own, Dovzan. Though the Akans spoke it in public in their lives ‘down below,’ it was not the language in which they thought, and not the language of the Telling. It was the tongue of the enemy.

Since the helicopter had come so close, the first aircraft that had ever done so, the people of the Library took more care to sweep away paths or tracks in the snow that might lead an eye in the sky to the entrances of the caves.

a long and intense linguistico-philosophical discussion about whether history and the Telling could be understood as the same thing, or similar things, or not alike at all; about what historians did, what maz did, and why.

“I think history and the Telling are the same thing,” Unroy said at last. “They’re ways of holding and keeping things sacred.”

“What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful.” “So the Telling tries to find the truth in events ...

“There are hundreds of thousands of people in the rehabilitation centers,” Unroy told Sutty. “The Corporation gets its labor cheap.”

We slip through the mesh. Or we’ve done so for many years. So I didn’t worry. But he wasn’t the Corporation police. He was one man. One fanatic.”

“He believes slogans? He loves the Corporation?”

Odiedin was no scholar, no sage like these maz from the lowlands, but he had a clear mind and a clear heart. On their long trek she had come to trust him entirely, and when she saw him crying over the books in the Library, she knew she loved him.

“So the cog is wiser than the wheel?”

“You’re my enemy. The true believer. The righteous man with the righteous mission. The one that jails people for reading and burns the books. That persecutes people who do exercises the wrong way. That dumps out the medicine and pisses on it. That pushes the button that sends the drones to drop the bombs. And hides behind a bunker and doesn’t get hurt. Shielded by God. Or the state. Or whatever lie he uses to hide his envy and self-interest and cowardice and lust for power. It took me a while to see you, though. You saw me right away. You knew I was your enemy. Was unrighteous. How did you know it?”

Simplistic, not simple, and what the hell does pure mean?

He was simpleminded, with his ‘enemy of the state’ jargon. And single-minded. A fanatic, as Odiedin had said. In fact, a terrorist. Pure and simple.

When he made his infatuation too clear, she turned on him

This late in the summer, it was most unlikely that anyone else would arrive; indeed, as she had told the Monitor, the people here were already talking of leaving.

Thus the pilgrimage, the way to the caves, had been kept invisible for forty years.

What the maz wanted of her was clear and urgent: they wanted her to save their treasure.

What she herself wanted—would have wanted, if it had been possible—was to stay here. To live in the caves of being, to read, to hear the Telling, here where it was still complete or nearly complete, still one unbroken story. To live in the forest of words. To listen. That was what she was fitted for, what she longed to do, and could not.

Spent our time copying, instead of bringing everything we have together where they can destroy it all at once.

They didn’t look at the machines the Corporation started making, the ways to copy things in an instant, to put whole libraries into a computer. Now we’ve got our treasure where we can’t use those technologies.

“All we know, we hide.”

Tell him that belief is the wound that knowledge heals.”

bigots have small ears.”

You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’

But all the same, when you have a lot of Gods, maybe it’s easier than having one.

Whatever they said God said to do was right. Whoever didn’t do what they said God said to do was wrong.

They opposed science, all learning, everything except what was in their own books.”