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Chapter One
When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it
was the Pale.
Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of
marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red,
dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day. A whiff of asafetida. The
brook-babble of Aunty gossiping with Moti's mother on the verandah. Uncle Hurree's dark
hand lying still on a white page. Ganesh's little piggy kindly eye. A match struck and the
rich grey curl of incense smoke: pungent, vivid, gone. Scents, glimpses, echoes that
drifted or glimmered through her mind when she was walking the streets, or eating, or
taking a break from the sensory assault of the neareals she had to partiss in, in the
daytime, under the other sun.
But night is the same on any world. Light's absence is only that. And in the darkness, it
was the Pale she was in. Not in dream, never in dream. Awake, before she slept, or when
she woke from dream, disturbed and tense, and could not get back to sleep. A scene would
begin to happen, not in sweet, bright bits but in full recall of a place and a length of
time; and once the memory began, she could not stop it. 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. But those lovers were lucky, they remembered it
together.
The rain. The first winter in Vancouver rain. The sky like a roof of lead weighing down on
the tops of buildings, flattening the huge black mountains up behind the city. Southward
the rain-rough grey water of the Sound, under which lay Old Vancouver, drowned by the sea
rise long ago. Black sleet on shining asphalt streets. Wind, the wind that made her
whimper like a dog and cringe, shivering with a scared exhilaration, it was so fierce and
crazy, that cold wind out of the Arctic, ice breath of the snow bear. It went right
through her flimsy coat, but her boots were warm, huge ugly black plastic boots splashing
in the gutters, and she'd soon be home. 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.
Aunty looked so little, here, little and ephemeral, like a small butterfly. A
red-and-orange cotton saree, thin brass bangles on insect wrists. Though there were plenty
of Indians and Indo-Canadians here, plenty of neighbors, Aunty looked small even among
them, displaced, misplaced. Her smile seemed foreign and apologetic. She had to wear shoes
and stockings all the time. Only when she got ready for bed did her feet reappear, the
small brown feet of great character which had always, in the village, been a visible part
of her as much as her hands, her eyes. Here her feet were put away in leather cases,
amputated by the cold. So she didn't walk much, didn't run about the house, bustle about
the kitchen. She sat by the heater in the front room, wrapped up in a pale ragged knitted
woollen blanket, a butterfly going back into its cocoon. Going away, farther away all the
time, but not by walking.
Sutty found it easier now to know Mother and Father, whom she had scarcely known for the
last fifteen years, than to know Aunty, whose lap and arms had been her haven. It was
delightful to discover her parents, her mother's good-natured wit and intellect, her
father's shy, unhandy efforts at showing affection. To converse with them as an adult
while knowing herself unreasonably beloved as a child-it was easy, it was delightful. They
talked about everything, they learned one another. While Aunty shrank, fluttered away very
softly, deviously, seeming not to be going anywhere, back to the village, to Uncle
Hurree's grave.
Spring came, fear came. Sunlight came back north here long and pale like an adolescent, a
silvery shadowy radiance. Small pink plum trees blossomed all down the side streets of the
neighborhood. The Fathers declared that the Treaty of Beijing contravened the Doctrine of
Unique Destiny and must be abrogated. 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.
Mother was down at the Link offices every day, coming home late and grim. This is their
final push, she said; if they do this, we have nowhere to go but underground.
In late March, a squadron of planes from the Host of God flew from Colorado to the
District of Washington and bombed the Library there, plane after plane, four hours of
bombing that turned centuries of history and millions of books into dirt. Washington was
not a Pale, but the beautiful old building, though often closed and kept locked, under
guard, had never been attacked; it had endured through all the times of trouble and war,
breakdown and revolution, until this one. The Time of Cleansing. 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. They were dirt. Let the Lord shine out! cried the pilots in their white uniforms
and mirror-masks, back at the church at Colorado Base, facelessly facing the cameras and
the singing, swaying crowds in ecstasy. Wipe away the filth and let the Lord shine
out!
But the new Envoy who had arrived from Hain last year, Dalzul, was talking with the
Fathers. They had admitted Dalzul to the Sanctum. There were neareals and holos and 2Ds of
him in the net and Godsword. It seemed that the Commander-General
of the Hosts had not received orders from the Fathers to destroy the Library of
Washington. The error was not the Commander-General's, of course. Fathers made no errors.
The pilots' zeal had been excessive, their action unauthorised. Word came from the
Sanctum: the pilots were to be punished. They were led out in front of the ranks and the
crowds and the cameras, publicly stripped of their weapons and white uniforms. Their hoods
were taken off, their faces were bared. They were led away in shame to
re-education.
All that was on the net, though Sutty could watch it without having to partiss in it,
Father having disconnected the vr-proprios. Godsword was full of it, too. And full of the
new Envoy, again. Dalzul was a Terran. Born right here on God's Earth, they said. A man
who understood the men of Earth as no alien ever could, they said. A man from the stars
who came to kneel at the feet of the Fathers and to discuss the implementation of the
peaceful intentions of both the Holy Office and the Ekumen.
"Handsome fellow," Mother said, peering. "What is he? A white
man?"
"Inordinately so," Father said.
"Wherever is he from?"
But no one knew. Iceland, Ireland, Siberia, everybody had a different story. Dalzul had
left Terra to study on Hain, they all agreed on that. He had qualified very quickly as an
Observer, then as a Mobile, and then had been sent back home: the first Terran Envoy to
Terra.
"He left well over a century ago," Mother said. "Before the Unists took
over East Asia and Europe. Before they even amounted to much in Western Asia. He must find
his world quite changed."
Lucky man, Sutty was thinking. Oh lucky, lucky man! He got away, he went to Hain, he
studied at the School on Ve, he's been where everything isn't God and hatred, where
they've lived a million years of history, where they understand it all!
That same night she told Mother and Father that she wanted to study at the Training
School, to try to qualify for the Ekumenical College. Told them very timidly, and found
them undismayed, not even surprised. "This seems a rather good world to get off of,
at present," Mother said.
They were so calm and favorable that she thought, Don't they realise, if I qualify and get
sent to one of the other worlds, they'll never see me again? Fifty years, a hundred,
hundreds, round trips in space were seldom less, often more. Didn't they care? It was only
later that evening, when she was watching her father's profile at table, full lips, hook
nose, hair beginning to go grey, a severe and fragile face, that it occurred to her that
if she was sent to another world, she would never see them again either. They had thought
about it before she did. Brief presence and long absence, that was all she and they had
ever had. And made the best of it.
Excerpted from THE TELLING (c) Copyright 2000 by Ursula LeGuin. Reprinted with permission from the publisher, Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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