"Were your parents maz, then?"
"My grandparents." He held the book as if it were a talisman. "The first thing I remember is my grandfather showing me how to write the word ’tree.’" His finger on the cover of the book sketched the two-stroke ideogram. "We were sitting on the porch, in the shade, where we could see the sea. The fishing boats were coming in. Bolov Yeda is on hills above a bay. The biggest city on the coast. My grandparents had a beautiful house. There was a vine growing over the porch, up to the roof, with a thick trunk and yellow flowers. They held the Telling in the house every day. They went to the umyazu in the evenings."
He used the forbidden pronoun, he/she/they. He was not aware of it, Sutty thought. His voice had become soft, husky, easy.
"My parents were schoolteachers. They taught the new writing at the Corporation school. I learned it, but I liked the old writing better. I was interested in writing, in books. In the things my grandparents taught me. They thought I was born to be a maz. Grandmother would say, ’Oh, Kiem, let the child go play!’ But Grandfather would want me to stay and learn one more set of characters, and I always wanted to please him. To do better… Grandmother taught me the spoken things, the things children learned of the Telling. But I liked the writing better. I could make it look beautiful. I could keep it. The spoken words just went out like the wind, and you always had to say them all over again to keep them alive. But the writing stayed, and you could learn to make it better. More beautiful."
"So you went to live with your grandparents, to study with them?"
He answered with the same quietness and almost dreamy ease. "When I was a little child, we lived there all together. Then my father became a school administrator. And my mother entered the Ministry of Information. They were transferred to Tambe, and then to Dovza City. My mother had to travel a great deal. They both rose very quickly in the Corporation. They were valuable officials. Very active. My grandparents said it would be better if I stayed home with them, while my parents were moving about and working so hard. So I did."
"And you wanted to stay with them?"
"Oh, yes," he said, with complete simplicity. "I was happy."
The word seemed to echo in his mind, to jar him out of the quietness from which he had been speaking. He turned his head away from Sutty, an abrupt movement that brought vividly to her mind the moment on the street in Okzat-Ozkat when he said to her with passionate anger and pleading, "Do not betray us!"
They sat a while without speaking. No one else was moving about or talking in the Tree Cave. Deep silence in the Lap of Silong.
"I grew up in a village," Sutty said. "With my uncle and aunt. Really my great-uncle and great-aunt. Uncle Hurree was thin and quite dark-skinned, with white bristly hair and eyebrows — terrible eyebrows. I thought he frowned lightning out of them, when I was little. Aunty was a tremendous cook and manager. She could organise anybody. I learned to cook before I learned how to read. But Uncle did teach me, finally. He’d been a professor at the University of Calcutta. A great city in my part of Terra. He taught literature. We had five rooms in the house in the village, and they were all full of books, except the kitchen. Aunty wouldn’t allow books in the kitchen. But they were piled all over my room, all around the walls, under the bed and the table. When I first saw the Library caves here, I thought of my room at home."
"Did your uncle teach in the village?"
"No. He hid there. We hid. My parents were hiding in a different place. Lying low. There was a kind of revolution going on. Like yours here, but the other way round. People who … But I’d rather listen to you than talk about that. Tell me what happened. Did you have to leave your grandparents? How old were you?"
"Eleven," he said.
She listened. He spoke.
"My grandparents were very active too," he said. His tone had become leaden, labored, though he did not hesitate for words. "But not as loyal producer-consumers. They were leaders of a band of underground reactionary activists. Fomenting cult activities and teaching antiscience. I didn’t understand that. They took me to the meetings they organised. I didn’t know they were illegal meetings. The umyazu was closed, but they didn’t tell me that the police had closed it. They didn’t send me to Corporation school. They kept me home and taught me only superstition and deviant morality. Finally my father realised what they were doing. He and my mother had separated. He hadn’t been to see me for two years, but he sent for me. A man came. He came at night. I heard my grandmother talking very loudly, angrily. I’d never heard her talk that way. I got up and came into the front room. My grandfather was sitting in his chair, just sitting, he didn’t look at me or say anything. Grandmother and a man were facing each other across the table. They looked at me, and then the man looked at her. She said, ’Go get dressed, Azyaru, your father wants you to come see ’ him.’ I went and got dressed. When I came out again, they were still just the way they had been, exactly the same: Grandfather sitting like an old, deaf, blind man staring at nothing, and Grandmother standing with her hands in fists on the table, and the man standing there. I began crying. I said, ’I don’t want to go, I want to stay here.’ Then Grandmother came and held my shoulders, but she pushed me. She pushed me at the man. He said, ’Come on.’ And she said, ’Go, Azyaru!’ And I… went with him."
"Where did you go?" Sutty asked in a whisper.
"To my father in Dovza City. I went to school there." A long silence. He said, "Tell me about… your village. Why you were hiding."
"Fair’s fair," Sutty said. "But it’s a long story."
"All stories are long," he murmured. The Fertiliser had said something like that once. Short stories are only pieces of the long one, he had said.
"What’s hard to explain is about God, on my world," she said.
"I know God," Yara said.
That made her smile. It lightened her for a moment. "I’m sure you do," she said. "But what might be hard to understand, here, is what God is, there. Here, it’s a word and not much else. In your state theism, it seems to mean what’s good. What’s right. Is that right?"
"God is Reason, yes," he said, rather uncertainly.
"Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation."
He looked intent but puzzled.
"Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ’Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ’Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ’No, Shiva’s.’
"All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ’Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’