"I was. For two years."
"No child?"
He shook his head.
He continued to gaze straight ahead. He sat stiffly, not moving. His sleeping bag was tented up over one knee on a kind of frame Tobadan had made to immobilise the knee and relieve the pain. The little book lay by his hand, JEWEL FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LEARNING.
Sutty bent forward to loosen her shoulder muscles, sat up straight again.
"Goiri asked me to tell you about my world. Maybe I can, because my life hasn’t been so different from yours, in some ways… I told you about the Unists. After they took over the government of our part of the country, they started having what they called cleansings in the villages. It got more and more unsafe for us. People told us we should hide our books, or throw them in the river. Uncle Hurree was dying then. His heart was tired, he said. He told Aunty she should get rid of his books, but she wouldn’t. He died there with them around him.
"After that, my parents were able to get Aunty and me out of India. Clear across the world, to another continent, in the north, to a city where the government wasn’t religious. There were some cities like that, mostly where the Ekumen had started schools that taught the Hainish learning. The Unists hated the Ekumen and wanted to keep all the extraterrestrials off Earth, but they were afraid to try to do it directly. So they encouraged terrorism against the Pales and the ansible installations and anything else the alien demons were responsible for."
She used the English word demon, there being no such word in Dovzan. She paused a while, took a deep, conscious breath. Yara sat in the intense silence of the listener.
"So I went to high school and college there, and started training to work for the Ekumen. About that time, the Ekumen sent a new Envoy to Terra, a man called Dalzul, who’d grown up on Terra. He came to have a great deal of influence among the Unist Fathers. Before very long they were giving him more and more control, taking orders from him. They said he was an angel — that’s a messenger from God. Some of them began to say he was going to save all mankind and bring them to God, and so …" But there was no Akan word for worship. "They lay down on the ground in front of him and praised him and begged him to be kind to them. And they did whatever he told them to do, because that was their idea of how to do right — to obey orders from God. And they thought Dalzul spoke for God. Or was God. So within a year he got them to dismantle the theocratic regime. In the name of God.
"Most of the old regions or states were going back to democratic governments, choosing their leaders by election, and restoring the Terran Commonwealth, and welcoming people from the other worlds of the Ekumen. It was an exciting time. It was wonderful to watch Unism fall to pieces, crumble into fragments. More and more of the believers believed Dalzul was God, but also more and more of them decided that he was the… opposite of God, entirely wicked. There was one kind called the Repentants, who went around in processions throwing ashes on their heads and whipping each other to atone for having misunderstood what God wanted. And a lot of them broke off from all the others and set up some man, a Unist Father or a terrorist leader, as a Savior of their own, and took orders from him. They were all dangerous, they were all violent. The Dalzulites had to protect Dalzul from the anti-Dalzulites. They wanted to kill him. They were always planting bombs, trying suicide raids. All of them. They’d always used violence, because their belief justified it. It told them that God rewards those who destroy unbelief and the unbeliever. But mostly they were destroying each other, tearing each other to pieces. They called it the Holy Wars. It was a frightening time, but it seemed as if there was no real problem for the rest of us — Unism was just taking itself apart.
"Well, before it got as far as that, when the Liberation was just beginning, my city was set free. And we danced in the streets. And I saw a woman dancing. And I fell in love with her."
She stopped.
It had all been easy enough, to this point. This point beyond which she had never gone. The story that she had told only to herself, only in silence, before sleep, stopped here. Her throat began to tighten.
"I know you think that’s wrong," she said.
After a hesitation, he said, "Because no children can be born of such union, the Committee on Moral Hygiene declared—"
"Yes, I know. The Unist Fathers declared the same thing. Because God created women to be vessels for men’s semen. But after freedom we didn’t have to hide for fear of being sent to revival camps. Like your maz couples who get sent to rehabilitation centers." She looked at him, challenging.
But he did not take the challenge. He accepted what she said and waited, listening.
She could not talk her away around it or away from it. She had to talk her way through it. She had to tell it.
"We lived together for two years," she said. Her voice came out so softly that he turned a little toward her to hear. "She was much prettier than me, and much more intelligent. And kinder. And she laughed. Sometimes she laughed in her sleep. Her name was Pao."
With the name came the tears, but she held them back.
"I was two years older and a year ahead of her in our training. I stayed back a year to be with her in Vancouver. Then I had to go and begin training in the Ekumenical Center, in Chile. A long way south. Pao was going to join me when she graduated from the university. We were going to study together and be a team, an Observer team. Go to new worlds together. We cried a lot when I had to leave for Chile, but it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be. It wasn’t bad at all, really, because we could talk all the time on the phone and the net and we knew we’d see each other in the winter, and then after the spring she’d come down and we’d be together forever. We were together. We were like maz. We were two that weren’t two, but one. It was a kind of pleasure or joy, missing her, because she was there, she was there to miss. And she told me the same thing, she said that when I came back in the winter, she was going to miss missing me…"
She had begun crying, but the tears were easy, not hard. Only she had to stop and sniff and wipe her eyes and nose.
"So I flew back to Vancouver for the holiday. It was summer in Chile, but winter there. And we … we hugged and kissed and cooked dinner. And we went to see my parents, and Pao’s parents, and walked in the park, where there were big trees, old trees. It was raining. It rains a lot there. I love the rain."
Her tears had stopped.
"Pao went to the library, downtown, to look up something for the examinations she’d be taking after the holiday. I was going to go with her, but I had a cold, and she said, ’Stay here, you’ll just get soaked,’ and I felt like lying around being lazy, so I stayed in our apartment, and fell asleep.
"There was a Holy War raid. It was a group called the Purifiers of Earth. They believed that Dalzul and the Ekumen were servants of the anti-God and should be destroyed. A lot of them had been in the Unist military forces. They had some of the weapons the Unist Fathers had stockpiled. They used them against the training schools."
She heard her voice, as flat as his had been.
"They used drones, unmanned bombers. From hundreds of kilos away, in the Dakotas. They hid underground and pressed a button and sent the drones. They blew up the college, the library, blocks and blocks of the downtown. Thousands of people were killed. Things like that happened all the time in the Holy Wars. She was just one person. Nobody, nothing, one person. I wasn’t there. I heard the noise."
Her throat ached, but it always did. It always would.
She could not say anything more for a while.
Yara asked softly, "Were your parents killed?"
The question touched her. It moved her to a place where she could respond. She said, "No. They were all right. I went to stay with them. After that I went back to Chile."