"Maybe that’s why the Executives sent the Legates back."
"The Legates?"
"The men on the second ship from Terra."
"Second ship?" Sutty said, startled and puzzled. "There was only one ship from Terra, before the one I came on."
But as she spoke, she remembered her last long conversation with Tong Ov. He had asked her if she thought the Unist Fathers, acting on their own without informing the Ekumen, might have sent missionaries to Aka.
"Tell me about it, Yara! I don’t know anything about that ship."
She could see him physically draw back very slightly, struggling with his immediate reluctance to answer. This had been classified information, she thought, known only to the upper echelons, not part of official Corporation history. Though they no doubt assumed we knew it.
"A second ship came and was sent back to Terra?" she asked.
"It appears so."
She sent an exasperated silent message at his rigid profile: Oh, don’t come the tight-lipped bureaucrat on me now! She said nothing. After a pause, he spoke again.
"There were records of the visit. I never saw them."
"What were you told about ships from Terra — can you tell me?"
He brooded a bit. "The first one came in the year Redan Thirty. Seventy-two years ago. It landed near Abazu, on the eastern coast. There were eighteen men and women aboard." He glanced at her to check this for accuracy, and she nodded. "The provincial governments that were still in power then in the east decided to let the aliens go wherever they liked. The aliens said they’d come to learn about us, and to invite us to join in the Ekumen. Whatever we asked them about Terra and the other worlds they’d tell us, but they came, they said, not as tellers but as listeners. As yoz, not maz. They stayed five years. A ship came for them, and on the ship’s ansible they sent a telling of what they’d learned here back to Terra." Again he looked at her for confirmation.
"Most of that telling was lost," Sutty said.
"Did they get back to Terra?"
"I don’t know. I left Terra sixty years ago, sixty-one years now. If they got back during the Unist rule, or during the Holy Wars, they might have been silenced, or jailed, or shot… But there was a second ship?"
"Yes."
"The Ekumen sponsored that first ship. But it didn’t sponsor another expedition from Terra, because the Unists had taken over. They cut communication with the Ekumen to a bare minimum. They kept closing ports and teaching centers, threatening aliens with expulsion, letting terrorists cripple the facilities, keeping them powerless. If a second ship came from Terra, the Unists sent it. I never heard anything about it, Yara. It certainly wasn’t announced to the common people."
Accepting this, he said, "It came two years after the first ship left. There were fifty people on it, with a boss maz, a leader. His name was Fodderdon. It landed in Dovza, south of the capital. Its people got in touch with the Corporation Executives at once. They said Terra was going to give all its knowledge to Aka. They brought all kinds of information, technological information. They showed us how we’d have to stop doing things in the old, ignorant ways and change our thinking, to learn what they could teach us. They brought plans, and books, and engineers and theorists to teach us the techniques. They had an ansible on their ship, so that information could come from Terra as soon as we needed it."
"A great big box of toys," Sutty whispered.
"It changed everything. It strengthened the Corporation tremendously. It was the first step in the March to the Stars. Then … I don’t know what happened. All we were told was that Fodderdon and the others gave us information freely at first, but then began to withhold it and to demand an unfair price for it."
"I can imagine what price," Sutty said.
He looked his question.
"Your immortal part," she said. There was no Akan word for soul. Yara waited for her to explain. "I imagine he said: You must believe. You must believe in the One God. You must believe that I alone, Father John, am God’s voice on Aka. Only the story I tell is true. If you obey God and me, we’ll tell you all the wonderful things we know. But the price of our Telling is high. More than any money."
Yara nodded dubiously, and pondered. "Fodderdon did say that the Executive Council would have to follow his orders. That’s why I called him a boss maz."
"That’s what he was."
"I don’t know about the rest. We were told that there were policy disagreements, and the ship and the Legates were sent back to Terra. However… I’m not certain that that’s what happened." He looked uncomfortable, and deliberated for a long time over what he was going to say. "I knew an engineer in New Alyuna who worked on the Aka One." He meant the NAFAL ship now on its way from Aka to Hain, the pride of the Corporation. "He said they’d used the Terran ship as a model. He may have meant they had the plans for it. But he made it sound as if he’d actually been in the ship. He was drunk. I don’t know."
The fifty Unist missionary-conquistadors had very likely died in Corporation labor camps. But Sutty saw now how Dovza itself had been betrayed into betraying the rest of Aka.
It saddened her heart, this story. All the old mistakes, made over and over. She gave a deep sigh. "So, having no way to distinguish Unist Legates from Ekumenical Observers, you’ve handled us ever since with extreme distrust… You know, Yara, I think your Executives were wise in refusing the bargain Father John offered. Though probably they saw it simply as a power struggle. What’s harder to see is that even the gift of knowledge itself had a price attached. And still does."
"Yes, of course it does," Yara said. "Only we don’t know what it is. Why do your people hide the price?" She stared at him, nonplussed. "I don’t know," she said. "I didn’t realise… I have to think about that."
Yara sat back, looking tired. He rubbed his eyes and closed them. He said softly, "The gift is lightning," evidently quoting some line of the Telling.
Sutty saw beautiful, arching ideograms, high on a shadowy white walclass="underline" the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth. She saw Sotyu Ang’s worn, dark hands meet in the shape of a mountain peak above his heart. The price is nothing…
They sat in the silence, following their thoughts.
After a long time, she asked, "Yara, do you know the story about Dear Takieki?"
He stared at her and then nodded. It was a memory from childhood, evidently, that required some retrieval. After a bit longer he said definitely, "Yes."
"Was Dear Takieki really a fool? I mean, it was his mother who gave him the bean meal. Maybe he was right not to give it away, no matter what they offered him."
Yara sat pondering. "My grandmother told me that story. I remember I thought I’d like to be able to walk anywhere, the way he did, without anybody looking after me. I was still little, my grandparents didn’t let me go off by myself. So I said he must have wanted to go on walking. Not stay at a farm. And Grandmother asked, ’But what will he do when he runs out of food?’ And I said, ’Maybe he can bargain. Maybe he can give the maz some of the bean meal and keep some, and take just a few of the gold coins. Then he could go on walking, and still buy food to eat when winter comes.’"
He smiled faintly, remembering, but his face remained troubled.
It was always a troubled face. She remembered it when it was hard, cold, closed. It had been beaten open.
He was worried for good reason. He was not progressing well with walking. His knee would still not bear weight for longer than a few minutes, and his back injury prevented him from using crutches without pain and risk of further damage. Odiedin and To-badan worked with him daily, endlessly patient. Yara responded to them with his own dogged patience, but the look of trouble never left him.