The Telling Read Online Free PDF Page A

humpback bridge: a silhouette, simple, immobile, timeless—the image of a drawing in one of the Akan books they had partially salvaged from the lost transmission.
    How reverently she had handled those few pages of images, lines of poems, fragments of prose, how she had pored over them, back in Valparaiso, trying to feel from them what these people of another world were like, longing to know them. It had been hard to erase the copies from her noter, here, and no matter what Tong said, she still felt it as a wrong, a capitulation to the enemy. She had studied the copies in her noter one last time, lovingly, painfully, trying to hold on to them before she deleted them.
And there are no footprints in the dust behind us
.... She had shut her eyes as she deleted that poem. Doing so, she felt that she was erasing all her yearning hope that when she came to Aka she'd learn what it was about.
    But she remembered the four lines of the poem, and the hope and yearning were still there.
    The quiet engines of Ferry Eight drummed softly. Hour by hour the embankments grew lower, older, more often broken by stairs and landings. At last they sank away altogether into mud and reeds and shrubby banks, and the Ereha spread itself out wider and wider and amazingly wider across a flatness of green and yellow-green fields.
    For five days the boat, moving steadily eastward on that steady breadth of water through mild sunshine and mild starry darkness, was the tallest thing in sight. Now and then it came to a riverside city where it would tie up at an old dock dwarfed under high new office and apartment towers and take on supplies and passengers.
    Sutty found it amazingly easy to talk to people on the boat. In Dovza City everything had conspired to keep her reserved and silent. Though the four offworlders were given apartments and a certain freedom of movement, the Corporation scheduled their lives very closely with appointments, programming and supervising their work and amusements. Not that they were the only ones so controlled: Aka's abrupt and tremendous technological advance was sustained by rigid discipline universally enforced and self-enforced. It seemed that everybody in the city worked hard, worked long hours, slept short hours, ate in haste. Every hour was scheduled. Everybody she'd been in touch with in the Ministries of Poetry and of Information knew exactly what they wanted her to do and how she should do it, and as soon as she started doing as they directed, they hurried off about their business, leaving her to hers.
    Though the technologies and achievements of the Ekumenical worlds were held as the shining model for everything on Aka, the four visitors from the Ekumen were kept, as Tong said, in a fish tank. From time to time they were put on display to the public and in the neareals, smiling figures sitting at a Corporation banquet or somewhere near the chief of a bureau giving a speech; but they were not asked to speak. Only to smile. Possibly the ministers did not trust them to say exactly what they ought to say. Possibly the ministers found them rather flat, dull examples of the superior civilisations Aka was striving so hard to emulate. Most civilisations, perhaps, look shinier in general terms and from several light-years away.
    Though Sutty had met many Akans and disliked few of them, after a half year on the planet she had scarcely had anything deserving the name of a conversation with any one of them. She had seen nothing of Akan private life except the stiff dinner parties of upper-level bureaucrats and Corporation officials. No personal friendship had ever come even remotely into view. No doubt the people she met had been advised not to talk with her more than necessary, so that the Corporation could remain in full control of the information she received. But even with people she saw constantly, intimacy did not grow. She did not feel this distance as prejudice, xenophobia; the Akans were remarkably unconcerned about