The Telling Read Online Free PDF

foreignness as such. It was that they were all so busy, and all bureaucrats. Conversation went by program. At the banquets people talked business, sports, and technology. Waiting in lines or at the laundry, they talked sports and the latest neareals. They avoided the personal and, in public, repeated the Corporation line on all matters of policy and opinion, to the point of contradicting her when her description of her world didn't tally with what they had been taught about wonderful, advanced, resourceful Terra.
    But on the riverboat, people talked. They talked personally, intimately, and exhaustively. They leaned on the railing talking, sat around on the deck talking, stayed at the dinner table with a glass of wine talking.
    A word or smile from her was enough to include her in their talk. And she realised, slowly, because it took her by surprise, that they didn't know she was an alien.
    They all knew there were Observers from the Ekumen on Aka; they'd seen them on the neareals, four infinitely remote, meaningless figures among the ministers and executives, stuffed aliens among the stuffed shirts; but they had no expectation of meeting one among ordinary people.
    She had expected not only to be recognised but to be set apart and kept at a remove wherever she traveled. But no guides had been offered and no supervisors were apparent. It seemed that the Corporation had decided to let her be genuinely on her own. She had been on her own in the city, but in the fish tank, a bubble of isolation. The bubble had popped. She was outside.
    It was a little frightening when she thought about it, but she didn't think much about it, because it was such a pleasure. She was accepted—one of the travelers, one of the crowd. She didn't have to explain, didn't have to evade explanation, because they didn't ask. She spoke Dovzan with no more accent, indeed less, than many Akans from regions other than Dovza. People assumed from her physical type—short, slight, dark-skinned—that she came from the east of the continent. "You're from the east, aren't you?" they said. "My cousin Muniti married a man from Turu," and then they went on talking about themselves.
    She heard about them, their cousins, their families, their jobs, their opinions, their houses, their hernias. People with pets traveled by riverboat, she discovered, petting a woman's furry and affable kittypup. People who disliked or feared flying took the boat, as a chatty old gentleman told her in vast detail. People not in a hurry went by boat and told each other their stories. Sutty got told even more stories than most, because she listened without interrupting, except to say, Really? What happened then? and How wonderful! or How terrible! She listened with greed, tireless. These dull and fragmentary relations of ordinary lives could not bore her. Everything she had missed in Dovza City, everything the official literature, the heroic propaganda left out, they told. If she had to choose between heroes and hernias, it was no contest.
    As they got farther upstream, deeper inland, passengers of a different kind began to come aboard. Country people used the riverboat as the simplest and cheapest way to get from one town to another—walk onto the boat here and get off it there. The towns were smaller now, without tall buildings. By the seventh day, passengers were boarding not with pets and luggage but with fowls in baskets, goats on leashes.
    They weren't exactly goats, or deer or cows or any other earthly thing; they were eberdin; but they blatted, and had silky hair, and in Sutty's mental ecology they occupied the goat niche. They were raised for milk, meat, and the silky hair. In the old days, according to a bright-colored page of a picture book that had survived the lost transmission, eberdin had pulled carts and even carried riders. She remembered the blue-and-red banners on the cart, and the inscription under the picture: SETTING OFF FOR THE GOLDEN MOUNTAIN. She