Pao knew a lot of Unist hymns, and had one for most occasions. Sutty got the flu. Flu was a frightening thing, so many strains of it were fatal. She remembered vividly her terror, standing in the crowded streetcar while the headache got worse and worse, and when she got home and couldn’t focus her eyes on Pao’s face. Pao cared for her night and day and when the fever went down made her drink Chinese medicinal teas that tasted like piss and mildew. She was weak for days and days, lying there on the futons staring at the dingy ceiling, weak and stupid, peaceful, coming back to life.

But in that epidemic little Aunty found her way back to the village. The first time Sutty was strong enough to visit home, it was strange to be there with Mother and Father and not with Aunty. She kept turning her head, thinking Aunty was standing in the doorway or sitting in her chair in the other room in her ragged blanket cocoon. Mother gave Sutty Aunty’s bangles, the six everyday brass ones, the two gold ones for dressing up, tiny, frail circlets through which Sutty’s hands would never pass. She gave them to Lakshmi for her baby girl to wear when she got bigger. "Don’t hold on to things, they weigh you down. Keep in your head what’s worth keeping," Uncle Hurree had said, preaching what he’d had to practice; but Sutty kept the red-and-orange saree of cotton gauze, which folded up into nothing and could not weigh her down. It was in the bottom of her suitcase here, in Okzat-Ozkat. Someday maybe she would show it to Iziezi. Tell her about Aunty. Show her how you wore a saree. Most women enjoyed that and liked to try it on themselves. Pao had tried on Sutty’s old grey-and-silver saree once, to entertain Sutty while she was convalescing, but she said it felt too much like skirts, which of course she had been forced to wear in public all her life because of the Unist clothing laws, and she couldn’t get the trick of securing the top. "My tits are going to pop out!" she cried, and then, encouraging them to do so, had performed a remarkable version of what she called Indian classical dance all over the futons.

Sutty had been frightened again, very badly frightened, when she discovered that everything she’d learned in the months before she got the flu — the Ekumenical history, the poems she’d memorised, even simple words of Hainish she had known for years — seemed to have been wiped out. "What will I do, what will I do, if I can’t keep things even in my head?" she whispered to Pao, when she finally broke down and confessed to the terror that had been tormenting her for a week. Pao hadn’t comforted her much, just let her tell her fear and misery, and finally said, "I think that will wear off. I think you’ll find it all coming back." And of course she was right. Talking about it changed it. The next day, as Sutty was riding the streetcar, the opening lines of The Terraces of Darranda suddenly flowered out in her mind like great fireworks, the marvelous impetuous orderly fiery words; and she knew that all the other words were there, not lost, waiting in the darkness, ready to come when she called them. She bought a huge bunch of daisies and took them home for Pao. They put them in the one vase they had, black plastic, and they looked like Pao, black and white and gold. With the vision of those flowers an intense and complete awareness of Pao’s body and presence filled her now, here in the high quiet room on another world, as it had filled her constantly there, then, when she was with Pao, and when she wasn’t with her, but there was no time that they weren’t together, no time that they were truly apart, not even that long, long flight down all the coast of the Americas had separated them. Nothing had separated them. Let me not to the marriage, of true minds admit impediment… "O my true mind," she whispered in the dark, and felt the warm arms holding her before she slept.

Tong Ov’s brief reply came, a printout, received at a bureau of the District Prefecture and hand-delivered, after inspection of her ZIL bracelet, by a uniformed messenger. Observer Sutty Dass: Consider your holiday the beginning of a field trip. Continue research and recording personal observations as you see fit.

So much for the Monitor! Surprised and jubilant, Sutty went outdoors to look up at the bannered peak of Silong and think where to start.

She had gathered in her mind innumerable things to learn about: the meditation exercises; the double-cloud doors, which she had found all over the city, always whitewashed or painted over; the inscriptions in shops; the tree metaphors she kept hearing in talk about food or health or anything to do with the body; the possible existence of banned books; the certain existence of a web or net of information, subtler than the electronic one and uncontrolled by the Corporation, that kept people all over the city in touch and aware at all times of, for instance, Sutty: who she was, where she was, what she wanted. She saw this awareness in the eyes of street people, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, the old women who dug in the little gardens, the old men who sat in the sun on barrels on street corners. She felt it as uninvasive, as if she walked among faint lines of guidance, not bonds, not constraints, but reassurances. That she had not first entered either Iziezi’s or the Fertiliser’s door entirely by chance now seemed probable, though she could not explain it, and acceptable, though she did not know why.

Now that she was free, she wanted to go back to the Fertiliser’s shop. She went up into the hills of the city, began to climb that narrow street. Halfway up it she came face to face with the Monitor.

Released from concern about either obeying or evading him, she looked at him as she had at first on the river journey, not as the object of bureaucratic control looks at the bureaucrat, but humanly. He had a straight back and good features, though ambition, anxiety, authority had made his face hard, tight. Nobody starts out that way, Sutty thought. There are no hard babies. Magnanimous, she greeted him, "Good morning, Monitor!"

Her cheery, foolish voice rang in her own ears. Wrong, wrong. To him such a greeting was mere provocation. He stood silent, facing her.

He cleared his throat and said, "I have been ordered to withdraw my request to you to inform my office of your contacts and travel plans. Since you did not comply with it, I attempted to keep some protective surveillance over you. I am informed that you complained of this. I apologise for any annoyance or inconvenience caused you by myself or my staff."

His tone was cold and dour but he had some dignity, and Sutty, ashamed, said, "No — I’m sorry, I—"

"I warn you," he said, paying no attention, his voice more intense, "that there are people here who intend to use you for their own ends. These people are not picturesque relics of a time gone by. They are not harmless. They are vicious. They are the dregs of a deadly poison — the drug that stupefied my people for ten thousand years. They seek to drag us back into that paralysis, that mindless barbarism. They may treat you kindly, but I tell you they are ruthless. You are a prize to them. They’ll flatter you, teach you lies, promise you miracles. They are the enemies of truth, of science. Their so-called knowledge is rant, superstition, poetry. Their practices are illegal, their books and rites are banned, and you know that. Do not put my people into the painful position of finding a scientist of the Ekumen in possession of illegal materials — participating in obscene, unlawful rites. I ask this of you — as a scientist of the Ekumen—" He had begun to stammer, groping for words.

Sutty looked at him, finding his emotion unnerving, grotesque. She said drily, "I am not a scientist. I read poetry. And you need not tell me the evils religion can do. I know them."

"No," he said, "you do not." His hands clenched and unclenched. "You know nothing of what we were. How far we have come. We will never go back to barbarism."