Sutty loved to study it and try to make out the inscriptions and poems surrounding it. The painting was beautiful, the poetry was splendid and elusive, the whole chart was a work of high art, absorbing, enlightening. Maz Uming sat down and after a few knocks on his drum began intoning one of the interminable chants that accompanied the rituals and many of the tellings. Maz Ottiar read and discussed some of the inscriptions, which were four or five hundred years old. Her voice was soft, full of silences.
Softly and hesitantly, the students asked questions. She answered them the same way.
Then she drew back and sat down and took up the chant in a gnat voice, and old Uming, half blind, his speech thickened by a stroke, got up and talked about one of the poems.
"That’s by Maz Niniu Raying, five, six, seven hundred years back, eh? It’s in The Arbor. Somebody wrote it here, a good calligrapher, because it talks about how the leaves of the Tree perish but always return so long as we see them and say them. See, here it says: ‘Word, the gold beyond the fall, returns the glory to the branch.’ And underneath it here, see, somebody later on wrote, ‘Mind’s life is memory.’" He smiled round at them, a kind, lopsided smile. "Remember that, eh? ‘Mind’s life is memory.’ Don’t forget!" He laughed, they laughed. All the while, out front in the grocery shop, the maz’ grandson kept the volume turned up high on the audio system, cheery music, exhortations, and news announcements blaring out to cover the illicit poetry, the forbidden laughter.
It was a pity, but no surprise, Sutty told her noter, that an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline should contain a large proportion of superstition and verge over into what she labeled in her noter HP, hocus-pocus. The great jungle of significance had its swamps and morasses, and she had at last stumbled into some of them. She met a few maz who claimed arcane knowledge and supernal powers. Boring as she found all such claims, she knew she could not be sure of what was valuable and what was drivel, and painstakingly recorded whatever information she could buy from these maz concerning alchemy, numerology, and literal readings of symbolic texts. They sold her bits of texts and snippets of methodology at a fairly stiff price, grudgingly, hedging the transactions with portentous warnings about the danger of this powerful knowledge.
She particularly detested the literal readings. By such literalism, fundamentalism, religions betrayed the best intentions of their founders. Reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law. But she put it all into her noter-which she had now had to unload into crystal storage twice, for she could not transmit any of the treasure-and-trash she was amassing.
At this distance, with all means of communication monitored, there was no way to consult with Tong Ov as to what she should or he intended to do with all this material. She couldn’t even tell him she’d found it. The problem remained, and grew.
Among the HP she came on a brand that was, as far as she knew, unique to Aka: a system of arcane significances attached to the various strokes that composed the ideogrammatic characters and the further strokes and dots that qualified them with verbal tense and mode and nominal case and with Action or Element (for everything, literally every thing, could be categorised under the Four Actions and the Five Elements). Every character of the old writing thus became a code to be interpreted by specialists, who functioned much as horoscope readers had in Sutty’s homeland. She discovered that many people in Okzat-Ozkat, including officials of the Corporation, would undertake nothing of importance without calling in a ’sign reader’ to write out their name and other relevant words and, after poring over these and referring to impressively elaborate charts and diagrams, to advise and foretell. "This is the kind of thing that makes me sympathise with the Monitor," she told her noter. Then she said, "No. It’s what the Monitor wants from his own kind of HP. Political HP. Everything locked in place, on course, under control. But he’s handed over the controls just as much as they have."
Many of the practices she learned about had equivalents on Earth. The exercises, like yoga and tai chi, were physical-mental, a lifelong discipline, leading toward mindfulness, or toward a trance state, or toward martial vigor and readiness, depending on the style and the practitioner’s desire. Trance seemed to be sought for its own sake as an experience of essential stillness and balance rather than as satori or revelation. Prayer… Well, what about prayer?
The Akans did not pray.
That seemed so strange, so unnatural, that as soon as she had the thought, she qualified it: it was very possible that she didn’t properly understand what prayer was.
If it meant asking for something, they didn’t do it. Not even to the extent that she did. She knew that when she was very startled she cried, "O Ram!" and when she was very frightened she whispered, "O please, please." The words were strictly meaningless, yet she knew they were a kind of prayer. She had never heard an Akan say anything of the kind. They could wish one another well — "May you have a good year, may your venture prosper" — just as they could curse one another — "May your sons eat stones," she had heard Diodi the barrow man murmur as a blue-and-tan stalked by. But those were wishes, not prayers. People didn’t ask God to make them good or to destroy their enemy. They didn’t ask the gods to win them the lottery or cure their sick child. They didn’t ask the clouds to let the rain fall or the grain grow. They wished, they willed, they hoped, but they didn’t pray.
If prayer was praise, then perhaps they did pray. She had come to understand their descriptions of natural phenomena, the Fertiliser’s pharmacopoeia, the maps of the stars, the lists of ores and minerals, as litanies of praise. By naming the names they rejoiced in the complexity and specificity, the wealth and beauty of the world, they participated in the fullness of being. They described, they named, they told all about everything. But they did not pray for anything.
Nor did they sacrifice anything. Except money.
To get money, you had to give money: that was a firm and universal principle. Before any business undertaking, they buried silver and brass coins, or threw them into the river, or gave them to beggars. They pounded out gold coins into airy, translucent gold leaf with which they decorated niches, columns, even whole walls of buildings, or had them spun into thread and woven into gorgeous shawls and scarves to give away on New Year’s Day. Silver and gold coins were hard to come by, as the Corporation, detesting this extravagant waste, had gone over mostly to paper; so people burned paper money like incense, made paper boats of it and sailed them off on the river, chopped it up fine and ate it with salad. The practice was pure HP, but Sutty found it irresistible. Slaughtering goats or one’s firstborn to placate the supernatural seemed to her the worst kind of perversity, but she saw a gambler’s gallantry in this money sacrifice. Easy come, easy go. At the New Year, when you met a friend or acquaintance, you each lighted a one-ha bill and waved it about like a little torch, wishing each other health and prosperity. She saw even employees of the Corporation doing this. She wondered if the Monitor had ever done it. The more naive people that she came to know at the tellings and in the classes, and Diodi and other friendly acquaintances of the streets, all believed in sign reading and alchemical marvels and talked about diets that let you live forever, exercises that had given the ancient heroes the strength to withstand whole armies. Even Iziezi held firmly by sign reading. But most of the maz, the educated, the teachers, claimed no special powers or attainments at all. They lived firmly and wholly in the real world. Spiritual yearning and the sense of sacredness they knew, but they did not know anything holier than the world, they did not seek a power greater than nature. Sutty was certain of that. No miracles! she told her noter, jubilant.