Books, tellings, anything. What you cooked. Who you made love with. How you wrote the word for tree. Anything.

No wonder the system was incoherent, fragmented. No wonder Uming’s world had stopped going around. The wonder was that anything remained of it at all.

As if her realisations had summoned him out of nothingness, the Monitor passed her on the street next morning. He did not look at her.

A few days later she went to visit Maz Sotyu Ang. His shop was closed. It had never been closed before. She asked a neighbor sweeping his front step if he would be back soon. "I think the producer-consumer is away," the man said vaguely.

Maz Elyed had lent her a beautiful old book-lent or given, she was not sure. "Keep it, it’s safe with you," Elyed had said. It was an ancient anthology of poems from the Eastern Isles, an inexhaustible treasure. She was deep in studying and transferring it into her noter. Several days passed before she thought to visit her old friend the Fertiliser again. She walked up the steep street that shone blinding black in the sunshine. Spring came late but fast to these foothills of the great range. The air blazed with light. She walked past the shop without recognising it.

She was disoriented, turned back, found the shop. It was all white: whitewashed, a blank front. All the signs, the bold characters, the old words gone. Silenced. Snowfall… The door stood ajar. She looked in. The counters and the walls of tiny drawers had been torn out. The room was empty, dirty, ransacked. The walls where she had seen the living words, the breathing words, had been smeared over with brown paint.

The twice-forked lightning tree. …

The neighbor had come out when she passed. He was sweeping his step again. She began to speak to him and then did not. Skuyen? How did you know?

She started back home and then, seeing the river glittering at the foot of the streets, turned and went along the hillside out of town to a path that led down to and followed the river. She had hiked that path all one day, one of those days long, long ago in the early autumn when she was waiting for the Envoy to tell her to go back to the city.

She set off upriver beside thickets of newly leafed-out shrubs and the dwarfed frees that grew here not far from timberline. The Ereha ran milky blue with the first glacier melt. Ice crunched in the ruts of the road, but the sun was hot on her head and back. Her mouth was still dry with shock. Her throat ached.

Go back to the city. She should go back to the city. Now. With the three record crystals and the noter full of stuff, full of poetry. Get it all to Tong Ov before the Monitor got it.

There was no way to send it. She must take it. But travel must be authorised. O Ram! where was her ZIL? She hadn’t worn it for months. Nobody here used ZILs, only if you worked for the Corporation or had to go to one of the bureaus. It was in her briefcase, in her room. She’d have to use her ZIL at the telephone on Dock Street, get through to Tong, ask him to get her an authorisation to come to the city. By plane. Take the riverboat down to Eltli and fly from there. Do it all out in the open, let them all know, so they couldn’t stop her privately, trick her somehow. Confiscate her records. Silence her. Where was Maz Sotyu? What were they doing to him? Was it her fault?

She could not think about that now. What she had to do was save what she could of what Sotyu had given her. Sotyu and Ottiar and Uming and Odiedin and Elyed and Iziezi, dear Iziezi. She could not think about that now.

She turned round, walked hurriedly back along the river into town, found her ZIL bracelet in her briefcase in her room, went to Dock Street, and put in a call to Tong Ov at the Ekumenical Office in Dovza City.

His Dovzan secretary answered and said superciliously that he was in a meeting. "I must speak to him, now," Sutty said and was not surprised when the secretary said in a meek tone that she would call him.

When Sutty heard his voice she said, in Hainish, hearing the words as foreign and strange, "Envoy, I’ve been out of touch for so long, I feel as if we needed to talk."

"I see," Tong said, and a few other meaningless things, while she and probably he tried to figure out how to say anything meaningful. If only he knew any of her languages, if only she knew his! But their only common languages were Hainish and Dovzan.

"Nothing devolving in particular?" he inquired. , "No, no, not really. But I’d like to bring you the material I’ve been collecting," she said. "Just notes on daily life in Okzat-Ozkat."

"I was hoping to come see you there, but that seems to be contraindicated at present," Tong said. "With a window just wide enough for one, of course it’s a pity to close the blinds. But I know how much you love Dovza City and must have been missing it. I’m equally sure that you’ve found nothing much interesting up there. So, if your work’s all done, by all means come on back and enjoy yourself here."

Sutty groped and stammered, and finally said, "Well, as you know it’s a very, the Corporation State is a very homogeneous culture, very powerful and definitely in control, very successful. So everything here is, yes, is very much the same here as there. But maybe I should stay on and finish the, finish the tapes before I bring them? They’re not very interesting."

"Here, as you know," said Tong, "our hosts share all kinds of information with us. And we share ours with them. Everybody here is getting loads of fresh material, very educational and inspiring. So what you’re doing there isn’t really all that important. Don’t worry about it. Of course I’m not at all uneasy about you. And have no need to be. Do I?"

"No, yes, of course not," she said. "Honestly."

She left the telephone office, showing her ZIL at the door, and hurried back to her inn, her home. She thought she had followed Tong’s backward talk, but it destroyed itself in her memory. She thought he had been trying to tell her to stay there, not to try to bring what she had to him, because he would have to show it to officials there and it would be confiscated, but she was not sure that was what he had meant. Maybe he truly meant it was not all that important. Maybe he meant he could not help her at all.

Helping Iziezi prepare dinner, she was sure that she had panicked, had been stupid to call Tong, thus bringing attention to herself and her friends and informants here. Feeling that she must be careful, cautious, she said nothing about the desecrated shop.

Iziezi had known Maz Sotyu Ang for years, but she said nothing about him either. She showed no sign of anything being wrong. She showed Sutty how to slice the fresh numiem, thin and on the bias, to bring the flavor out.

It was one of Elyed’s teaching nights. After she and Akidan and Iziezi had eaten, Sutty took her leave and went down River Street into the poor part of town, the yurt city, where the Corporation had not brought electric enlightenment and there were only the tiny gleams of oil lamps inside the shacks and tents. It was cold, but not the bone-dry, blade-keen cold of winter. A damp, spring-smelling cold, full of life. But Sutty’s heart swelled with dread as she came near Elyed’s shop: to find it all whited out, gutted, raped…

The great-grandnephew was screaming bloody murder as somebody separated him from a screwdriver, and nieces smiled at Sutty as she went through the shop to the back room. She was early for the teaching hour. Nobody was in the little room but the maz and an unobtrusive grandnephew setting up chairs.

"Maz Elyed Oni, do you know Maz Sotyu Ang — the herbalist — his shop—" She could not keep the words from bursting out.

"Yes," the old woman said.

"He’s staying with his daughter."

"The shop, the herbary—"

"That is gone."

"But—"

Her throat ached. She struggled with tears of rage and outrage that wanted to be cried, here with this woman who could be her grandmother, who was her grandmother.