She knew now that all she would ever know of the Telling was the least hint or fragment of what there was to know. But that was all right; that was how it was. So long as it was here.

One maz couple was making a catalogue of the books in their Akan version of Sutty’s noter. They had been coming up to the caves for twenty years, working on the catalogue. They discussed it with her eagerly, and she promised to try to link her noter with theirs to duplicate and transfer the information.

Though the maz treated her with unfailing courtesy and respect, conversations were mostly formal and often difficult. They all had to speak in a language not their own, Dovzan. Though the Akans spoke it in public in their lives ’down below,’ it was not the language in which they thought, and not the language of the Telling. It was the tongue of the enemy. It was a barrier. Sutty realized how much closer she had drawn to people in Okzat-Ozkat as she learned their Rangma speech. Several of the maz of the Library knew Hainish, which was taught in the Corporation universities as a mark of true education. It wasn’t of much use here, except perhaps in one conversation Sutty had with the young maz Unroy Kigno.

They went out together to enjoy the daylight for an hour and to sweep footsteps away. Since the helicopter had come so close, the first aircraft that had ever done so, the people of the Library took more care to sweep away paths or tracks in the snow that might lead an eye in the sky to the entrances of the caves. Sutty and Unroy had finished the rather pleasant job of throwing the light, dry snow about with brooms, and were taking a breather, sitting on boulders near the minules’ stable.

"What is history?" Unroy asked abruptly, using the Hainish word. "Who are historians? Are you one?"

"The Hainish say I am," Sutty said, and they launched into a long and intense linguistico-philosophical discussion about whether history and the Telling could be understood as the same thing, or similar things, or not alike at all; about what historians did, what maz did, and why.

"I think history and the Telling are the same thing," Unroy said at last. "They’re ways of holding and keeping things sacred."

"What is sacredness?"

"What is true is sacred. What has been suffered. What is beautiful."

"So the Telling tries to find the truth in events … or the pain, or the beauty?"

"No need to try to find it," said Unroy. "The sacredness is there. In the truth, the pain, the beauty. So that the telling of it is sacred."

Her partner, Kigno, was in a prison camp in Doy. He had been arrested and sentenced for teaching atheist religion and reactionary antiscience dogma. Unroy knew where he was, a huge steel-mill complex manned by prisoners, but no communication was possible.

"There are hundreds of thousands of people in the rehabilitation centers," Unroy told Sutty. "The Corporation gets its labor cheap."

"What are you going to do with your prisoner here?"

Unroy shook her head. "I wish he’d been killed like the other one," she said. "He’s a problem we have no solution to."

Sutty agreed in bitter silence.

The Monitor was being well looked after; several of the maz were professional healers. They had put him in a small tent by himself and kept him warm and fed. His tent was in a big cave among seven or eight tents belonging to guides and minule hostlers. There was always somebody there with an ear and an eye, as they put it. In any case there was no danger of his trying to escape until his wrenched back and badly damaged knee mended.

Odiedin visited him daily. Sutty had not yet brought herself to do so.

"His name is Yara," Odiedin told her.

"His name is Monitor," she said, contemptuous.

"Not any longer," Odiedin said drily. "His pursuit of us was unauthorised. If he goes back to Dovza, he’ll be sent to a rehabilitation center."

"A forced labor camp? Why?"

"Officials must not exceed their orders or take unauthorised action."

"That wasn’t a Corporation helicopter?"

Odiedin shook his head. "The pilot owned it. Used it to bring supplies to mountain climbers in the South Range. Yara hired him. To look for us."

"How strange," Sutty said. "Was he after me, then?"

"As a guide."

"I was afraid of that."

"I was not." Odiedin sighed. "The Corporation is so big, its apparatus is so clumsy, we little people in these big hills are beneath their notice. We slip through the mesh. Or we’ve done so for many years. So I didn’t worry. But he wasn’t the Corporation police. He was one man. One fanatic."

"Fanatic?" She laughed. "He believes slogans? He loves the Corporation?"

"He hates us. The maz, the Telling. He fears you."

"As an alien?"

"He thinks you’ll persuade the Ekumen to side with the maz against the Corporation."

"What makes him think that?"

"I don’t know. He’s a strange man. I think you should talk with him."

"What for?"

"To hear what he has to tell," Odiedin said.

She put it off, but conscience pushed her. Odiedin was no scholar, no sage like these maz from the lowlands, but he had a clear mind and a clear heart. On their long trek she had come to trust him entirely, and when she saw him crying over the books in the Library, she knew she loved him. She wanted to do what he asked her to do, even if it was to hear what the Monitor had to tell.

Maybe she could also tell the Monitor a little of what he ought to hear. In any case, sooner or later she’d have to face him. And the question of what to do about him. And the question of her responsibility for his being there.

Before the evening meal the next day, she went to the big cave where they had put him. A couple of minule handlers were gambling, tossing marked sticks, by lantern light. On the inner wall of the cave, a pure black concave curve ten meters high, the figure of the Tree had been incised by the dwellers here in centuries past: the single trunk, the two branches, the five lobes of foliage. Gold leaf still glittered in the lines of the drawing, and bits of crystal, jet, and moonstone winked among the carved leaves. Her eyes were well used to darkness now. The glow of a small electric light in a tent close under the back wall seemed as bright as sunlight.

"The Dovzan?" she asked the gamblers. One nodded with his chin toward the lighted tent.

The door flap was closed. She stood outside a while and finally said, "Monitor?"

The flap opened. She looked in cautiously. The small interior of the tent was warm and bright. They had fixed the injured man a bed pad with a slanted back support so he need not lie entirely flat. The cord of the door flap, a hand-crank-powered electric lamp, a tiny oil heater, a bottle of water, and a small noter lay within his reach.

He had been terribly bruised in the crash, and the bruising was still livid: blue-black-green all down the right side of his face, the right eye swollen half shut, both arms spotted with great brown-blue marks. Two fingers of his left hand were lightly splinted. But Sutty’s eyes were on the little device, the noter.

She entered the tent on her knees, and kneeling in the narrow clear space, picked up the device and studied it.

"It doesn’t transmit," the man said.

"So you say," Sutty said, beginning to play with it, to run it through its paces. After a while she said, ironically, "Apologies for going through your private files, Monitor. I’m not interested in them. But I have to test this thing’s capacities."

He said nothing.

The device was a recorder notebook, rather flashily designed but with several serious design flaws, like so much Akan technology-undigested techshit, she thought. It had no sending or receiving functions. She set it back down where he could reach it.

That alarm relieved, she was aware of her embarrassment and intense discomfort at being shut in this small space with this man. She wanted nothing but distance from him. The only way to make it was with words.