"Did your uncle teach in the village?"

"No. He hid there. We hid. My parents were hiding in a different place. Lying low. There was a kind of revolution going on. Like yours here, but the other way round. People who … But I’d rather listen to you than talk about that. Tell me what happened. Did you have to leave your grandparents? How old were you?"

"Eleven," he said.

She listened. He spoke.

"My grandparents were very active too," he said. His tone had become leaden, labored, though he did not hesitate for words. "But not as loyal producer-consumers. They were leaders of a band of underground reactionary activists. Fomenting cult activities and teaching antiscience. I didn’t understand that. They took me to the meetings they organised. I didn’t know they were illegal meetings. The umyazu was closed, but they didn’t tell me that the police had closed it. They didn’t send me to Corporation school. They kept me home and taught me only superstition and deviant morality. Finally my father realised what they were doing. He and my mother had separated. He hadn’t been to see me for two years, but he sent for me. A man came. He came at night. I heard my grandmother talking very loudly, angrily. I’d never heard her talk that way. I got up and came into the front room. My grandfather was sitting in his chair, just sitting, he didn’t look at me or say anything. Grandmother and a man were facing each other across the table. They looked at me, and then the man looked at her. She said, ’Go get dressed, Azyaru, your father wants you to come see ’ him.’ I went and got dressed. When I came out again, they were still just the way they had been, exactly the same: Grandfather sitting like an old, deaf, blind man staring at nothing, and Grandmother standing with her hands in fists on the table, and the man standing there. I began crying. I said, ’I don’t want to go, I want to stay here.’ Then Grandmother came and held my shoulders, but she pushed me. She pushed me at the man. He said, ’Come on.’ And she said, ’Go, Azyaru!’ And I… went with him."

"Where did you go?" Sutty asked in a whisper.

"To my father in Dovza City. I went to school there." A long silence. He said, "Tell me about… your village. Why you were hiding."

"Fair’s fair," Sutty said. "But it’s a long story."

"All stories are long," he murmured. The Fertiliser had said something like that once. Short stories are only pieces of the long one, he had said.

"What’s hard to explain is about God, on my world," she said.

"I know God," Yara said.

That made her smile. It lightened her for a moment. "I’m sure you do," she said. "But what might be hard to understand, here, is what God is, there. Here, it’s a word and not much else. In your state theism, it seems to mean what’s good. What’s right. Is that right?"

"God is Reason, yes," he said, rather uncertainly.

"Well, on Terra, the word has been an enormously important one for thousands of years, among many peoples. And usually it doesn’t refer so much to what’s reasonable as to what’s mysterious. What can’t be understood. So there are all kinds of ideas of God. One is that God is an entity that created everything else and is responsible for everything that exists and happens. Like a kind of universal, eternal Corporation."

He looked intent but puzzled.

"Where I grew up, in the village, we knew about that kind of God, but we had a lot of other kinds. Local ones. A great many of them. They all were each other, though, really. There were some great ones, but I didn’t know much about them as a child. Only from my name. Aunty explained my name to me once. I asked, ’Why am I Sutty?’ And she said, ’Sutty was God’s wife.’ And I asked, Am I Ganesh’s wife?’ Because Ganesh was the God I knew best, and I liked him. But she said, ’No, Shiva’s.’

"All I knew about Shiva then was that he has a lovely white bull that’s his friend. And he has long, dirty hair and he’s the greatest dancer in the universe. He dances the worlds into being and out of being. He’s very strange and ugly and he’s always fasting. Aunty told me that Sutty loved him so much that she married him against her father’s will. I knew that was hard for a girl to do in those days, and I thought she was very brave. But then Aunty told me that Sutty went back to see her father. And her father talked insultingly about Shiva and was extremely rude to him. And Sutty was so angry and ashamed that she died of it. She didn’t do anything, she just died. And ever since then, faithful wives who die when their husbands die are called after her. Well, when Aunty told me that, I said, ’Why did you name me for a stupid silly woman like that!’

"And Uncle was listening, and he said, ’Because Sati is Shiva, and Shiva is Sati. You are the lover and the griever. You are the anger. You are the dance.’

"So I decided if I had to be Sutty, it was all right, so long as I could be Shiva too…"

She looked at Yara. He was absorbed and utterly bewildered.

"Well, never mind about that. It is terribly complicated. But all the same, when you have a lot of Gods, maybe it’s easier than having one. We had a God rock among the roots of a big tree near the road. People in the village painted it red and fed it butter, to please it, to please themselves. Aunty put marigolds at Ganesh’s feet every day. He was a little bronze God with an animal nose in the back room. He was Shiva’s son, actually. Much kinder than Shiva. Aunty recited things and sang to him. Doing pooja. I used to help her do pooja. I could sing some of the songs. I liked the incense and the marigolds… But these people I have to tell you about, the people we were hiding from, they didn’t have any little Gods. They hated them. They only had one big one. A big boss God. Whatever they said God said to do was right. Whoever didn’t do what they said God said to do was wrong. A lot of people believed this. They were called Unists. One God, one Truth, one Earth. And they… They made a lot of trouble."

The words came out foolish, babyish, primer words for the years of agony.

"You see, my people, I mean all of us on Earth, had done a lot of damage to our world, fought over it, used it up, wasted it. There’d been plagues, famines, misery for so long. People wanted comfort and help. They wanted to believe they were doing something right. I guess if they joined the Unists, they could believe everything they did was right."

He nodded. That he understood.

"The Unist Fathers said that what they called evil knowledge had brought all this misery. If there was no evil knowledge, people would be good. Unholy knowledge should be destroyed to make room for holy belief. They opposed science, all learning, everything except what was in their own books."

"Like the maz."

"No. No, I think that’s a mistake, Yara. I can’t see that the Telling excludes any knowledge, or calls any knowledge evil, or anything unholy. It doesn’t include anything of what Aka has learned in the last century from contact with other civilisations — that’s true. But I think that’s only because the maz didn’t have time to start working all that new information into the Telling before the Corporation State took over as your central social institution. It replaced the maz with bureaucrats, and then criminalised the Telling. Pushed it underground, where it couldn’t develop and grow. Called it unholy knowledge, in fact. What I don’t understand is why the Corporation thought such violence, such brutal use of power, was necessary."

"Because the maz had had all the wealth, all the power. They kept the people ignorant, drugged with rites and superstitions."

"But they didn’t keep the people ignorant! What is the Telling but teaching whatever’s known to whoever will listen?"

He hesitated, rubbed his hand over his mouth. "Maybe that was the old way," he said. "Maybe once. But it wasn’t like that. In Dovza the maz were oppressors of the poor. All the land belonged to the umyazu. Their schools taught only fossilised, useless knowledge. They refused to let people have the new justice, the new learning-"