"Violently?"

Again he hesitated.

"Yes. In Belsi the reactionary mob killed two officials of the Corporation State. There was disobedience everywhere. Defiance of the law."

He rubbed his hand hard over his face, though it must have hurt the sore, discolored temple and cheek.

"This is how it was," he said. "Your people came here and they brought a new world with them. A promise of our own world made greater, made better. They wanted to give us that. But the people who wanted to accept that world were stopped, prevented, by the old ways. The old ways of doing everything. The maz mumbling forever about things that happened ten thousand years ago, claiming they knew everything about everything, refusing to learn anything new, keeping people poor, holding us back. They were wrong. They were selfish. Usurers of knowledge. They had to be pushed aside, to make way for the future. And if they kept standing in the way, they had to be punished. We had to show people that they were wrong. My grandparents were wrong. They were enemies of the state. They would not admit it. They refused to change."

He had begun talking evenly, but by the end he was breathing in gasps, staring ahead of him, his hand clenched on the little primer.

"What happened to them?"

"They were arrested soon after I came to live with my father. They were in prison for a year in Tambe." A long pause. "A great number of recalcitrant reactionary leaders were brought to Dovza City for a just public trial. Those who recanted were allowed to do rehabilitative work on the Corporate Farms." His voice was colorless. "Those who did not recant were executed by the producer-consumers of Aka."

"They were shot?"

"They were brought into the Great Square of Justice." He stopped short.

Sutty remembered the place, a plain of pavement surrounded by the four tall, ponderous buildings housing the Central Courts. It was usually jammed with stalled traffic and hurrying pedestrians.

Yara began to talk again, still looking straight ahead at what he was telling.

"They all stood in the middle of the square, inside a rope, with police guarding them. People had come from all over to see justice done. There were thousands of people in the square. All around the criminals. And in all the streets leading to the square. My father brought me to see. We stood in a high window in the Supreme Court building. He put me in front of him so that I could see. There were piles of stones, building stones from umyazu that had been pulled down, big piles at the corners of the square. I didn’t know what they were for. Then the police gave an order, and everybody pushed in toward the middle of the square where the criminals were. They began to beat them with the stones. Their arms went up and down and … They were supposed to throw the rocks, to stone the criminals, but there were too many people. It was too crowded. Hundreds of police, and all the people. So they beat them to death. It went on for a long time."

"You had to watch?"

"My father wanted me to see that they had been wrong."

He spoke quite steadily, but his hand, his mouth gave him away. He had never left that window looking down into the square. He was twelve years old and stood there watching for the rest of his life.

So he saw his grandparents had been wrong. What else could he have seen?

Again a long silence. Shared.

To bury pain so deep, so deep you never need feel it. Bury it under anything, everything. Be a good son. A good girl. Walk over the graves and never look down. Keep far the Dog that’s friend to men… But there were no graves. Smashed faces, splintered skulls, blood-clotted grey hair in a heap in the middle of a square.

Fragments of bone, tooth fillings, a dust of exploded flesh, a whiff of gas. The smell of burning in the ruins of a building in the rain.

"So after that you lived in Dovza City. And entered the Corporation. The Sociocultural Bureau."

"My father hired tutors for me. To remedy my education. I qualified well in the examinations."

"Are you married, Yara?"

"I was. For two years."

"No child?"

He shook his head.

He continued to gaze straight ahead. He sat stiffly, not moving. His sleeping bag was tented up over one knee on a kind of frame Tobadan had made to immobilise the knee and relieve the pain. The little book lay by his hand, JEWEL FRUITS FROM THE TREE OF LEARNING.

Sutty bent forward to loosen her shoulder muscles, sat up straight again.

"Goiri asked me to tell you about my world. Maybe I can, because my life hasn’t been so different from yours, in some ways… I told you about the Unists. After they took over the government of our part of the country, they started having what they called cleansings in the villages. It got more and more unsafe for us. People told us we should hide our books, or throw them in the river. Uncle Hurree was dying then. His heart was tired, he said. He told Aunty she should get rid of his books, but she wouldn’t. He died there with them around him.

"After that, my parents were able to get Aunty and me out of India. Clear across the world, to another continent, in the north, to a city where the government wasn’t religious. There were some cities like that, mostly where the Ekumen had started schools that taught the Hainish learning. The Unists hated the Ekumen and wanted to keep all the extraterrestrials off Earth, but they were afraid to try to do it directly. So they encouraged terrorism against the Pales and the ansible installations and anything else the alien demons were responsible for."

She used the English word demon, there being no such word in Dovzan. She paused a while, took a deep, conscious breath. Yara sat in the intense silence of the listener.

"So I went to high school and college there, and started training to work for the Ekumen. About that time, the Ekumen sent a new Envoy to Terra, a man called Dalzul, who’d grown up on Terra. He came to have a great deal of influence among the Unist Fathers. Before very long they were giving him more and more control, taking orders from him. They said he was an angel — that’s a messenger from God. Some of them began to say he was going to save all mankind and bring them to God, and so …" But there was no Akan word for worship. "They lay down on the ground in front of him and praised him and begged him to be kind to them. And they did whatever he told them to do, because that was their idea of how to do right — to obey orders from God. And they thought Dalzul spoke for God. Or was God. So within a year he got them to dismantle the theocratic regime. In the name of God.

"Most of the old regions or states were going back to democratic governments, choosing their leaders by election, and restoring the Terran Commonwealth, and welcoming people from the other worlds of the Ekumen. It was an exciting time. It was wonderful to watch Unism fall to pieces, crumble into fragments. More and more of the believers believed Dalzul was God, but also more and more of them decided that he was the… opposite of God, entirely wicked. There was one kind called the Repentants, who went around in processions throwing ashes on their heads and whipping each other to atone for having misunderstood what God wanted. And a lot of them broke off from all the others and set up some man, a Unist Father or a terrorist leader, as a Savior of their own, and took orders from him. They were all dangerous, they were all violent. The Dalzulites had to protect Dalzul from the anti-Dalzulites. They wanted to kill him. They were always planting bombs, trying suicide raids. All of them. They’d always used violence, because their belief justified it. It told them that God rewards those who destroy unbelief and the unbeliever. But mostly they were destroying each other, tearing each other to pieces. They called it the Holy Wars. It was a frightening time, but it seemed as if there was no real problem for the rest of us — Unism was just taking itself apart.