"My department was not informed," he began, then stopped, and began again: "I believe that there have," and finally, doggedly, he started over, forcing himself through the jargon of his calling: "There have been high-level discussions concerning foreign policy for several years. Since an Akan ship is on its way to Hain, and being informed that an Ekumenical ship is scheduled to arrive next year, some elements within the Council have advocated a more relaxed policy. It was said that there might be profit if some doors were opened to an increase of mutual exchange of information. Others involved in decisions on these matters took the view that Corporation control of dissidence is still far too incomplete for any laxity to be advisable. A… a form of compromise was eventually attained among the factions of opinion on the matter."

When Yara had run out of passive constructions, Sutty made a rough mental translation and said, "So I was the compromise? A test case, then. And you were assigned to watch me and report."

"No," Yara said with sudden bluntness. "I asked to. Was allowed to. At first. They thought when you saw the poverty and backwardness of Rangma, you’d go back quickly to the city. When you settled in Okzat-Ozkat, the Central Executive didn’t know how to exert control without giving offense. My department was overruled again. I advised that you be sent back to the capital. Even my superiors within the department ignored my reports. They ordered me back to the capital. They won’t listen. They won’t believe the strength of the maz in the towns and the countryside. They think the Telling is over!"

He spoke with intense and desolate anger, caught in the trap of his complex, insoluble pain. Sutty could think of nothing to say to him.

They sat there in a silence that gradually became more peaceful as they listened and surrendered to the pure silence of the caves.

"You were right," she said at last.

He shook his head, contemptuous, impatient. But when she left, saying she would look in again tomorrow, he muttered, "Thank you, yoz Sutty." Servile address, meaningless ritual phraseology. From the heart.

After that their conversations were easier. He wanted her to tell him about Earth, but it was hard for him to understand, and often, though she thought he did understand, he denied it. He protested: "All you tell me is about destruction, cruel actions, how things went badly. You hate your Earth."

"No," she said. She looked up at the tent wall. She saw the curve in the road just as you came to the village, and the roadside dust she and Moti played in. Red dust. Moti showed her how to make little villages out of mud and pebbles, planting flowers all around them. He was a whole year older than she was. The flowers wilted at once in the hot, hot sun of endless summer. They curled up and lay down and went back into the dark red mud that dried to silken dust.

"No, no," she said. "My world’s beautiful beyond telling, and I love it, Yara. I’m telling you propaganda. I’m trying to tell you why, before your government started imitating what we do, they’d have done better to look at who we are. And at what we did to ourselves."

"But you came here. And you had so much knowledge we didn’t have."

"I know. I know. The Hainish did the same thing to us. We’ve been trying to copy the Hainish, to catch up to the Hainish, ever since they found us. Maybe Unism was a protest against that as much as anything. An assertion of our God-given right to be self-righteous, irrational fools in our own particularly bloody way and not in anybody else’s."

He pondered this. "But we need to learn. And you said that the Ekumen thinks it wrong to withhold any knowledge."

"I did. But the Historians study the way knowledge should be taught, so that what people learn is genuine knowledge, not a bit here and a bit there that don’t fit together. There’s a Hainish parable of the Mirror. If the glass is whole, it reflects the whole world, but broken, it shows only fragments, and cuts the hand that holds it. What Terra gave Aka is a splinter of the mirror."

"Maybe that’s why the Executives sent the Legates back."

"The Legates?"

"The men on the second ship from Terra."

"Second ship?" Sutty said, startled and puzzled. "There was only one ship from Terra, before the one I came on."

But as she spoke, she remembered her last long conversation with Tong Ov. He had asked her if she thought the Unist Fathers, acting on their own without informing the Ekumen, might have sent missionaries to Aka.

"Tell me about it, Yara! I don’t know anything about that ship."

She could see him physically draw back very slightly, struggling with his immediate reluctance to answer. This had been classified information, she thought, known only to the upper echelons, not part of official Corporation history. Though they no doubt assumed we knew it.

"A second ship came and was sent back to Terra?" she asked.

"It appears so."

She sent an exasperated silent message at his rigid profile: Oh, don’t come the tight-lipped bureaucrat on me now! She said nothing. After a pause, he spoke again.

"There were records of the visit. I never saw them."

"What were you told about ships from Terra — can you tell me?"

He brooded a bit. "The first one came in the year Redan Thirty. Seventy-two years ago. It landed near Abazu, on the eastern coast. There were eighteen men and women aboard." He glanced at her to check this for accuracy, and she nodded. "The provincial governments that were still in power then in the east decided to let the aliens go wherever they liked. The aliens said they’d come to learn about us, and to invite us to join in the Ekumen. Whatever we asked them about Terra and the other worlds they’d tell us, but they came, they said, not as tellers but as listeners. As yoz, not maz. They stayed five years. A ship came for them, and on the ship’s ansible they sent a telling of what they’d learned here back to Terra." Again he looked at her for confirmation.

"Most of that telling was lost," Sutty said.

"Did they get back to Terra?"

"I don’t know. I left Terra sixty years ago, sixty-one years now. If they got back during the Unist rule, or during the Holy Wars, they might have been silenced, or jailed, or shot… But there was a second ship?"

"Yes."

"The Ekumen sponsored that first ship. But it didn’t sponsor another expedition from Terra, because the Unists had taken over. They cut communication with the Ekumen to a bare minimum. They kept closing ports and teaching centers, threatening aliens with expulsion, letting terrorists cripple the facilities, keeping them powerless. If a second ship came from Terra, the Unists sent it. I never heard anything about it, Yara. It certainly wasn’t announced to the common people."

Accepting this, he said, "It came two years after the first ship left. There were fifty people on it, with a boss maz, a leader. His name was Fodderdon. It landed in Dovza, south of the capital. Its people got in touch with the Corporation Executives at once. They said Terra was going to give all its knowledge to Aka. They brought all kinds of information, technological information. They showed us how we’d have to stop doing things in the old, ignorant ways and change our thinking, to learn what they could teach us. They brought plans, and books, and engineers and theorists to teach us the techniques. They had an ansible on their ship, so that information could come from Terra as soon as we needed it."

"A great big box of toys," Sutty whispered.

"It changed everything. It strengthened the Corporation tremendously. It was the first step in the March to the Stars. Then … I don’t know what happened. All we were told was that Fodderdon and the others gave us information freely at first, but then began to withhold it and to demand an unfair price for it."