Betrayals

"On the planet 0 there has not been a war for five thou-
sand years," she read, "and on Gethen there has
never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her
eyes and because she was trying to train herself to
read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the
way Tikuli gulped his food. "There has never been a
war": in her mind the words stood clear and bright,
surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark,
soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world
without war? It would be the real world- Peace was
the true life, the life of working and learning and
bringing up children to work and learn. War, which
devoured work, learning, and children, was the
denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know
only how to deny. Bom in the dark shadow of power
misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding
and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight.
Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the
shadow, a doubled unbelief.

So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes
and the page of the book open on her lap, she
sighed and closed her eyes, thinking, "I am a liar."
Then she opened her eyes and read more about the
other worlds, the far realities.

Tikuli, sleeping curled up around his tail in the
weak sunshine, sighed as if imitating her, and
scratched a dreamflea. Gubu was out in the reeds,
hunting; she could not see him, but now and then
the plume of a reed quivered, and once a marsh hen
flew up cackling in indignation.

Absorbed in a description of the peculiar social
customs of the Ithsh, she did not see Wada till he
was at the gate letting himself in. "Oh, you're here
already," she said, taken by surprise and feeling
unready, incompetent, old, as she always felt with
other people. Alone, she only felt old when she was
overtired or ill. Maybe living alone was the right
thing for her after all. "Come on in," she said, get-
ting up and dropping her book and picking it up
and feeling her back hair where the knot was com-
ing loose. "I'll just get my bag and be off, then."

"No hurry," the young man said in his soft
voice. "Eyid won't be here for a while yet."

Very kind of you to tell me I don't have to hurry
to leave my own house, Yoss thought, but said noth-
ing. obedient to the insufferable, adorable selfish-
ness of the young. She went in and got her shopping
bag, reknotted her hair, tied a scarf over it, and came
out onto the little open porch. Wada had sat down
in her chair; he jumped up when she came out. He
was a shy boy, the gentler, she thought, of the two

a-5s3i 2   i~^S

Betrayals

lovers. "Have fun," she said with a smile, knowing
she embarrassed him. "I'll be back in a couple of
hours  before sunset." She went down to her gate,
let herself out, and set off the way Wada had come,
along the path up to the winding wooden causeway
across the marshes to the village.

She would not meet Eyid on the way. The girl
would be coming from the north on one of the bog-
paths, having left the village at a different time and
in a different direction than Wada, so that nobody
would notice that for a few hours every week or so
the two young people were gone at the same time.
They were madly in love, had been in love for three
years, and would have lived in partnership long since
if Wada's father and Eyid's father's brother hadn't
quarreled over a piece of reallocated Corporation
land and set up a feud between the families that had
so far stopped short of bloodshed, but put a love
match out of the question. The land was valuable;

the families, though poor, each aspired to be leaders
of the village. Nothing would heal the grudge. The
whole village took sides in it. Eyid and Wada had
nowhere to go, no skills to keep them alive in the
cities, no tribal relations in another village who
might take them in. Their passion was trapped in
the hatred of the old. Yoss had come on them, a year
ago now, in each other's arms on the cold ground of
an island in the marshes  blundering onto them
as once she had blundered onto a pair of fendeer
fawns holding utterly still in the nest of grass where
the doe had left them. This pair had been as fright-
ened, as beautiful and vulnerable as the fawns, and
they had begged her "not to tell" so humbly, what
could she do? They were shivering with cold, Eyid's

CT>1 3   ^*eS

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS



bare legs were muddy, they clung to each other like
children. "Come to my house," she said sternly. "For
mercy sake!" She stalked off. Timidly, they followed
her. "I will be back in an hour or so," she said when
she had got them indoors, into her one room with
the bed alcove right beside the chimney. "Don't get
things muddy!"

That time she had roamed the paths keeping
watch, in case anybody was out looking for them.
Nowadays she mostly went into the village while "the
fawns" were in her house having their sweet hour.

They were too ignorant to think of any way to
thank her. Wada, a peat-cutter, might have supplied
her fire without anyone being suspicious, but they
never left so much as a flower, though they always
made up the bed very neat and tight. Perhaps
indeed they were not very grateful. Why should
they be? She gave them only what was their due:

a bed, an hour of pleasure, a moment of peace. It
wasn't their fault, or her virtue, that nobody else
would give it to them.

Her errand today took her in to Eyid's uncle's
shop. He was the village sweets-seller. All the holy
abstinence she had intended when she came here two
years ago, the single bowl of unflavored grain, the
draft of pure water, she'd given that up in no time.
She got diarrhea from a cereal diet, and the water of
the marshes was undrinkable. She ate every fresh veg-
etable she could buy or grow, drank wine or bottled
water or fruit juice from the city, and kept a large sup-
ply of sweets  dried fruits, raisins, sugar-brittle,
even the cakes Eyid's mother and aunts made, fat
disks with a nutmeat squashed onto the top, dry,
greasy, tasteless, but curiously satisfying. She bought

3-*Hg>  4   1~tS

Betrayals

a bagful of them and a brown wheel of sugar-brittle,
and gossiped with the aunts, dark, darting-eyed little
women who had been at old Uad's wake last night
and wanted to talk about it. "Those people" 
Wada's family, indicated by a glance, a shrug, a sneer
 had misbehaved as usual, got drunk, picked fights,
boasted, got sick, and vomited all over the place,
greedy upstart louts that they were. When she
stopped by the newsstand to pick up a paper (anoth-
er vow long since broken; she had been going to read
only the Arkamye and learn it by heart), Wada's moth-
er was there, and she heard how "those people" 
Eyid's family  had boasted and picked fights and
vomited all over the place at the wake last night. She
did not merely hear; she asked for details, she drew
the gossip out; she loved it.

What a fool, she thought, starting slowly home
on the causeway path, what a fool I was to think I
could ever drink water and be silent! I'll never, never
be able to let anything go, anything at all. I'll never
be free, never be worthy of freedom. Even old age
can't make me let go. Even losing Safnan can't make
me let go.

Before the Five Armies they stood. Holding up his
sword, Enar said to Kamye: My hands hold your death,
my Lord! Kamye answered: Brother, it is your death they
hold.

She knew those lines, anyway. Everybody knew
those lines. And so then Enar dropped his sword,
because he was a hero and a holy man, the Lord's
younger brother. But I can't drop my death. I'll hold
it to the end, I'll cherish it. hate it, eat it, drink it, lis-
ten to it. give it my bed, mourn it, everything but let
it go.

VMS 5 c-'-a*

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

She looked up out of her thoughts into the
afternoon on the marshes: the sky a cloudless misty
blue, reflected in one distant curving channel of
water, and the sunlight golden over the dun levels
of the reedbeds and among the stems of the reeds.
The rare, soft west wind blew. A perfect day. The
beauty of the world, the beauty of the world! A
sword in my hand, turned against me. Why do you
make beauty to kill us, my Lord?

She trudged on, pulling her headscarf tighter
with a little dissatisfied jerk. At this rate she would
soon be wandering around the marshes shouting
aloud, like Abberkam.

And there he was, the thought had summoned
him: lurching along in the blind way he had as if he
never saw anything but his thoughts, striking at the
roadway with his big stick as if he was killing a snake.
Long grey hair blowing around his face. He wasn't
shouting, he only shouted at night, and not for a long
time now, but he was talking, she saw his lips move;

then he saw her, and shut his mouth, and drew him-
self into himself, wary as a wild animal. They
approached each other on the narrow causeway path,
not another human being in all the wilderness of
reeds and mud and water and wind.

"Good evening. Chief Abberkam," Yoss said
when there were only a few paces between them.
What a big man he was; she never could believe
how tall and broad and heavy he was till she saw
him again, his dark skin still smooth as a young
man's, but his head stooped and his hair grey and
wild. A huge hook nose and the mistrustful, unsee-
ing eyes. He muttered some kind of greeting, hardly
slowing his gait.

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Betrayals

The mischief was in Yoss today; she was sick of
her own thoughts and sorrows and shortcomings.
She stopped, so that he had to stop or else run right
into her, and said, "Were you at the wake last
night?"

He stared down at her; she felt he was getting
her into focus, or part of her; he finally said,
"Wake?"

"They buried old Uad last night. Alt the men got
drunk, and it's a mercy the feud didn't finally break
out."

"Feud?" he repeated in his deep voice.

Maybe he wasn't capable of focusing any more,
but she was driven to talk to him, to get through to
him. "The Dewis and Kamanners. They're quarrel-
ing over that arable island just north of the village.
And the two poor children, they want to be part-
ners, and their fathers threaten to kill them if they
look at each other. What idiocy! Why don't they
divide the island and let the children pair and let
their children share it? It'll come to blood one of
these days, I think."

"To blood," the Chief said, repeating again like a
half-wit, and then slowly, in that great, deep voice, the
voice she had heard crying out in agony in the night
across the marshes, "Those men. Those shopkeepers.
They have the souls of owners. They won't kill. But
they won't share. If it's property, they won't let
go. Never."

She saw again the lifted sword.

"Ah," she said with a shudder. "So then the chil-
dren must wait... fill the old people die ... "

"Too late," he said. His eyes met hers for one
instant, keen and strange; then he pushed back his

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

hair impatiently, growled something by way of
good-bye, and started on so abruptly that she almost
crouched aside to make way for him. That's how a
chief walks, she thought wryly, as she went on. Big,
wide, taking up space, stamping the earth down.
And this, this is how an old woman walks, narrow-
ly, narrowly.

There was a strange noise behind her  gun-
shots, she thought, for city usages stay in the nerves
 and she turned sharp round, Abberkam had
stopped and was coughing explosively, tremendous-
ly, his big frame hunched around the spasms that
nearly wracked him off his feet. Yoss knew that kind
of coughing. The Ekumen was supposed to have
medicine for it, but she'd left the city before any of
it came. She went to Abberkam and when the parox-
ysm was over and he stood gasping, grey-faced, she
said, "That's berlot: are you getting over it or are you
getting it?"

He shook his head-
She waited.

While she waited she thought, what do I care if
he's sick or not? Does he care? He came here to die.
I heard him howling out on the marshes in the dark,
last winter. Howling in agony. Eaten out with
shame, like a man with cancer who's been all eaten
out by the cancer but can't die.

"It's all right," he said, hoarse, angry, wanting
her only to get away from him; and she nodded
and went on her way. Let him die. How could he
want to live knowing what he'd lost, his power, his
honor, and what he'd done? Lied, betrayed his sup-
porters, embezzled. The perfect politician. Big
Chief Abberkam, hero of the Liberation, leader of

Betrayals

the World Party, who had destroyed the World
Party by his greed and folly.

She glanced back once. He was moving very
slowly or perhaps had stopped, she was not sure. She
went on, taking the right-hand way where the
causeway forked, going down onto the bog-path
that led to her little house.

Three hundred years ago these marshlands had
been a vast, rich agricultural valley, one of the first
to be irrigated and cultivated by the Agricultural
Plantation Corporation when they brought their
slaves from Werel to the Yeowe Colony. Too well irri-
gated, too well cultivated; fertilizing chemicals and
salts of the soil had accumulated till nothing would
grow, and the Owners went elsewhere for their prof-
it. The banks of the irrigation canals slumped here
and there and the waters of the river wandered free
again, pooling and meandering, slowly washing the
lands clean. The reeds grew, miles and miles of reeds
bowing a little under the-wind, under the cloud-
shadows and the wings of long-legged birds. Here
and there on an island of rockier soil a few fields and
a slave-village remained, a few sharecroppers left
behind, useless people on useless land. The freedom
of desolation- And all through the marshes there
were lonely houses.

Growing old, the people of Werel and Yeowe
might turn to silence, as their religion recommended
them to do: when their children were grown, when
they had done their work as householder and citi-
zen, when as their body weakened their soul might
make itself strong, they left their life behind and
came empty-handed to lonely places- Even on the
Plantations, the Bosses had let old slaves go out into

(CTH   9    SfS

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

the wilderness, go free. Here in the North, freedmen
from the cities had come out to the marshlands and
lived as recluses in the lonely houses. Now, since the
Liberation, even women came.

Some of the houses were derelict, and any soul-
maker might claim them; most, like Yoss's
thatched cabin, were owned by villagers who
maintained them and gave them to a recluse rent-
free as a religious duty, a means of enriching the
soul. Yoss liked knowing that she was a source of
spiritual profit to her landlord, a grasping man
whose account with Providence was probably other-
wise all on the debit side. She liked to feel useful.
She took it for another sign of her incapacity to let
the world go, as the Lord Kamye bade her do. You are
no longer useful, he had told her in a hundred ways,
over and over, since she was sixty; but she would
not listen. She left the noisy world and came out to
the marshes, but she let the world go on chattering
and gossiping and singing and crying in her ears.
She would not hear the low voice of the Lord.

Eyid and Wada were gone when she got home;

the bed was made up very tight, and the foxdog
Tikuli was sleeping on it, curled up around his tail.
Gubu the spotted cat was prancing around asking
about dinner. She picked him up and petted his
silken, speckled back while he nuzzled under her ear,
making his steady roo-roo-roo of pleasure and affec-
tion; then she fed him. Tikuli took no notice, which
was odd. Tikuli was sleeping too much. She sat on
the bed and scratched the roots of his stiff, red-furred
ears. He woke and yawned and looked at her with
soft amber eyes, his red plume of tail stirring. "Aren't
you hungry?" she asked him. I will eat to please you,

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Betrayals

Tikuli answered, getting down off the bed rather
stiffly. "Oh, Tikuli, you're getting old," Yoss said, and
the sword stirred in her heart. Her daughter Safnan
had given her Tikuli. a tiny red cub, a scurry of paws
and plume-tail  how long ago? Eight years. A long
time- A lifetime for a foxdog-

More than a lifetime for Safnan. More than a
lifetime for her children, Yoss's grandchildren,
Enkamma and Uye.

If I am alive, they are dead, Yoss thought, as she
always thought; if they are alive, I am dead. They
went on the ship that goes like light; they are trans-
lated into the light. When they return into life,
when they step off the ship on the world called
Hain, it will be eighty years from the day they left,
and I will be dead, long dead; I am dead. They left
me and I am dead. Let them be alive. Lord, sweet
Lord, let them be alive, I will be dead. I came here to
be dead. For them. I cannot, I cannot let them be
dead for me.

Tikuli's cold nose touched her hand- She looked
intently at him. The amber of his eyes was dimmed,
bluish. She stroked his head, scratched the roots of
his ears, silent.

He ate a few bites to please-, her, and climbed
back up onto the bed. She made her own dinner,
soup and rewarmed soda cakes, and ate it, not tast-
ing it. She washed the three dishes she had used,
made up the fire, and sat by it trying to read her
book slowly, while Tikuli slept on the bed and Gubu
lay on the hearth gazing into the fire with round
golden eyes, going roo-roo-roo very softly. Once he
sat up and made his battlecall, "Hoooo!" at some
noise he heard out in the marshes, and stalked

'x^e' 11 (i-sto

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

about a bit; then he settled down again to staring
and roo-ing. Later, when the fire was out and the
house utterly dark in the starless darkness, he joined
Yoss and Tikuli in the warm bed, where earlier the
young lovers had had their brief, sharp joy.

She found she was thinking about Abberkam, the
next couple of days, as she worked in her little veg-
etable garden, cleaning it up for the winter. When
the Chief first came, the villagers had been all abuzz
with excitement about his living in a house that
belonged to the headman of their village. Disgraced,
dishonored, he was still a very famous man. An
elected Chief of the Heyend, one of the principal
Tribes of Yeowe, he had come to prominence during
the last years of the War of Liberation, leading a
great movement for what he called Racial Freedom.
Even some of the villagers had embraced the main
principle of the World Party: No one was to live on
Yeowe but its own people. No Werelians, the hated
ancestral colonizers, the Bosses and Owners. The
War had ended slavery; and in the last few years the
diplomats of the Ekumen had negotiated an end to
Werel's economic power over its former colony-
planet. The Bosses and Owners, even those whose
families had lived on Yeowe for centuries, had all
withdrawn to Werel, the Old World, next outward
from the sun. They had run, and their soldiers had
been driven after them. They must never return,
said the World Party. Not as traders, not as visitors,
they would never again pollute the soil and soul of
Yeowe- Nor would any other foreigner, any other
Power. The Aliens of the Ekumen had helped Yeowe

o-o 12 s*

Betrayals

free itself; now they too must go. There was no place
for them here. "This is our world. This is the free
world. Here we will make our souls in the image of
Kamye the Swordsman," Abberkam had said over
and over, and that image, the curved sword, was the
symbol of the World Party.

And blood had been shed. From the Uprising at
Nadami on, thirty years of fighting, rebellions, retal-
iations, half her lifetime, and even after Liberation.
after all the Werelians were gone, the fighting went
on. Always, always, the young men were ready to
rush out and kill whoever the old men told them to
kill, each other, women, old people, children;

always there was a war to be fought in the name of
Peace, Freedom, Justice, the Lord. Newly freed tribes
fought over land, the city chiefs fought for power.
All Yoss had worked for all her life as an educator in
the capital had come to pieces not only during the
War of Liberation but after it, as the city disintegrated
in one ward-war after another.

In all fairness, she thought, despite his waving
Kamye's sword, Abberkam. in leading the World
Party, had tried to avoid war and had partly suc-
ceeded. His preference was for the winning of power
by policy and persuasion, and he was a master of it.
He had come very near success. The curved sword
was everywhere, the rallies cheering his speeches
were immense. ABBERKAM AND RACIAL FREE-
DOM! said huge posters stretched across the city
avenues. He was certain to win the first free election
ever held on Yeowe, to be Chief of the World
Council. And then, nothing much at first, the
rumors. The defections. His son's suicide. His son's
mother's accusations of debauchery and gross luxury.

a* 13 a-*

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

The proof that he had embezzled great sums of
money given his party for relief of districts left in
poverty by the withdrawal of Werelian capital. The
revelation of the secret plan to assassinate the Envoy
of the Ekumen and put the blame on Abberkam's
old friend and supporter Demeye.... That was what
brought him down. A chief could indulge himself
sexually, misuse power, grow rich off his people and
be admired for it, but a chief who betrayed a com-
panion was not forgiven. It was, Yoss thought, the
code of the slave.

Mobs of his own supporters turned against him,
attacking the old APCY Manager's Residency, which
he had taken over. Supporters of the Ekumen joined
with forces still loyal to him to defend him and
restore order to the capital city. After days of street
warfare, hundreds of men killed fighting and thou-
sands more in riots around the continent, Abberkam
surrendered. The Ekumen supported a provisional
government in declaring amnesty. Their people
walked him through the bloodstained, bombed-out
streets in absolute silence. People watched, people
who had trusted him, people who had revered him,
people who had hated him, watched him walk past
in silence, guarded by the foreigners, the Aliens he
had tried to drive from their world.

She had read about it in the paper. She had been
living in the marshes for over a year then. "Serve
him right," she had thought, and not much more.
Whether the Ekumen was a true ally or a new set of
Owners in disguise, she didn't know, but she liked to
see any chief go down- Werelian Bosses, strutting
tribal headmen, or ranting demagogues, let them
taste dirt. She'd eaten enough of their dirt in her life.

sW 14 -s^a

Betrayals

When a few months later they told her in the
village that Abberkam was coming to the marsh-
lands as a recluse, a soulmaker, she had been sur-
prised and for a moment ashamed at having
assumed his talk had all been empty rhetoric- Was
he a religious man, then?  Through all the luxu-
ry, the orgies, the thefts, the powermongering, the
murders? No! Since he'd lost his money and power,
he'd stayed in view by making a spectacle of his
poverty and piety. He was utterly shameless. She was
surprised at the bitterness of her indignation. The
first time she saw him she felt like spitting at the big,
thick-toed, sandaled feet, which were all she saw of
him; she refused to look at his face.

But then in the winter she had heard the howl-
ing out on the marshes, at night, in the freezing
wind. Tikuli and Gubu had pricked an ear but been
unfrightened by the awful noise. That led her after a
minute to recognize it as a human voice  a man
shouting aloud, drunk? mad?  howling, beseech-
ing, so that she had got up to go to him, despite her
terror; but he was not calling out for human aid.
"Lord, my Lord, Kamye!" he shouted, and looking
out her door she saw him up on the causeway, a
shadow against the pale night clouds, striding and
tearing at his hair and crying like an animal, like a
soul in pain.

After that night she did not judge him. They
were equals. When she next met him she looked
him in the face and spoke, forcing him to speak to
her.

That was not often; he lived in true seclusion.
No one came across the marshes to see him. People
in the village often enriched their souls by giving

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

her food, harvest surplus, leftovers, sometimes at
the holy days a dish cooked for her; but she saw no
one take anything out to Abberkam's house- Maybe
they had offered and he was too proud to take.
Maybe they were afraid to offer.

She dug up her root bed with the miserable
short-handled spade Em Dewi had given her, and
thought about Abberkam howling, and about the
way he had coughed. Safnan had nearly died of the
berlot when she was four. Yoss had heard that terri-
ble cough for weeks. Had Abberkam been going to
the village to get medicine, the other day? Had he
got there, or turned back?

She put on her shawl, for the wind had turned
r^'d again, the autumn was getting on. She went up
to the causeway and took the right-hand turn.

Abberkam's house was of wood, riding a raft of
tree trunks sunk in the peaty water of the marsh.
Such houses were very old, going back two hundred
years or more to when there had been trees growing
in the valley. It had been a farmhouse and was much
larger than her hut, a rambling, dark place, the roof
in ill repair, some windows boarded over, planks on
the porch loose as she stepped up on it. She said his
name, then said it again louder. The wind whined in
the reeds. She knocked, waited, pushed the heavy
door open. It was dark indoors. She was in a kind of
vestibule. She heard him talking in the next room.
"Never down to the adit, in the intent, take it out,
take it out," the deep, hoarse voice said, and then he
coughed. She opened the door; she had to let her
eyes adjust to the darkness for a minute before she
could see where she was. It was the old front room
of the house. The windows were shuttered, the fire

VMS    16    -CT-

Betrayals

dead. There was a sideboard, a table, a couch, but a
bed stood near the fireplace. The tangled covers had
slid to the floor, and Abberkam was naked on the
bed, writhing and raving in fever. "Oh, Lord!" Yoss
said. That huge, black, sweat-oiled breast and belly
whoried with grey hair, those powerful arms and
groping hands, how was she going to get near him?

She managed it, growing less timid and cautious
as she found him weak in his fever, and, when he
was lucid, obedient to her requests. She got him cov-
ered up, piled up all the blankets he had and a rug
from the floor of an unused room on top; she built
up the fire as hot as she could make it; and after a
couple of hours he began to sweat, sweat pouring
out of him till the sheets and mattress were soaked.
"You are immoderate," she railed at him in the
depths of the night, shoving and hauling at him,
making him stagger over to the decrepit couch and
lie there wrapped in the rug so she could get his bed-
ding dry at the fire. He shivered and coughed, and
she brewed up the herbals she had brought, and
drank the scalding tea along with him. He fell sud-
denly asleep and slept like death, not wakened even
by the cough that wracked him. She fell as sudden-
ly asleep and woke to find herself lying on bare
hearthstones, the fire dying, the day white in the
windows.

Abberkam lay tike a mountain range under the
rug, which she saw now to be filthy; his breath
wheezed but was deep and regular. She got up piece
by piece, all ache and pain, made up the fire and got
warm, made tea, investigated the pantry. It was
stocked with essentials; evidently the Chief ordered
in supplies from Veo, the nearest town of any size.

t..- 17   :"a>

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

She made herself a good breakfast, and when
Abberkam roused, got some more herbal tea into
him. The fever had broken. The danger now was
water in the lungs, she thought; they had warned
her about that with Safnan, and this was a man of
sixty. If he stopped coughing, that would be a dan-
ger sign. She made him lie propped up. "Cough,"
she told him.

"Hurts," he growled.

"You have to," she said, and he coughed, hak-
hak.

"More!" she ordered, and he coughed till his
body was shaken with the spasms.

"Good," she said. "Now sleep." He slept.

Tikuli, Gubu would be starving! She fled home,
fed her pets, petted them, changed her under-
clothes, sat down in her own chair by her own fire-
side for half an hour with Gubu going roo-roo under
her ear. Then she went back across the marshes to
the Chief's house.

She got his bed dried out by nightfall and
moved him back into it. She stayed that night, but
left him in the morning, saying, "I'll be back in the
evening." He was silent, still very sick, indifferent to
his own plight or hers.

The next day he was clearly better: the cough
was phlegmy and rough, a good cough; she well
remembered when Safnan had finally begun cough-
ing a good cough. He was fully awake from time to
time, and when she brought him the bottle she had
made serve as a bedpan he took it from her and
turned away from her to piss in it. Modesty, a good
sign in a Chief, she thought. She felt pleased with
him and with herself. She had been useful. "I'm

3-hBi 18 a-*.

Betrayals

going to leave you tonight; don't let the covers slip
off. I'll be back in the morning," she told him,
pleased with herself, her decisiveness, her unan-
swerability.

But when she got home in the clear, cold
evening, Tikuli was curled up in a comer of the
room where he had never slept before. He would not
eat, and crept back to his corner when she tried to
move him, pet him, make him sleep on the bed. Let
me be, he said, looking away from her, turning his
eyes away, tucking his dry, black, sharp nose into
the curve of his foreleg. Let me be, he said patiently,
let me die, that is what I am doing now.

She slept, because she was very tired. Gubu
stayed out in the marshes all night. In the morning
Tikuli was just the same, curled up on the floor in
the place where he had never slept, waiting.

"I have to go," she told him, "I'll be back soon
 very soon. Wait for me, Tikuli."

He said nothing, gazing away from her with dim
amber eyes. It was not her he waited for.

She strode across the marshes, dry-eyed, angry,
useless. Abberkam was much the same as he had
been; she fed him some grain pap, looked to his
needs, and said, "I can't stay. My kit is sick, I have to
go back."

"Kit," the big man said in his rumble of voice.

"A foxdog. My daughter gave him to me." Why
was she explaining, excusing herself? She left; when
she got home Tikuli was where she had left him. She
did some mending, cooked up some food she
thought Abberkam might eat, tried to read the book
about the worlds of the Ekumen, about the world
that had no war, where it was always winter, where

3i  19  <^*^>

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

people were both men and women. In the middle of
the afternoon she thought she must go back to
Abberkam, and was just getting up when Tikuli too
stood up. He walked very slowly over to her. She sat
down again in her chair and stooped to pick him up,
but he put his sharp muzzle into her hand, sighed,
and lay down with his head on his paws. He sighed
again.

She sat and wept aloud for a while, not long;

then she got up and got the gardening spade and
went outdoors. She made the grave at the corner of
the stone chimney, in a sunny nook. When she
went in and picked Tikuli up she thought with a
thrill like terror, "He is not dead!" He was dead, only
he was not cold yet; the thick red fur kept the body's
warmth in. She wrapped him in her blue scarf and
took him in her arms, carried him to his grave, feel-
ing that faint warmth still through the cloth, and
the light rigidity of the body, like a wooden statue.
She rilled the grave and set a stone that had fallen
from the chimney on it. She could not say anything,
but she had an image in her mind like a prayer, of
Tikuli running in the sunlight somewhere.

She put out food on the porch for Gubu, who
had kept out of the house all day, and set off up the
causeway. It was a silent, overcast evening. The reeds
stood grey and the pools had a leaden gleam.

Abberkam was sitting up in bed, certainly better,
perhaps with a touch of fever but nothing serious;

he was hungry, a good sign. When she brought him
his tray he said, "The kit, it's all right?"

"No," she said and turned away, able only after
a minute to say, "Dead."

"In the Lord's hands," said the hoarse, deep

<F*'s 20 *<

Betrayals

voice, and she saw Tikuli in the sunlight again, in
some presence, some kind presence like the sun-
light.

"Yes," she said. "Thank you." Her lips quivered
and her throat closed up. She kept seeing the design
on her blue scarf, leaves printed in a darker blue. She
made herself busy. Presently she came back to see to
the fire and sit down beside it. She felt very tired.

"Before the Lord Kamye took up the sword,
he was a herdsman," Abberkam said. "And they
called him Lord of the Beasts, and Deer-Herd, because
when he went into the forest he came among the
deer, and lions also walked with him among the deer,
offering no harm. None were afraid."

He spoke so quietly that it was a while before
she realised he was saying lines from the Arkamye.

She put another block of peat on the fire and sat
down again.

"Tell me where you come from. Chief Abber-
kam," she said.

"Gebba Plantation."

"In the east?"

He nodded.

"What was it like?"

The fire smouldered, making its pungent smoke.
The night was intensely silent. When she first came
out here from the city the silence had wakened her,
night after night.

"What was it like?" he said almost in a whisper,
Like most people of their race, the dark iris filled his
eyes, but she saw the white flash as he glanced over
at her. "Sixty years ago," he said. "We lived in the
Plantation compound. The canebrakes; some of us
worked there, cut cane, worked in the mill. Most of

c-^SS 21  s-'-s

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

the women, the little children. Most men and the
boys over nine or ten went down the mines. Some
of the girls, too, they wanted them small, to work
the shafts a man couldn't get into- I was big. They
sent me down the mines when I was eight years
old."

"What was it like?"

"Dark," he said. Again she saw the flash of his
eyes. "I look back and think how did we live? how
did we stay living in that place? The air down the
mine was so thick with the dust that it was black.
Black air. Your lantern light didn't go five feet into
that air. There was water in most of the workings, up
to a man's knees. There was one shaft where a soft-
coal face had caught fire and was burning so the
whole system was full of smoke- They went on work-
ing it, because the lodes ran behind that coke. We
wore masks, filters. They didn't do much good. We
breathed the smoke-1 always wheeze some like I do
now. It's not just the berlot. It's the old smoke. The
men died of the black lung. All the men. Forty,
forty-five years old, they died. The Bosses gave your
tribe money when a man died. A death bonus. Some
men thought that made it worth while dying."

"How did you get out?"

"My mother," he said. "She was a chief's daugh-
ter from the village. She taught me. She taught me
religion and freedom."

He has said that before, Yoss thought. It has
become his stock answer, his standard myth.

"How? What did she say?"

A pause. "She taught me the Holy Word,"
Abberkam said. "And she said to me, 'You and your
brother, you are the true people, you are the Lord's

a^s 22 a-*-

Betrayals

people, his servants, his warriors, his lions: only
you. Lord Kamye came with us from the Old World
and he is ours now, he lives among us.' She named
us Abberkam, Tongue of the Lord, and Domerkam,
Arm of the Lord. To speak the truth and fight to be
flee."

"What became of your brother?" Yoss asked
after a time.

"Killed at Nadami," Abberkam said, and again
both were silent for a while.

Nadami had been the first great outbreak of the
Uprising which finally brought the Liberation to
Yeowe- At Nadami plantation slaves and city freed-
people had first fought side by side against the own-
ers. If the slaves had been able to hold together
against the owners, the Corporations, they might
have won their freedom years sooner. But the liber-
ation movement had constantly splintered into trib-
al rivalries, chiefs vying for power in the newly freed
territories, bargaining with the Bosses to consolidate
their gains. Thirty years of war and destruction
before the vastly outnumbered Werelians were
defeated, driven offworld, leaving the Yeowans free
to turn upon one another.

"Your brother was lucky," said Yoss.

Then she looked across at the Chief, wondering
how he would take this challenge. His big, dark face
had a softened look in the firelight. His grey, coarse
hair had escaped from the loose braid she had made
of it to keep it from his eyes, and straggled around
his face. He said slowly and softly, "He was my
younger brother. He was Enar on the Field of the
Five Armies."

Oh, so then you're the Lord Kamye himself?

33tS 23  O-'-S'

FOUR  WAYS TO  FORGIVENESS

Yoss retorted in her mind, moved, indignant, cyni-
cal. What an ego!  But, to be sure, there was
another implication. Enar had taken up his sword to
kill his Elder Brother on that battlefield, to keep him
from becoming Lord of the World. And Kamye had
told him that the sword he held was his own death;

that there is no lordship and no freedom in life,
only in the letting go of life, of longing, of desire.
Enar had laid down his sword and gone into the
wilderness, into the silence, saying only, "Brother, I
am thou." And Kamye had taken up that sword to
fight the Armies of Desolation, knowing there is no
victory.

So who was he, this man? this big fellow? this
sick old man, this little boy down in the mines in
the dark, this bully, thief, and liar who thought he
could speak for the Lord?

"We're talking too much," Yoss said, though
neither of them had said a word for five minutes.
She poured a cup of tea for him and set the kettle off
the fire, where she had kept it simmering to keep the
air moist. She took up her shawl. He watched her
with that same soft look in his face, an expression
almost of confusion.

"It was freedom I wanted," he said. "Our free-
dom."

His conscience was none of her concern. "Keep
warm," she said.

"You're going out now?"

"I can't get lost on the causeway."

It was a strange walk, though, for she had no
lantern, and the night was very black. She thought,
feeling her way along the causeway, of that black air

he had told her of down in the mines, swallowing

i

sw 24 ra"-g>

Betrayals

light. She thought of Abberkam's black, heavy body.
She thought how seldom she had walked atone at
night. When she was a child on Banni Plantation,
the slaves were locked in the compound at night.
Women stayed on the women's side and never went
alone. Before the War, when she came to the city as
a freedwoman, studying at the training school,
she'd had a taste of freedom; but in the bad years of
the War and even since the Liberation a woman
couldn't go safely in the streets at night. There were
no police in the working quarters, no streetlights;

district warlords sent their gangs out raiding; even
in daylight you had to look out, try to stay in the
crowd, always be sure there was a street you could
escape by.

She grew anxious that she would miss her turn-
ing, but her eyes had grown used to the dark by the
time she came to it, and she could even make out
the blot of her house down in the formlessness of
the reedbeds. The Aliens had poor night vision, she
had heard. They had little eyes, little dots with
white all round them, like a scared calf. She didn't
like their eyes, though she liked the colors of their
skin, mostly dark brown or ruddy brown, warmer
than her greyish-brown slave skin or the blue-black
hide Abberkam had got from the owner who had
raped his mother. Cyanid skins, the Aliens said
politely, an ocular adaptation to the radiation spec-
trum of the Werelian System sun.

Gubu danced about her on the pathway down,
silent, tickling her legs with his tail. "Look out," she
scolded him, "I'm going to walk on you." She was
grateful to him, picked him up as soon as they were
indoors. No dignified and joyous greeting from

's9-s' 25 '^^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Tikuli, not this night, not ever. Roo-roo-roo, Gubu
went under her ear, listen to me, I'm here, life goes
on, where's dinner?

The Chief got a touch of pneumonia after all, and
she went into the village to call the clinic in Veo.
They sent out a practitioner, who said he was doing
fine, just keep him sitting up and coughing, the
herbal teas were fine, just keep an eye on him, that's
right, and went away, thanks very much. So she
spent her afternoons with him. The house without
Tikuli seemed very drab, the late autumn days
seemed very cold, and anyhow what else did she
have to do? She liked the big, dark raft-house. She
wasn't going to clean house for the Chief or any
man who didn't do it for himself, but she poked
about in it, in rooms Abberkam evidently hadn't
used or even looked at. She found one upstairs, with
long low windows all along the west wall, that she
liked. She swept it out and cleaned the windows
with their small, greenish panes. When he was
asleep she would go up to that room and sit on a
ragged wool rug, its only furnishing. The fireplace
had been sealed up with loose bricks, but heat came
up it from the peat fire burning below, and with her
back against the warm bricks and the sunlight slant-
ing in, she was warm. She felt a peacefulness there
that seemed to belong to the room, the shape of its
air, the greenish, wavery glass of the windows. There
she would sit in silence, unoccupied, content, as she
had never sat in her own house.

The Chief was slow to get his strength back.
Often he was sullen, dour, the uncouth man she had

sw 26 x*6s

Betrayals

first thought him, sunk in a stupor of self-centered
shame and rage. Other days he was ready to talk;

even to listen, sometimes.

"I've been reading a book about the worlds of
the Ekumen," Yoss said, waiting for their bean-cakes
to be ready to turn and fry on the other side. For the
last several days she had made and eaten dinner
with him in the late afternoon, washed up, and
gone home before dark. "It's very interesting. There
isn't any question that we're descended from the
people of Hain, all of us. Us and the Aliens too. Even
our animals have the same ancestors."

"So they say," he grunted. .

"It isn't a matter of who says it," she said.
"Anybody who will look at the evidence sees it; it's
a genetic fact. That you don't like it doesn't alter it."

"What is a 'fact' a million years old?" he said.
"What has it to do with you, with me, with us? This
is our world. We are ourselves. We have nothing to
do with them."

"We do now," she said rather fliply, flipping the
bean-cakes.

"Not if I had had my way," he said.

She laughed. "You don't give up, do you?"

"No," he said.

After they were eating, he in bed with his tray,
she at a stool on the hearth, she went on, with a
sense of teasing a bull, daring the avalanche to fall;

for all he was still sick and weak, there was that
menace in him, his size, not of body only. "Is that
what it was all about, really?" she asked. "The World
Party. Having the planet for ourselves, no Aliens?
Just that?"

"Yes," he said, the dark rumble.

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Why? The Ekumen has so much to share with
us. They broke the Corporations' hold over us.
They're on our side."

"We were brought to this world as slaves," he
said, "but it is our world to find our own way in.
Kamye came with us, the Herdsman, the Bondsman,
Kamye of the Sword. This is his world. Our earth. No
one can give it to us. We don't need to share other
people's knowledge or follow their gods- This is
where we live, this earth. This is where we die to
rejoin the Lord."

After a while she said, "I have a daughter, and a
grandson and granddaughter. They left this world
four years ago. They're on a ship that is going to
Hain. All these years I live till I die are like a few
minutes, an hour to them. They'll be there in eighty
years  seventy-six years, now. On that other earth.
They'll live and die there. Not here,"

"Were you willing for them to go?"

"It was their choice."

"Not yours."

"I don't live their lives."

"But you grieve," he said.

The silence between them was heavy.

"It is wrong, wrong, wrong!" he said, his voice
strong and loud. "We had our own destiny, our own
way to the Lord, and they've taken it from us 
we're slaves again! The wise Aliens, the scientists
with all their great knowledge and inventions, our
ancestors, they say they are  'Do this!' they say,
and we do it. 'Do that!' and we do it. Take your chil-
dren on the wonderful ship and fly to our wonder-
ful worlds!' And the children are taken, and they'll
never come home. Never know their home. Never

T-*CO  28   T?-

Betrayals

know who they are. Never know whose hands might
have held them."

He was orating; for all she knew it was a speech
he had made once or a hundred times, ranting and
magnificent; there were tears in his eyes. There were
tears in her eyes also. She would not let him use her,
play on her, have power over her.

"If I agreed with you," she said, "still, still, why
did you cheat, Abberkam? You lied to your own peo-
ple, you stole!"

"Never," he said. "Everything I did, always,
every breath I took, was for the World Party. Yes, I
spent money, all the money I could get, what was it
for except the cause? Yes. I threatened the Envoy, I
wanted to drive him and all the rest of them off this
world! Yes, I lied to them. because they want to con-
trol us, to own us, and I will do anything to save my
people from slavery  anything!"

He beat his great fists on the mound of his
knees, and gasped for breath, sobbing.

"And there is nothing I can do, 0 Kamye!" he
cried, and hid his face in his arms.

She sat silent, sick at heart-
After a long time he wiped his hands over his
face, like a child, wiping the coarse, straggling hair
back, rubbing his eyes and nose. He picked up the
tray and set it on his knees, picked up the fork, cut
a piece of bean-cake, put it in his mouth, chewed,
swallowed. If he can, I can, Yoss thought, and did
the same. They finished their dinner. She got up
and came to take his tray. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It was gone then," he said very quietly- He
looked up at her directly, seeing her, as she felt he
seldom did.

^-i^a 29  f^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

She stood, not understanding, waiting.

"It was gone then. Years before. What I believed
at Nadami. That all we needed was to drive them out
and we would be free. We lost our way as the war
went on and on. I knew it was a lie. What did it mat-
ter if I lied more?"

She understood only that he was deeply upset
and probably somewhat mad, and that she had been
wrong to goad him. They were both old, both de-
feated, they had both lost their child. Why did she
want to hurt him? She put her hand on his hand for
a moment, in silence, before she picked up his tray.

As she washed up the dishes in the scullery, he
called her, "Come here, please!" He had never done
so before, and she hurried into the room.

"Who were you?" he asked.

She stood staring.

"Before you came here," he said impatiently.

"I went from the plantation to education
school," she said. "I lived in the city. I taught
physics. I administered the teaching of science in
the schools. I brought up my daughter."

"What is your name?"

"Yoss. Seddewi Tribe, from Banni."

He nodded, and after a moment more she went
back to the scullery. He didn't even know my name,
she thought.

Every day she made him get up, walk a little, sit in a
chair; he was obedient, but it tired him. The next
afternoon she made him walk about a good while,
and when he got back to bed he closed his eyes at
once. She slipped up the rickety stairs to the west-

aW 30 ^*o

Betrayals

window room and sat there a long time in perfect
peace.

She had him sit up in the chair while she made
their dinner. She talked to cheer him up, for he
never complained at her demands, but he looked
gloomy and bleak, and she blamed herself for upset-
ting him yesterday. Were they not both here to leave
all that behind them, all their mistakes and failures
as well as their loves and victories? She told him
about Wada and Eyid, spinning out the story of the
star-crossed lovers, who were, in fact, in bed in her
house that afternoon. "I didn't used to have any-
where to go when they came," she said. "It could be
rather inconvenient, cold days like today. I'd have to
hang around the shops in the village. This is better,
I must say. I like this house."

He only grunted, but she felt he was listening
intently, almost that he was trying to understand,
like a foreigner who did not know the language.

"You don't care about the house, do you?" she
said, and laughed, serving up their soup. "You're
honest, at least. Here I am pretending to be holy, to
be making my soul, and I get fond of things,
attached to them, I love things." She sat down by
the fire to eat her soup. "There's a beautiful room
upstairs," she said, "the front corner room, looking
west. Something good happened in that room,
lovers lived there once, maybe. I like to look out at
the marshes from there."

When she made ready to go he asked, "Will
they be gone?"

"The fawns? Oh yes. Long since. Back to their
hateful families. I suppose if they could live togeth-
er, they'd soon be just as hateful. They're very igno-

Tfff 31  S^tS

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

rant. How can they help it? The village is narrow-
minded, they're so poor. But they cling to their love
for each other, as if they knew it ... it was their
truth..."

"'Hold fast to the noble thing,'" Abberkam said.
She knew the quotation-

"Would you like me to read to you?" she asked.
"I have the Arkamye, I could bring it."

He shook his head, with a sudden, broad smile.
"No need," he said. "I know it."

"All of it?"

He nodded-

"1 meant to leam it  part of it anyway 
when I came here," she said, awed. "But I never did.
There never seems to be time. Did you leam it
here?"

"Long ago. In the jail, in Gebba City," he said.
"Plenty of time there- . . . These days, I lie here and
say it to myself." His smile lingered as he looked up
at her. "It gives me company in your absence."

She stood wordless.

"Your presence is sweet to me," he said.

She wrapped herself in her shawl and hurried
out with scarcely a word of good-bye.

She walked home in a crowd of confused, con-
flicted feelings. What a monster the man was! He
had been flirting with her: there was no doubt
about it. Coming on to her, was more like it. Lying
in bed like a great felled ox, with his wheezing and
his grey hair! That soft, deep voice, that smile, he
knew the uses of that smile, he knew how to keep it
rare. He knew how to get round a woman, he'd got
round a thousand if the stories were true, round
them and into them and out again, here's a little

(r-a> 32   ^*"

Betrayals

semen to remember your Chief by, and bye-bye,
baby. Lord!

So, why had she taken it into her head to tell
him about Eyid and Wada being in her bed? Stupid
woman, she told herself, striding into the mean east
wind that scoured the greying reeds- Stupid, stupid,
old, old woman.

Gubu came to meet her, dancing and batting
with soft paws at her legs and hands, waving his
short, end-knotted, black-spotted tail. She had left
the door unlatched for him, and he could push it
open. It was ajar- Feathers of some kind of small bird
were strewn all over the room and there was a little
blood and a bit of entrait on the hearthrug.
"Monster," she told him. "Murder outside!" He
danced his battle dance and cried Hoo! Hoo! He
slept all night curled up in the small of her back,
obligingly getting up, stepping over her, and curling
up on the other side each time she turned over.

She turned over frequently, imagining or dream-
ing the weight and heat of a massive body, the
weight of hands on her breasts, the tug of lips at her
nipples, sucking life.

She shortened her visits to Abberkam. He was able to
get up, see to his needs, get his own breakfast; she
kept his peatbox by the chimney filled and his
larder supplied, and she now brought him dinner
but did not stay to eat it with him. He was mostly
grave and silent, and she watched her tongue. They
were wary with each other. She missed her hours
upstairs in the western room; but that was done
with, a kind of dream, a sweetness gone.

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Eyid came to Yoss's house alone one afternoon,
sullen-faced. "I guess I won't come back out here,"
she said,

"What's wrong?"

The girl shrugged.

"Are they watching you?"

"No. I don't know. I might, you know. I might
get stuffed." She used the old slave word for preg-
nant.

"You used the contraceptives, didn't you?" She
had bought them for the pair in Veo, a good supply.

Eyid nodded vaguely. "I guess it's wrong," she
said, pursing her mouth.

"Making love? Using contraceptives?"

"I guess ifs wrong," the girl repeated, with a quick,
vengeful glance-

"All right," Yoss said.

Eyid turned away.

"Good-bye, Eyid."

Without speaking, Eyid went off by the bog-
path.

Hold fast to the noble thing, Yoss thought, bit-
terly.

She went round the house to Tikuli's grave, but
it was too cold to stand outside for long, a still,
aching, midwinter cold. She went in and shut the
door. The room seemed small and dark and low. The
dull peat fire smoked and smouldered. It made no
noise burning. There was no noise outside the house.
The wind was down, the ice-bound reeds were still.

I want some wood, I want a wood fire, Yoss
thought. A flame leaping and crackling, a story-
telling fire, like we used to have in the grandmoth-
ers' house on the plantation.

r*- .34 ^-a

Betrayals

The next day she went off one of the bog-paths
to a ruined house half a mile away and pulled some
loose boards off the fallen-in porch. She had a roar-
ing blaze in her fireplace that night. She took to
going to the ruined house once or more daily, and
built up a sizeable woodpile next to the stacked
peat in the nook on the other side of the chimney
from her bed nook. She was no longer going to
Abberkam's house; he was recovered, and she wanted
a goal to walk to- She had no way to cut the longer
boards, and so shoved them into the fireplace a bit at
a time; that way one would last all the evening. She
sat by the bright fire and tried to leam the First Book
of the Arkamye. Gubu lay on the hearthstone some-
times watching the flames and whispering roo, roo,
sometimes asleep. He hated so to go out into the icy
reeds that she made him a little dirt-box in the
scullery, and he used it very neatly.

The deep cold continued, the worst winter she
had known on the marshes, fierce drafts led her to
cracks in the wood walls she had not known about;

she had no rags to stuff them with and used mud
and wadded reeds. If she let the fire go out, the tittle
house grew icy within an hour. The peat fire,
banked, got her through the nights. In the daytime
often she put on a piece of wood for the flare, the
brightness, the company of it.

She had to go into the village. She had put off
going for days, hoping that the cold might relent,
and had run out of practically everything. It was
colder than ever. The peat blocks now on the fire
were earthy and burned poorly, smouldering, so she
put a piece of wood in with them to keep the fire live-
ly and the house warm. She wrapped every jacket and

^ 35 a*

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

shawl she had around her and set off with her sack.
Gubu blinked at her from the hearth- "Lazy lout,"
she told him. "Wise beast."

The cold was frightening. If I slipped on the ice
and broke a leg, no one might come by for days, she
thought. I'd lie here and be frozen dead in a few
hours. Well, well, welt, I'm in the Lord's hands, and
dead in a few years one way or the other. Only, dear
Lord, let me get to the village and get warm!

She got there, and spent a good while at the
sweet-shop stove catching up on gossip, and at
the news vendor's woodstove, reading old newspa-
pers about a new war in the eastern province. Eyid's
aunts and Wada's father, mother, and aunts all asked
her how the Chief was. They also all told her to go
by her landlord's house, Kebi had something for her.
He had a packet of cheap nasty tea for her. Perfectly
willing to let him enrich his soul, she thanked him
for the tea. He asked her about Abberkam. The Chief
had been ill? He was better now? He pried; she
replied indifferently. It's easy to live in silence, she
thought; what I could not do is live with these
voices.

She was loath to leave the warm room, but her
bag was heavier than she liked to carry, and the icy
spots on the road would be hard to see as the light
failed. She took her leave and set off across the vil-
lage again and up onto the causeway. It was later
than she had thought. The sun was quite low, hid-
ing behind one bar of cloud in an otherwise stark
sky, as if grudging even a half hour's warmth and
brightness. She wanted to get home to her fire, and
stepped right along.

Keeping her eyes on the way ahead for fear of

f-^s 36 '^-^

Betrayals

ice, at first she only heard the voice. She knew it,
and she thought, Abberkam has gone mad again!
For he was running towards her, shouting. She
stopped, afraid of him, but it was her name he was
shouting. "Yoss! Yoss! It's all right!" he shouted,
coming up right on her, a huge wild man, all dirty,
muddy, ice and mud in his grey hair, his hands
black, his clothes black, and she could see the whites
all round his eyes.

"Get back!" she said, "get away, get away from
me!"

"It's all right," he said, "but the house, but the
house  "

"What house?"

"Your house, it burned. I saw it, I was coming to
the village, I saw the smoke down in the marsh  "

He went on, but Yoss stood paralysed, unhearing-
She had shut the door, let the latch fall. She never
locked it, but she had let the latch fall, and
Gubu would not be able to-get out. He was in the
house. Locked in: the bright, desperate eyes: the lit-
tle voice crying 

She started forward. Abberkam blocked her way.

"Let me get by," she said. "I have to get by." She
set down her bag and began to run.

Her arm was caught, she was stopped as if by a
sea wave, swung right round. The huge body and
voice were all around her. "It's all right, the kit is all
right, it's in my house," he was saying. "Usten, lis-
ten to me, Yoss! The house bumed. The kit is all
right."

"What happened?" she said, shouting, furious.
"Let me go! I don't understand! What happened?"

"Please, please be quiet," he begged her, releas-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

ing her. "We'll go by there. You'll see it. There isn't
much to see."

Very shakily, she walked along with him while
he told her what had happened. "But how did it
start?" she said, "how could it?"

"A spark; you left the fire burning? Of course, of
course you did, it's cold. But there were stones out of
the chimney, I could see that. Sparks, if there was any
wood on the fire  maybe a floorboard caught 
the thatch, maybe. Then it would all go, in this dry
weather, everything dried out, no rain. Oh my Lord,
my sweet Lord, I thought you were in there. I thought
you were in the house. I saw the fire, 1 was up on the
causeway  then I was down at the door of the
house, I don't know how, did I fly, I don't know  I
pushed, it was latched, I pushed it in, and I saw the
whole back wall and ceiling burning, blazing. There
was so much smoke, I couldn't tell if you were there,
I went in, the little animal was hiding in a comer 
I thought how you cried when the other one died, I
tried to catch it, and it went out the door like a flash,
and I saw no one was there, and made for the door,
and the roof fell in." He laughed, wild, triumphant.
"Hit me on the head, see?" He stooped, but she still
was not tall enough to see the top of his head. "I saw
your bucket and tried to throw water on the front
wall, to save something, then I saw that was crazy, it
was all on fire, nothing left. And I went up the path,
and the little animal, your pet, was waiting there, all
shaking. It let me pick it up, and I didn't know what
to do with it. so I ran back to my house, and left it
there. I shut the door. It's safe there. Then I thought
you must be in the village, so I came back to find
you."

.-o 38 ^s

Betrayals

They had come to the turnoff. She went to the
side of the causeway and looked down. A smear of
smoke, a huddle of black. Black sticks. Ice. She
shook all over and felt so sick she had to crouch
down, swallowing cold saliva. The sky and the reeds
went from left to right, spinning, in her eyes; she
could not stop them spinning.

"Come, come on now, it's all right. Come on
with me." She was aware of the voice, the hands and
arms, a large warmth supporting her. She walked
along with her eyes shut. After a while she could
open them and look down at the road, carefully.

"Oh, my bag  I left it  It's all I have," she
said suddenly with a kind of laugh, turning around
and nearly falling over because the turn started the
spinning again.

"1 have it here. Come on, it's just a short way
now." He carried the bag oddly, in the crook of his
arm. The other arm was around her, helping her
stand up and walk. They came to his house, the dark
raft-house. It faced a tremendous orange-and-yellow
sky, with pink streaks going up the sky from where
the sun had set; the sun's hair, they used to call that,
when she was a child. They turned from the glory,
entering the dark house.

"Gubu?" she said.

It took a while to find him. He was cowering
under the couch. She had to haul him out, he
would not come to her. His fur was full of dust and
came out in her hands as she stroked it. There was
a little foam on his mouth, and he shivered and was
silent in her arms. She stroked and stroked the sil-
very, speckled back, the spotted sides, the silken
white belly fur. He closed his eyes finally; but the

^s 39 -^-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

instant she moved a little, he leapt, and ran back
under the couch.

She sat and said, "I'm sony, I'm sorry, Gubu, I'm
sorry."

Hearing her speak, the Chief came back into the
room. He had been in the scullery. He held his wet
hands in front of him and she wondered why he
didn't dry them. "Is he all right?" he asked.

"It'll take a while," she said. "The fire. And a
strange house. They're . . . cats are territorial. Don't
like strange places."

She could not arrange her thoughts or words,
they came in pieces, unattached.

"That is a cat, then?"

"A spotted cat, yes."

"Those pet animals, they belonged to the
Bosses, they were in the Bosses' houses," he said.
"We never had any around."

She thought it was an accusation. "They came
from Werel with the Bosses," she said, "yes. So did
we." After the sharp words were out she thought
that maybe what he had said was an apology for
ignorance.

He still stood there holding out his hands stiffly.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I need some kind of bandage,
I think."

She focused slowly on his hands.

"You burned them," she said.

"Not much. I don't know when."

"Let me see." He came nearer and turned the
big hands palm up: a fierce red blistered bar across
the bluish inner skin of the fingers of one, and a
raw bloody wound in the base of the thumb of the
other.

.^.a 40  ^s

Betrayals

"I didn't notice till I was washing." he said. "It
didn't hurt."

"Let me see your head," she said, remembering;

and he knelt and presented her with a matted shag-
gy sooty object with a red-and-black bum right
across the top of it. "Oh, Lord," she said.

His big nose and eyes appeared under the grey
tangle, close to her, looking up at her, anxious. "I
know the roof fell onto me," he said, and she began
to laugh.

"It would take more than a roof falling onto
you!" she said. "Have you got anything  any clean
cloths  I know I left some clean dish towels in the
scullery closet  Any disinfectant?"

She talked as she cleaned the head wound. "I
don't know anything about burns except try to keep
them clean and leave them open and dry. We should
call the clinic in Veo. I can go into the village,
tomorrow."

"I thought you were a doctor or a nurse," he
said.

"I'm a school administrator!"

"You looked after me."

"1 knew what you had. I don't know anything
about bums. I'll go into the village and call. Not
tonight, though."

"Not tonight," he agreed. He flexed his hands,
wincing. "I was going to make us dinner," he said. "I
didn't know there was anything wrong with my
hands. I don't know when it happened."

"When you rescued Gubu," Yoss said in a mat-
ter-of-fact voice, and then began crying. "Show me
what you were going to eat, I'll put it on," she said
through tears.

T.S 41   31iiS>

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

"I'm sony about your things," he said.

"Nothing mattered. I'm wearing almost all my
clothes," she said, weeping. "There wasn't anything.
Hardly any food there even. Only the Arkamye. And
my book about the worlds." She thought of the pages
blackening and curling as the fire read them. "A
friend sent me that from the city, she never approved
of me coming here, pretending to drink water and be
silent. She was right, too, I should go back, I should
never have come. What a liar I am, what a fool!
Stealing wood! Stealing wood so I could have a nice
fire! So I could be warm and cheerful! So I set the
house on fire, so everything's gone, mined, Kebi's
house, my poor little cat, your hands, it's my fault. I
forgot about sparks from wood fires, the chimney was
built for peat fires, I forgot. I forget everything, my
mind betrays me, my memory lies, I lie. I dishonor
my Lord, pretending to turn to him when I can't rum
to him, when I can't let go the world. So I bum it! So
the sword cuts your hands." She took his hands in
hers and bent her head over them. "Tears are disin-
fectant," she said. "Oh I'm sorry, I am sorry!"

His big, burned hands rested in hers. He leaned
forward and kissed her hair, caressing it with his lips
and cheek. "I will say you the Arkamye," he said. "Be
still now. We need to eat something. You feel very
cold. I think you have some shock, maybe. You sit
there. I can put a pot on to heat, anyhow."

She obeyed. He was right, she felt very cold. She
huddled closer to the fire. "Gubu?" she whispered.
"Gubu, it's all right. Come on, come on, little one."
But nothing moved under the couch.

Abberkam stood by her, offering her something:

a glass; it was wine, red wine.

ry^s 42 T^

Betrayals

"You have wine?" she said, startled.

"Mostly I drink water and am silent," he said.
"Sometimes I drink wine and talk. Take it."

She took it humbly. "I wasn't shocked," she
said,

"Nothing shocks a city woman," he said grave-
ly. "Now I need you to open up this jar."

"How did you get the wine open?" she asked as
she unscrewed the lid of a Jar of fish stew.

"It was already open," he said, deep-voiced,
imperturbable.

They sat across the hearth from each other to
eat, helping themselves from the pot hung on the
firehook. She held bits of fish down low so they
could be seen from under the couch and whispered
to Gubu, but he would not come out.

"When he's very hungry, he will," she said. She
was tired of the teary quaver in her voice, the knot
in her throat, the sense of shame. "Thank you for
the food," she said. "I feel better."

She got up and washed the pot and the spoons;

she had told him not to get his hands wet, and he
did not offer to help her, but sat on by the fire,
motionless, like a great dark lump of stone.

"I'll go upstairs," she said when she was done.
"Maybe I can get hold of Gubu and take him with
me. Let me have a blanket or two."

He nodded. "They're up there. I lighted the
fire," he said- She did not know what he meant;

she had knelt to peer under the couch. She knew as
she did so that she was grotesque, an old woman
bundled up in shawls with her rear end in the air,
whispering, "Gubu, Gubu!" to a piece of furniture.
But there was a little scrabbling, and then Gubu

vw 43 a*^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

came straight into her hands. He clung to her shoul-
der with his nose hidden under her ear. She sat up
on her heels and looked at Abberkam, radiant. "Here
he is!" she said. She got to her feet with some diffi-
culty, and said, "Good night."

"Good night, Yoss," he said- She dared not try to
carry the oil lamp, and made her way up the stairs
in the dark, holding Gubu close with both hands till
she was in the west room and had shut the door.
Then she stood staring. Abberkam had unsealed the
fireplace, and some time this evening he had lighted
the peat laid ready in it; the ruddy glow flickered in
the long, low windows black with night, and the
scent of it was sweet. A bedstead that had been in
another unused room now stood in this one, made
up, with mattress and blankets and a new white
wool rug thrown over it. A jug and basin stood on
the shelf by the chimney. The old rug she had used
to sit on had been beaten and scrubbed, and lay
clean and threadbare on the hearth.

Gubu pushed at her arms; she set him down,
and he ran straight under the bed. He would be all
right there. She poured a little water from the jug
into the basin and set it on the hearth in case he was
thirsty. He could use the ashes for his box.
Everything we need is here, she thought, still look-
ing with a sense of bewilderment at the shadowy
room, the soft light that struck the windows from
within.

She went out, closing the door behind her, and
went downstairs. Abberkam sat still by the fire. His
eyes flashed at her. She did not know what to say.

"You liked that room," he said.

She nodded.

s*a> 44 s*s

Betrayals

"You said maybe it was a lovers' room once. I
thought maybe it was a lovers' room to be."

After a while she said, "Maybe."

"Not tonight," he said, with a low rumble: a
laugh, she realised. She had seen him smile once,
now she had heard him laugh.

"No. Not tonight," she said stiffly.

"I need my hands," he said, "I need everything,
for that, for you."

She said nothing, watching him.

"Sit down, Yoss, please," he said. She sat down
in the hearth-seat facing him.

"When I was ill I thought about these things,"
he said, always a touch of the orator in his voice. "I
betrayed my cause, I lied and stole in its name,
because I could not admit 1 had lost faith in it. I
feared the Aliens because I feared their gods. So
many gods! I feared that they would diminish my
Lord. Dimmish him!" He was silent for a minute,
and drew breath; she could hear the deep rasp in his
chest. "I betrayed my son's mother many times,
many times. Her, other women, myself. I did not
hold to the one noble thing." He opened up his
hands, wincing a little, looking at the bums across
them. "1 think you did," he said.

After a while she said, "I only stayed with
Safnan's father a few years. I had some other men.
What does it matter, now?"

"That's not what I mean," he said. "I mean that
you did not betray your men, your child, yourself. All
right, all thafs past. You say, what does it matter now,
nothing matters. But you give me this chance even
now, this beautiful chance, to me, to hold you, hold
you fast."

,-^.iR 45 f^s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

She said nothing.

"I came here in shame," he said, "and you hon-
ored me."

"Why not? Who am I to judge you?"

"'Brother, I am thou.'"

She looked at him in terror, one glance, then
looked into the fire. The peat burned low and warm,
sending up one faint curl of smoke. She thought of
the warmth, the darkness of his body.

"Would there be any peace between us?" she
said at last.

"Do you need peace?"

After a while she smiled a little.

"I will do my best," he said. "Stay in this house
a while."

She nodded.

46 ws

Forgiveness
Day

GC^g)

Solly had been a space brat, a Mobile's child, living on this
ship and that, this world and that; she'd traveled five
hundred light-years by the time she was ten. At twen-
ty-five she had been through a revolution on AIterra,
learned aiji on Terra and farthinking from an old hil-
fer on Rokanan, breezed through the Schools on
Hain, and survived an assignment as Observer in
murderous, dying Kheakh, skipping another half mil-
lennium at near-lightspeed in the process. She was
young, but she'd been around.

She got bored with the Embassy people in Voe
Deo telling her to watch out for this, remember
that; she was a Mobile herself now, after all. Werel
had its quirks  what world didn't? She'd done
her homework, she knew when to curtsy and when
not to belch, and vice versa. It was a relief to get
on her own at last, in this gorgeous little city, on
this gorgeous little continent, the first and only

rf^ 47  v*-ff

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Envoy of the Ekumen to the Divine Kingdom of
Gatay.

She was high for days on the altitude, the tiny,
brilliant sun pouring vertical light into the noisy
streets, the peaks soaring up incredibly behind every
building, the dark blue sky where great near stars
burned all day, the dazzling nights under six or
seven lolloping bits of moon, the tall black people
with their black eyes, narrow heads, long, narrow
hands and feet, gorgeous people, her people! She
loved them all. Even if she saw a little too much of
them.

The last time she had had completely to herself
was a few hours in the passenger cabin of the
airskimmer sent by Gatay to bring her across the
ocean from Voe Deo. On the airstrip she was met by
a delegation of priests and officials from the King
and the Council, magnificent in scarlet and brown
and turquoise, and swept off to the Palace, where
there was a lot of curtsying and no belching, of
course, for hours  an introduction to his little
shrunken old majesty, introductions to High
Muckamucks and Lord Hooziwhats, speeches, a
banquet  all completely predictable, no problems
at all, not even the impenetrable giant fried flower
on her plate at the banquet. But with her, from that
first moment on the airstrip and at every moment
thereafter, discreetly behind or beside or very near
her, were two men; her Guide and her Guard.

The Guide, whose name was San Ubattat, was
provided by her hosts in Gatay; of course he was
reporting on her to the government, but he was a
most obliging spy, endlessly smoothing the way for
her, showing her with a bare hint what was expected

a-sg> 48 'w-3-

Forgiveness Day

or what would be a gaffe, and an excellent linguist,
ready with a translation when she needed one. San
was all right. But the Guard was something else.

He had been attached to her by the Ekumen's
hosts on this world, the dominant power on Werel,
the big nation of Voe Deo- She had promptly
protested to the Embassy back in Voe Deo that she
didn't need or want a bodyguard. Nobody in Gatay
was out to get her and even if they were, she pre-
ferred to look after herself. The Embassy sighed.
Sorry, they said. You're stuck with him. Voe Deo has
a military presence in Gatay, which after all is a
client state, economically dependent. It's in Voe
Dec's interest to protect the legitimate government
of Gatay against the native terrorist factions, and
you get protected as one of their interests. We can't
argue with that.

She knew better than to argue with the Embassy,
but she could not resign herself to the Major. His
military title, rega, she translated by the archaic
word "Major," from a skit she'd seen on Terra. That
Major had been a stuffed uniform, covered with
medals and insignia. It puffed and strutted and com-
manded, and finally blew up into bits of stuffing. If
only this Major would blow up! Not that he strutted,
exactly, or even commanded, directly. He was stoni-
ly polite, woodenly silent, stiff and cold as rigor
mortis. She soon gave up any effort to talk to him;

whatever she said, he replied Yessum or Nomum
with the prompt stupidity of a man who does not
and will not actually listen, an officer officially inca-
pable of humanity. And he was with her in every
public situation, day and night, on the street, shop-
ping, meeting with businessmen and officials, sight-

w^s 49 T'**

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

seeing, at court, in the balloon ascent above the
mountains  with her everywhere, everywhere but
bed.

Even in bed she wasn't quite as atone as she
would often have liked; for the Guide and the Guard
went home at night, but in the anteroom of her bed-
room slept the Maid  a gift from His Majesty, her
own private asset.

She remembered her incredulity when she first
learned that word, years ago, in a text about
slavery. "On Werel. members of the dominant caste
are called owners; members of the serving class are
called assets. Only owners are referred to as men
or women; assets are called bondsmen, bonds-
women."

So here she was, the owner of an asset. You don't
turn down a king's gift. Her asset's name was Rewe.
Rewe was probably a spy too, but it was hard to
believe. She was a dignified, handsome woman some
years older than Solly and about the same intensity
of skin color, though Solly was pinkish brown and
Rewe was bluish brown. The palms of her hands were
a delicate azure. Rewe's manners were exquisite and
she had tact, astuteness, an infallible sense of when she
was wanted and when not. Solly of course treated her
as an equal, stating right out at the beginning that
she believed no human being had a right to domi-
nate, much less own, another, that she would give
Rewe no orders, and that she hoped they might
become friends. Rewe accepted this, unfortunately,
as a new set of orders. She smiled and said yes. She
was infinitely yielding. Whatever Solly said or did
sank into that acceptance and was lost, leaving Rewe
unchanged: an attentive, obliging, gentle physical

CT-S' 50 i-'"ei

Forgiveness Day

presence, just out of reach. She smiled, and said yes,
and was untouchable.

And Solly began to think, after the first fizz of
the first days in Gatay, that she needed Rewe, really
needed her as a woman to talk with. There was no
way to meet owner women, who lived hidden away
in their bezas, women's quarters, "at home," they
called it. All bondswomen but Rewe were somebody
else's property, not hers to talk to. All she ever met
was men. And eunuchs.

That had been another thing hard to believe, that
a man would voluntarily trade his virility for a little
social standing; but she met such men all the time in
King Hotat's court. Born assets, they earned partial
independence by becoming eunuchs, and as such
often rose to positions of considerable power and
trust among their owners. The eunuch Tayandan,
majordomo of the palace, ruled the King, who didn't
rule, but figureheaded for the Council. The Council
was made up of various kinds- of lord but only one
kind of priest, Tualites. Only assets worshiped Kamye,
and the original religion of Gatay had been sup-
pressed when the monarchy became Tualite a centu-
ry or so ago. If there was one thing she really disliked
about Werel, aside from slavery and gender-domi-
nance, it was the religions. The songs about Lady Tual
were beautiful, and the statues of her and the great
temples in Voe Deo were wonderful, and the Arkamye
seemed to be a good story though long-winded; but
the deadly self-righteousness, the intolerance, the stu-
pidity of the priests, the hideous doctrines that justi-
fied every cruelty in the name of the faith! As a mat-
ter of fact, Solly said to herself, was there anything
she did like about Werel?

S^-Sl 51   T^gl

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

And answered herself instantly: I love it, I love
it. I love this weird little bright sun and all the bro-
ken bits of moons and the mountains going up like
ice walls and the people  the people with their
black eyes without whites like animals' eyes, eyes
like dark glass, like dark water, mysterious  I want
to love them, I want to know them, I want to reach
them!

But she had to admit that the pissants at the
Embassy had been right about one thing: being a
woman was tough on Werel. She fit nowhere. She
went about alone, she had a public position; and
so was a contradiction in terms: proper women
stayed at home, invisible. Only bondswomen went
out in the streets, or met strangers, or worked at
any public job. She behaved like an asset, not like
an owner. Yet she was something very grand, an
envoy of the Ekumen, and Gatay very much want-
ed to join the Ekumen and not to offend its
envoys. So the officials and courtiers and busi-
nessmen she talked to on the business of the
Ekumen did the best they could: they treated her
as if she were a man-

The pretense was never complete and often
broke right down. The poor old King groped her
industriously, under the vague impression that she
was one of his bedwarmers. When she contradicted
Lord Gatuyo in a discussion, he stared with the
blank disbelief of a man who has been talked back
to by his shoe. He had been thinking of her as a
woman. But in general the disgenderment worked,
allowing her to work with them; and she began to
fit herself into the game, enlisting Rewe's help in
making clothes that resembled what male owners

Forgiveness Day

wore in Gatay, avoiding anything that to them
would be specifically feminine. Rewe was a quick,
intelligent seamstress. The bright, heavy, close-fitted
trousers were practical and becoming, the embroi-
dered jackets were splendidly warm. She liked wear-
ing them. But she felt unsexed by these men who
could not accept her for what she was. She needed
to talk to a woman.

She tried to meet some of the hidden owner
women through the owner men, and met a wall of
politeness without a door, without a peephole.
What a wonderful idea; we will certainly arrange a
visit when the weather is better! I should be over-
whelmed with the honor if the Envoy were to
entertain Lady Mayoyo and my daughters, but my
foolish, provincial girls are so unforgivably timid 
I'm sure you understand. Oh, surely, surely, a tour of
the inner gardens  but not at present, when the
vines are not in flower! We must wait until the vines
are in flower!

There was nobody to talk to, nobody, until she
met Batikam the Makil.

It was an event: a touring troupe from Voe Deo-
There wasn't much going on in Gatay's little moun-
tain capital by way of entertainment, except for
temple dancers  all men, of course  and the
soppy fluff that passed as drama on the Werelian
network. Solly had doggedly entered some of these
wet pastels, hoping for a glimpse into the life "at
home," but she couldn't stomach the swooning
maidens who died of love while the stiff-necked
jackass heroes, who all looked like the Major, died
nobly in battle, and Tual the Merciful leaned out of
the clouds smiling upon their deaths with her eyes

s-* 53 a-**

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

slightly crossed and the whites showing, a sign of
divinity. Solly had noticed that Werelian men never
entered the network for drama. Now she knew why.
But the receptions at the palace and the parties in
her honor given by various lords and businessmen
were pretty dull stuff: all men, always, because they
wouldn't have the slave girls in while the Envoy was
there; and she couldn't flirt even with the nicest
men, couldn't remind them that they were men,
since that would remind them that she was a
woman not behaving like a lady. The fizz had defi-
nitely gone flat by the time the makil troupe came.

She asked San, a reliable etiquette advisor, if it
would be all right for her to attend the performance-
He hemmed and hawed and finally, with more than
usual oily delicacy, gave her to understand that it
would be all right so long as she went dressed as a
man. "Women, you know, don't go in public. But
sometimes, they want so much to see the entertain-
ers, you know? Lady Amatay used to go with Lord
Amatay, dressed in his clothes, every year; every-
body knew, nobody said anything  you know. For
you, such a great person, it would be all right.
Nobody will say anything. Quite, quite all right. Of
course. I come with you, the rega comes with you.
Like friends, ha? You know, three good men friends
going to the entertainment, ha? Ha?"

Ha, ha, she said obediently. What fun!  But it
was worth it, she thought, to see the makils.

They were never on the network. Young girls at
home were not to be exposed to their performances,
some of which, San gravely informed her, were
unseemly. They played only in theaters. Clowns,
dancers, prostitutes, actors, musicians, the makils

CTO 54 sw

Forgiveness Day

formed a kind of subclass, the only assets not per-
sonally owned. A talented slave boy bought by the
Entertainment Corporation from his owner was
thenceforth the property of the Corporation, which
trained and looked after him the rest of his life.

They walked to the theater, six or seven streets
away- She had forgotten that the makils were all
transvestites, indeed she did not remember it when
she first saw them, a troop of tall slender dancers
sweeping out onto the stage with the precision and
power and grace of great birds wheeling, flocking,
soaring. She watched unthinking, enthralled by
their beauty, until suddenly the music changed and
the clowns came in, black as night, black as owners,
wearing fantastic trailing skirts, with fantastic jut-
ting jeweled breasts, singing in tiny, swoony voices,
"Oh do not rape me please kind Sir, no no, not
now!" They're men, they're men! Solly realized
then, already laughing helplessly. By the time
Batikam finished his star turn, a marvelous dramat-
ic monologue, she was a fan. "I want to meet him,"
she said to San at a pause between acts. "The actor
 Batikam."

San got the bland expression that signified he
was thinking how it could be arranged and how to
make a little money out of it. But the Major was on
guard, as ever. Stiff as a stick, he barely turned his
head to glance at San. And San's expression began to
alter.

If her proposal was out of line, San would have
signaled or said so. The Stuffed Major was simply
controlling her, trying to keep her as tied down as
one of "his" women. It was time to challenge him.
She turned to him and stared straight at him. "Rega

T-MS 55 ^'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Teyeo," she said, "I quite comprehend that you're
under orders to keep me in order. But if you give
orders to San or to me, they must be spoken aloud,
and they must be justified. I will not be managed by
your winks or your whims."

There was a considerable pause, a truly delicious
and rewarding pause. It was difficult to see if the
Major's expression changed; the dim theater light
showed no detail in his blue-black face- But there
was something frozen about his stillness that told
her she'd stopped him. At last he said, "I'm charged
to protect you, Envoy."

"Am I endangered by the makils? Is there
impropriety in an envoy of the Ekumen congratu-
lating a great artist of Werel?"

Again the frozen silence. "No," he said.

"Then I request you to accompany me when I go
backstage after the performance to speak to Batikam."

One stiff nod. One stiff, stuffy, defeated nod.
Score one! Solly thought, and sat back cheerfully to
watch the Hghtpainters, the erotic dances, and the
curiously touching little drama with which the
evening ended. It was in archaic poetry, hard to
understand, but the actors were so beautiful, their
voices so tender that she found tears in her eyes and
hardly knew why.

"A pity the makils always draw on the Arkamye,"
said San, with smug, pious disapproval. He was not a
very high-class owner, in fact he owned no assets;

but he was an owner, and a bigoted Tualite, and liked
to remind himself of it. "Scenes from the Incarnations
ofTual would be more befitting such an audience."

"I'm sure you agree, Rega," she said, enjoying
her own irony.

- 56 a-'-s?

Forgiveness Day

"Not at all," he said, with such toneless polite-
ness that at first she did not realise what he had said;

and then forgot the minor puzzle in the bustle of
finding their way and gaining admittance to the
backstage and to the performers' dressing room.

When they realised who she was, the managers
tried to clear all the other performers out, leaving
her alone with Batikam (and San and the Major, of
course); but she said no, no, no, these wonderful
artists must not be disturbed, just let me talk a
moment with Batikam. She stood there in the bus-
tle of doffed costumes, half-naked people, smeared
makeup, laughter, dissolving tension after the
show, any backstage on any world, talking with the
clever, intense man in elaborate archaic woman's
costume. They hit it off at once. "Can you come to
my house?" she asked. "With pleasure," Batikam
said, and his eyes did not flick to San's or the
Major's face: the first bondsman she had yet met
who did not glance to her Quard or her Guide for
permission to say or do anything, anything at all.
She glanced at them only to see if they were
shocked. San looked collusive, the Major looked
rigid. "I'll come in a little while," Batikam said. "I
must change."

They exchanged smiles, and she left. The fizz was
back in the air. The huge close stars hung clustered
like grapes of fire. A moon tumbled over the icy
peaks, another jigged like a lopsided lantern above
the curlicue pinnacles of the palace. She strode along
the dark street, enjoying the freedom of the male robe
she wore and its warmth, making San trot to keep up;

the Major, long-legged, kept pace with her. A high,
trilling voice called, "Envoy!" and she turned with a

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

smile, then swung round, seeing the Major grappling
momentarily with someone in the shadow of a porti-
co. He broke free, caught up to her without a word,
seized her arm in an iron grip, and dragged her into a
run. "Let go!" she said, struggling; she did not want
to use an aiji break on him, but nothing less was
going to get her free.

He pulled her nearly off-balance with a sudden
dodge into an alley; she ran with him, letting him
keep hold on her arm. They came unexpectedly out
into her street and to her gate, through it, into the
house, which he unlocked with a word  how did
he do that?  "What is all this?" she demanded,
breaking away easily, holding her arm where his grip
had bruised it.

She saw, outraged, the last flicker of an exhila-
rated smile on his face. Breathing hard, he asked,
"Are you hurt?"

"Hurt? Where you yanked me, yes  what do
you think you were doing?"

"Keeping the fellow away."

"What fellow?"

He said nothing.

"The one who called out? Maybe he wanted to
talk to me!"

After a moment the Major said, "Possibly. He
was in the shadow. I thought he might be armed. I
must go out and look for San Ubattat. Please keep
the door locked until I come back." He was out the
door as he gave the order; it never occurred to him
that she would not obey, and she did obey, raging.
Did he think she couldn't look after herself? That
she needed him interfering in her life, kicking slaves
around, "protecting" her? Maybe it was time he saw

s*s> 58 '^a

Forgiveness Day

what an aiji fall looked like. He was strong and
quick, but had no real training. This kind of amateur
interference was intolerable, really intolerable; she
must protest to the Embassy again.

As soon she let him back in with a nervous,
shamefaced San in tow, she said, "You opened my
door with a password. I was not informed that you
had right of entrance day and night."

He was back to his military blankness.
"Nomum," he said.

"You are not to do so again. You are not to seize
hold of me ever again. I must tell you that if you do,
I will injure you. If something alarms you, tell me
what it is and I will respond as I see fit. Now will you
please go."

"With pleasure, mum," he said, wheeled, and
marched out.

"Oh, Lady  Oh, Envoy," San said, "that was a
dangerous person, extremely dangerous people, 1
am so sorry, disgraceful," and he babbled on. She
finally got him to say who he thought it was, a reli-
gious dissident, one of the Old Believers who held to
the original religion of Gatay and wanted to cast out
or kill all foreigners and unbelievers. "A bonds-
man?" she asked with interest, and he was shocked
 "Oh, no, no, a real person, a man  but most
misguided, a fanatic, a heathen fanatic! Knifemen,
they call themselves. But a man. Lady  Envoy, cer-
tainly a man!"

The thought that she might think that an asset
might touch her upset him as much as the attempted
assault. If such it had been-

As she considered it, she began to wonder if,
since she had put the Major in his place at the the-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

ater, he had found an excuse to put her in her place
by "protecting" her. Well, if he tried it again, he'd
find himself upside down against the opposite wall.

"Rewe!" she called, and the bondswoman
appeared instantly as always. "One of the actors is
coming. Would you like to make us a little tea,
something like that?" Rewe smiled, said, "Yes," and
vanished. There was a knock at the door. The Major
opened it  he must be standing guard outside 
and Batikam came in.

It had not occurred to her that the makil would
still be in women's clothing, but it was how he
dressed offstage too, not so magnificently, but with
elegance, in the delicate, flowing materials and dark,
subtle hues that the swoony ladies in the dramas
wore. It gave considerable piquancy, she felt, to her
own male costume. Batikam was not as handsome
as the Major, who was a stunning-looking man till
he opened his mouth; but the makil was magnetic,
you had to look at him. He was a dark greyish
brown, not the blue-black that the owners were so
vain of (though there were plenty of black assets
too, Solly had noticed: of course, when every
bondswoman was her owner's sexual servant).
Intense, vivid intelligence and sympathy shone in
his face through the makil's stardust black makeup,
as he looked around with a slow, lovely laugh at her,
at San, and at the Major standing at the door. He
laughed like a woman, a warm ripple, not the ha, ha
of a man. He held out his hands to Solly, and she
came forward and took them. "Thank you for com-
ing, Batikam!" she said, and he said, "Thank you for
asking me, Alien Envoy!"

"San," she said, "I think this is your cue?"

'S9.S  60   <3--3'

Forgiveness Day

Only indecision about what he ought to do
could have slowed San down till she had to speak.
He still hesitated a moment, then smiled with unc-
tion and said, "Yes, so sony, a very good night to
you. Envoy! Noon hour at the Office of Mines,
tomorrow, I believe?" Backing away, he backed right
into the Major, who stood like a post in the door-
way. She looked at the Major, ready to order him out
without ceremony, how dare he shove back in! 
and saw the expression on his face. For once his
blank mask had cracked, and what was revealed was
contempt. Incredulous, sickened contempt. As if he
was obliged to watch someone eat a turd.

"Get out," she said. She turned her back on both
of them. "Come on, Batikam; the only privacy I
have is in here," she said, and led the makil to her
bedroom.

He was born where his fathers before him were
bom, in the old, cold house in the foothills above
Noeha. His mother did not cry out as she bore him,
since she was a soldier's wife, and a soldier's mother,
now. He was named for his great-uncle, killed on
duty in the Sosa. He grew up in the stark discipline
of a poor household of pure veot lineage. His father,
when he was on leave, taught him the arts a soldier
must know; when his father was on duty the old
Asset-Sergeant Habbakam took over the lessons,
which began at five in the morning, summer or win-
ter, with worship, shortsword practice, and a cross-
country run. His mother and grandmother taught
him the other arts a man must know, beginning
with good manners before he was two, and after his

7 61   aCT<s)

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

second birthday going on to history, poetry, and sit-
ting still without talking.

The child's day was filled with lessons and
fenced with disciplines; but a child's day is long.
There was room and time for freedom, the freedom
of the farmyard and the open hills- There was the
companionship of pets, foxdogs, running dogs, spot-
ted cats, hunting cats, and the farm cattle and the
greathorses; not much companionship otherwise.
The family's assets, other than Habbakam and the
two housewomen, were sharecroppers, working the
stony foothill land that they and their owners had
lived on forever. Their children were light-skinned,
shy, already stooped to their lifelong work, ignorant
of anything beyond their fields and hills. Sometimes
they swam with Teyeo, summers, in the pools of the
river. Sometimes he rounded up a couple of them to
play soldiers with him. They stood awkward,
uncouth, smirking when he shouted "Charge!" and
mshed at the invisible enemy. "Follow me!" he cried
shrilly, and they lumbered after him, firing their tree-
branch guns at random, pow, pow. Mostly he went
alone, riding his good mare Tasi or afoot with a hunt-
ing cat pacing by his side.

A few times a year visitors came to the estate, rel-
atives or fellow officers of Teyeo's father, bringing
their children and their housepeople. Teyeo silently
and politely showed the child guests about, intro-
duced them to the animals, took them on rides.
Silently and politely, he and his cousin Gemat came
to hate each other; at age fourteen they fought for an
hour in a glade behind the house, punctiliously fol-
lowing the rules of wrestling, relentlessly hurting
each other, getting bloodier and wearier and more

T-fc.3 62   ^3

Forgiveness Day

desperate, until by unspoken consent they called it
off and returned in silence to the house, where every-
one was gathering for dinner. Everyone looked at
them and said nothing. They washed up hurriedly,
hurried to table. Gemat's nose leaked blood all
through the meal; Teyeo's jaw was so sore he could
not open it to eat. No one commented.

Silently and politely, when they were both fif-
teen, Teyeo and Rega Toebawe's daughter fell in
love. On the last day of her visit they escaped by
unspoken collusion and rode out side by side, rode
for hours, too shy to talk. He had given her Tasi to
ride. They dismounted to water and rest the horses
in a wild valley of the hills. They sat near each other,
not very near, by the side of the little quiet-running
stream. "I love you," Teyeo said. "I love you," Emdu
said, bending her shining black face down. They did
not touch or look at each other. They rode back over
the hills, joyous, silent.

When he was sixteen Teyeo was sent to the
Officers' Academy in the capital of his province.
There he continued to learn and practice the arts of
war and the arts of peace. His province was the most
rural in Voe Deo; its ways were conservative, and his
training was in some ways anachronistic. He was of
course taught the technologies of modem warfare,
becoming a first-rate pod pilot and an expert in tel-
ereconnaissance; but he was not taught the modern
ways of thinking that accompanied the technologies
in other schools. He learned the poetry and history
of Voe Deo, not the history and politics of the
Ekumen. The Alien presence on Werel remained
remote, theoretical to him. His reality was the old
reality of the veot class, whose men held themselves

3~S 63   3A-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

apart from all men not soldiers and in brotherhood
with all soldiers, whether owners, assets, or enemies.
As for women. Teyeo considered his rights over
them absolute, binding him absolutely to responsi-
ble chivalry to women of his own class and protec-
tive, merciful treatment of bondswomen. He
believed all foreigners to be basically hostile,
untrustworthy heathens. He honored the Lady Tual,
but worshiped the Lord Kamye. He expected no jus-
tice, looked for no reward, and valued above all
competence, courage, and self-respect. In some
respects he was utterly unsuited to the world he was
to enter, in others well prepared for it, since he was
to spend seven years on Yeowe fighting a war in
which there was no justice, no reward, and never
even an illusion of ultimate victory.

Rank among veot officers was hereditary. Teyeo
entered active service as a rega, the highest of the
three veot ranks- No degree of ineptitude or distinc-
tion could lower or raise his status or his pay. Material
ambition was no use to a veot. But honor and respon-
sibility were to be earned, and he earned them quick-
ly. He loved service, loved the life, knew he was good
at it, intelligently obedient, effective in command; he
had come out of the Academy with the highest rec-
ommendations, and being posted to the capital, drew
notice as a promising officer as well as a likable young
man. At twenty-four he was absolutely fit, his body
would do anything he asked of it. His austere
upbringing had given him little taste for indulgence
but an intense appreciation of pleasure, so the luxu-
ries and entertainments of the capital were a discov-
ery of delight to him. He was reserved and rather shy,
but companionable and cheerful. A handsome young

saws 64 a'*-s>

Forgiveness Day

man, in with a set of other young men very like him,
for a year he knew what it is to live a completely priv-
ileged life with complete enjoyment of it. The bril-
liant intensity of that enjoyment stood against the
dark background of the war in Yeowe, the slave revo-
lution on the colony planet, which had gone on all
his lifetime, and was now intensifying. Without that
background, he could not have been so happy. A
whole life of games and diversions had no interest for
him; and when his orders came, posted as a pilot and
division commander to Yeowe, his happiness was
pretty nearly complete.

He went home for his thirty-day leave. Having
received his parents' approbation, he rode over the
hills to Rega Toebawe's estate and asked for his
daughter's hand in marriage. The rega and his wife
told their daughter that they approved his offer and
asked her, for they were not strict parents, if she
would like to marry Teyeo. "Yes," she said. As a
grown, unmarried woman, she lived in seclusion in
the women's side of the house, but she and Teyeo
were allowed to meet and even to walk together,
the chaperone remaining at some distance. Teyeo
told her it was a three-year posting; would she
marry in haste now, or wait three years and have a
proper wedding? "Now," she said, bending down
her narrow, shining face. Teyeo gave a laugh of
delight, and she laughed at him. They were married
nine days later  it couldn't be sooner, there had to
be some fuss and ceremony, even if it was a soldier's
wedding  and for seventeen days Teyeo and Emdu
made love, walked together, made love, rode
together, made love, came to know each other,
came to love each other, quarreled, made up, made

'y*-S' 65 sf-si

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

love, slept in each other's arms. Then he left for the
war on another world, and she moved to the
women's side of her husband's house.

His three-year posting was extended year by
year, as his value as an officer was recognised and as
the war on Yeowe changed from scattered contain-
ing actions to an increasingly desperate retreat. In
his seventh year of service an order for compas-
sionate leave was sent out to Yeowe Headquarters
for Rega Teyeo, whose wife was dying of complica-
tions of berlot fever. At that point, there was no
headquarters on Yeowe; the Army was retreating
from three directions towards the old colonial cap-
ital; Teyeo's division was fighting a rear-guard
defense in the sea marshes; communications had
collapsed.

Command on Werel continued to find it incon-
ceivable that a mass of ignorant slaves with the
crudest kind of weapons could be defeating the
Army of Voe Deo, a disciplined, trained body of sol-
diers with an infallible communications network,
skimmers, pods, every armament and device permit-
ted by the Ekumenical Convention Agreement. A
strong faction in Voe Deo blamed the setbacks on
this submissive adherence to Alien rules. The hell
with Ekumenical Conventions, Bomb the damned
dusties back to the mud they were made of. Use the
biobomb, what was it for, anyway? Get our men off
the foul planet and wipe it clean. Start fresh. If we
don't win the war on Yeowe, the next revolution's
going to be right here on Werel, in our own cities, in
our own homes! The jittery government held on
against this pressure. Werel was on probation, and
Voe Deo wanted to lead the planet to Ekumenical

',-va 66 s-*"

Forgiveness Day

status. Defeats were minimised, losses were not
made up, skimmers, pods, weapons, men were not
replaced. By the end of Teyeo's seventh year, the
Army on Yeowe had been essentially written off by
its government. Early in the eighth year, when the
Ekumen was at last permitted to send its Envoys to
Yeowe, Voe Deo and the other countries that had
supplied auxiliary troops finally began to bring their
soldiers home.

It was not until he got back to Werel that Teyeo
learned his wife was dead-
He went home to Noeha. He and his father
greeted each other with a silent embrace, but his
mother wept as she embraced him. He knelt to her
in apology for having brought her more grief than
she could bear-
He lay that night in the cold room in the silent
house, listening to his heart beat like a slow drum.
He was not unhappy, the relief of being at peace and
the sweetness of being home.were too great for that;

but it was a desolate calm, and somewhere in it was
anger. Not used to anger, he was not sure what he
felt. It was as if a faint, sullen red flare colored every
image in his mind, as he lay trying to think through
the seven years on Yeowe, first as a pilot, then the
ground war, then the long retreat, the killing and
the being killed. Why had they been left there to be
hunted down and slaughtered? Why had the gov-
ernment not sent them reinforcements? The ques-
tions had not been worth asking then, they were not
worth asking now. They had only one answer: We
do what they ask us to do, and we don't complain. I
fought every step of the way, he thought without
pride. The new knowledge sliced keen as a knife

ccf 67 ^s'

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

through all other knowledge  And while I was
fighting, she was dying. All a waste, there on Yeowe.
All a waste, here on Werel. He sat up in the dark, the
cold, silent, sweet dark of night in the hills. "Lord
Kamye," he said aloud, "help me. My mind betrays
me."

During the long leave home he sat often with
his mother. She wanted to talk about Emdu, and at
first he had to force himself to listen. It would be
easy to forget the girl he had known for seventeen
days seven years ago, if only his mother would let
him forget. Gradually he learned to take what she
wanted to give him, the knowledge of who his wife
had been. His mother wanted to share all she could
with him of the joy she had had in Emdu, her
beloved child and friend. Even his father, retired
now, a quenched, silent man, was able to say, "She
was the light of the house." They were thanking
him for her. They were telling him that it had not all
been a waste.

But what lay ahead of them? Old age, the empty
house. They did not complain, of course, and
seemed content in their severe, placid round of daily
work; but for them the continuity of the past with
the future was broken.

"I should remarry," Teyeo said to his mother, "Is
there anyone you've noticed . . . ?"

It was raining, a grey light through the wet win-
dows, a soft thrumming on the eaves. His mother's
face was indistinct as she bent to her mending.

"No," she said. "Not really." She looked up at
him, and after a pause asked, "Where do you think
you'll be posted?"

"I don't know."

-i-e> 68 ir**

Forgiveness Day

"There's no war now," she said, in her soft, even
voice.

"No," Teyeo said. "There's no war."
"Will there be ... ever? do you think?"
He stood up, walked down the room and back,
sat down again on the cushioned platform near her;

they both sat straight-backed, still except for the
slight motion of her hands as she sewed; his hands
lay lightly one in the other, as he had been taught
when he was two.

"I don't know," he said. "It's strange. It's as if
there hadn't been a war. As if we'd never been on
Yeowe  the Colony, the Uprising, all of it. They
don't talk about it. It didn't happen. We don't fight
wars. This is a new age. They say that often on the
net. The age of peace, brotherhood across the stars.
So, are we brothers with Yeowe, now? Are we broth-
ers with Gatay and Bambur and the Forty States? Are
we brothers with our assets? I can't make sense of it.
I don't know what they mean. I don't know where I
fit in." His voice too was quiet and even.
"Not here, I think," she said. "Not yet."
After a while he said, "I thought... children ..."
"Of course. When the time comes." She smiled at
him. "You never could sit still for half an hour. . . .
Wait. Wait and see."

She was right, of course; and yet what he saw in
the net and in town tried his patience and his pride.
It seemed that to be a soldier now was a disgrace.
Government reports, the news and the analyses, con-
stantly referred to the Army and particularly the veot
class as fossils, costly and useless, Voe Deo's principal
obstacle to full admission to the Ekumen. His own
uselessness was made clear to him when his request

x*-s 69 s-*-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

for a posting was met by an indefinite extension of
his leave on half pay. At thirty-two, they appeared to
be telling him, he was superannuated-

Again he suggested to his mother that he should
accept the situation, settle down, and look for
a wife. "Talk to your father," she said. He did so; his
father said, "Of course your help is welcome, but I
can run the farm well enough for a while yet.
Your mother thinks you should go to the capital,
to Command. They can't ignore you if you're
there. After all. After seven years' combat  your
record  "

Teyeo knew what that was worth, now. But he
was certainly not needed here, and probably irritated
his father with his ideas of changing this or that way
things were done. They were right: he should go to
the capital and find out for himself what part he
could play in the new world of peace.

His first half-year there was grim. He knew
almost no one at Command or in the barracks; his
generation was dead, or invalided out, or home on
half pay. The younger officers, who had not been on
Yeowe. seemed to him a cold, buttoned-up lot,
always talking money and politics. Little business-
men, he privately thought them. He knew they were
afraid of him  of his record, of his reputation.
Whether he wanted to or not he reminded them
that there had been a war that Werel had fought and
lost, a civil war, their own race fighting against itself,
class against class. They wanted to dismiss it as a
meaningless quarrel on another world, nothing to
do with them.

Teyeo walked the streets of the capital, watched
the thousands of bondsmen and bondswomen hur-

^s 70

Forgiveness Day

rying about their owners' business, and wondered
what they were waiting for.

"The Ekumen does not interfere with the social,
cultural, or economic arrangements and affairs of
any people," the Embassy and the government
spokesmen repeated. "Full membership for any
nation or people that wishes it is contingent only on
absence, or renunciation, of certain specific meth-
ods and devices of warfare," and there followed the
list of terrible weapons, most of them mere names to
Teyeo, but a few of them inventions of his own
country: the biobomb, as they called it, and the neu-
ronics-

He personally agreed with the Ekumen's judg-
ment on such devices, and respected their patience
in waiting for Voe Deo and the rest of Werel to prove
not only compliance with the ban, but acceptance
of the principle. But he very deeply resented their
condescension. They sat in judgment on everything
Werelian, viewing from above. The less they said
about the division of classes, the clearer their disap-
proval was, "Slavery is of very rare occurrence in
Ekumenical worlds," said their books, "and disap-
pears completely with full participation in the
Ekumenical polity." Was that what the Alien
Embassy was really waiting for?

"By our Lady!" said one of the young officers 
many of them were Tualites, as well as businessmen
 "the Aliens are going to admit the dusties before
they admit us!" He was sputtering with indignant
rage, like a red-faced old rega faced with an insolent
bondsoldier. "Yeowe  a damned planet of savages,
tribesmen, regressed into barbarism  preferred
over us!"

Ot^S 71  3-W

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"They fought well," Teyeo observed, knowing
he should not say it as he said it, but not liking to
hear the men and women he had fought against
called dusties. Assets, rebels, enemies, yes.

The young man stared at him and after a
moment said, "I suppose you love 'em, eh? The
dusties?"

"I killed as many as I could," Teyeo replied
politely, and then changed the conversation. The
young man, though nominally Teyeo's superior at
Command, was an oga, the lowest rank of veot, and
to snub him further would be ill-bred.

They were stuffy, he was touchy; the old days of
cheerful good fellowship were a faint, incredible
memory. The bureau chiefs at Command listened to
his request to be put back on active service and sent
him endlessly on to another department. He could
not live in barracks, but had to find an apartment,
like a civilian. His half pay did not permit him
indulgence in the expensive pleasures of the city.
While waiting for appointments to see this or that
official, he spent his days in the library net of the
Officers' Academy. He knew his education had been
incomplete and was out of date. If his country was
going to join the Ekumen, in order to be useful he
must know more about the Alien ways of thinking
and the new technologies. Not sure what he needed
to know, he floundered about in the network, bewil-
dered by the endless information available, increas-
ingly aware that he was no intellectual and no
scholar and would never understand Alien minds,
but doggedly driving himself on out of his depth.

A man from the Embassy was offering an intro-
ductory course in Ekumenical history in the public

Forgiveness Day

net. Teyeo joined it, and sat through eight or ten tec-
ture-and-discussion periods, straight-backed and
still, only his hands moving slightly as he took full
and methodical notes. The lecturer, a Hainishman
who translated his extremely long Hainish name as
Old Music, watched Teyeo, tried to draw him out in
discussion, and at last asked him to stay in after ses-
sion. "I should like to meet you, Rega," he said,
when the others had dropped out.

They met at a cafe. They met again. Teyeo did
not like the Alien's manners, which he found effu-
sive; he did not trust his quick, clever mind; he felt
Old Music was using him, studying him as a speci-
men of The Veot, The Soldier, probably The
Barbarian. The Alien, secure in his superiority, was
indifferent to Teyeo's coldness, ignored his distrust,
insisted on helping him with information and guid-
ance, and shamelessly repeated questions Teyeo had
avoided answering. One of these was, "Why are you
sitting around here on half pay?"

"It's not by my own choice, Mr Old Music,"
Teyeo finally answered, the third time it was asked.
He was very angry at the man's impudence, and so
spoke with particular mildness. He kept his eyes
away from Old Music's eyes, bluish, with the whites
showing like a scared horse. He could not get used
to Aliens' eyes.

"They won't put you back on active service?"

Teyeo assented politely. Could the man, howev-
er alien, really be oblivious to the fact that his ques-
tions were grossly humiliating?

"Would you be willing to serve in the Embassy
Guard?"

That question left Teyeo speechless for a moment;

3-w 73 s-vs

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

then he committed the extreme rudeness of answer-
ing a question with a question. "Why do you ask?"

"I'd like very much to have a man of your
capacity in that corps," said Old Music, adding with
his appalling candor, "Most of them are spies or
blockheads. It would be wonderful to have a man I
knew was neither. It's not just sentry duty, you
know. I imagine you'd be asked by your government
to give information; that's to be expected. And we
would use you, once you had experience and if you
were willing, as a liaison officer. Here or in other
countries. We would not, however, ask you to give
information to us. Am I clear, Teyeo? I want no mis-
understanding between us as to what I am and am
not asking of you."

"You would be able .. - ?" Teyeo asked cautiously.

Old Music laughed and said, "Yes. I have a string
to pull in your Command. A favor owed. Will you
think it over?"

Teyeo was silent a minute. He had been nearly a
year now in the capital and his requests for posting
had met only bureaucratic evasion and, recently,
hints that they were considered insubordinate. "I'll
accept now, if I may," he said, with a cold deference.

The Hainishman looked at him, his smile
changing to a thoughtful, steady gaze. "Thank you,"
he said. "You should hear from Command in a few
days."

So Teyeo put his uniform back on, moved back
to the City Barracks, and served for another seven
years on alien ground. The Ekumenical Embassy
was, by diplomatic agreement, a part not of Werel
but of the Ekumen  a piece of the planet that no
longer belonged to it. The Guardsmen furnished by

Forgiveness Day

Voe Deo were protective and decorative, a highly
visible presence on the Embassy grounds in their
white-and-gold dress uniform. They were also visi-
bly armed, since protest against the Alien presence
still broke out erratically in violence.

Rega Teyeo, at first assigned to command a
troop of these guards, soon was transferred to a dif-
ferent duty, that of accompanying members of the
Embassy staff about the city and on journeys. He
served as a bodyguard, in undress uniform. The
Embassy much preferred not to use their own peo-
ple and weapons, but to request and trust Voe
Deo to protect them. Often he was also called upon
to be a guide and interpreter, and sometimes a
companion. He did not like it when visitors from
somewhere in space wanted to be chummy and
confiding, asked him about himself, invited him to
come drinking with them. With perfectly concealed
distaste, with perfect civility, he refused such offers.
He did his job and kept his.distance. He knew that
that was precisely what the Embassy valued him for.
Their confidence in him gave him a cold satisfac-
tion.

His own government had never approached
him to give information, though he certainly
learned things that would have interested them. Voe
Dean intelligence did not recruit their agents among
veots. He knew who the agents in the Embassy
Guard were; some of them tried to get information
from him, but he had no intention of spying for
spies.

Old Music, whom he now surmised to be the
head of the Embassy's intelligence system, called
him in on his return from a winter leave at home.

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

The Hainishman had learned not to make emo-
tional demands on Teyeo, but could not hide a
note of affection in his voice greeting him. "Hullo,
Rega! I hope your family's well? Good. I've got a
particularly tricky job for you. Kingdom of Gatay.
You were there with Kemehan two years ago,
weren't you? Well, now they want us to send an
Envoy. They say they want to join. Of course the
old King's a puppet of your government; but
there's a lot else going on there. A strong religious
separatist movement. A Patriotic Cause, kick out all
the foreigners, Voe Deans and Aliens alike. But the
King and Council requested an Envoy, and all
we've got to send them is a new arrival. She may
give you some problems till she leams the ropes. I
judge her a bit headstrong. Excellent material, but
young, very young. And she's only been here a few
weeks. I requested you, because she needs your
experience. Be patient with her, Rega. I think you'll
find her likable."

He did not. In seven years he had got accus-
tomed to the Aliens' eyes and their various smells
and colors and manners. Protected by his flawless
courtesy and his stoical code, he endured or
ignored their strange or shocking or troubling
behavior, their ignorance and their different
knowledge. Serving and protecting the foreigners
entrusted to him, he kept himself aloof from them,
neither touched nor touching. His charges learned
to count on him and not to presume on him.
Women were often quicker to see and respond to
his Keep Out signs than men; he had an easy,
almost friendly relationship with an old Terran
Observer whom he had accompanied on several

CT-Si 76  S*

Forgiveness Day

long investigatory tours. "You are as peaceful to be
with as a cat, Rega," she told him once, and he val-
ued the compliment. But the Envoy to Gatay was
another matter.

She was physically splendid, with clear red-
brown skin like that of a baby, glossy swinging hair,
a free walk  too free: she flaunted her ripe, slender
body at men who had no access to it, thrusting it at
him, at everyone, insistent, shameless. She
expressed her opinion on everything with coarse
self-confidence. She could not hear a hint and
refused to take an order. She was an aggressive,
spoiled child with the sexuality of an adult, given
the responsibility of a diplomat in a dangerously
unstable country. Teyeo knew as soon as he met her
that this was an impossible assignment. He could
not trust her or himself. Her sexual immodesty
aroused him as it disgusted him; she was a whore
whom he must treat as a princess. Forced to endure
and unable to ignore her, he_nated her.

He was more familiar with anger than he had
used to be, but not used to hating. It troubled him
extremely. He had never in his life asked for a
reposting, but on the morning after she had taken
the makil into her room, he sent a stiff little appeal
to the Embassy. Old Music responded to him with a
sealed voice-message through the diplomatic link:

"Love of god and country is like fire, a wonderful
friend, a terrible enemy; only children play with fire.
I don't like the situation. There's nobody here I can
replace either of you with. Will you hang on a while
longer?"

He did not know how to refuse. A veot did not
refuse duty. He was ashamed at having even

rTf-Si 77  a''-

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

thought of doing so, and hated her again for caus-
ing him that shame.

The first sentence of the message was enigmat-
ic, not in Old Music's usual style but flowery, indi-
rect, like a coded warning. Teyeo of course knew
none of the intelligence codes either of his country
or of the Ekumen. Old Music would have to use
hints and indirection with him, "Love of god and
country" could well mean the Old Believers and the
Patriots, the two subversive groups in Gatay, both of
them fanatically opposed to foreign influence; the
Envoy could be the child playing with fire. Was she
being approached by one group or the other? He
had seen no evidence of it, unless the man in the
shadows that night had been not a knifeman but a
messenger. She was under his eyes all day, her house
watched all night by soldiers under his command.
Surely the makil, Batikam, was not acting for either
of those groups. He might well be a member of the
Hame, the asset liberation underground of Voe Deo,
but as such would not endanger the Envoy, since the
Hame saw the Ekumen as their ticket to Yeowe and
to freedom-

Teyeo puzzled over the words, replaying them
over and over, knowing his own stupidity faced with
this kind of subtlety, the ins and outs of the politi-
cal labyrinth. At last he erased the message and
yawned, for it was late; bathed, lay down, turned off
the light, said under his breath, "Lord Kamye, let me
hold with courage to the one noble thing!" and slept
like a stone.

The makil came to her house every night after the the-

C.9.S 78  3-*^>

Forgiveness Day

ater. Teyeo tried to tell himself there was nothing
wrong in it- He himself had spent nights with the mak-
ils, back in the palmy days before the war. Expert, artis-
tic sex was part of their business. He knew by hearsay
that rich city women often hired them to come supply
a husband's deficiencies. But even such women did so
secretly, discreetly, not in this vulgar, shameless way,
utterly careless of decency, flouting the moral code, as
if she had some kind of right to do whatever she
wanted wherever and whenever she wanted it- Of
course Batikam colluded eagerly with her, playing on
her infatuation, mocking the Gatayans, mocking
Teyeo  and mocking her. though she didn't know it.
What a chance for an asset to make fools of all the
owners at once!

Watching Batikam, Teyeo felt sure he was a
member of the Hame. His mockery was very subtle;

he was not trying to disgrace the Envoy. Indeed his
discretion was far greater than hers. He was trying to
keep her from disgracing herself- The makil returned
Teyeo's cold courtesy in kind, but once or twice their
eyes met and some brief, involuntary understanding
passed between them, fraternal, ironic.

There was to be a public festival, an observation
of the Tualite Feast of Forgiveness, to which the
Envoy was pressingly invited by the King and
Council. She was put on show at many such events.
Teyeo thought nothing about it except how to pro-
vide security in an excited holiday crowd, until San
told him that the festival day was the highest holy
day of the old religion of Gatay, and that the Old
Believers fiercely resented the imposition of the for-
eign rites over their own. The little man seemed gen-
uinely worried. Teyeo worried too when next day

T9>SI 79  V^-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

San was suddenly replaced by an elderly man who
spoke little but Gatayan and was quite unable to
explain what had become of San Ubattat- "Other
duties, other duties call," he said in very bad Voe
Dean, smiling and bobbing, "very great relishes
time, aha? Relishes duties call."

During the days that preceded the festival tension
rose in the city; graffiti appeared, symbols of the old
religion smeared across walls; a Tualite temple was des-
ecrated, after which the Royal Guard was much in evi-
dence in the streets. Teyeo went to the palace and
requested, on his own authority, that the Envoy not be
asked to appear in public during a ceremony that was
"likely to be troubled by inappropriate demonstra-
tions." He was called in and treated by a Court official
with a mixture of dismissive insolence and conniving
nods and winks, which left him really uneasy. He left
four men on duty at the Envoy's house that night.
Returning to his quarters, a little barracks down the
street which had been handed over to the Embassy
Guard, he found the window of his room open and a
scrap of writing, in his own language, on his table: Pest
Fis set up for assasnatwn.

He was at the Envoy's house promptly the next
morning and asked her asset to tell her he must
speak to her. She came out of her bedroom pulling a
white wrap around her naked body. Batikam
followed her, half-dressed, sleepy, and amused.
Teyeo gave him the eye-signal go, which he received
with a serene, patronising smile, murmuring to the
woman, "I'll go have some breakfast. Rewe? have
you got something to feed me?" He followed the
bondswoman out of the room. Teyeo faced the
Envoy and held out the scrap of paper.

S^S- 80 33-

Forgiveness Day

"I received this last night, ma'am," he said. "I
must ask you not to attend the festival tomorrow."

She considered the paper, read the writing, and
yawned. "Who's it from?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

"What's it mean? Assassination? They can't
spell, can they?"

After a moment, he said, "There are a number of
other indications  enough that 1 must ask you  "

"Not to attend the festival of Forgiveness, yes. I
heard you." She went to a window seat and sat
down, her robe falling wide to reveal her legs; her
bare, brown feet were short and supple, the soles
pink, the toes small and orderly. Teyeo looked fixed-
ly at the air beside her head. She twiddled the bit of
paper. "If you think it's dangerous, Rega, bring a
guardsman or two with you," she said, with the
faintest tone of scorn. "I really have to be there. The
King requested it, you know. And I'm to light the big
fire, or something. One of the few things women are
allowed to do in public here.... I can't back out of
it." She held out the paper, and after a moment he
came close enough to take it. She looked up at him
smiling; when she defeated him she always smiled
at him. "Who do you think would want to blow me
away, anyhow? The Patriots?"

"Or the Old Believers, ma'am. Tomorrow is
one of their holidays."

"And your Tualites have taken it away from
them? Well, they can't exactly blame the Ekumen,
can they?"

"I think it possible that the government might
permit violence in order to excuse retaliation,
ma'am."

s*e> 81 f*

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

She started to answer carelessly, realised what he
had said, and frowned. "You think the Council's set-
ting me up? What evidence have you?"

After a pause he said, "Very little, ma'am. San
Ubattat "

"San's been ill. The old fellow they sent isn't
much use, but he's scarcely dangerous! Is that all?"
He said nothing, and she went on, "Until you have
real evidence, Rega, don't interfere with my obliga-
tions. Your militaristic paranoia isn't acceptable
when it spreads to the people I'm dealing with here.
Control it, please! I'll expect an extra guardsman or
two tomorrow; and that's enough."

"Yes, ma'am," he said, and went out. His head
sang with anger. It occurred to him now that her
new guide had told him San Ubattat had been
kept away by religious duties, not by illness. He
did not turn back. What was the use? "Stay on for
an hour or so, will you, Seyem?" he said to the
guard at her gate, and strode off down the street,
trying to walk away from her, from her soft brown
thighs and the pink soles of her feet and her stu-
pid, insolent, whorish voice giving him orders. He
tried to let the bright icy sunlit air. the stepped
streets snapping with banners for the festival, the
glitter of the great mountains and the clamor of
the markets fill him, dazzle and distract him; but
he walked seeing his own shadow fall in front of
him like a knife across the stones, knowing the
futility of his life.

"The veot looked worried," Batikam said in his vel-
vet voice, and she laughed, spearing a preserved

3--   82   33-.S

Forgiveness Day

fruit from the dish and popping it, dripping, into his
mouth.

"I'm ready for breakfast now, Rewe," she called,
and sat down across from Batikam. "I'm starving! He
was having one of his phallocratic fits. He hasn't
saved me from anything lately- It's his only func-
tion, after all. So he has to invent occasions. I wish,
I wish he was out of my hair. It's so nice not to have
poor little old San crawling around like some kind of
pubic infestation. If only I could get rid of the Major
now!"

"He's a man of honor," the makil said; his tone
did not seem ironical.

"How can an owner of slaves be an honorable
man?"

Batikam watched her from his long, dark eyes.
She could not read Werelian eyes, beautiful as they
were, filling their lids with darkness.

"Male hierarchy members always yatter about
their precious honor," she said. "And 'their'
women's honor, of course."

"Honor is a great privilege," Batikam said. "I
envy it. I envy him."

"Oh, the hell with all that phony dignity, it's
just pissing to mark your territory. All you need
envy him, Batikam, is his freedom."

He smiled. "You're the only person I've ever
known who was neither owned nor owner. That is
freedom. That is freedom. I wonder if you know it?"

"Of course I do," she said. He smiled, and went
on eating his breakfast, but there had been some-
thing in his voice she had not heard before. Moved
and a little troubled, she said after a while, "You're
going away soon."

a-^s 83 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Mind reader. Yes. In ten days, the troupe goes
on to tour the Forty States."

"Oh, Batikam, I'll miss you! You're the only
man, the only person here I can talk to  let alone
the sex "

"Did we ever?"

"Not often," she said, laughing, but her voice
shook a little. He held out his hand; she came to
him and sat on his lap, the robe dropping open.
"Little pretty Envoy breasts," he said, lipping and
stroking, "little soft Envoy belly . . -" Rewe came in
with a tray and softly set it down. "Eat your break-
fast, little Envoy," Batikam said, and she disengaged
herself and returned to her chair, grinning.

"Because you're free you can be honest," he
said, fastidiously peeling a pini fruit. "Don't be too
hard on those of us who aren't and can't." He
cut a slice and fed it to her across the table. "It has
been a taste of freedom to know you," he said. "A
hint, a shadow ..."

"In a few years at most, Batikam, you will be
free. This whole idiotic structure of masters and
slaves will collapse completely when Werel comes
into the Ekumen."

"If it does."

"Of course it will."

He shrugged. "My home is Yeowe," he said.

She stared, confused. "You come from Yeowe?"

"I've never been there," he said- "I'll probably
never go there. What use have they got for makils? But
it is my home. Those are my people. That is my free-
dom. When will you see..." His fist was clenched; he
opened it with a soft gesture of letting something go.
He smiled and returned to his breakfast. "I've got to

s-^ 84 (CT-

Forgiveness Day

get back to the theater," he said. "We're rehearsing an
act for the Day of Forgiveness."

She wasted all day at court. She had made per-
sistent attempts to obtain permission to visit the
mines and the huge government-run farms on the
far side of the mountains, from which Gatay's wealth
flowed. She had been as persistently foiled  by the
protocol and bureaucracy of the government, she
had thought at first, their unwillingness to let a
diplomat do anything but run round to meaningless
events; but some businessmen had let something slip
about conditions in the mines and on the farms that
made her think they might be hiding a more brutal
kind of slavery than any visible in the capital. Today
she got nowhere, waiting for appointments that had
not been made. The old fellow who was standing in
for San misunderstood most of what she said in Voe
Dean, and when she tried to speak Gatayan he mis-
understood it all, through stupidity or intent. The
Major was blessedly absent most of the morning,
replaced by one of his soldiers, but turned up at
court, stiff and silent and set-jawed, and attended her
until she gave up and went home for an early bath.

Batikam came late that night. In the middle of
one of the elaborate fantasy games and role reversals
she had learned from him and found so exciting, his
caresses grew slower and slower, soft, dragging
across her like feathers, so that she shivered with
unappeased desire and, pressing her body against
his, realised that he had gone to sleep. "Wake up,"
she said, laughing and yet chilled, and shook him a
little. The dark eyes opened, bewildered, full of fear.

"I'm sorry," she said at once, "go back to sleep,
you're tired. No, no, it's all right, it's late." But he

3e' 85 s-^"s

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

went on with what she now, whatever his skill and
tenderness, had to see was his job.

In the morning at breakfast she said, "Can you
see me as an equal, do you, Batikam?"

He looked tired, older than he usually did. He
did not smile. After a while he said, "What do you
want me to say?"

"That you do."

"I do," he said quietly.

"You don't trust me," she said, bitter.

After a while he said, "This is Forgiveness Day.
The Lady Tual came to the men of Asdok, who had
set their hunting cats upon her followers. She came
among them riding on a great hunting cat with a
fiery tongue, and they fell down in terror, but she
blessed them, forgiving them." His voice and hands
enacted the story as he told it. "Forgive me," he said.

"You don't need any forgiveness!"

"Oh, we all do. It's why we Kamyites borrow the
Lady Tual now and then. When we need her. So,
today you'll be the Lady Tual, at the rites?"

"All I have to do is light a fire, they said," she
said anxiously, and he laughed. When he left she
told him she would come to the theater to see him,
tonight, after the festival.

The horse-race course, the only flat area of any
size anywhere near the city, was thronged, vendors
calling, banners waving; the Royal motorcars drove
straight into the crowd, which parted like water and
closed behind. Some rickety-looking bleachers had
been erected for lords and owners, with a curtained
section for ladies. She saw a motorcar drive up to the
bleachers; a figure swathed in red cloth was bundled
out of it and hurried between the curtains, vanish-

-^a 86 T*

Forgiveness Day

ing. Were there peepholes for them to watch the cer-
emony through? There were women in the crowds,
but bondswomen only, assets. She realised that she,
too, would be kept hidden until her moment of the
ceremony arrived: a red tent awaited her, alongside
the bleachers, not far from the roped enclosure
where priests were chanting. She was rushed out of
the car and into the tent by obsequious and deter-
mined courtiers.

Bondswomen in the tent offered her tea, sweets,
mirrors, makeup, and hair oil, and helped her put
on the complex swathing of fine red-and-yellow
cloth, her costume for her brief enactment of Lady
Tual. Nobody had told her very clearly what she was
to do, and to her questions the women said, "The
priests will show you. Lady, you just go with them.
You just light the fire- They have it all ready." She
had the impression that they knew no more than
she did; they were pretty girls, court assets, excited
at being part of the show, indifferent to the religion.
She knew the symbolism of the fire she was to light:

into it faults and transgressions could be cast and
burnt up, forgotten. It was a nice idea.

The priests were whooping it up out there; she
peeked out  there were indeed peepholes in the
tent fabric  and saw the crowd had thickened.
Nobody except in the bleachers and right against
the enclosure ropes could possibly see anything, but
everybody was waving red-and-yetlow banners,
munching fried food, and making a day of it, while
the priests kept up their deep chanting. In the far
right of the little, blurred field of vision through the
peephole was a familiar arm: the Major's, of course.
They had not let him get into the motorcar with her.

SVSI  87   5^-SS

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

He must have been furious. He had got here,
though, and stationed himself on guard. "Lady,
Lady," the court girls were saying, "here come the
priests now," and they buzzed around her making
sure her headdress was on straight and the
damnable, hobbling skirts fell in the right folds.
They were still plucking and patting as she stepped
out of the tent, dazzled by the daylight, smiling and
trying to hold herself very straight and dignified as
a Goddess ought to do. She really didn't want to
tuck up their ceremony.

Two men in priestly regalia were waiting for her
right outside the tent door. They stepped forward
immediately, taking her by the elbows and saying,
"This way, this way. Lady." Evidently she really
wouldn't have to figure out what to do. No doubt
they considered women incapable of it, but in the
circumstances it was a relief. The priests hurried her
along faster than she could comfortably walk in
the tight-drawn skirt. They were behind the bleach-
ers now; wasn't the enclosure in the other direction?
A car was coming straight at them, scattering the
few people who were in its way. Somebody was
shouting; the priests suddenly began yanking her,
trying to run; one of them yelled and let go her arm,
felled by a flying darkness that had hit him with a
jolt  she was in the middle of a melee, unable to
break the iron hold on her arm, her legs imprisoned
in the skirt, and there was a noise, an enormous
noise, that hit her head and bent it down, she
couldn't see or hear, blinded, struggling, shoved face
first into some dark place with her face pressed into
a stifling, scratchy darkness and her arms held
locked behind her.

CTO 88 cCTt

Forgiveness Day

A car, moving. A long time. Men, talking low.
They talked in Gatayan- It was very hard to breathe.
She did not struggle; it was no use. They had taped
her arms and legs, bagged her head. After a long time
she was hauled out like a corpse and carried quickly,
indoors, down stairs, set down on a bed or couch, not
roughly though with the same desperate haste. She
lay still. The men talked, still almost in whispers. It
made no sense to her. Her head was still hearing that
enormous noise, had it been real? had she been
struck? She felt deaf, as if inside a wall of cotton. The
cloth of the bag kept getting stuck on her mouth,
sucked against her nostrils as she tried to breathe.

It was plucked off; a man stooping over her
turned her so he could untape her arms, then her
legs, murmuring as he did so, "Don't to be scared,
Lady, we don't to hurt you," in Voe Dean. He backed
away from her quickly. There were four or five of
them; it was hard to see, there was very little light.
"To wait here," another said,, "everything all right.
Just to keep happy." She was trying to sit up, and it
made her dizzy. When her head stopped spinning,
they were all gone. As if by magic. Just to keep
happy.

A small very high room. Dark brick walls, earthy
air. The light was from a little biolume plaque stuck on
the ceiling, a weak, shadowless glow. Probably quite
sufficient for Werelian eyes. Just to keep happy. I have
been kidnapped. How about that. She inventoried: the
thick mattress she was on; a blanket; a door; a small
pitcher and a cup; a drainhole, was it, over in the cor-
ner? She swung her legs off the mattress and her feet
struck something lying on the floor at the foot of it 
she coiled up, peered at the dark mass, the body lying

-w 89 5-?-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

there. A man. The uniform, the skin so black she could
not see the features, but she knew him. Even here,
even here, the Major was with her.

She stood up unsteadily and went to investigate
the drainhole, which was simply that, a cement-
lined hole in the floor, smelling slightly chemical,
slightly foul. Her head hurt, and she sat down on
the bed again to massage her arms and ankles, eas-
ing the tension and pain and getting herself back
into herself by touching and confirming herself,
rhythmically, methodically. I have been kidnapped.
How about that. Just to keep happy. What about
him?

Suddenly knowing that he was dead, she shud-
dered and held still.

After a while she leaned over slowly, trying to
see his face, listening. Again she had the sense of
being deaf. She heard no breath. She reached out,
sick and shaking, and put the back of her hand
against his face. It was cool, cold. But warmth
breathed across her fingers, once, again. She
crouched on the mattress and studied him. He lay
absolutely still, but when she put her hand on his
chest she felt the slow heartbeat.

"Teyeo," she said in a whisper. Her voice would
not go above a whisper.

She put her hand on his chest again. She wanted
to feel that slow, steady beat, the faint warmth; it
was reassuring. Just to keep happy.

What else had they said? Just to wait. Yes. That
seemed to be the program. Maybe she could sleep.
Maybe she could sleep and when she woke up the
ransom would have come. Or whatever it was they
wanted.

SI^S 90 !V*SI

Forgiveness Day

*       *       *

She woke up with the thought that she still had her
watch, and after sleepily studying the tiny silver
readout for a while decided she had slept three
hours; it was still the day of the Festival, too soon for
ransom probably, and she wouldn't be able to go to
the theater to see the makils tonight. Her eyes had
grown accustomed to the low light and when she
looked she could see, now, that there was dried
blood all over one side of the man's head. Exploring,
she found a hot lump like a fist above his temple,
and her fingers came away smeared. He had got
himself crowned. That must have been him, launch-
ing himself at the priest, the fake priest, all she could
remember was a flying shadow and a hard thump
and an ooof! like an aiji attack, and then there had
been the huge noise that confused everything. She
clicked her tongue, tapped the wall, to check her
hearing- It seemed to be all right; the wall of cotton
had disappeared. Maybe she had been crowned her-
self? She felt her head, but found no lumps. The
man must have a concussion, if he was still out after
three hours. How bad? When would the men come
back?

She^iot up and nearly fell over, entangled in the
damned Goddess skirts. If only she was in her own
clothes, not this fancy dress, three pieces of flimsy
stuff you had to have servants to put on you! She
got out of the skirt piece, and used the scarf piece to
make a kind of tied skirt that came to her knees. It
wasn't warm in this basement or whatever it was; it
was dank and rather cold. She walked up and down,
four steps turn, four steps turn, four steps turn, and

i-ste 91  -*

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

did some warm-ups- They had dumped the man
onto the floor. How cold was it? Was shock part of
concussion? People in shock needed to be kept
warm. She dithered a long time, puzzled at her own
indecision, at not knowing what to do. Should she
try to heave him up onto the mattress? Was it better
not to move him? Where the hell were the men?
Was he going to die?

She stooped over him and said sharply, "Rega!
Teyeo!" and after a moment he caught his breath.

"Wake up!" She remembered now, she thought
she remembered, that it was important not to let
concussed people lapse into a coma. Except he
already had-

He caught his breath again, and his face
changed, came out of the rigid immobility, softened;

his eyes opened and closed, blinked, unfocused.
"Oh Kamye," he said very softly.

She couldn't believe how glad she was to see
him. Just to keep happy. He evidently had a blind-
ing headache, and admitted that he was seeing
double. She helped him haul himself up onto the
mattress and covered him with the blanket. He
asked no questions, and lay mute, lapsing back to
sleep soon. Once he was settled she went back to her
exercises, and did an hour of them. She looked at
her watch. It was two hours later, the same day, the
Festival day. It wasn't evening yet. When were the
men going to come?

They came early in the morning, after the end-
less night that was the same as the afternoon and the
morning. The metal door was unlocked and thrown
clanging open, and one of them came in with a tray
while two of them stood with raised, aimed guns in

iM^ 92 ^-

Forgiveness Day

the doorway. There was nowhere to put the tray but
the floor, so he shoved it at Solly, said, "Sorry, Lady!"
and backed out; the door clanged shut, the bolts
banged home. She stood holding the tray. "Wait!"
she said.

The man had waked up and was looking groggi-
ly around. After finding him in this place with her
she had somehow lost his nickname, did not think
of him as the Major, yet shied away from his name.
"Here's breakfast, I guess," she said, and sat down on
the edge of the mattress. A cloth was thrown over the
wicker tray; under it was a pile of Gatayan grainrolls
stuffed with meat and greens, several pieces of fruit,
and a capped water carafe of thin, fancily beaded
metal alloy. "Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, maybe,"
she said. "Shit. Oh well. It looks good. Can you eat?
Can you sit up?"

He worked himself up to sit with his back
against the wall, and then shut his eyes.

"You're still seeing double?"

He made a small noise of assent.

"Are you thirsty?"

Small noise of assent.

"Here." She passed him the cup. By holding it in
both hands he got it to his mouth, and drank the
water slowly, a swallow at a time. She meanwhile
devoured three grainrolls one after the other, then
forced herself to stop, and ate a pini fruit. "Could
you eat some fruit?" she asked him, feeling guilty.
He did not answer. She thought of Batikam feeding
her the slice of pini at breakfast, when, yesterday, a
hundred years ago.

The food in her stomach made her feel sick. She
took the cup from the man's relaxed hand  he was

TW 93 s-^>

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

asleep again  and poured herself water, and drank
it slowly, a swallow at a time.

When she felt better she went to the door and
explored its hinges, lock, and surface. She felt and
peered around the brick walls, the poured concrete
floor, seeking she knew not what, something to
escape with, something. .. . She should do exercises.
She forced herself to do some, but the queasiness
returned, and a lethargy with it. She went back to the
mattress and sat down. After a while she found she
was crying. After a while she found she had been
asleep. She needed to piss. She squatted over the hole
and listened to her urine fall into it. There was noth-
ing to clean herself with. She came back to the bed
and sat down on it, stretching out her legs, holding
her ankles in her hands. It was utterly silent.

She turned to look at the man; he was watching
her. It made her start. He looked away at once. He
still lay half-propped up against the wall, uncom-
fortable, but relaxed.

"Are you thirsty?" she asked.

"Thank you," he said. Here where nothing was
familiar and time was broken off from the past, his
soft, light voice was welcome in its familiarity. She
poured him a cup full and gave it to him. He man-
aged it much more steadily, sitting up to drink.
"Thank you," he whispered again, giving her back
the cup.

"How's your head?"

He put up his hand to the swelling, winced, and
sat back.

"One of them had a stick," she said, seeing it in
a flash in the jumble of her memories  "a priest's
staff. You jumped the other one."

o^ 94 ^^si

Forgiveness Day

"They took my gun," he said. "Festival." He kept
his eyes closed.

"I got tangled in those damn clothes. 1 couldn't
help you at all. Listen. Was there a noise, an explo-
sion?"

"Yes. Diversion, maybe."

"Who do you think these boys are?"

"Revolutionaries. Or . .."

"You said you thought the Gatayan government
was in on it."

"I don't know," he murmured.

"You were right, I was wrong, I'm sorry," she
said with a sense of virtue at remembering to make
amends.

He moved his hand very slightly in an it-doesn't-
matter gesture.

"Are you still seeing double?"

He did not answer; he was phasing out again.

She was standing, trying to remember Selish
breathing exercises, when- the door crashed and
clanged, and the same three men were there, two
with guns, all young, black-skinned, short-haired,
very nervous. The lead one stooped to set a tray
down on the floor, and without the least premed-
itation Solly stepped on his hand and brought her
weight down on it. "You wait!" she said. She was
staring straight into the faces and gun muzzles of
the other two. "Just wait a moment, listen! He has
a head injury, we need a doctor, we need more
water, I can't even clean his wound, there's no
toilet paper, who the hell are you people any-
way?"

The one she had stomped was shouting, "Get
off! Lady to get off my hand!" but the others heard

"^-"li 95  '^s'

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

her. She lifted her foot and got out of his way as he
came up fast, backing into his buddies with the
guns. "All right. Lady, we are sorry to have trouble,"
he said, tears in his eyes, cradling his hand. "We are
Patriots. You send messish to this Pretender, like our
messish. Nobody is to hurt. All right?" He kept back-
ing up, and one of the gunmen swung the door to.
Crash, rattle.

She drew a deep breath and turned. Teyeo was
watching her. "That was dangerous," he said, smil-
ing very slightly.

"I know it was," she said, breathing hard. "It
was stupid. I can't get hold of myself. I feel like
pieces of me. But they shove stuff in and run,
damn ill We have to have some water!" She was in
tears, the way she always was for a moment after
violence or a quarrel. "Let's see, what have they
brought this time." She lifted the tray up onto the
mattress; like the other, in a ridiculous semblance
of service in a hotel or a house with slaves, it was
covered with a cloth. "All the comforts," she mur-
mured. Under the cloth was a heap of sweet pas-
tries, a little plastic hand mirror, a comb, a tiny pot
of something that smelled like decayed flowers,
and a box of what she identified after a while as
Gatayan tampons.

"It's things for the lady," she said, "God damn
them, the stupid Goddamn pricks! A mirror!" She
flung the thing across the room. "Of course I can't
last a day without looking in the mirror! God damn
them!" She flung everything else but the pastries
after the mirror, knowing as she did so that she
would pick up the tampons and keep them under
the mattress and, oh. God forbid, use them if she

^*0  96   5~-S>

Forgiveness Day

had to, if they had to stay here, how long would it
be? ten days or more  "Oh, God," she said again.
She got up and picked everything up, put the mirror
and the little pot, the empty water jug and the fruit
skins from the last meal, onto one of the trays and
set it beside the door. "Garbage," she said in Voe
Dean. Her outburst, she realised, had been in anoth-
er language; Alterran, probably. "Have you any
idea," she said, sitting down on the mattress again,
"how hard you people make it to be a woman? You
could turn a woman against being one!"

"I think they meant well," Teyeo said. She
realised that there was not the faintest shade of
mockery, even of amusement in his voice. If he was
enjoying her shame, he was ashamed to show her
that he was. "I think they're amateurs," he said-
After a while she said, "That could be bad."
"It might." He had sat up and was gingerly feel-
ing the knot on his head. His coarse, heavy hair was
blood-caked all around it. "Kidnapping," he said.
"Ransom demands. Not assassins. They didn't have
guns. Couldn't have got in with guns- I had to give
up mine."

"You mean these aren't the ones you were
warned about?"

"I don't know." His explorations caused him a
shiver of pain, and he desisted. "Are we very short of
water?"

She brought him another cupful. "Too short for
washing. A stupid Goddamn mirror when what we
need is water!"

He thanked her and drank and sat back, nursing
the last swallows in the cup. "They didn't plan to
take me," he said.

^ 97 ^s

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

She thought about it and nodded. "Afraid you'd
identify them?"

"If they had a place for me, they wouldn't put
me in with a lady." He spoke without irony. "They
had this ready for you. It must be somewhere in the
city."

She nodded. "The car ride was half an hour or
less. My head was in a bag. though."

"They've sent a message to the Palace. They got
no reply, or an unsatisfactory one. They want a mes-
sage from you."

"To convince the government they really have
me? Why do they need convincing?"

They were both silent.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I can't think." He lay back.
Feeling tired, tow, edgy after her adrenaline rush,
she lay down alongside him. She had rolled up the
Goddess's skirt to make a pillow; he had none. The
blanket lay across their legs.

"Pillow," she said. "More blankets. Soap. What
else?"

"Key," he murmured.

They lay side by side in the silence and the faint
unvarying light.

Next morning about eight, according to Solly's
watch, the Patriots came into the room, four of
them. Two stood on guard at the door with their
guns ready; the other two stood uncomfortably in
what floor space was left, looking down at their cap-
tives, both of whom sat cross-legged on the mat-
tress. The new spokesman spoke better Voe Dean
than the others. He said they were very sorry to

T^S> 98 ^.s

Forgiveness Day

cause the lady discomfort and would do what they
could to make it comfortable for her, and she must
be patient and write a message by hand to the
Pretender King, explaining that she would be set
free unharmed as soon as the King commanded the
Council to rescind their treaty with Voe Deo.

"He won't," she said. "They won't let him."

"Please do not discuss," the man said with fran-
tic harshness. "This is writing materials. This is the
message." He set the papers and a stylo down on the
mattress, nervously, as if afraid to get close to her.

She was aware of how Teyeo effaced himself, sit-
ting without a motion, his head lowered, his eyes
lowered; the men ignored him.

"If I write this for you, I want water, a lot of
water, and soap and blankets and toilet paper and
pillows and a doctor, and I want somebody to come
when I knock on that door, and I want some decent
clothes. Warm clothes. Men's clothes,"

"No doctor!" the man.said. "Write it! Please!
Now!" He was jumpy, twitchy, she dared push him
no further. She read their statement, copied it out in
her large, childish scrawl  she seldom handwrote
anything  and handed both to the spokesman. He
glanced over it and without a word hurried the
other men out. Clash went the door.

"Should 1 have refused?"

"I don't think so," Teyeo said. He stood up and
stretched, but sat down again looking dizzy. "You
bargain well," he said.

"We'll see what we get. Oh, God. What is going
on?"

"Maybe," he said slowly, "Gatay is unwilling to
yield to these demands. But when Voe Deo  and

^ 99 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

your Ekumen  get word of it, they'll put pressure
on Gatay."

"I wish they'd get moving- I suppose Gatay is
horribly embarrassed, saving face by trying to con-
ceal the whole thing  is that likely? How long can
they keep it up? What about your people? Won't
they be hunting for you?"

"No doubt," he said, in his polite way.

It was curious how his stiff manner, his man-
ners, which had always shunted her aside, cut her
out, here had quite another effect: his restraint and
formality reassured her that she was still part of the
world outside this room, from which they came and
to which they would return, a world where people
lived long lives.

What did long life matter? she asked herself.
and didn't know. It was nothing she had ever
thought about before. But these young Patriots lived
in a world of short lives. Demands, violence, imme-
diacy, and death, for what? for a bigotry, a hatred, a
rush of power.

"Whenever they leave," she said in a low voice,
"I get really frightened."

Teyeo cleared his throat and said, "So do I."

Exercises.

"Take hold  no, take hold, I'm not made of
glass!  Now "

"Ha!" he said, with his flashing grin of excite-
ment, as she showed him the break, and he in turn
repeated it, breaking from her.

"All right, now you'd be waiting  here" 
thump  "see?"

^ 100 ^-s

Forgiveness Day

"Ai!"

"I'm sorry  I'm sony, Teyeo  I didn't think
about your head  Are you all right? I'm really
sorry "

"Oh, Kamye," he said, sitting up and holding
his black, narrow head between his hands. He drew
several deep breaths. She knelt penitent and anx-
ious.

"That's." he said. and breathed some more,
"that's not. not fair play."

"No of course it's not, it's aiji  all's fair in love
and war, they say that on Terra  Really, I'm sorry,
I'm terribly sorry, that was so stupid of me!"

He laughed, a kind of broken and desperate
laugh, shook his head, shook it again. "Show me,"
he said. "I don't know what you did."

Exercises.

"What do you do with. your mind?"

"Nothing."

"You just let it wander?"

"No. Am I and my mind different beings?"

"So . .. you don't focus on something? You just
wander with it?"

"No."

"So you don't let it wander."

"Who?" he said, rather testily.

A pause.

"Do you think about "

"No," he said- "Be still."

A very long pause, maybe a quarter hour.

"Teyeo, I can't. I itch. My mind itches. How
long have you been doing this?"

T*-S'  101   ^'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

A pause, a reluctant answer: "Since I was two."

He broke his utterly relaxed motionless pose,
bent his head to stretch his neck and shoulder mus-
cles. She watched him.

"I keep thinking about long life, about living
long," she said. "I don't mean just being alive a
long time, hell, I've been alive about eleven hun-
dred years, what does that mean, nothing. I mean
... Something about thinking of life as long makes
a difference. Like having kids does. Even thinking
about having kids. It's like it changes some bal-
ance- It's funny I keep thinking about that now,
when my chances for a long life have kind of taken
a steep fall... ."

He said nothing. He was able to say nothing in
a way that allowed her to go on talking. He was one '
of the least talkative men she had ever known. Most
men were so wordy. She was fairly wordy herself.
He was quiet. She wished she knew how to be quiet.

"It's just practice, isn't it?" she asked. "Just sit-
ting there."

He nodded.

"Years and years and years of practice. , . - Oh,
God. Maybe ..."

"No, no," he said, taking her thought immedi-
ately.

"But why don't they do something? What are
they waiting for? It's been nine days\"

From the beginning, by unptanned, unspoken
agreement, the room had been divided in two: the
line ran down the middle of the mattress and across
to the facing wall. The door was on her side, the left;

.T^e? 102 Tw

Forgiveness Day

the shit-hole was on his side, the right. Any invasion
of the other's space was requested by some almost
invisible cue and permitted the same way. When
one of them used the shit-hole the other unobtru-
sively faced away. When they had enough water to
take cat-baths, which was seldom, the same arrange-
ment held. The line down the middle of the mat-
tress was absolute. Their voices crossed it, and the
sounds and smells of their bodies. Sometimes she
felt his warmth; Werelian body temperature was
somewhat higher than hers, and in the dank, still air
she felt that faint radiance as he slept. But they
never crossed the line, not by a finger, not in the
deepest sleep.

Solly thought about this, finding it, in some
moments, quite funny. At other moments it seemed
stupid and perverse. Couldn't they both use some
human comfort? The only time she had touched
him was the first day, when she had helped him get
onto the mattress, and then when they had enough
water she had cleaned his scalp wound and little by
little washed the clotted, stinking blood out of his
hair, using the comb, which had after all been a
good thing to have, and pieces of the Goddess's
skirt, an invaluable source of washcloths and ban-
dages. Then once his head healed, they practiced aiji
daily; but aiji had an impersonal, ritual purity to its
clasps and grips that was a long way from creature
comfort. The rest of the time his bodily presence was
clearly, invariably uninvasive and untouchable.

He was only maintaining, under incredibly dif-
ficult circumstances, the rigid restraint he had
always shown. Not just he, but Rewe, too; all of
them, all of them but Batikam; and yet was

.-^ 103 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Batikam's instant yielding to her whim and desire
the true contact she had thought it? She thought of
the fear in his eyes, that last night. Not restraint, but
constraint.

It was the mentality of a slave society: slaves
and masters caught in the same trap of radical dis-
trust and self-protection.

"Teyeo," she said, "I don't understand slavery.
Let me say what I mean," though he had shown no
sign of interruption or protest, merely civil attention.
"I mean, I do understand how a social institution
comes about and how an individual is simply part of
it  I'm not saying why don't you agree with me in
seeing it as wicked and unprofitable, I'm not asking
you to defend it or renounce it. I'm trying to under-
stand what it feels like to believe that two-thirds of
the human beings in your world are actually, right-
fully your property. Five-sixths, in fact, including
women of your caste."

After a while he said, "My family owns about
twenty-five assets."

"Don't quibble."

He accepted the reproof.

"It seems to me that you cut off human contact.
You don't touch slaves and slaves don't touch you,
in the way human beings ought to touch, in mutu-
ality. You have to keep yourselves separate, always
working to maintain that boundary. Because it isn't
a natural boundary  it's totally artificial, man-
made. I can't tell owners and assets apart physically.
Can you?"

"Mostly."

"By cultural, behavioral clues  right?"

After thinking a while, he nodded.

Tt.3)   104   -^-S

Forgiveness Day

"You are the same species, race, people, exactly
the same in every way, with a slight selection towards
color. If you brought up an asset child as an owner it
would be an owner in every respect, and vice versa. So
you spend your lives keeping up this tremendous divi-
sion that doesn't exist. What I don't understand is
how you can fail to see how appallingly wasteful it is.
I don't mean economically!"

"In the war," he said, and then there was a very
long pause; though Solly had a lot more to say, she
waited, curious. "1 was on Yeowe," he said, "you
know, in the civil war."

That's where you got all those scars and dents,
she thought; for however scrupulously she averted
her eyes, it was impossible not to be familiar with
his spare, onyx body by now, and she knew that in
aiji he had to favor his left arm, which had a con-
siderable chunk out of it just above the bicep.

"The slaves of the Colonies revolted, you know,
some of them at first, then all of them. Nearly all. So
we Army men there were all owners. We couldn't
send asset soldiers, they might defect. We were all
veots and volunteers. Owners fighting assets. I was
fighting my equals. I learned that pretty soon. Later
on I learned I was fighting my superiors. They
defeated us."

"But that  " Solly said, and stopped; she did
not know what to say.

"They defeated us from beginning to end," he
said. "Partly because my government didn't under-
stand that they could. That they fought better and
harder and more intelligently and more bravely
than we did."

"Because they were fighting for their freedom!"

T-?-a- 105 '^<

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Maybe so," he said in his polite way-

"So ..."

"I wanted to tell you that I respect the people I
fought."

"I know so little about war, about fighting," she
said, with a mixture of contrition and irritation.
"Nothing, really. I was on Kheakh, but that wasn't
war, it was racial suicide, mass slaughter of a bio-
sphere. I guess there's a difference .... That was
when the Ekumen finally decided on the Arms
Convention, you know. Because of Orint and then
Kheakh destroying themselves. The Terrans had
been pushing for the Convention for ages- Having
nearly committed suicide themselves a while back.
I'm half-Terran. My ancestors rushed around their
planet slaughtering each other. For millennia. They
were masters and slaves, too, some of them, a lot of
them.. .. But I don't know if the Anns Convention
was a good idea- If it's right. Who are we to tell any-
body what to do and not to do? The idea of the
Ekumen was to offer a way. To open it. Not to bar it
to anybody."

He listened intently, but said nothing until
after some while. "We learn to ... close ranks.
Always. You're right, I think, it wastes . . . energy,
the spirit. You are open."

His words cost him so much, she thought, not
like hers that just came dancing out of the air and
went back into it. He spoke from his marrow. It made
what he said a solemn compliment, which she
accepted gratefully, for as the days went on she real-
ized occasionally how much confidence she had lost
and kept losing: self-confidence, confidence that
they would be ransomed, rescued, that they would

JT 106 i-*-?

Forgiveness Day

get out of this room, that they would get out of it
alive.

"Was the war very brutal?"

"Yes," he said. "I can't. . . I've never been able
to  to see it  Only something comes like a flash
" He held his hands up as if to shield his eyes.
Then he glanced at her, wary. His apparently cast-
iron self-respect was, she knew now, vulnerable in
many places.

"Things from Kheakh that I didn't even know I
saw, they come that way," she said. "At night." And
after a while, "How long were you there?"

"A little over seven years."

She winced. "Were you lucky?"

It was a queer question, not coming out the way
she meant, but he took it at value. "Yes," he said.
"Always. The men I went there with were killed.
Most of them in the first few years. We lost three
hundred thousand men on Yeowe. They never talk
about it. Two-thirds of the-veot men in Voe Deo
were killed. If it was lucky to live, I was lucky." He
looked down at his clasped hands, locked into him-
self.

After a while she said softly, "I hope you still
are."

He said nothing.

"How long has it been?" he asked, and she said,
clearing her throat, after an automatic glance at her
watch, "Sixty hours."

Their captors had not come yesterday at what
had become a regular time, about eight in the mom-
ing. Nor had they come this morning.

3*tS.  107   O^-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

With nothing left to eat and now no water left,
they had grown increasingly silent and inert. It was
hours since either had said anything. He had put off
asking the time as long as he could prevent himself.

"This is horrible," she said, "this is so horrible. I
keep thinking..."

"They won't abandon you," he said. "They feel
a responsibility."

"Because I'm a woman?"

"Partly."

"Shit."

He remembered that in the other life her coarse-
ness had offended him.

"They've been taken, shot. Nobody bothered to
find out where they were keeping us," she said.

Having thought the same thing several hundred
times, he had nothing to say.

"It's just such a horrible place to die," she said.
"It's sordid. I stink. I've stunk for twenty days. Now
I have diarrhea because I'm scared. But I can't shit
anything. I'm thirsty and I can't drink."

"Solly," he said sharply. It was the first time he
had spoken her name. "Be still. Hold fast."

She stared at him.

"Hold fast to what?"

He did not answer at once and she said, "You
won't let me touch you!"

"Not to me "

"Then to what? There isn't anything!" He
thought she was going to cry, but she stood up, took
the empty tray, and beat it against the door till it
smashed into fragments of wicker and dust. "Come!
God damn you! Come, you bastards!" she shouted.
"Let us out of here!"

s^-e> 108 aa-s

Forgiveness Day

After that she sat down again on the mattress.
"Well," she said.

"Listen," he said.

They had heard it before: no city sounds
came down to this cellar, wherever it was, but
this was something bigger, explosions, they both
thought.

The door rattled.

They were both afoot when it opened: not with
the usual clash and clang, but slowly. A man waited
outside; two men came in. One, armed, they had
never seen; the other, the tough-faced young man
they called the spokesman, looked as if he had been
running or fighting, dusty, worn-out, a little dazed.
He closed the door. He had some papers in his hand.
The four of them stared at one another in silence for
a minute.

"Water," Solly said. "You bastards!"

"Lady," the spokesman said, "I'm sorry." He was
not listening to her. His eyes were not on her. He
was looking at Teyeo, for the first time. "There is a
lot of fighting," he said.

"Who's fighting?" Teyeo asked, hearing himself
drop into the even tone of authority, and the young
man respond to it as automatically: "Voe Deo. They
sent troops. After the funeral, they said they would
send troops unless we surrendered. They came yes-
terday. They go through the city killing- They know
all the Old Believer centers. Some of ours." He had a
bewildered, accusing note in his voice.

"What funeral?" Solly said.

When he did not answer, Teyeo repeated it:

"What funeral?"

"The lady's funeral, yours. Here  I brought net

^ 109 -^

POUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

prints  A state funeral. They said you died in the
explosion."

"What Goddamned explosion?" Solly said in her
hoarse, parched voice, and this time he answered her:

"At the Festival. The Old Believers. The fire, Tual's fire,
there were explosives in it. Only it went off too soon.
We knew their plan. We rescued you from that, Lady,"
he said, suddenly turning to her with that same
accusatory tone.

"Rescued me, you asshole!" she shouted, and
Teyeo's dry lips split in a startled laugh, which he
repressed at once.

"Give me those," he said, and the young man
handed him the papers.

"Get us water!" Solly said.

"Stay here, please. We need to talk," Teyeo said,
instinctively holding on to his ascendancy. He sat
down on the mattress with the net prints. Within a
few minutes he and Solly had scanned the reports
of the shocking disruption of the Festival of
Forgiveness, the lamentable death of the Envoy of the
Ekumen in a terrorist act executed by the cult
of Old Believers, the brief mention of the death of a
Voe Dean Embassy guard in the explosion, which
had killed over seventy priests and onlookers, the
long descriptions of the state funeral, reports of
unrest, terrorism, reprisals, then reports of the
Palace gratefully accepting offers of assistance from
Voe Deo in cleaning out the cancer of terrorism. . ..

"So," he said finally. "You never heard from the
Palace. Why did you keep us alive?"

Solly looked as if she thought the question lacked
tact, but the spokesman answered with equal blunt-
ness, "We thought your country would ransom you."

3-*   110   -i-XiS

Forgiveness Day

"They will," Teyeo said. "Only you have to keep
your government from knowing we're alive. If
you "

"Wait," Solly said, touching his hand. "Hold on.
I want to think about this stuff. You'd better not
leave the Ekumen out of the discussion. But getting
in touch with them is the tricky bit."

"If there are Voe Dean troops here, all I need is
to get a message to anyone in my command, or the
Embassy Guards."

Her hand was still on his, with a warning pres-
sure. She shook the other one at the spokesman, fin-
ger outstretched: "You kidnapped an Envoy of the
Ekumen, you asshole! Now you have to do the
thinking you didn't do ahead of time. And I do too,
because I don't want to get blown away by your
Goddamned little government for turning up alive
and embarrassing them. Where are you hiding, any-
how? Is there any chance of us getting out of this
room, at least?"

The man, with that edgy, frantic look, shook his
head- "We are all down here now," he said. "Most of
the time. You stay here safe."

"Yes, you'd better keep your passports safe!"
Solly said. "Bring us some water, damn it! Let us talk
a while. Come back in an hour."

The young man leaned towards her suddenly,
his face contorted. "What the hell kind of lady you
are," he said. "You foreign filthy stinking cunt."

Teyeo was on his feet, but her grip on his hand
had tightened: after a moment of silence, the
spokesman and the other man turned to the door,
rattled the lock, and were let out.

"Our," she said, looking dazed.

^ ill ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

"Don't," he said, "don't " He did not know
how to say it. "They don't understand," he said. "It's
better if I talk."

"Of course. Women don't give orders. Women
don't talk. Shitheads! I thought you said they felt so
responsible for me!"

"They do," he said. "But they're young men.
Fanatics. Very frightened." And you talk to them
as if they were assets, he thought, but did not
say.

"Well so am I frightened!" she said, with a little
spurt of tears. She wiped her eyes and sat down
again among the papers. "God," she said. "We've
been dead for twenty days. Buried for fifteen. Who
do you think they buried?"

Her grip was powerful; his wrist and hand hurt.
He massaged the place gently, watching her.

"Thank you," he said. "I would have hit him."

"Oh, I know. Goddamn chivalry. And the one
with the gun would have blown your head off.
Listen, Teyeo. Are you sure all you have to do is get
word to somebody in the Army or the Guard?"

"Yes, of course."

"You're sure your country isn't playing the same
game as Gatay?"

He stared at her. As he understood her, slowly
the anger he had stifled and denied, all these inter-
minable days of imprisonment with her, rose in
him, a fiery flood of resentment, hatred, and con-
tempt.

He was unable to speak, afraid he would speak
to her as the young Patriot had done.

He went around to his side of the room and sat
on his side of the mattress, somewhat turned from

=^"s> 112 T"-

Forgiveness Day

her. He sat cross-legged, one hand lying lightly in
the other.

She said some other things. He did not listen or
reply.

After a while she said, "We're supposed to be talk-
ing, Teyeo. We've only got an hour. I think those kids
might do what we tell them, if we tell them some-
thing plausible  something that'll work."

He would not answer. He bit his lip and held
still.

"Teyeo, what did I say? I said something wrong.
I don't know what it was. I'm sorry."

"They would  " He struggled to control his lips
and voice. "They would not betray us."

"Who? The Patriots?"

He did not answer.

"Voe Deo, you mean? Wouldn't betray us?"

In the pause that followed her gentle, incredu-
lous question, he knew that she was right; that it
was all collusion among the. powers of the world;

that his loyalty to his country and service was wasted,
as futile as the rest of his life- She went on talking,
palliating, saying he might very well be right- He
put his head into his hands, longing for tears, dry as
stone.

She crossed the line. He felt her hand on his
shoulder.

"Teyeo, I am very sorry," she said. "I didn't
mean to insult you! I honor you. You've been all my
hope and help."

"It doesn't matter," he said. "If I  If we had
some water."

She leapt up and battered on the door with her
fists and a sandal.

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Bastards, bastards," she shouted.

Teyeo got up and walked, three steps and turn,
three steps and turn, and halted on his side of the
room. "If you're right," he said, speaking slowly and
formally, "we and our captors are in danger not only
from Gatay but from my own people, who may . . .
who have been furthering these anti-Government
factions, in order to make an excuse to bring troops
here ... to pacify Gatay. That's why they know
where to find the factionalists. We are ... we're
lucky our group were . . . were genuine."

She watched him with a tenderness that he
found irrelevant.

"What we don't know," he said, "is what side
the Ekumen will take. That is ... There really is only
one side."

"No, there's ours, too. The underdogs. If the
Embassy sees Voe Deo pulling a takeover of Gatay,
they won't interfere, but they won't approve.
Especially if it involves as much repression as it
seems to."

"The violence is only against the anti-Ekumen
factions."

"They still won't approve. And if they find out
I'm alive, they're going to be quite pissed at the peo-
ple who claimed I went up in a bonfire. Our problem
is how to get word to them. I was the only person rep-
resenting the Ekumen in Gatay, Who'd be a safe
channel?"

"Any of my men. But. . ."

"They'll have been sent back; why keep
Embassy Guards here when the Envoy's dead and
buried? I suppose we could try. Ask the boys to try,
that is." Presently she said wistfully, "I don't sup-

Forgiveness Day

pose they'd just let us go  in disguise? It would be
the safest for them."

"There is an ocean," Teyeo said.

She beat her head. "Oh, why don't they bring
some water...." Her voice was like paper sliding on
paper. He was ashamed of his anger, his grief, him-
self. He wanted to tell her that she had been a help
and hope to him too, that he honored her, that she
was brave beyond belief; but none of the words
would come- He felt empty, worn-out. He felt old. If
only they would bring water!

Water was given them at last; some food, not
much and not fresh. Clearly their captors were in
hiding and under duress. The spokesman  he gave
them his war-name, Kergat, Gatayan for Liberty 
told them that whole neighborhoods had been
cleared out, set afire, that Voe Dean troops were in
control of most of the city including the Palace, and
that almost none of this was being reported in the
net. "When this is over Voe Deo will own my coun-
try," he said with disbelieving fury.

"Not for long," Teyeo said.

"Who can defeat them?" the young man said.

"Yeowe. The idea of Yeowe."

Both Kergat and Solly stared at him.

"Revolution," he said. "How long before Werel
becomes New Yeowe?"

"The assets?" Kergat said, as if Teyeo had sug-
gested a revolt of cattle or of flies. "They'll never
organise."

"Look out when they do," Teyeo said mildly.

"You don't have any assets in your group?" Solly
asked Kergat, amazed. He did not bother to answer.
He had classed her as an asset, Teyeo saw. He under-

^ 115 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

stood why; he had done so himself, in the other life,
when such distinctions made sense.

"Your bondswoman, Rewe," he asked Solly 
"was she a friend?"

"Yes," Solly said, then, "No. I wanted her to be."

"The makil?"

After a pause she said, "I think so."

"Is he still here?"

She shook her head. "The troupe was going on
with their tour, a few days after the Festival."

"Travel has been restricted since the Festival,"
Kergat said. "Only government and troops."

"He's Voe Dean- If he's still here, they'll proba-
bly send him and his troupe home. Try and contact
him, Kergat."

"A makil?" the young man said, with that same
distaste and incredulity. "One of your Voe Dean
homosexual clowns?"

Teyeo shot a glance at Solly: Patience, patience.

"Bisexual actors," Solly said, disregarding him,
but fortunately Kergat was determined to disregard
her.

"A clever man," Teyeo said, "with connections.
He could help us. You and us. It could be worth it- If
he's still here. We must make haste."

"Why would he help us? He is Voe Dean."

"An asset, not a citizen," Teyeo said. "And a
member of Hame, the asset underground, which
works against the government of Voe Deo. The
Ekumen admits the legitimacy of Hame. He'll report
to the Embassy that a Patriot group has rescued the
Envoy and is holding her safe, in hiding, in extreme
danger. The Ekumen, I think, will act promptly and
decisively. Correct, Envoy?"

-t-hea 116 ^^s'

Forgiveness Day

Suddenly reinstated, Solly gave a short, digni-
fied nod. "But discreetly," she said. "They'll avoid
violence, if they can use political coercion."

The young man was trying to get it all into his
mind and work it through. Sympathetic to his
weariness, distrust, and confusion, Teyeo sat qui-
etly waiting. He noticed that Solly was sitting
equally quietly, one hand lying in the other. She
was thin and dirty and her unwashed, greasy hair
was in a lank braid. She was brave, like a brave
mare, all nerve. She would break her heart before
she quit.

Kergat asked questions; Teyeo answered them,
reasoning and reassuring. Occasionally Solly spoke,
and Kergat was now listening to her again, uneasily,
not wanting to, not after what he had called her. At
last he left, not saying what he intended to do; but
he had Batikam's name and an identifying message
from Teyeo to the Embassy: "Half-pay veots learn to
sing old songs quickly."

"What on earth!" Solly said when Kergat was
gone.

"Did you know a man named Old Music, in the
Embassy?"

"Ah! Is he a friend of yours?"

"He has been kind."

"He's been here on Werel from the start. A First
Observer. Rather a powerful man  Yes, and 'quick-
ly/ all right. ... My mind really isn't working at all.
I wish I could lie down beside a little stream, in a
meadow, you know, and drink. All day. Every time I
wanted to, just stretch my neck out and siup, siup,
slup. .. . Running water ... In the sunshine ... Oh
God, oh God, sunshine. Teyeo, this is very difficult.

Vf^S: 117 V*eS

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

This is harder than ever. Thinking that there maybe
is really a way out of here. Only not knowing. Trying
not to hope and not to not hope. Oh, I am so tired
of sitting here!"

"What time is it?"

"Half past twenty. Night. Dark out. Oh God,
darkness! Just to be in the darkness ... Is there any
way we could cover up that damned biolume?
Partly? To pretend we had night, so we could pre-
tend we had day?"

"If you stood on my shoulders, you could reach
it. But how could we fasten a cloth?"

They pondered, staring at the plaque.

"I don't know. Did you notice there's a little
patch of it that looks like it's dying? Maybe we don't
have to worry about making darkness. If we stay
here long enough. Oh, God!"

"Well," he said after a while, curiously self-
conscious, "I'm tired." He stood up, stretched,
glanced for permission to enter her territory, got a
drink of water, returned to his territory, took off his
jacket and shoes, by which time her back was turned,
took off his trousers, lay down, pulled up the blan-
ket, and said in his mind, "Lord Kamye, let me hold
fast to the one noble thing." But he did not sleep.

He heard her slight movements; she pissed,
poured a little water, took off her sandals, lay
down.

A long time passed.

"Teyeo."

"Yes."

"Do you think ... that it would be a mistake ...
under the circumstances ... to make love?"

A pause.

Forgiveness Day

"Not under the circumstances," he said, almost
inaudibly. "But  in the other life  "

A pause-

"Short life versus long life," she murmured.

"Yes."

A pause.

"No," he said, and turned to her. "No, that's
wrong." They reached out to each other. They
clasped each other, cleaved together, in blind haste,
greed, need. crying out together the name of God in
their different languages and then like animals in
the wordless voice. They huddled together, spent,
sticky, sweaty, exhausted, reviving, rejoined, reborn
in the body's tenderness, in the endless exploration,
the ancient discovery, the long flight to the new
world.

He woke slowly, in ease and luxury. They were
entangled, his face was against her arm and breast;

she was stroking his hair, sometimes his neck and
shoulder. He lay for a long time aware only of that
lazy rhythm and the cool of her skin against his
face, under his hand, against his leg.

"Now I know," she said, her half whisper deep
in her chest, near his ear, "that I don't know you.
Now I need to know you." She bent forward to
touch his face with her lips and cheek.

"What do you want to know?"

"Everything- Tell me who Teyeo is. .. ."

"I don't know," he said. "A man who holds you
dear."

"Oh, God," she said, hiding her face for a
moment in the rough, smelly blanket.

"Who is God?" he asked sleepily. They spoke
Voe Dean, but she usually swore in Terran or

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Alterran; in this case it had been Atterran, Seyt, so he
asked, "Who is Seyt?"

"Oh  Tual  Kamye  what have you. I just
say it. It's just bad language. Do you believe in one
of them? I'm sorry! I feel like such an oaf with you,
Teyeo. Blundering into your soul, invading you 
We are invaders, no matter how pacifist and prig-
gish we are "

"Must I love the whole Ekumen?" he asked,
beginning to stroke her breasts, feeling her tremor of
desire and his own.

"Yes," she said, "yes, yes."

It was curious, Teyeo thought, how little sex
changed anything. Everything was the same, a lit-
tle easier, less embarrassment and inhibition; and
there was a certain and lovely source of pleasure
for them, when they had enough water and food
to have enough vitality to make love. But the only
thing that was truly different was something he
had no word for. Sex, comfort, tenderness, love,
trust, no word was the right word, the whole
word. It was utterly intimate, hidden in the mutu-
ality of their bodies, and it changed nothing in
their circumstances, nothing in the world, even
the tiny wretched world of their imprisonment.
They were still trapped. They were getting very
tired and were hungry most of the time. They were
increasingly afraid of their increasingly desperate
captors.

"I will be a lady," Solly said. "A good girl. Tell
me how, Teyeo."

"I don't want you to give in," he said, so fierce-

^s 120 ^<?

Forgiveness Day

ly, with tears in his eyes, that she went to him and
held him in her arms.

"Hold fast," he said.

"I will," she said. But when Kergat or the others
came in she was sedate and modest, letting the men
talk, keeping her eyes down. He could not bear to see
her so, and knew she was right to do so.

The doorlock rattled, the door clashed, bringing
him up out of a wretched, thirsty sleep. It was night
or very early morning. He and Solly had been sleep-
ing close entangled for the warmth and comfort of
it; and seeing Kergat's face now he was deeply afraid.
This was what he had feared, to show, to prove her
sexual vulnerability. She was still only half-awake,
clinging to him.

Another man had come in. Kergat said nothing.
It took Teyeo some time to recognise the second
man as Batikam.

When he did, his mind remained quite blank.
He managed to say the makil's name. Nothing else.

"Batikam?" Solly croaked. "Oh, my God!"

"This is an interesting moment," Batikam said
in his warm actor's voice. He was not transvestite,
Teyeo saw, but wore Gatayan men's clothing. "I
meant to rescue you, not to embarrass you, Envoy,
Rega. Shall we get on with it?"

Teyeo had scrambled up and was pulling on his
filthy trousers. Solly had slept in the ragged pants
their captors had given her. They both had kept on
their shirts for warmth.

"Did you contact the Embassy, Batikam?" she
was asking, her voice shaking, as she pulled on her
sandals.

"Oh, yes. I've been there and come back,

^ 121 ^o

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

indeed. Sorry it took so long. I don't think I quite
realised your situation here."

"Kergat has done his best for us," Teyeo said at
once, stiffly.

"I can see that. At considerable risk- I think the
risk from now on is low. That is . . ." He looked
straight at Teyeo. "Rega, how do you feel about
putting yourself in the hands of Hame?" he said.
"Any problems with that?"

"Don't, Batikam," Solly said. "Trust him!"

Teyeo tied his shoe, straightened up, and said,
"We are all in the hands of the Lord Kamye."

Batikam laughed, the beautiful full laugh they
remembered.

"In the Lord's hands, then," he said, and led them
out of the room.

In the Arkamye it is said, "To live simply is most
complicated."

Solly requested to stay on Werel, and after a
recuperative leave at the seashore was sent as
Observer to South Voe Deo. Teyeo went straight
home, being informed that his father was very ill.
After his father's death, he asked for indefinite leave
from the Embassy Guard, and stayed on the farm
with his mother until her death two years later. He
and Solly, a continent apart, met only occasionally
during those years.

When his mother died, Teyeo freed his family's
assets by act of irrevocable manumission, deeded
over their farms to them, sold his now almost val-
ueless property at auction, and went to the capital.
He knew Solly was temporarily staying at the

asus 122 c^-s

Forgiveness Day

Embassy. Old Music told him where to find her. He
found her in a small office of the palatial building.
She looked older, very elegant. She looked at him
with a stricken and yet wary face. She did not come
forward to greet or touch him. She said, "Teyeo, I've
been asked to be the first Ambassador of the
Ekumen to Yeowe."
He stood still.

"Just now  I just came from talking on the
ansible with Hain "

She put her face in her hands. "Oh, my God!"
she said.

He said, "My congratulations, truly, Solly."
She suddenly ran at him, threw her arms around
him, and cried, "Oh, Teyeo, and your mother died, I
never thought, I'm so sorry, I never, I never do  I
thought we could  What are you going to do? Are
you going to stay there?"

"I sold it," he said. He was enduring rather than
returning her embrace. "I thought I might return to
the service."

"You sold your farm? But I never saw it!"
"I never saw where you were born," he said-
There was a pause. She stood away from him.
and they looked at each other.
"You would come?" she said.
"I would," he said.

Several years after Yeowe entered the Ekumen,
Mobile Solly Agat Terwa was sent as an
Ekumenical liaison to Terra; later she went from
there to Hain, where she served with great distinc-
tion as a Stabile. In all her travels and posts she

^ 123 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

was accompanied by her husband, a Werelian
army officer, a very handsome man, as reserved as
she was outgoing. People who knew them knew
their passionate pride and trust in each other.
Solly was perhaps the happier person, rewarded
and fulfilled in her work; but Teyeo had no regrets.
He had lost his world, but he had held fast to the
one noble thing.

-&) 124  a-*-.

A Man of the
People

Stse

He sat beside his father by the great irrigation tank. Fire-
copied wings soared and dipped through the twilight
air. Trembling circles enlarged, interlocked, faded on
the still surface of the water. "What makes the water
go that way?" he asked, softly because it was mysteri-
ous, and his father answered softly, "It's where the
araha touch it when they drink." So he understood
that in the center of each circle was a desire, a thirst.
Then it was time to go home, and he ran before his
father, pretending he was an araha flying, back
through the dusk into the steep, bright-windowed
town.

His name was Mattinyehedarheddyuragamurus-
kets Havzhiva. The word havzhiva means "ringed peb-
ble," a small stone with a quartz inclusion running
through it that shows as a stripe round it. The people

TS 125 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

of Stse are particular about stones and names. Boys
of the Sky, the Other Sky, and the Static Interference
lineages are traditionally given the names of stones
or desirable manly qualities such as courage,
patience, and grace. The Yehedarhed family were
traditionalists, strong on family and lineage. "If you
know who your people are, you know who you are,"
said Havzhiva's father. Granite. A kind, quiet man
who took his paternal responsibility seriously, he
spoke often in sayings.

Granite was Havzhiva's mother's brother, of
course; that is what a father was. The man who had
helped his mother conceive Havzhiva lived on a
farm; he stopped in sometimes to say hello when he
was in town. Havzhiva's mother was the Heir of the
Sun. Sometimes Havzhiva envied his cousin Aloe,
whose father was only six years older than she was
and played with her like a big brother. Sometimes he
envied children whose mothers were unimportant.
His mother was always fasting or dancing or travel-
ing, had no husband, and rarely slept at home. It
was exciting to be with her, but difficult. He had to
be important when he was with her. It was always a
relief to be home with nobody there but his father
and his undemanding grandmother and her sister
the Winter Dancekeeper and her husband and
whichever Other Sky relatives from farms and other
pueblos were visiting at the moment.

There were only two Other Sky households in
Stse, and the Yehedarheds were more hospitable
than the Doyefarads, so all the relatives came and
stayed with them. They would have been hard put
to afford it if the visitors hadn't brought all sorts of
farm stuff, and if Tovo hadn't been Heir of the Sun.

cs^s 126 is*-s>

A Man of the People

She got paid richly for teaching and for performing
the rituals and handling the protocol at other pueb-
los. She gave all she earned to her family, who spent
it all on their relatives and on ceremonies, festivi-
ties, celebrations, and funerals.

"Wealth can't stop," Granite said to Havzhiva.
"It has to keep going. Like the blood circulating. You
keep it, it gets stopped  that's a heart attack. You
die."

"Will Hezhe-old-man die?" the boy asked. Old
Hezhe never spent anything on a ritual or a relative;

and Havzhiva was an observant child.

"Yes," his father answered. "His araha is already
dead."

Araha is enjoyment; honor; the particular qual-
ity of one's gender, manhood or womanhood; gen-
erosity; the savor of good food or wine.

It is also the name of the plumed, fire-colored,
quick-flying mammal that Havzhiva used to see
come to drink at the irrigation ponds, tiny flames
darting above the darkening water in the evening.

Stse is an almost-island, separated from the
mainland of the great south continent by marshes
and tidal bogs, where millions of wading birds gath-
er to mate and nest. Ruins of an enormous bridge
are visible on the landward side, and another half-
sunk fragment of min is the basis of the town's boat
pier and breakwater. Vast works of other ages
encumber all Hain, and are no more and no less
venerable or interesting to the Hainish than the rest
of the landscape. A child standing on the pier to
watch his mother sail off to the mainland might
wonder why people had bothered to build a bridge
when there were boats and flyers to ride. They must

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

have liked to walk, he thought. I'd rather sail in a
boat. Or fly.

But the silver flyers flew over Stse, not landing,
going from somewhere else to somewhere else,
where historians lived. Plenty of boats came in and
out of Stse harbor, but the people of his lineage did
not sail them. They lived in the Pueblo of Stse and
did the things that their people and their lineage
did. They learned what people needed to learn, and
lived their knowledge.

"People have to learn to be human," his father
said. "Look at Shell's baby. It keeps saying 'Teach
me! Teach me!'"

"Teach me," in the language of Stse, is "aowa."

"Sometimes the baby says 'ngaaaaa,'" Havzhiva
observed.

Granite nodded. "She can't speak human words
very well yet," he said.

Havzhiva hung around the baby that winter,
teaching her to say human words. She was one of
his Etsahin relatives, his second cousin once
removed, visiting with her mother and her father
and his wife. The family watched Havzhiva with.
approval as he patiently said "baba" and "gogo" to
the fat, placid, staring baby. Though he had no sis-
ter and thus could not be a father, if he went on
studying education with such seriousness, he would
probably have the honor of being the adopted
father of a baby whose mother had no brother.

He also studied at school and in the temple,
studied dancing, and studied the local version of
soccer. He was a serious student. He was good at soc-
cer but not as good as his best friend, a Buried Cable
girl named lyan lyan (a traditional name for Buried

is* 128 crva

A Man of the People

Cable girls, a seabird name). Until they were twelve,
boys and girls were educated together and alike.
lyan lyan was the best soccer player on the chil-
dren's team. They always had to put her on the
other side at halftime so that the score would even
out and they could go home for dinner without any-
body having lost or won badly. Part of her advan-
tage was that she had got her height very early, but
most of it was pure skill.

"Are you going to work at the temple?" she
asked Havzhiva as they sat on the porch roof of her
house watching the first day of the Enactment of
the Unusual Gods, which took place every eleven
years. No unusual things were happening yet, and
the amplifiers weren't working well, so the music in
the plaza sounded faint and full of static. The two
children kicked their heels and talked quietly. "No, I
think I'll leam weaving from my father," the boy
said.

"Lucky you. Why do only stupid boys get to use
looms?" It was a rhetorical question, and Havzhiva
paid it no attention. Women were not weavers. Men
did not make bricks- Other Sky people did not oper-
ate boats but did repair electronic devices. Buried
Cable people did not castrate animals but did main-
tain generators. There were things one could do and
things one could not do; one did those things for
people and people did those things for one. Coming
up on puberty, lyan lyan and Havzhiva were making
a first choice of their first profession. lyan lyan had
already chosen to apprentice in house-building and
repair, although the adult soccer team would proba-
bly claim a good deal of her time.

A globular silver person with spidery legs came

cs^s 129 a^-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

down the street in long bounds, emitting a shower
of sparks each time it landed. Six people in red with
tall white masks ran after it, shouting and throwing
speckled beans at it. Havzhiva and lyan lyan joined
in the shouting and craned from the roof to see it go
bounding round the corner towards the plaza. They
both knew that this Unusual God was Chert, a
young man of the Sky lineage, a goalkeeper for the
adult soccer team; they both also knew that it was a
manifestation of deity, A god called Zarstsa or Ball-
Lighting was using Chert to come into town for the
ceremony, and had just bounded down the street
pursued by shouts of fear and praise and showers of
fertility. Amused and entertained by the spectacle,
they judged with some acuteness the quality of the
god's costume, the jumping, and the fireworks, and
were awed by the strangeness and power of the
event. They did not say anything for a long time
after the god had passed, but sat dreamily in the
foggy sunlight on the roof. They were children who
lived among the daily gods. Now they had seen one
of the unusual gods. They were content. Another
one would come along, before long. Time is nothing
to the gods.

At fifteen, Havzhiva and lyan lyan became gods
together.

Stse people between twelve and fifteen were vig-
ilantly watched; there would be a great deal of grief
and deep, lasting shame if a child of the house, the
family, the lineage, the people, should change being
prematurely and without ceremony. Virginity was a
sacred status, not to be carelessly abandoned; sexual

a^    130    -rw

A Man of the People

activity was a sacred status, not to be carelessly
undertaken. It was assumed that a boy would mas-
turbate and make some homosexual experiments,
but not a homosexual pairing; adolescent boys who
paired off, and those who incurred suspicion of try-
ing to get alone with a girl, were endlessly lectured
and hectored and badgered by older men. A grown
man who made sexual advances to a virgin of either
sex would forfeit his professional status, his religious
offices, and his houseright.

Changing being took a while. Boys and girls had
to be taught how to recognise and control their fer-
tility, which in Hainish physiology is a matter of
personal decision. Conception does not happen: it is
performed. It cannot take place unless both the
woman and the man have chosen it. At thirteen,
boys began to be taught the technique of deliberate-
ly releasing potent sperm. The teachings were full of
warnings, threats, and scoldings, though the boys
were never actually punished. After a year or two
came a series of tests of achieved potency, a thresh-
old ritual, frightening, formal, extremely secret,
exclusively male. To have passed the tests was, of
course, a matter of intense pride; yet Havzhiva, like
most boys, came to his final change-of-being rites
very apprehensive, hiding fear under a sullen
stoicism.

The girls had been differently taught. The peo-
ple of Stse believed that a woman's cycle of fertility
made it easy for her to leam when and how to con-
ceive, and so the teaching was easy too- Girls'
threshold rituals were celebratory, involving praise
rather than shame, arousing anticipation rather
than fear. Women had been telling them for years,

'S9.S  131   G-*-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

with demonstrations, what a man wants, how to
make him stand up tall, how to show him what a
woman wants. During this training, most girls asked
if they couldn't just go on practicing with each
other, and got scolded and lectured. No, they
couldn't. Once they had changed status they could
do as they pleased, but everybody must go through
"the twofold door" once.

The change-of-being rites were held whenever
the people in charge of them could get an equal
number of fifteen-year-old boys and girls from the
pueblo and its farms. Often a boy or girl had to be
borrowed from one of the related pueblos to even
out the number or to pair the lineages correctly.
Magnificently masked and costumed, silent, the par-
ticipants danced and were honored all day in the
plaza and in the house consecrated to the ceremony;

in the evening they ate a ritual meal in silence; then
they were led off in pairs by masked and silent ritu-
alists. Many of them kept their masks on, hiding
their fear and modesty in that sacred anonymity.

Because Other Sky people have sex only with
Original and Buried Cable people and they were the
only ones of those lineages in the group, lyan lyan
and Havzhiva had known they must be paired. They
had recognised each other as soon as the dancing
began- When they were left alone in the consecrated
room, they took off their masks at once. Their eyes
met. They looked away.

They had been kept apart most of the time for
the past couple of years, and completely apart for
the last months. Havzhiva had begun to get his
growth, and was nearly as tall as she was now.
Each saw a stranger. Decorous and serious, they

^e 132 ^s

A Man of the People

approached each other, each thinking, "Let's get it
over with." So they touched, and that god entered
them, becoming them; the god for whom they were
the doorway; the meaning for which they were the
word. It was an awkward god at first, clumsy, but
became an increasingly happy one.

When they left the consecrated house the next
day, they both went to lyan lyan's house. "Havzhiva
will live here," lyan lyan said, as a woman has a
right to say. Everybody in her family made him wel-
come and none of them seemed surprised.

When he went to get his clothes from his grand-
mother's house, nobody there seemed surprised,
everybody congratulated him, an old woman cousin
from Etsahin made some embarrassing jokes, and
his father said, "You are a man of this house now;

come back for dinner."

So he slept with lyan lyan at her house, ate
breakfast there, ate dinner at his house, kept his
daily clothes at her house, kept his dance clothes at
his house, and went on with his education, which
now had mostly to do with rug-weaving on the
power broadlooms and with the nature of the cos-
mos. He and lyan lyan both played on the adult soc-
cer team.

He began to see more of his mother, because
when he was seventeen she asked him if he wanted
to learn Sun-stuff with her, the rites and protocols of
trade, arranging fair exchange with farmers of Stse
and bargaining with other pueblos of the lineages
and with foreigners. The rituals were learned by
rote, the protocols were learned by practice-
Havzhiva went with his mother to the market, to
outlying farms, and across the bay to the mainland

s 133 -s'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

pueblos. He had been getting restless with weaving,
which filled his mind with patterns that left no
room outside themselves. The travel was welcome,
the work was interesting, and he admired Tovo's
authority, wit, and tact. Listening to her and a group
of old merchants and Sun people maneuvering
around a deal was an education in itself. She did not
push him; he played a very minor role in these
negotiations. Training in complicated business such
as Sun-stuff took years, and there were other, older
people in training before him. But she was satisfied
with him. "You have a knack for persuading," she
told him one afternoon as they were sailing home
across the golden water, watching the roofs of Stse
solidify out of mist and sunset light. "You could
inherit the Sun, if you wanted to."

Do I want to? he thought. There was no
response in him but a sense of darkening or soften-
ing, which he could not interpret. He knew he liked
the work. Its patterns were not closed. It took him
out of Stse, among strangers, and he liked that. It
gave him something to do which he didn't know
how to do, and he liked that.

"The woman who used to live with your father
is coming for a visit," Tovo said.

Havzhiva pondered. Granite had never married.
The women who had borne the children Granite
sired both lived in Stse and always had. He asked
nothing, a polite silence being the adult way of sig-
nifying that one doesn't understand.

"They were young. No child came," his mother
said. "She went away after that. She became a histo-
rian."

"Ah," Havzhiva said in pure, blank surprise.

A Man of the People

He had never heard of anybody who became a
historian. It had never occurred to him that a person
could become one, any more than a person could
become a Stse- You were born what you were. You
were what you were born.

The quality of his polite silence was desperately
intense, and Tovo certainly was not unaware of it.
Part of her tact as a teacher was knowing when a
question needed an answer. She said nothing.

As their sail slackened and the boat slid in
toward the pier built on the ancient bridge founda-
tions, he asked, "Is the historian Buried Cable or
Original?"

"Buried Cable," his mother said. "Oh, how stiff
I am! Boats are such stiff creatures!" The woman
who had sailed them across, a fenywoman of the
Grass lineage, rolled her eyes, but said nothing in
defense of her sweet, supple little boat.

"A relative of yours is coming?" Havzhiva said
to lyan lyan that night.

"Oh, yes, she templed in." lyan lyan meant a
message had been received in the information cen-
ter of Stse and transmitted to the recorder in her
household. "She used to live in your house, my
mother said. Who did you see in Etsahin today?"

"Just some Sun people. Your relative is a histori-
an?"

"Crazy people," lyan lyan said with indiffer-
ence, and came to sit naked on naked Havzhiva and
massage his back.

The historian arrived, a little short thin woman
of fifty or so called Mezha. By the time Havzhiva
met her she was wearing Stse clothing and eating
breakfast with everybody else. She had bright eyes

?*e' 135 wvs

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

and was cheerful but not talkative. Nothing about
her showed that she had broken the social contract,
done things no woman does, ignored her lineage,
become another kind of being. For all he knew she
was married to the father of her children, and wove
at a loom, and castrated animals. But nobody
shunned her, and after breakfast the old people of the
household took her off for a returning-traveler cere-
mony, just as if she were still one of them.

He kept wondering about her, wondering what
she had done. He asked lyan lyan questions about
her till lyan lyan snapped at him, "I don't know
what she does, I don't know what she thinks.
Historians are crazy. Ask her yourself!"

When Havzhiva realised that he was afraid to
do so, for no reason, he understood that he was in
the presence of a god who was requiring some-
thing of him. He went up to one of the sitting
holes, rock cairns on the heights above the town.
Below him the black tile roofs and white walls of
Stse nestled under the bluffs, and the irrigation
tanks shone silver among fields and orchards.
Beyond the tilled land stretched the long sea
marshes. He spent a day sitting in silence, looking
out to sea and into his soul. He came back down
to his own house and slept there. When he turned
up for breakfast at lyan lyan's house she looked at
him and said nothing.

"I was fasting," he said.

She shrugged a Mttle. "So eat," she said, sitting
down by him. After breakfast she left for work. He
did not, though he was expected at the looms.

"Mother of All Children," he said to the histori-
an, giving her the most respectful title a man of one

^-*e 136 '^s'

A Man of the People

lineage can give a woman of another, "there are
things I do not know, which you know."

"What I know I will teach you with pleasure,"
she said, as ready with the formula as if she had
lived here all her life. She then smiled and fore-
stalled his next oblique question. "What was given
me I give," she said, meaning there was no question
of payment or obligation. "Come on, let's go to the
plaza."

Everybody goes to the plaza in Stse to talk, and
sits on the steps or around the fountain or on hot
days under the arcades, and watches other people
come and go and sit and talk. It was perhaps a little
more public than Havzhiva would have liked, but he
was obedient to his god and his teacher.

They sat in a niche of the fountain's broad base
and conversed, greeting people every sentence or
two with a nod or a word.

"Why did " Havzhiva began, and stuck.

"Why did I leave? Where did I go?" She cocked
her head, bright-eyed as an araha, checking that
those were the questions he wanted answered. "Yes.
Well, I was crazy in love with Granite, but we had no
child, and he wanted a child. . . - You look like he
did then. I like to look at you. ... So, I was unhap-
py- Nothing here was any good to me. And I knew
how to do everything here. Or that's what I
thought."

Havzhiva nodded once.

"I worked at the temple. I'd read messages that
came in or came by and wonder what they were
about. I thought, all that's going on in the world!
Why should I stay here my whole life? Does my
mind have to stay here? So I began to talk with

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

some of them in other places in the temple: who
are you, what do you do, what is it like there. . . .
Right away they put me in touch with a group of
historians who were born in the pueblos, who look
out for people like me, to make sure they don't
waste time or offend a god."

This language was completely familiar to
Havzhiva, and he nodded again, intent.

"I asked them questions. They asked me ques-
tions. Historians have to do a lot of that, I found out
they have schools, and asked if I could go to one.
Some of them came here and talked to me and my
family and other people, finding out if there would
be trouble if I left. Stse is a conservative pueblo.
There hadn't been a historian from here for four
hundred years."

She smiled; she had a quick, catching smile, but
the young man listened with unchanging, intense
seriousness. Her look rested on his face tenderly.

"People here were upset, but nobody was angry.
So after they talked about it, I left with those people.
We flew to Kathhad. There's a school there. 1 was
twenty-two. I began a new education. I changed
being. I learned to be a historian."

"How?" he asked, after a long silence.

She drew a long breath. "By asking hard ques-
tions," she said. "Like you're doing now.... And by
giving up all the knowledge I had  throwing it
away."

"How?" he asked again, frowning. "Why?"

"Like this. When I left, I knew 1 was a Buried
Cable woman. When I was there, I had to unknow
that knowledge. There, I'm not a Buried Cable
woman. I'm a woman. I can have sex with any per-

3-hi   138   -i-*-

A Man of the People

son I choose. I can take up any profession I choose.
Lineage matters, here. It does not matter, there. It
has meaning here, and a use. It has no meaning and
no use, anywhere else in the universe." She was as
intense as he, now. "There are two kinds of knowl-
edge, local and universal. There are two kinds of
time, local and historical."

"Are there two kinds of gods?"

"No," she said. "There are no gods there. The
gods are here."

She saw his face change.

She said after a while, "There are souls, there.
Many, many souls, minds, minds full of knowledge
and passion. Living and dead. People who lived on
this earth a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thou-
sand years ago. Minds and souls of people from
worlds a hundred light-years from this one, all of
them with their own knowledge, their own history.
The world is sacred, Havzhiva. The cosmos is sacred.
That's not a knowledge I ever had to give up. All I
learned, here and there, only increased it. There's
nothing that is not sacred." She spoke slowly and
quietly, the way most people talked in the pueblo.
"You can choose the local sacredness or the great
one. In the end they're the same. But not in the life
one lives. To know there is a choice is to have to
make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.' The
Peoples are the rock. The historians are the river."

After a while he said, "Rocks are the river's bed."

She laughed. Her gaze rested on him again,
appraising and affectionate. "So I came home," she
said. "For a rest."

"But you're not  you're no longer a woman of
your lineage?"

^s> 139 ^

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Yes; here. Still. Always."

"But you've changed being. You'll leave again."

"Yes," she said decisively. "One can be more
than one kind of being. I have work to do, there."

He shook his head, slower, but equally decisive.
"What good is work without the gods? It makes no
sense to me, Mother of All Children. I don't have
the mind to understand."

She smiled at the double meaning. "I think
you'll understand what you choose to understand,
Man of my People," she said, addressing him for-
mally to show that he was free to leave when he
wanted.

He hesitated, then took his leave. He went to
work, filling his mind and world with the great
repeated patterns of the broadloom rugs.

That night he made it up to lyan lyan so ardent-
ly that she was left spent and a bit amazed. The god
had come back to them burning, consuming.

"1 want a child," Havzhiva said as they lay melded,
sweated together, arms and legs and breasts and
breath all mingled in the musky dark.

"Oh," lyan lyan sighed, not wanting to talk,
decide, resist. "Maybe . . . Later , . . Soon . .."

"Now," he said, "now."

"No," she said softly. "Hush."

He was silent. She slept.

More than a year later, when they were nineteen,
lyan lyan said to him before he put out the light, "I
want a baby."

"It's too soon."

"Why? My brother's nearly thirty. And his wife

J- 140 -x^s

A Man of the People

would like a baby around. After it's weaned I'll come
sleep with you at your house. You always said you'd
like that."

"It's too soon," he repeated. "I don't want it."

She turned to him, laying aside her coaxing,
reasonable tone. "What do you want, Havzhiva?"

"I don't know."

"You're going away. You're going to leave the
People. You're going crazy. That woman, that
damned witch!"

"There are no witches," he said coldly. "That's
stupid talk. Superstition."

They stared at each other, the dear friends, the
lovers.

"Then what's wrong with you? If you want to
move back home, say so. If you want another
woman, go to her. But you could give me my child,
first! when I ask you for it! Have you lost your
araha?" She gazed at him with tearful eyes, fierce,
unyielding.

He put his face in his hands. "Nothing is right,"
he said. "Nothing is right. Everything I do, I have to
do because that's how it's done, but it  it doesn't
make sense  there are other ways "

"There's one way to live rightly," lyan lyan said,
"that I know of. And this is where I live. There's one
way to make a baby. If you know another, you can
do it with somebody else!" She cried hard after this,
convulsively, the fear and anger of months breaking
out at last, and he held her to calm and comfort her.

When she could speak, she leaned her head
against him and said miserably, in a small, hoarse
voice, "To have when you go, Havzhiva."

At that he wept for shame and pity, and whis-

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

pered, "Yes, yes." But that night they lay holding
each other, trying to console each other, till they fell
asleep like children.

"I am ashamed," Granite said painfully.

"Did you make this happen?" his sister asked,
dry.

"How do I know? Maybe I did. First Mezha, now
my son. Was I too stern with him?"

"No, no."

"Too lax, then. I didn't teach him well. Why is
he crazy?"

"He isn't crazy, brother. Let me tell you what I
think. As a child he always asked why, why, the way
children do. I would answer: That's how it is, that's
how it's done. He understood. But his mind has no
peace. My mind is like that, if I don't remind myself.
Learning the Sun-stuff, he always asked, why thus?
why this way, not another way? I answered: Because
in what we do daily and in the way we do it, we
enact the gods. He said: Then the gods are only what
we do. I said: In what we do rightly, the gods are:

that is the truth. But he wasn't satisfied by the truth.
He isn't crazy, brother, but he is lame. He can't walk.
He can't walk with us. So, if a man can't walk, what
should he do?"

"Sit still and sing," Granite said slowly.

"If he can't sit still? He can fly."

"Fly?"

"They have wings for him, brother."

"1 am ashamed," Granite said, and hid his face
in his hands.

'-r*eS  142   3-^.S

A Man of the People

Tovo went to the temple and sent a message to
Mezha at Kathhad: "Your pupil wishes to join you."
There was some malice in the words. Tovo blamed
the historian for upsetting her son's balance, offcen-
tering him till, as she said, his soul was lamed. And
she was jealous of the woman who in a few days had
outdone the teachings of years. She knew she was
jealous and did not care. What did her jealousy or
her brother's humiliation matter? What they had to
do was grieve.

As the boat for Daha sailed away, Havzhiva looked
back and saw Stse: a quilt of a thousand shades of
green, the sea marshes, the pastures, fields,
hedgerows, orchards; the town clambering up the
bluffs above, pale granite walls, white stucco walls,
black tile roofs, wall above wall and roof above roof.
As it diminished it looked like a seabird perched
there, white and black, a bird on its nest. Above the
town the heights of the island came in view, grey-
blue moors and high, wild hills fading into the
clouds, white skeins of marsh birds Hying.

At the port in Daha, though he was farther from
Stse than he had ever been and people had a strange
accent, he could understand them and read the
signs. He had never seen signs before, but their use-
fulness was evident. Using them, he found his way
to the waiting room for the Kathhad flyer. People
were sleeping on the cots provided, in their own
blankets. He found an empty cot and lay on it,
wrapped in the blanket Granite had woven for him
years ago. After a short, strange night, people came
in with fruit and hot drinks. One of them gave

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

Havzhiva his ticket. None of the passengers knew
anyone else; they were all strangers; they kept their
eyes down. Announcements were made, and they
all went outside and went into the machine, the
flyer.

Havzhiva made himself look at the world as it
fell out from under him. He whispered the Staying
Chant soundlessly, steadily. The stranger in the seat
next to him joined in.

When the world began to tilt and rush up
towards him he shut his eyes and tried to keep
breathing.

One by one they filed out of the flyer onto a
flat, black place where it was raining. Mezha came to
him through the rain, saying his name. "Havzhiva,
Man of my People, welcome! Come on. There's a
place for you at the School."

Kathhad and Ve

By the third year at Kathhad Havzhiva knew a great
many things that distressed him. The old knowledge
had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all
paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new
knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no
sense.

For instance, he knew now that historians did
not study history. No human mind could encompass
the history of Hain; three million years of it. The
events of the first two million years, the Fore-Eras,
tike layers of metamorphic rock, were so com-
pressed, so distorted by the weight of the succeeding

A Man of the People

millennia and their infinite events that one could
reconstruct only the most sweeping generalities from
the tiny surviving details. And if one did chance to
find some miraculously preserved document from a
thousand millennia ago, what then? A king ruled in
Azbahan; the Empire fell to the Infidels; a fusion
rocket has landed on Ve. . . . But there had been
uncountable kings, empires, inventions, billions of
lives lived in millions of countries, monarchies,
democracies, oligarchies, anarchies, ages of chaos
and ages of order, pantheon upon pantheon of gods,
infinite wars and times of peace, incessant discoveries
and forgettings, innumerable horrors and triumphs,
an endless repetition of unceasing novelty. What is
the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at
any one moment, and then at the next moment,
and then at the next, and the next, and the next?
You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it
flows through this land, and we have named it
History.

To Havzhiva the knowledge that his life, any life
was one flicker of light for one moment on the sur-
face of that river was sometimes distressing, some-
times restful.

What the historians mostly did was explore, in an
easy and unhurried fashion, the local reach and
moment of the river, Hain itself had been for several
thousand years in an unexciting period marked by the
coexistence of small, stable, self-contained societies,
currently called pueblos, with a high-technology,
low-density network of cities and information cen-
ters, currently called the temple. Many of the people
of the temple, the historians, spent their lives trav-
eling to and gathering knowledge about the other

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

inhabited planets of the nearby Orion Arm,
colonised by their ancestors a couple of million
years ago during the Fore-Eras. They acknowledged
no motive in these contacts and explorations other
than curiosity and fellow-feeling. They were getting
in touch with their long-lost relatives. They called
that greater network of worlds by an alien word,
Ekumen, which meant "the household."

By now Havzhiva knew that everything he had
learned in Stse, all the knowledge he had had, could
be labeled: typical pueblo culture of northwestern
coastal South Continent. He knew that the beliefs,
practices, kinship systems, technologies, and intel-
lectual organising patterns of the different pueblos
were entirely different one from another, wildly dif-
ferent, totally bizarre  )ust as bizarre as the system
of Stse  and he knew that such systems were to be
met with on every Known World that contained
human populations living in small, stable groups
with a technology adapted to their environment, a
low, constant birth rate, and a political life based on
consent.

At first such knowledge had been intensely dis-
tressing. It had been painful. It had made him
ashamed and angry. First he thought the historians
kept their knowledge from the pueblos, then he
thought the pueblos kept knowledge from their own
people. He accused; his teachers mildly denied. No,
they said. You were taught that certain things were
true, or necessary; and those things are true and nec-
essary. They are the local knowledge of Stse.

They are childish, irrational beliefs' he said.
They looked at him, and he knew he had said some-
thing childish and irrational.

s^-s 146 x**s

A Man of the People

Local knowledge is not partial knowledge, they
said. There are different ways of knowing. Each has
its own qualities, penalties, rewards. Historical
knowledge and scientific knowledge are a way of
knowing. Like local knowledge, they must be
learned- The way they know in the Household isn't
taught in the pueblos, but it wasn't hidden from
you, by your people or by us- Everybody anywhere
on Hain has access to all the information in the tem-
ple.

This was true; he knew it to be true- He could
have found out for himself, on the screens of the
temple of Stse, what he was learning now. Some of
his fellow students from other pueblos had indeed
taught themselves how to learn from the screens,
and had entered history before they ever met a his-
torian.

Books, however, books that were the body of his-
tory, the durable reality of it, barely existed'in Stse,
and his anger sought justification there. You keep the
books from us, all the books in the Library of Hain!
No, they said mildly. The pueblos choose not to have
many books. They prefer the live knowledge, spoken
or passing on the screens, passing from the breath to
the breath, from living mind to living mind. Would
you give up what you learned that way? Is it less than,
is it inferior to what you've learned here from books?
There's more than one kind of knowledge, said the
historians.

By his third year, Havzhiva had decided that
there was more than one kind of people. The
pueblans, able to accept that existence is fundamen-
tally arbitrary, enriched the world intellectually and
spiritually. Those who couldn't be satisfied with

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

mystery were more likely to be of use as historians,
enriching the world intellectually and materially.

Meanwhile he had got quite used to people who
had no lineage, no relatives, and no religion.
Sometimes he said to himself with a glow of pride, "I
am a citizen of all history, of the millions of years of
Hainish history, and my country is the whole
galaxy!" At other times he felt miserably small, and
he would leave his screens or his books and go look
for company among his fellow students, especially
the young women who were so friendly, so compan-
ionable.

At the age of twenty-four Havzhiva, or Zhiv as he
was now called, had been at the Ekumenicat School
on Ve for a year.

Ve, the next planet out from Hain, was
colonised eons ago, the first step in the vast Hainish
expansion of the Fore-Eras. It has gone through
many phases as a satellite or partner of Hainish civ-
ilizations; at this period it is inhabited entirely by
historians and Aliens.

In their current (that is, for at least the past hun-
dred millennia) mood of not tampering, the Hainish
have let Ve return to its own norms of coldness, dry-
ness, and bleakness  a climate within human tol-
erance, but likely to truly delight only people from
the Terran Altiplano or the uplands of Chiffewar.
Zhiv was out hiking through this stem landscape
with his companion, friend, and lover, Tiu.

They had met two years before, in Kathhad- At
that point Zhiv had still been reveling in the avail-
ability of all women to himself and himself to all

r*.s 148 s-s-

A Man of the People

women, a freedom that had only gradually dawned
on him, and about which Mezha had warned him
gently. "You will think there are no rules," she said.
"There are always rules." He had been conscious
mainly of his own increasingly fearless and careless
transgression of what had been the rules- Not all the
women wanted to have sex, and not all the women
wanted to have sex with men, as he had soon dis-
covered, but that still left an infinite variety. He
found that he was considered attractive. And being
Hainish was a definite advantage with the Alien
women.

The genetic alteration that made the Hainish
able to control their fertility was not a simple bit of
gene-splicing; involving a profound and radical
reconstruction of human physiology, it had proba-
bly taken up to twenty-five generations to establish
 so say the historians of Hain, who think they
know in general terms the steps such a transforma-
tion must have followed. However the ancient
Hainish did it, they did not do it for any of their
colonists. They left the peoples of their colony
worlds to work out their own solutions to the First
Heterosexual Problem. These have been, of course,
various and ingenious; but in all cases so far, to
avoid conception you have to do something or have
done something or take something or use some-
thing  unless you have sex with the Hainish.

Zhiv had been outraged when a girl from
Beldene asked him if he was sure he wouldn't get
her pregnant. "How do you know?" she said. "Maybe
I should take a zapper just to be safe." Insulted in the
quick of his manhood, he disentangled himself,
said, "Maybe it is only safe not to be with me," and

s^s 149 tCT-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

stalked out. Nobody else questioned his integrity,
fortunately, and he cruised happily on, until he met
Tiu.

She was not an Alien. He had sought out
women from offworld; sleeping with Aliens added
exoticism to transgression, or, as he put it, was an
enrichment of knowledge such as every historian
should seek- But Tiu was Hainish. She had been born
and brought up in Darranda, as had her ancestors
before her. She was a child of the Historians as he
was a child of the People. He realised very soon that
this bond and division was far greater than any mere
foreignness: that their unlikeness was true difference
and their likeness was true kinship. She was the
country he had left his own country to discover. She
was what he sought to be. She was what he sought.

What she had  so it seemed to him  was per-
fect equilibrium. When he was with her he felt that
for the first time in his life he was learning to walk.
To walk as she did: effortless, unself-conscious as an
animal, and yet conscious, careful, keeping in mind
alt that might unbalance her and using it as
tightrope walkers use their long poles. . . . This, he
thought, this is a dweller in true freedom of mind,
this is a woman free to be fully human, this perfect
measure, this perfect grace.

He was utterly happy when he was with her. For
a long time he asked nothing beyond that, to be
with her. And for a long time she was wary of him,
gentle but distant. He thought she had every right
to keep her distance. A pueblo boy, a fellow who
couldn't tell his uncle from his father  he knew
what he was, here, in the eyes of the ill-natured and
the insecure. Despite their vast knowledge of human

svs 150 "<

A Man of the People

ways of being, historians retained the vast human
capacity for bigotry. Tiu had no such prejudices, but
what did he have to offer her? She had and was
everything. She was complete. Why should she look
at him? If she would only let him look at her, be
with her, it was all he wanted.

She looked at him, liked him, found him
appealing and a little frightening. She saw how he
wanted her, how he needed her, how he had made
her into the center of his life and did not even know
it. That would not do. She tried to be cold, to turn
him away. He obeyed. He did not plead. He stayed
away.

But after fifteen days he came to her and said,
"Tiu, I cannot live without you," and knowing that
he was speaking the plain truth she said. "Then live
with me a while/' For she had missed the passion his
presence filled the air with. Everybody else seemed
so tame, so balanced.

Their lovemaking was an.immediate, immense,
and continual delight. Tiu was amazed at herself, at
her obsession with Zhiv, at her letting him pull her
out of her orbit so far. She had never expected to
adore anybody, let alone to be adored. She had led
an orderly life, in which the controls were individ-
ual and internal, not social and external as they had
been in Zhiv's life in Stse. She knew what she wanted
to be and do. There was a direction in her, a true
north, that she would always follow. Their first year
together was a series of continual shifts and changes
in their relationship, a kind of exciting love dance,
unpredictable and ecstatic. Very gradually, she
began to resist the tension, the intensity, the ecsta-
sy. It was lovely but it wasn't right, she thought. She

("^   151   St-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

wanted to go on. That constant direction began to
pull her away from him again; and then he fought
for his life against it.

That was what he was doing, after a long day's
hike in the Desert of Asu Asi on Ve, in their miracu-
lously warm Gethenian-made tent. A dry, icy wind
moaned among cliffs of crimson stone above them,
polished by the endless winds to a shine like lacquer
and carved by a lost civilization with lines of some
vast geometry.

They might have been brother and sister, as
they sat in the glow of the Cnabe stove: their red-
bronze coloring was the same, their thick, glossy,
black hair, their fine, compact body type. The
pueblan decorum and quietness of Zhiv's move-
ments and voice met in her an articulate, quicker,
more vivid response.

But she spoke now slowly, almost stiffly.

"Don't force me to choose, Zhiv," she said. "Ever
since I started in the Schools I've wanted to go to
Terra. Since before. When I was a kid. All my life.
Now they offer me what I want, what I've worked
for. How can you ask me to refuse?"

"I don't."

"But you want me to put it off. If I do, I may lose
the chance forever. Probably not. But why risk it 
for one year? You can follow me next year!"

He said nothing.

"If you want to," she added stiffly. She was
always too ready to forgo her claim on him. Perhaps
she had never believed fully in his love for her. She
did not think of herself as lovable, as worthy of his
passionate loyalty. She was frightened by it, felt
inadequate, false. Her self-respect was an intellectu-

^s 152 ---s'

A Man of the People

al thing. "You make a god of me," she had told him,
and did not understand when he replied with happy
seriousness, "We make the god together."

"I'm sorry," he said now. "It's a different form of
reason. Superstition, if you like. I can't help it, Tiu.
Terra is a hundred and forty light-years away. If you
go, when you get there, I'll be dead."

"You will not! You'll have lived another year
here, you'll be on your way there, you'll arrive a year
after I do!"

"I know that. Even in Stse we teamed that," he
said patiently. "But I'm superstitious. We die to each
other if you go. Even in Kathhad you learned that."

"I didn't. It's not true. How can you ask me to
give up this chance for what you admit is a supersti-
tion? Be fair, Zhiv!"

After a long silence, he nodded.

She sat stricken, understanding that she had
won. She had won badly.

She reached across to him, trying to comfort
him and herself. She was scared by the darkness in
him, his grief, his mute acceptance of betrayal. But
it wasn't betrayal  she rejected the word at once.
She wouldn't betray him. They were in love. They
loved each other. He would follow her in a year, two
years at the most. They were adults, they must not
cling together like children. Adult relationships are
based on mutual freedom, mutual trust. She told
herself all these things as she said them to him. He
said yes, and held her, and comforted her. In the
night, in the utter silence of the desert, the blood
singing in his ears, he lay awake and thought, "It
has died unborn. It was never conceived."

They stayed together in their little apartment at

-rMs  153 ^'-s'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

the School for the few more weeks before Tiu left.
They made love cautiously, gently, talked about his-
tory and economics and ethnology, kept busy. Tiu
had to prepare herself to work with the team she was
going with, studying the Terran concepts of hierar-
chy; Zhiv had a paper to write on social-energy gen-
eration on Werel. They worked hard. Their friends
gave Tiu a big farewell party. The next day Zhiv went
with her to Ve Port. She kissed and held him, telling
him to hurry, hurry and come to Terra. He saw her
board the flyer that would take her up to the NAFAL
ship waiting in orbit. He went back to the apartment
on the South Campus of the School. There a friend
found him three days later sitting at his desk in a
curious condition, passive, speaking very slowly if at
all, unable to eat or drink. Being pueblo-born, the
friend recognised this state and called in the medi-
cine man (the Hainish do not call them doctors).
Having ascertained that he was from one of the
Southern pueblos, the medicine man said,
"Havzhiva! The god cannot die in you here!"

After a long silence the young man said softly in
a voice which did not sound like his voice, "I need
to go home."

"That is not possible now," said the medicine
man. "But we can arrange a Staying Chant while I
find a person able to address the god." He promptly
put out a call for students who were ex-People of
the South- Four responded. They sat all night with
Havzhiva singing the Staying Chant in two lan-
guages and four dialects, until Havzhiva joined
them in a fifth dialect, whispering the words hoarse-
ly, till he collapsed and slept for thirty hours.

He woke in his own room. An old woman was

J-^S 154 T^S>

A Man of the People

having a conversation with nobody beside him. "You
aren't here," she said. "No, you are mistaken. You
can't die here. It would not be right, it would be
quite wrong. You know that. This is the wrong place.
This is the wrong life. You know that! What are you
doing here? Are you lost? Do you want to know the
way home? Here it is. Listen." She began singing in a
thin, high voice, an almost tuneless, almost wordless
song that was familiar to Havzhiva, as if he had
heard it long ago. He fell asleep again while the old
woman went on talking to nobody.

When he woke again she was gone. He never
knew who she was or where she came from; he
never asked- She had spoken and sung in his own
language, in the dialect of Stse-

He was not going to die now, but he was very
unwell. The medicine man ordered him to the
Hospital at Tes, the most beautiful place on all Ve, an
oasis where hot springs and sheltering hills make a
mild local climate and flowers and forests can grow.
There are paths endlessly winding under great trees,
warm lakes where you can swim forever, little misty
ponds from which birds rise crying, steam-shrouded
hot springs, and a thousand waterfalls whose voices
are the only sound all night. There he was sent to stay
till he was recovered.

He began to speak into his noter, after he had
been at Tes twenty days or so; he would sit in the
sunlight on the doorstep of his cottage in a glade of
grasses and ferns and talk quietly to himself by way
of the little recording machine. "What you select
from, in order to tell your story, is nothing less than
everything," he said, watching the branches of the
old trees dark against the sky. "What you build up

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

your world from, your local, intelligible, rational,
coherent world, is nothing less than everything.
And so all selection is arbitrary. All knowledge is par-
tial  infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown
out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a frag-
ment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
All human knowledge is local. Every life, each
human life, is local, is arbitrary, the infinitesimal
momentary glitter of a reflection of . . ." His voice
ceased; the silence of the glade among the great
trees continued.

After forty-five days he returned to the School.
He took a new apartment. He changed fields, leav-
ing social science, Tiu's field, for Ekumenical service
training, which was intellectually closely related but
led to a different kind of work. The change would
lengthen his time at the School by at least a year,
after which if he did well he could hope for a post
with the Ekumen. He did well, and after two years
was asked, in the polite fashion of the Ekumenical
councils, if he would care to go to Werel. Yes, he
said, he would. His friends gave a big farewell party
for him.

"I thought you were aiming for Terra," said one
of his less-astute classmates. "All that stuff about war
and slavery and class and caste and gender  isn't
that Terran history?"

"It's current events in Werel," Havzhiva said.

He was no longer Zhiv. He had come back from
the Hospital as Havzhiva.

Somebody else was stepping on the unastute
classmate's foot, but she paid no attention. "I
thought you were going to follow Tiu," she said. "
I thought that's why you never slept with anybody.

37-B   156   SS^>

A Man of the People

God, if I'd only known!" The others winced, but
Havzhiva smiled and hugged her apologetically.

In his own mind it was quite clear. As he had
betrayed and forsaken lyan lyan, so Tiu had
betrayed and forsaken him. There was no going back
and no going forward. So he must turn aside.
Though he was one of them, he could no longer
live with the People; though he had become one of
them, he did not want to live with the historians. So
he must go live among Aliens.

He had no hope of joy. He had bungled that, he
thought. But he knew that the two long, intense dis-
ciplines that had filled his life, that of the gods and
that of history, had given him an uncommon
knowledge, which might be of use somewhere; and
he knew that the right use of knowledge is fulfill-
ment.

The medicine man came to visit him the day
before he left, checked him over, and then sat for a
while saying nothing. Havzhiva sat with him. He
had long been used to silence, and still sometimes
forgot that it was not customary among historians.

"What's wrong?" the medicine man said. It
seemed to be a rhetorical question, from its medita-
tive tone; at any rate, Havzhiva made no answer.

"Please stand up," the medicine man said, and
when Havzhiva had done so, "Now walk a tittle." He
walked a few steps; the medicine man observed him.
"You're out of balance," he said. "Did you know it?"

"Yes."

"I could get a Staying Chant together this
evening."

"It's all right," Havzhiva said. "I've always been
off-balance."

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

"There's no need to be," the medicine man said.
"On the other hand, maybe it's best, since you're
going to Werel. So: Good-bye for this life."

They embraced formally, as historians did, espe-
cially when as now it was absolutely certain that
they would never see one another again. Havzhiva
had to give and get a good many formal embraces
that day. The next day he boarded the Terraces of
Darranda and went across the darkness.

Yeowe

During his journey of eighty light-years at NAFAL
speed, his mother died, and his father, and lyan lyan,
everyone he had known in Stse, everyone he knew in
Kathhad and on Ve. By the time the ship landed,
they had all been dead for years. The child lyan lyan
had borne had lived and grown old and died.

This was a knowledge he had lived with ever
since he saw Tiu board her ship, leaving him to die.
Because of the medicine man, the four people who
had sung for him, the old woman, and the waterfalls
ofTes, he had lived; but he had lived with that knowl-
edge.

Other things had changed as well. At the time
he left Ve, Werel's colony planet Yeowe had been a
slave world, a huge work camp. By the time he
arrived on Werel, the War of Liberation was over,
Yeowe had declared its independence, and the insti-
tution of slavery on Werel itself was beginning to
disintegrate.

Havzhiva longed to observe this terrible and

ffcs. 158 ^*e>

A Man of the People

magnificent process, but the Embassy sent him
promptly off to Yeowe. A Hainishman called
Sohikelwenyanmurkeres Esdardon Aya counseled
him before he left. "If you want danger, it's danger-
ous," he said, "and if you like hope, it's hopeful.
Werel is unmaking itself, while Yeowe's trying to
make itself. I don't know if it's going to succeed. I
tell you what, Yehedarhed Havzhiva: there are great
gods loose on these worlds."

Yeowe had got rid of its Bosses, its Owners, the
Four Corporations who had run the vast slave plan-
tations for three hundred years; but though the thir-
ty years of the War of Liberation were over, the
fighting had not stopped. Chiefs and warlords
among the slaves who had risen to power during the
Liberation now fought to keep and extend their
power. Factions had battled over the question of
whether to kick all foreigners off the planet forever
or to admit Aliens and join the Ekumen. The isola-
tionists had finally been voted down, and there was
a new Ekumenical Embassy in the old colonial capi-
tal. Havzhiva spent a while there learning "the lan-
guage and the table manners," as they said. Then
the Ambassador, a clever young Terran named Solly,
sent him south to the region called Yotebber, which
was clamoring for recognition.

History is infamy, Havzhiva thought as he rode
the train through the ruined landscapes of the
world.

The Werelian capitalists who colonised the
planet had exploited it and their slaves recklessly,
mindlessly, in a long orgy of profit-making. It takes
a while to spoil a world, but it can be done. Strip-
mining and single-crop agriculture had defaced and

^s 159 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

sterilised the earth. The rivers were polluted, dead.
Huge dust storms darkened the eastern horizon.

The Bosses had run their plantations by force
and fear. For over a century they had shipped male
slaves only, worked them till they died, imported
fresh ones as needed. Work gangs in these all-male
compounds developed into tribal hierarchies. At last,
as the price of slaves on Werel and the cost of ship-
ping rose, the Corporations began to buy bonds
women for Yeowe Colony. So over the next two cen-
turies the slave population grew, and slave-cities were
founded, "Assetvilles" and "Dustytowns" spreading
out from the old compounds of the plantations.
Havzhiva knew that the Liberation movement had
arisen first among the women in the tribal com-
pounds, a rebellion against male domination, before
it became a war of all slaves against their owners.

The slow train stopped in city after city: miles of
shacks and cabins, treeless, whole tracts bombed or
burnt out in the war and not yet rebuilt; factories,
some of them gutted ruins, some functioning but
ancient-looking, rattletrap, smoke-belching. At each
station hundreds of people got off the train and
onto it, swarming, crowding, shouting out bribes to
the porters, clambering up onto the roofs of the cars,
brutally shoved off again by uniformed guards and
policemen. In the north of the long continent, as on
Werel, he had seen many black-skinned people,
blue-black; but as the train went farther south there
were fewer of these, until in Yotebber the people in
the villages and on the desolate sidings were much
paler than he was, a bluish, dusty color. These were
the "dust people," the descendants of a hundred
generations of Werelian slaves.

-^si 160 ^-s

A Man of the People

Yotebber had been an early center of the
Liberation. The Bosses had made reprisal with
bombs and poison gas; thousands of people had
died. Whole towns had been burned to get rid of the
unburied dead, human and animal. The mouth of
the great river had been dammed with rotting bod-
ies- But all that was past. Yeowe was free, a new
member of the Ekumen of the Worlds, and Havzhiva
in the capacity of Sub-Envoy was on his way to help
the people of Yotebber Region to begin their new
history. Or from the point of view of a Hainishman,
to rejoin their ancient history.

He was met at the station in Yotebber City by a
large crowd surging and cheering and yelling
behind barricades manned by policemen and sol-
diers; in front of the barricades was a delegation of
officials wearing splendid robes and sashes of office
and variously ornate uniforms: big men, most of
them, dignified, very much public figures. There
were speeches of welcome, reporters and photogra-
phers for the holonet and the neareal news. It
wasn't a circus, however- The big men were definite-
ly in control. They wanted their guest to know he
was welcome, he was popular, he was  as the Chief
said in his brief, impressive speech  the Envoy
from the Future.

That night in his luxurious suite in an Owner's
city mansion converted to a hotel, Havzhiva
thought: If they knew that their man from the
future grew up in a pueblo and never saw a neareal
till he came here ...

He hoped he would not disappoint these peo-
ple. From the moment he had first met them on
Werel he had liked them, despite their monstrous

-^-s 161 ^g>

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

society. They were full of vitality and pride, and here
on Yeowe they were full of dreams of justice.
Havzhiva thought of justice what an ancient Terran
said of another god: I believe in it because it is
impossible. He slept well, and woke early in the
warm, bright morning, full of anticipation. He
walked out to begin to get to know the city, his city-

The doorman  it was disconcerting to find
that people who had fought so desperately for their
freedom had servants  the doorman tried hard to
get him to wait for a car, a guide, evidently dis-
tressed at the great man's going out so early, afoot,
without a retinue. Havzhiva explained that he
wanted to walk and was quite able to walk alone. He
set off, leaving the unhappy doorman calling after
him, "Oh, sir, please, avoid the City Park, sir!"

Havzhiva obeyed, thinking the park must be
closed for a ceremony or replanting. He came on a
plaza where a market was in full swing, and there
found himself likely to become the center of a
crowd; people inevitably noticed him. He wore the
handsome Yeowan clothes, singlet, breeches, a light
narrow robe, but he was the only person with red-
brown skin in a city of four hundred thousand peo-
ple. As soon as they saw his skin, his eyes, they knew
him: the Alien. So he slipped away from the market
and kept to quiet residential streets, enjoying the
soft, warm air and the decrepit, charming colonial
architecture of the houses. He stopped to admire an.
ornate Tualite temple. It looked rather shabby and
desolate, but there was, he saw, a fresh offering of
flowers at the feet of the image of the Mother at the
doorway. Though her nose had been knocked off
during the war, she smiled serenely, a little cross-

T^K 162 -^s

A Man of the People

eyed. People called out behind him. Somebody said
close to him, "Foreign shit, get off our world," and
his arm was seized as his legs were kicked out from
under him. Contorted faces, screaming, closed in
around him. An enormous, sickening cramp seized
his body, doubling him into a red darkness of strug-
gle and voices and pain, then a dizzy shrinking and
dwindling away of light and sound.

An old woman was sitting by him, whispering an
almost tuneless song that seemed dimly familiar.

She was knitting. For a long time she did not
look at him; when she did she said, "Ah." He had
trouble making his eyes focus, but he made out that
her face was bluish, a pale bluish tan, and there were
no whites to her dark eyes.

She rearranged some kind of apparatus that was
attached to him somewhere, and said, "I'm the med-
icine woman  the nurse. You have a concussion, a
slight skull fracture, a bruised kidney, a broken
shoulder, and a knife wound in your gut; but you'll
be all right; don't worry." All this was in a foreign
language, which he seemed to understand. At least
he understood "don't worry," and obeyed.

He thought he was on the Terraces ofDananda
in NAFAL mode. A hundred years passed in a bad
dream but did not pass. People and clocks had no
faces. He tried to whisper the Staying Chant and it
had no words. The words were gone. The old
woman took his hand. She held his hand and
slowly, slowly brought him back into time, into
local time, into the dim, quiet room where she sat
knitting.

.Tt^S 163 ^*-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

It was morning, hot, bright sunlight in the win-
dow. The Chief of Yotebber Region stood by his bed-
side, a tower of a man in white-and-crimson robes.

"I'm very sorry," Havzhiva said, slowly and
thickly because his mouth was damaged. "It was stu-
pid of me to go out alone. The fault was entirely
mine."

"The villains have been caught and will be tried
in a court of justice," said the Chief.

"They were young men," Havzhiva said- "My
ignorance and folly caused the incident "

"They will be punished," the Chief said.

The day nurses always had the holoscreen up
and watched the news and the dramas as they sat
with him. They kept the sound down, and Havzhiva
could ignore it. It was a hot afternoon; he was
watching faint clouds move slowly across the sky,
when the nurse said, using the formal address to a
person of high status, "Oh, quick  if the gentle-
man will look, he can see the punishment of the bad
men who attacked him!"

Havzhiva obeyed. He saw a thin human body
suspended by the feet, the arms and hands twitch-
ing, the intestines hanging down over the chest and
face- He cried out aloud and hid his face in his arm.
"Turn it off," he said, "turn it off!" He retched and
gasped for air. "You are not people!" he cried in his
own language, the dialect of Stse. There was some
coming and going in the room. The noise of a.
yelling crowd ceased abruptly. He got control of his
breath and lay with his eyes shut, repeating one
phrase of the Staying Chant over and over until his
mind and body began to steady and find a little bal-
ance somewhere, not much.

^e> 164 "s

A Man of the People

They came with food; he asked them to take it
away.

The room was dim, lit only by a night-light
somewhere low on the wall and the lights of the city
outside the window. The old woman, the night
nurse, was there, knitting in the half dark.

"I'm sorry," Havzhiva said at random, knowing
he didn't know what he had said to them.

"Oh, Mr. Envoy," the old woman said with a
long sigh. "I read about your people. The Hainish
people. You don't do things like we do. You don't
torture and kill each other. You live in peace-1 won-
der, I wonder what we seem to you. Like witches,
like devils, maybe,"

"No," he said, but he swallowed down another
wave of nausea.

"When you feel better, when you're stronger,
Mr. Envoy, I have a thing I want to speak to you
about." Her voice was quiet and full of an absolute,
easy authority, which probably could become for-
mal and formidable. He had known people who
talked that way all his life.

"I can listen now," he said, but she said, "Not
now. Later. You are tired. Would you like me to
sing?"

"Yes," he said, and she sat and knitted and sang
voicelessly, tunelessly, in a whisper. The names of
her gods were in the song: Tual, Kamye, They are
not my gods, he thought, but he closed his eyes and
slept, safe in the rocking balance.

Her name was Yeron, and she was not old. She was
forty-seven. She had been through a thirty-year war

3-^SI 165  SVS

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

and several famines. She had artificial teeth, some-
thing Havzhiva had never heard of, and wore eye-
glasses with wire frames; body mending was not
unknown on Werel, but on Yeowe most people
couldn't afford it, she said. She was very thin, and
her hair was thin. She had a proud bearing, but
moved stiffly from an old wound in the left hip.
"Everybody, everybody in this world has a bullet in
them, or whipping scars, or a leg blown off, or a
dead baby in their heart," she said. "Now you're one
of us, Mr- Envoy. You've been through the fire."

He was recovering well. There were five or six
medical specialists on his case. The Regional Chief
visited every few days and sent officials daily. The
Chief was, Havzhiva realised, grateful. The outra-
geous attack on a representative of the Ekumen had
given him the excuse and strong popular support for
a strike against the diehard isolationist World Party
led by his rival, another warlord hero of the
Liberation. He sent glowing reports of his victories
to the Sub-Envoy's hospital room. The holonews
was all of men in uniforms running, shooting, flyers
buzzing over desert hills. As he walked the halls,
gaining strength, Havzhiva saw patients lying in bed
in the wards wired in to the neareat net, "experienc-
ing" the fighting, from the point of view, of course,
of the ones with guns, the ones with cameras, the
ones who shot.

At night the screens were dark, the nets were
down, and Yeron came and sat by him in the dim
light from the window.

"You said there was something you had to tell
me," he said. The city night was restless, full of
noises, music, voices down in the street below the

.s*ssi 166 ^<~

A Man of the People

window she had opened wide to let in the warm,
many-scented air.

"Yes, I did." She put her knitting down. "I am
your nurse, Mr. Envoy, but also a messenger. When
I heard you'd been hurt, forgive me, but I said,
'Praise the Lord Kamye and the Lady of Mercy!'
Because I had not known how to bring my message
to you, and now I knew how." Her quiet voice
paused a minute. "I ran this hospital for fifteen
years. During the war. I can still pull a few strings
here." Again she paused. Like her voice, her silences
were familiar to him. "I'm a messenger to the
Ekumen," she said, "from the women. Women here.
Women all over Yeowe. We want to make an alliance
with you. ... I know, the government already did
that. Yeowe is a member of the Ekumen of the
Worlds. We know that. But what does it mean? To
us? It means nothing. Do you know what women
are, here, in this world? They are nothing. They are
not part of the government. Women made the
Liberation. They worked and they died for it just like
the men. But they weren't generals, they aren't
chiefs. They are nobody. In the villages they are less
than nobody, they are work animals, breeding stock.
Here it's some better. But not good. I was trained in
the Medical School at Besso. I am a doctor, not a
nurse. Under the Bosses, I ran this hospital. Now a
man runs it. Our men are the owners now. And
we're what we always were. Property. I don't think
that's what we fought the long war for. Do you, Mr.
Envoy? I think what we have is a new liberation to
make. We have to finish the job."

After a long silence, Havzhiva asked softly, "Are
you organised?"

VtWS      167       T^iS

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes! Just like the old days. We can
organise in the dark!" She laughed a little. "But I
don't think we can win freedom for ourselves alone
by ourselves alone. There has to be a change. The
men think they have to be bosses. They have to stop
thinking that. Well, one thing we have learned in
my lifetime, you don't change a mind with a gun.
You kill the boss and you become the boss. We must
change that mind. The old slave mind, boss mind.
We have got to change it, Mr. Envoy. With your
help. The Ekumen's help."

"I'm here to be a link between your people and
the Ekumen. But I'll need time," he said. "I need to
learn."

"All the time in the world. We know we can't
turn the boss mind around in a day or a year. This is
a matter of education." She said the word as a sacred
word. "It will take a long time. You take your time.
If we just know that you will listen."

"I will listen," he said.

She drew a long breath, took up her knitting
again. Presently she said, "It won't be easy to hear
us."

He was tired. The intensity of her talk was more
than he could yet handle. He did not know what she
meant. A polite silence is the adult way of signifying
that one doesn't understand. He said nothing.

She looked at him- "How are we to come to you?
You see, that's a problem. I tell you, we are nothing-
We can come to you only as your nurse. Your house-
maid. The woman who washes your clothes. We
don't mix with the chiefs. We aren't on the councils.
We wait on table. We don't eat the banquet."

"Tell me " he hesitated. "Tell me how to start.

TW  168   T*-SI

A Man of the People

Ask to see me if you can. Come as you can, as it...
if it's safe?" He had always been quick to learn his
lessons. "I'll listen. I'll do what I can." He would
never learn much distrust.

She leaned over and kissed him very gently on
the mouth. Her lips were light, dry, soft.

"There," she said, "no chief will give you that."

She took up her knitting again. He was half-
asleep when she asked, "Your mother is living, Mr.
Havzhiva?"

"All my people are dead."

She made a little soft sound. "Bereft," she said.
"And no wife?"

"No."

"We will be your mothers, your sisters, your
daughters. Your people. I kissed you for that love that
will be between us. You will see."

"The list of the persons invited to the reception, Mr.
Yehedarhed," said Doranden, the Chiefs chief liai-
son to the Sub-Envoy.

Havzhiva looked through the list on the hand-
screen carefully, ran it past the end, and said,
"Where is the rest?"

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Envoy  are there omissions?
This is the entire list."

"But these are all men."

In the infinitesimal silence before Doranden
replied, Havzhiva felt the balance of his life poised.

"You wish the guests to bring their wives? Of
course! If this is the Ekumenical custom, we shall be
delighted to invite the ladies!"

There was something lip-smacking in the way

^s 169 T-^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Yeowan men said "the ladies," a word which
Havzhiva had thought was applied only to women
of the owner class on Werel. The balance dipped.
"What ladies?" he asked, frowning. "I'm talking
about women. Do they have no part in this soci-
ety?"

He became very nervous as he spoke, for he
now knew his ignorance of what constituted danger
here. If a walk on a quiet street could be nearly
fatal, embarrassing the Chief's liaison might be
completely so. Doranden was certainly embarrassed 
floored. He opened his mouth and shut it.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Doranden," Havzhiva said,
"please pardon my poor efforts at jocosity. Of course
I know that women have all kinds of responsible
positions in your society. I was merely saying, in a
stupidly unfortunate manner, that I should be very
glad to have such women and their husbands, as
well as the wives of these guests, attend the recep-
tion. Unless I am truly making an enormous blunder
concerning your customs? I thought you did not
segregate the sexes socially, as they do on Werel.
Please, if I was wrong, be so kind as to excuse the
ignorant foreigner once again."

Loquacity is half of diplomacy, Havzhiva had
already decided. The other half is silence.

Doranden availed himself of the latter option,
and with a few earnest reassurances got himself
away. Havzhiva remained nervous until the follow-
ing morning, when Doranden reappeared with a
revised list containing eleven new names, all female.
There was a school principal and a couple of teach-
ers; the rest were marked "retired."

"Splendid, splendid!" said Havzhiva. "May I add

^ 170 ^

A Man of the People

one more name?"  Of course, of course, anyone
Your Excellency desires  "Dr. Yecon," he said.

Again the infinitesimal silence, the grain of dust
dropping on the scales. Doranden knew that name.
"Yes," he said.

"Dr. Yeron nursed me, you know. at your excel-
lent hospital. We became friends. An ordinary nurse
might not be an appropriate guest among such very
distinguished people; but 1 see there are several
other doctors on our list."

"Quite," said Doranden. He seemed bemused.
The Chief and his people had become used to patro-
nising the Sub-Envoy, ever so slightly and politely. An
invalid, though now well recovered; a victim; a man
of peace, ignorant of attack and even of self-defense;

a scholar, a foreigner, unworldly in every sense: they
saw him as something like that, he knew. Much as
they valued him as a symbol and as a means to their
ends, they thought him an insignificant man. He
agreed with them as to the fact, but not as to the qual-
ity, of his insignificance- He knew that what he did
might signify. He had just seen it.

"Surely you understand the reason for having a
bodyguard, Envoy," the General said with some
impatience.

"This is a dangerous city. General Denkam, yes, I
understand that. Dangerous for everyone. 1 see on the
net that gangs of young men, such as those who
attacked me, roam the streets quite beyond the control
of the police. Every child, every woman needs a body-
guard- I should be distressed to know that the safety
which is every citizen's right was my special privilege."

^ 171 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

The General blinked but stuck to his guns. "We
can't let you get assassinated," he said.

Havzhiva loved the bluntness of Yeowan hon-
esty. "I don't want to be assassinated," he said. "I
have a suggestion, sir. There are policewomen,
female members of the city police force, are there
not? Find me bodyguards among them. After all,
an armed woman is as dangerous as an armed
man, isn't she? And I should like to honor the
great part women played in winning Yeowe's free-
dom, as the Chief said so eloquently in his talk
yesterday."

The General departed with a face of cast iron.

Havzhiva did not particularly like his body-
guards. They were hard, tough women, unfriendly,
speaking a dialect he could hardly understand.
Several of them had children at home, but they
refused to talk about their children. They were
fiercely efficient. He was well protected. He saw
when he went about with these cold-eyed escorts
that he began to be looked at differently by the city
crowds: with amusement and a kind of fellow-
feeling. He heard an old man in the market say,
"That fellow has some sense."

Everybody called the Chief the Chief except to his
face. "Mr. President," Havzhiva said, "the question
really isn't one of Ekumenical principles or Hainish
customs at all. None of that is or should be of the
least weight, the least importance, here on Yeowe.
This is your world."

The Chief nodded once, massively.

"Into which," said Havzhiva, by now insuperably

yy^s, 172   ^

A Man of the People

loquacious, "immigrants are beginning to come from
Were! now, and many, many more will come, as the
Werelian ruling class tries to lessen revolutionary
pressure by allowing increasing numbers of the
underclass to emigrate. You, sir, know far better than
1 the opportunities and the problems that this great
influx of population will cause here in Yotebber. Now
of course at least half the immigrants will be female,
and I think it worth considering that there is a very
considerable difference between Werel and Yeowe in
what is called the construction of gender  the roles,
the expectations, the behavior, the relationships of
men and women. Among the Werelian immigrants
most of the decision-makers, the people of authority,
will be female. The Council of the Hame is about
nine-tenths women, I believe. Their speakers and
negotiators are mostly women. These people are com-
ing into a society governed and represented entirely
by men. I think there is the possibility of misunder-
standings and conflict, unless-the situation is careful-
ly considered beforehand. Perhaps the use of some
women as representatives  "

"Among slaves on the Old World," the Chief
said, "women were chiefs. Among our people, men
are chiefs. That is how it is. The slaves of the Old
World will be the free men of the New World."
"And the women, Mr. President?"
"A free man's women are free," said the Chief.

"Well, then," Yeron said, and sighed her deep sigh.
"I guess we have to kick up some dust."

"What dust people are good at," said Dobibe.
"Then we better kick up a whole lot," said

173

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Tualyan. "Because no matter what we do, they'll get
hysterical. They'll yell and scream about castrating
dykes who kill boy babies. If there's five of us
singing some damn song, it'll get into the neareals
as five hundred of us with machine guns and the
end of civilisation on Yeowe. So I say let's go for it.
Let's have five thousand women out singing. Let's
stop the trains. Lie down on the tracks. Fifty thou-
sand women lying on the tracks all over Yotebber.
You think?"

The meeting (of the Yotebber City and Regional
Educational Aid Association) was in a schoolroom of
one of the city schools. Two of Havzhiva's body-
guards, in plain clothes, waited unobtrusively in the
hall. Forty women and Havzhiva were jammed into
small chairs attached to blank netscreens.

"Asking for?" Havzhiva said.

"The secret ballot!"

"No job discrimination!"

"Pay for our work!"

"The secret ballot'"

"Child care!"

"The secret ballot!"

"Respect!"

Havzhiva's noter scribbled away madly. The
women went on shouting for a while and then set-
tled down to talk again.

One of the bodyguards spoke to Havzhiva as she
drove him home. "Sir," she said. "Was those all
teachers?"

"Yes," he said. "In a way."

"Be damn," she said. "Different from they used
to be."

A Man of the People

"Yehedarhed! What the hell are you doing down
there?"

"Ma'am?"

"You were on the news. Along with about a mil-
lion women lying across railroad tracks and all over
flyer pads and draped around the President's
Residence. You were talking to women and smiling."

"It was hard not to."

"When the Regional Government begins shoot-
ing, will you stop smiling?"

"Yes. Will you back us?"

"How?"

"Words of encouragement to the women of
Yotebber from the Ambassador of the Ekumen.
Yeowe a model of true freedom for immigrants from
the Slave World. Words of praise to the Government
of Yotebber  Yotebber a model for all Yeowe of
restraint, enlightenment, et cetera."

"Sure. I hope it helps. Is this a revolution,
Havzhiva?"

"It is education, ma'am."

The gate stood open in its massive frame; there were
no walls.

"In the time of the Colony," the Elder said, "this
gate was opened twice in the day: to let the people
out to work in the morning, to let the people in
from work in the evening. At all other times it was
locked and barred." He displayed the great broken
lock that hung on the outer face of the gate, the
massive bolts rusted in their hasps. His gesture was
solemn, measured, like his words, and again
Havzhiva admired the dignity these people had kept

ns^ 175 ^^r.

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

in degradation, the stateliness they had maintained
in, or against, their enslavement. He had begun to
appreciate the immense influence of their sacred
text, the Arkamye, preserved in oral tradition. "This
was what we had. This was our belonging," an old
man in the city had told him, touching the book
which, at sixty-five or seventy, he was learning to
read.

Havzhiva himself had begun to read the book in
its original language. He read it slowly, trying to
understand how this tale of fierce courage and abne-
gation had for three millennia informed and nour-
ished the minds of people in bondage. Often he
heard in its cadences the voices he had heard speak
that day.

He was staying for a month in Hayawa Tribal
Village, which had been the first slave compound of
the Agricultural Plantation Corporation of Yeowe in
Yotebber, three hundred fifty years ago. In this
immense, remote region of the eastern coast, much
of the society and culture of plantation slavery had
been preserved. Yeron and other women of the
Liberation Movement had told him that to know
who the Yeowans were he must know the planta-
tions and the tribes.

He knew that the compounds had for the first
century been a domain of men without women and
without children. They had developed an internal
government, a strict hierarchy of force and favor-
itism. Power was won by tests and ordeals and kept
by a nimble balancing of independence and collusion.
When women slaves were brought in at last, they
entered this rigid system as the slaves of slaves. By
bondsmen as by Bosses, they were used as servants

^ 176 ^

A Man of the People

and sexual outlets. Sexual loyalty and partnership
continued to be recognized only between men, a
nexus of passion, negotiation, status, and tribal pol-
itics. During the next centuries the presence of chil-
dren in the compounds had altered and enriched
tribal customs, but the system of male dominance,
so entirely advantageous to the slave-owners, had
not essentially changed.

"We hope to have your presence at the initia-
tion tomorrow," the Elder said in his grave way, and
Havzhiva assured him that nothing could please or
honor him more than attendance at a ceremony of
such importance. The Elder was sedately but visibly
gratified. He was a man over fifty, which meant he
had been bom a slave and had lived as a boy and
man through the years of the Liberation. Havzhiva
looked for scars, remembering what Yeron had said,
and found them: the Elder was thin, meager, lame,
and had no upper teeth; he was marked all through
by famine and war. Also he was ritually scarred, four
parallel ridges running from neck to elbow over the
point of the shoulder like long epaulets, and a dark
blue open eye tattooed on his forehead, the sign, in
this tribe, of assigned, unalterable chiefdom. A slave
chief, a chattel master of chattels, till the walls went
down.

The Elder walked on a certain path from the
gate to the longhouse, and Havzhiva following him
observed that no one else used this path: men,
women, children trotted along a wider, parallel road
that diverged off to a different entrance to the long-
house. This was the chiefs' way, the narrow way.

That night, while the children to be initiated
next day fasted and kept vigil over on the women's

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

side, all the chiefs and elders gathered for a feast.
There were inordinate amounts of the heavy food
Yeowans were accustomed to, spiced and ornately
served, the marsh rice that was the basis of every-
thing fancied up with colorings and herbs; above
all there was meat. Women slipped in and out serv-
ing ever more elaborate platters, each one with
more meat on it  cattle flesh. Boss food, the sure
and certain sign of freedom.

Havzhiva had not grown up eating meat, and
could count on it giving him diarrhea, but he
chewed his way manfully through the stews and
steaks, knowing the significance of the food and the
meaning of plenty to those who had never had
enough-
After huge baskets of fruit finally replaced the
platters, the women disappeared and the music
began. The tribal chief nodded to his leos, a word
meaning "sexual favorite/adopted brother/not
heir/not son." The young man, a self-assured, good-
natured beauty, smiled; he clapped his long hands
very softly once, then began to brush the grey-blue
palms in a subtle rhythm. As the table fell silent he
sang, but in a whisper.

Instruments of music had been forbidden on most
plantations; most Bosses had allowed no singing
except the ritual hymns to Tuat at the tenthday
service. A slave caught wasting Corporation time in
singing might have acid poured down his throat. So
long as he could work there was no need for him to
make noise.

On such plantations the slaves had developed
this almost silent music, the touch and brush of
palm against palm, a barely voiced, barely varied,

^ 178 ^

A Man of the People

long line of melody. The words sung were deliber-
ately broken, distorted, fragmented, so that they
seemed meaningless. Shesh, the owners had called
it, rubbish, and slaves were permitted to "pat hands
and sing rubbish" so long as they did it so softly it
could not be heard outside the compound walls.
Having sung so for three hundred years, they sang
so now.

To Havzhiva it was unnerving, almost frighten-
ing, as voice after voice joined, always at a whisper,
increasing the complexity of the rhythms till the
cross-beats nearly, but never quite, joined into a sin-
gle texture of hushing sibilant sound, threaded by
the long-held, quarter-tonal melody sung on sylla-
bles that seemed always about to make a word but
never did. Caught in it, soon almost lost in it, he
kept thinking now  now one of them will raise his
voice  now the leos will give a shout, a shout of
triumph, letting his voice free!  But he did not.
None did. The soft, rushing, waterlike music with its
infinitely delicate shifting rhythm went on and on.
Bottles of the orange Yote wine passed up and down
the table. They drank. They drank freely, at least.
They got drunk. Laughter and shouts began to inter-
rupt the music. But they never once sang above a
whisper.

They all reeled back to the longnouse on the
chiefs' path, embracing, peeing companionably, one
or two pausing to vomit here and there. A kind, dark
man who had been seated next to Havzhiva now
Joined him in his bed in his alcove of the longhouse.

Earlier in the evening this man had told him
that during the night and day of the initiation het-
erosexual intercourse was forbidden, as it would

-CTt 179 s-*"

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

change the energies. The initiation would go
crooked, and the boys might not become good
members of the tribe. Only a witch, of course, would
deliberately break the taboo, but many women were
witches and would try to seduce a man out of mal-
ice. Regular, that is, homosexual, intercourse would
encourage the energies, keep the initiation straight,
and give the boys strength for their ordeal. Hence
every man leaving the banquet would have a part-
ner for the night. Havzhiva was glad he had been
assigned to this man, not to one of the chiefs, whom
he found daunting, and who might have expected a
properly energetic performance. As it was, as well as
he could remember in the morning, he and his com-
panion had been too drunk to do much but fall
asleep amidst well-intended caresses.

Too much Yote wine left a ringing headache, he
knew that already, and his whole skull reconfirmed
the knowledge when he woke.

At noon his friend brought him to a place of
honor in the plaza, which was filling up with men.
Behind them were the men's longhouses, in front of
them the ditch that separated the women's side, the
inside, from the men's or gate side  still so-called,
though the compound walls were gone and the gate
alone stood, a monument, towering above the huts
and longhouses of the compound and the flat grain-
fields that stretched away in all directions, shim-
mering in the windless, shadowless heat.

From the women's huts, six boys came at a run
to the ditch. It was wider than a thirteen-year-old
could jump, Havzhiva thought; but two of the boys
made it. The other four leapt valiantly, fell short,
clambered out, one of them hobbling, having hurt

^ 180 ^

A Man of the People

a leg or foot in his fall. Even the two who had
made the jump successfully looked exhausted and
frightened, and all six were bluish grey from fast-
ing and staying awake. Elders surrounded them
and got them standing in line in the plaza, naked
and shivering, facing the crowd of all the men of
the tribe.

No women at all were visible, over on the
women's side.

A catechism began, chiefs and elders barking
questions which must evidently be answered with-
out delay, sometimes by one boy, sometimes by all
together, depending on the questioner's pointing or
sweeping gesture. They were questions of ritual, pro-
tocol, and ethics. The boys had been well drilled,
delivering their answers in prompt yelps. The one
who had lamed himself in the jump suddenly vom-
ited and then fainted, slipping quietly down in a lit-
tle heap. Nothing was done, and some questions
were still pointed to him, followed by a moment of
painful silence. After a while the boy moved, sat up,
sat a while shuddering, then struggled to his feet
and stood with the others. His bluish lips moved in
answer to all the questions, though no voice
reached the audience.

Havzhiva kept his apparent attention fixed on
the ritual, though his mind wandered back a long
time, a long way. We teach what we know, he
thought, and all our knowledge is local.

After the inquisition came the marking: a single
deep cut from the base of the neck over the point of
the shoulder and down the outer arm to the elbow,
made with a hard, sharp stake of wood dragged
gouging through skin and flesh to leave, when it

:0- 181 -^-9

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

healed, the furrowed scar that proved the man.
Slaves would not have been allowed any metal tools
inside the gate, Havzhiva reflected, watching steadi-
ly as behooved a visitor and guest. After each arm
and each boy, the officiating elders stopped to
resharpen the stake, rubbing it on a big grooved
stone that sat in the plaza. The boys' pale blue lips
drew back, baring their white teeth; they writhed,
half-fainting, and one of them screamed aloud,
silencing himself by clapping his free hand over his
mouth. One bit on his thumb till blood flowed from
it as well as from his lacerated arms. As each boy's
marking was finished the Tribal Chief washed the
wounds and smeared some ointment on them-
Dazed and wobbling, the boys stood again in line;

and now the old men were tender with them, smil-
ing, calling them "tribesman," "hero." Havzhiva
drew a long breath of relief.

But now six more children were being brought
into the plaza, led across the ditch-bridge by old
women. These were girls, decked with anklets and
bracelets, otherwise naked. At the sight of them a
great cheer went up from the audience of men.
Havzhiva was surprised. Women were to be made
members of the tribe too? That at least was a good
thing, he thought.

Two of the girls were barely adolescent, the oth-
ers were younger, one of them surely not more than
six. They were lined up, their backs to the audience,
facing the boys. Behind each of them stood the
veiled woman who had led her across the bridge;

behind each boy stood one of the naked elders. As
Havzhiva watched, unable to turn his eyes or mind
from what he saw, the little girls lay down face up

^ 182 ^~

A Man of the People

on the bare, greyish ground of the plaza. One of
them, slow to lie down, was tugged and forced down
by the woman behind her. The old men came
around the boys, and each one lay down on one of
the girls, to a great noise of cheering, jeering, and
laughter and a chant of "ha-ah-ha-ah!" from the
spectators. The veiled women crouched at the girls'
heads. One of them reached out and held down a
thin, flailing arm. The elders' bare buttocks pumped,
whether in actual coitus or an imitation Havzhiva
could not tell. "That's how you do it, watch, watch!"
the spectators shouted to the boys, amid jokes and
comments and roars of laughter. The elders one by
one stood up, each shielding his penis with curious
modesty.

When the last had stood up, the boys stepped
forward. Each lay down on a girl and pumped his
buttocks up and down, though not one of them,
Havzhiva saw, had had an erection. The men around
him grasped their own penises, shouting, "Here, try
mine!" and cheering and chanting until the last boy
scrambled to his feet. The girls lay flat, their legs
parted, like little dead lizards. There was a slight, ter-
rible movement towards them in the crowd of men.
But the old women were hauling the girls to their
feet, yanking them up, hurrying them back across
the bridge, followed by a wave of howls and jeers
from the audience.

"They're drugged, you know," said the kind,
dark man who had shared Havzhiva's bed, looking
into his face. "The girls. It doesn't hurt them."

"Yes, I see," said Havzhiva, standing still in his
place of honor.

"These ones are lucky, privileged to assist initia-

a^ 183 ^-

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

tion. It's important that girls cease to be virgin as
soon as possible, you know. Always more than one
man must have them, you know. So that they
can't make claims  'this is your son,' 'this baby
is the chief's son,' you know. That's all witchcraft.
A son is chosen. Being a son has nothing to
do with bondswomen's cunts. Bondswomen have
to be taught that early. But the girls are given
drugs now. It's not like the old days, under the
Corporations."

"I understand," Havzhiva said- He looked into
his friend's face, thinking that his dark skin meant
he must have a good deal of owner blood, perhaps
indeed was the son of an owner or a Boss. Nobody's
son, begotten on a slave woman. A son is chosen- AH
knowledge is local, all knowledge is partial. In Stse,
in the Schools of the Ekumen, in the compounds of
Yeowe.

"You still call them bondswomen," he said. His
tact, all his feelings were frozen, and he spoke in
mere stupid intellectual curiosity.

"No," the dark man said, "no, I'm sorry, the lan-
guage I learned as a boy  I apologize "

"Not to me."

Again Havzhiva spoke only and coldly what was
in his head. The man winced and was silent, his
head bowed.

"Please, my friend, take me to my room now,"
Havzhiva said, and the dark man gratefully obeyed
him.

He talked softly into his noter in Hainish in the
dark. "You can't change anything from outside it.

184

A Man of the People

Standing apart, looking down, taking the overview,
you see the pattern. What's wrong, what's missing.
You want to fix it. But you can't patch it. You have
to be in it, weaving it. You have to be part of the
weaving." This last phrase was in the dialect of
Stse.

Four women squatted on a patch of ground on the
women's side, which had roused his curiosity by its
untrodden smoothness: some kind of sacred space,
he had thought. He walked towards them. They
squatted gracelessly, hunched forward between their
knees, with the indifference to their appearance, the
carelessness of men's gaze, that he had noticed
before on the women's side. Their heads were
shaved, their skin chalky and pale. Dust people,
dusties, was the old epithet, but to Havzhiva their
color was more like clay or ashes. The azure tinge of
palms and soles and wherever the skin was fine was
almost hidden by the soil they were handling. They
had been talking fast and quietly, but went silent as
he came near. Two were old, withered up, with
knobby, wrinkled knees and feet. Two were young
women. They all glanced sidelong from time to time
as he squatted down near the edge of the smooth
patch of ground.

On it, he saw, they had been spreading dust, col-
ored earth, making some kind of pattern or picture.
Following the boundaries between colors he made
out a long pale figure a little like a hand or a branch,
and a deep curve of earthen red.

Having greeted them, he said nothing more, but
simply squatted there. Presently they went back to

T^S 185 ^*-e>

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

what they were doing, talking in whispers to one
another now and then.

When they stopped working, he said, "Is it
sacred?"

The old women looked at him, scowled, and
said nothing.

"You can't see it," said the darker of the young
women, with a flashing, teasing smile that took
Havzhiva by surprise.

"I shouldn't be here, you mean."

"No. You can be here. But you can't see it."

He rose and looked over the earth painting they
had made with grey and tan and red and umber
dust. The lines and forms were in a definite rela-
tionship, rhythmical but puzzling.

"It's not all there," he said.

"This is only a little, little bit of it," said the teas-
ing woman, her dark eyes bright with mockery in
her dark face.

"Never all of it at once?"

"No," she said, and the others said, "No," and
even the old women smiled.

"Can you tell me what the picture is?"

She did not know the word "picture." She
glanced at the others; she pondered, and looked up
at him shrewdly.

"We make what we know, here," she said, with
a soft gesture over the softly colored design. A warm
evening breeze was already blurring the boundaries
between the colors.

"They don't know it," said the other young
woman, ashen-skinned, in a whisper.

"The men?  They never see it whole?"

"Nobody does. Only us. We have it here." The

-i-*-' 186 -^-s

A Man of the People

dark woman did not touch her head but her heart,
covering her breasts with her long, work-hardened
hands. She smiled again.

The old women stood up; they muttered togeth-
er, one said something sharply to the young women,
a phrase Havzhiva did not understand; and they
stumped off.

"They don't approve of your talking of this work
to a man," he said,

"A city man," said the dark woman, and
laughed. "They think we'll run away."

"Do you want to run away?"

She shrugged. "Where to?"

She rose to her feet in one graceful movement
and looked over the earth painting, a seemingly ran-
dom, abstract pattern of lines and colors, curves and
areas.

"Can you see it?" she asked Havzhiva, with that
liquid teasing flash of the eyes.

"Maybe someday I can leam to," he said, meet-
ing her gaze.

"You'll have to find a woman to teach you," said
the woman the color of ashes.

"We are a free people now," said the Young Chief,
the Son and Heir, the Chosen.

"I haven't yet known a free people," Havzhiva
said, polite, ambiguous.

"We won our freedom. We made ourselves free. By
courage, by sacrifice, by holding fast to the one noble
thing. We are a free people." The Chosen was a strong-
faced, handsome, intelligent man of forty. Six gouged
lines of scarring ran down his upper arms like a

a-vsi 187 =-*o

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

rough mantle, and an open blue eye stared between
his eyes, unwinking.

"You are free men," Havzhiva said.

There was a silence.

"Men of the cities do not understand our
women," the Chosen said. "Our women do not
want a man's freedom. It is not for them. A
woman holds fast to her baby. That is the noble
thing for her. That is how the Lord Kamye made
woman, and the Merciful Tual is her example. In
other places it may be different. There may be
another kind of woman, who does not care for
her children. That may be. Here it is as I have
said."

Havzhiva nodded, the deep, single nod he had
learned from the Yeowans, almost a bow. "That is
so," he said.

The Chosen looked gratified.

"I have seen a picture," Havzhiva went on.

The Chosen was impassive; he might or might
not know the word. "Lines and colors made with
earth on earth may hold knowledge in them. All
knowledge is local, all truth is partial," Havzhiva said
with an easy, colloquial dignity that he knew was an
imitation of his mother, the Heir of the Sun, talking
to foreign merchants. "No truth can make another
truth untrue. All knowledge is a part of the whole
knowledge. A true line, a true color. Once you have
seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing
the part as the whole."

The Chosen stood like a grey stone. After a
while he said, "If we come to live as they live in the
cities, all we know will be lost." Under his dogmatic
tone was fear and grief.

vw 188 -a-

A Man of the People

"Chosen One," Havzhiva said, "you speak the
truth. Much will be lost. I know it. The lesser knowl-
edge must be given to gain the greater. And not once
only."

"The men of this tribe will not deny our truth,"
the Chosen said. His unseeing, unwinking central
eye was fixed on the sun that hung in a yellow dust-
haze above the endless fields, though his own dark
eyes gazed downward at the earth.

His guest looked from that alien face to the
fierce, white, small sun that still blazed low above
the alien land. "I am sure of that," he said.

When he was fifty-five. Stabile Yehedarhed
Havzhiva went back to Yotebber for a visit. He had
not been there for a long time. His work as
Ekumenical Advisor to the Yeowan Ministry of
Social Justice had kept him in the north, with fre-
quent trips to the other hemisphere. He had lived
for years in the Old Capital with his partner, but
often visited the New Capital at the request of a
new Ambassador who wanted to draw on his
expertise. His partner  they had lived together for
eighteen years, but there was no marriage on
Yeowe  had a book she was trying to finish, and
admitted that she would like to have the apart-
ment to herself for a couple of weeks while she
wrote. "Take that trip south you keep mooning
about," she said. "I'll fly down as soon as I'm done.
I won't tell any damned politicians where you are.
Escape! Go, go, go!"

He went. He had never liked flying, though he
had had to do a great deal of it, and so he made the

^a. 189 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

long journey by train. They were good, fast trains,
terribly crowded, people at every station swarming
and rushing and shouting bribes to the conductors,
though not trying to ride the roofs of the cars, not
at 130 kmh. He had a private room in a through car
to Yotebber City. He spent the long hours in silence
watching the landscape whirl by, the reclamation
projects, the old wastelands, the young forests, the
swarming cities, miles of shacks and cabins and cot-
tages and houses and apartment buildings, sprawl-
ing Werel-style compounds with connected houses
and kitchen gardens and worksheds, factories, huge
new plants; and then suddenly the country again,
canals and irrigation tanks reflecting the colors of
the evening sky, a bare-legged child walking with a
great white ox past a field of shadowy grain. The
nights were short, a dark, rocking sweetness of
sleep.

On the third afternoon he got off the train in
Yotebber City Station. No crowds. No chiefs- No
bodyguards. He walked through the hot, familiar
streets, past the market, through the City Park. A lit-
tle bravado, there. Gangs, muggers were still about,
and he kept his eye alert and his feet on the main
pathways. On past the old Tualite temple. He had
picked up a white flower that had dropped from a
shrub in the park. He set it at the Mother's feet. She
smiled, looking cross-eyed at her missing nose. He
walked on to the big, rambling new compound
where Yeron lived.

She was seventy-four and had retired recently
from the hospital where she had taught, practiced,
and been an administrator for the last fifteen
years. She was little changed from the woman

^s 190 ^

A Man of the People

he had first seen sitting by his bedside, only she
seemed smaller all over. Her hair was quite gone,
and she wore a glittering kerchief tied round her
head. They embraced hard and kissed, and she
stroked him and patted him, smiling irrepress-
ibiy. They had never made love, but there had
always been a desire between them, a yearning
to the other, a great comfort in touch. "Look at
that, look at that grey'." she cried, petting his
hair, "how beautiful! Come in and have a glass
of wine with mel How is your Araha? When is
she coming? You walked right across the city car-
rying that bag? You're still crazy!"

He gave her the gift he had brought her, a trea-
tise on Certain Diseases of Werel-Yeowe by a team of
Ekumenical medical researchers, and she seized it
greedily. For some while she conversed only
between plunges into the table of contents and the
chapter on berlot. She poured out the pale orange
wine. They had a second glass. "You look fine,
Havzhiva," she said, putting the book down and
looking at him steadily. Her eyes had faded to an
opaque bluish darkness. "Being a saint agrees with
you."

"It's not that bad, Yeron."

"A hero, then. You can't deny that you're a
hero."

"No," he said with a laugh. "Knowing what a
hero is, 1 won't deny it."

"Where would we be without you?"

"Just where we are now. ..." He sighed.
"Sometimes I think we're losing what little we've
ever won. This Tualbeda, in Detake Province, don't
underestimate him, Yeron. His speeches are pure

c^c" 191 -

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

misogyny and anti-immigrant prejudice, and peo-
ple are eating it up "

She made a gesture that utterly dismissed the
demagogue. "There is no end to that," she said. "But
I knew what you were going to be to us. Right away.
When I heard your name, even. I knew."

"You didn't give me much choice, you know."

"Bah. You chose, man."

"Yes," he said. He savored the wine. "I did."
After a while he said, "Not many people have the
choices I had. How to live, whom to live with, what
work to do. Sometimes I think I was able to choose
because I grew up where all choices had been made
for me."

"So you rebelled, made your own way," she said,
nodding.

He smiled. "I'm no rebel."

"Bah!" she said again. "No rebel? You, in the
thick of it, in the heart of our movement all the
way?"

"Oh yes," he said. "But not in a rebellious spir-
it- That had to be your spirit. My job was accep-
tance, To keep an acceptant spirit. That's what I
learned growing up. To accept. Not to change the
world. Only to change the soul. So that it can be in
the world. Be rightly in the world."

She listened but looked unconvinced. "Sounds
like a woman's way of being," she said. "Men gener-
ally want to change things to suit."

"Not the men of my people," he said.

She poured them a third glass of wine. "Tell
me about your people. I was always afraid to ask.
The Hainish are so old! So learned! They know so
much history, so many worlds! Us here with our

.^ 192 rt-5>

A Man of the People

three hundred years of misery and murder and
ignorance  you don't know how small you make
us feel."

"I think I do," Havzhiva said. After a while he
said, "I was born in a town called Stse."

He told her about the pueblo, about the Other
Sky people, his father who was his uncle, his moth-
er the Heir of the Sun, the rites, the festivals, the
daily gods, the unusual gods; he told her about
changing being; he told her about the historian's
visit, and how he had changed being again, going to
Kathhad.

"All those rules!" Yeron said. "So complicated
and unnecessary. Like our tribes. No wonder you ran
away."

"All I did was go team in Kathhad what I wouldn't
learn in Stse," he said, smiling. "What the rules are.
Ways of needing one another. Human ecology.
What have we been doing here, all these years, but
trying to find a good set of rules  a pattern that
makes sense?" He stood up, stretched his shoulders,
and said, "I'm drunk. Come for a walk with me."

They went out into the sunny gardens of the
compound and walked slowly along the paths
between vegetable plots and flower beds. Yeron
nodded to people weeding and hoeing, who looked
up and greeted her by name. She held Havzhiva's
arm firmly, with pride. He matched his steps to
hers.

"When you have to sit still, you want to fly," he
said, looking down at her pale, gnarled, delicate
hand on his arm. "If you have to fly, you want to sit
still. I learned sitting, at home. I learned flying, with
the historians. But I still couldn't keep my balance."

-^ 193 ^-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

"Then you came here," she said.
"Then I came here."
"And learned?"

"How to walk," he said. "How to walk with my
people."

^ 194

A Woman's
Liberation

GC^

1. Shomeke

My dear friend has asked me to write the story of my life,
thinking it might be of interest to people of other
worlds and times. I am an ordinary woman, but I
have lived in years of mighty changes and have been
advantaged to know with my very flesh the nature of
servitude and the nature of freedom.

I did not learn to read or write until I was a grown
woman, which is all the excuse I will make for the
faults of my narrative.

I was born a slave on the planet Werel. As a child
I was called Shomekes' Radosse Rakam. That is,
Property of the Shomeke Family, Granddaughter of
Dosse, Granddaughter of Kamye. The Shomeke fami-
ly owned an estate on the eastern coast of Voe Deo.
Dosse was my grandmother. Kamye is the Lord God.

The Shomekes possessed over four hundred

T^s> 195 i-"

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

assets, mostly used to cultivate the fields of gede, to
herd the saltgrass cattle, to work in the mills, and as
domestics in the House. The Shomeke family had
been great in history. Our Owner was an important
man politically, often away in the capital.

Assets took their name from their grandmother
because it was the grandmother that raised the
child. The mother worked all day, and there was no
father. Women were always bred to more than one
man- Even if a man knew his child he could not care
for it. He might be sold or traded away at any time.
Young men were seldom kept long on the estates. If
they were valuable, they were traded to other estates
or sold to the factories. If they were worthless, they
were worked to death.

Women were not often sold. The young ones
were kept for work and breeding, the old ones to
raise the young and keep the compound in order.
On some estates women bore a baby a year till they
died, but on ours most had only two or three chil-
dren. The Shomekes valued women as workers. They
did not want the men always getting at the women.
The grandmothers agreed with them and guarded
the young women closely.

I say men, women, children, but you are to
understand that we were not called men, women,
children. Only our owners were called so. We assets
or slaves were called bondsmen, bondswomen, and
pups or young. I will use those words, though I have
not heard or spoken them for many years, and never
before on this blessed world.

The bondsmen's part of the compound, the
gateside, was ruled by the Bosses, who were men.
some relations of the Shomeke family, others hired

^ 196 ^

A Woman's Liberation

by them. On the inside the young and the
bondswomen lived. There two cutfrees, castrated
bondsmen, were the Bosses in name, but the grand-
mothers ruled. Indeed nothing in the compound
happened without the grandmothers' knowledge.

If the grandmothers said an asset was too sick to
work, the Bosses would let that one stay home.
Sometimes the grandmothers could save a bondsman
from being sold away, sometimes they could protect
a girl from being bred by more than one man, or
could give a delicate girl a contraceptive. Everybody
in the compound obeyed the council of the grand-
mothers. But if one of them went too far, the Bosses
would have her flogged or blinded or her hands cut
off. When I was a young child, there lived in our
compound a woman we called Great-Grandmother,
who had holes for eyes and no tongue. I thought that
she was thus because she was so old. I feared that my
grandmother Dosse's tongue would wither in her
mouth. I told her that. She sai4, "No. It won't get any
shorter, because I don't let it get too long."

I lived in the compound. My mother birthed me
there, and was allowed to stay three months to
nurse me; then I was weaned to cow's milk, and my
mother returned to the House. Her name was
Shomekes' Rayowa Yowa. She was light-skinned like
most of the assets, but very beautiful, with slender
wrists and ankles and delicate features. My grand-
mother, too, was light, but I was dark, darker than
anybody else in the compound.

My mother came to visit, the cutfrees letting her
in by their ladder-door. She found me rubbing grey
dust on my body. When she scolded me, 1 told her
that I wanted to look like the others.

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"Listen, Rakam," she said to me, "they are dust
people. They'll never get out of the dust. You're
something better. And you will be beautiful. Why do
you think you're so black?" I had no idea what she
meant. "Someday I'll tell you who your father is,"
she said, as if she were promising me a gift. I knew
that the Shomekes' stallion, a prized and valuable
animal, serviced mares from other estates. I did not
know a father could be human.

That evening I boasted to my grandmother:

"I'm beautiful because the black stallion is my
father'" Dosse struck me across the head so that I fell
down and wept. She said, "Never speak of your
father."

I knew there was anger between my mother and
my grandmother, but it was a long time before I
understood why. Even now I am not sure I under-
stand all that lay between them.

We little pups ran around in the compound. We
knew nothing outside the walls. All our world was
the bondswomen's huts and the bondsmen's long-
houses, the kitchens and kitchen gardens, the bare
plaza beaten hard by bare feet- To me, the stockade
wall seemed a long way off.

When the field and mill hands went out the
gate in the early morning I didn't know where they
went. They were just gone. AH day long the whole
compound belonged to us pups, naked in the sum-
mer, mostly naked in the winter too, running
around playing with sticks and stones and mud,
keeping away from the grandmothers, until we
begged them for something to eat or they put us to
work weeding the gardens for a while.

In the evening or the early night the workers

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would come back, trooping in the gate guarded by
the Bosses. Some were worn out and grim, others
would be cheerful and talking and calling back and
forth. The great gate was slammed behind the last of
them. Smoke went up from all the cooking stoves.
The burning cowdung smelled sweet. People gath-
ered on the porches of the huts and longhouses.
Bondsmen and bondswomen lingered at the ditch
that divided the gateside from the inside, talking
across the ditch. After the meal the freedmen led
prayers to Tual's statue, and we lifted our own
prayers to Kamye, and then people went to their
beds, except for those who lingered to "jump the
ditch." Some nights, in the summer, there would be
singing, or a dance was allowed. In the winter one of
the grandfathers  poor old broken men, not strong
people like the grandmothers  would "sing the
word." That is what we called reciting the Arkamye.
Every night, always, some of the people were teach-
ing and others were learning the sacred verses. On
winter nights one of these old worthless bondsmen
kept alive by the grandmothers' charity would begin
to sing the word. Then even the pups would be still
to listen to that story.

The friend of my heart was Walsu. She was big-
ger than I, and was my defender when there were
fights and quarrels among the young or when older
pups called me "Blackie" and "Bossie." I was small
but had a fierce temper. Together, Walsu and I did
not get bothered much. Then Walsu was sent out
the gate. Her mother had been bred and was now
stuffed big, so that she needed help in the fields to
make her quota. Gede must be hand-harvested.
Every day as a new section of the bearing stalk

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comes ripe it has to be picked, and so gede pickers
go through the same field over and over for twenty
or thirty days, and then move on to a later planting.
Walsu went with her mother to help her pick her
rows. When her mother felt ill, Walsu took her
place, and with help from other hands she kept up
her mother's quota. She was then six years old by
owner's count, which gave all assets the same birth-
day, new year's day at the beginning of spring. She
might have truly been seven. Her mother remained
ill both before birthing and after, and Walsu took
her place in the gede field all that time. She never
afterward came back to play, only in the evenings to
eat and sleep. I saw her then and we could talk. She
was proud of her work. 1 envied her and longed to
go through the gate. I followed her to it and looked
through it at the world. Now the walls of the com-
pound seemed very close-

1 told my grandmother Dosse that I wanted to
go to work in the fields.

"You're too young."

"I'll be seven at the new year."

"Your mother made me promise not to let you
go out."

Next time my mother visited the compound, I
said, "Grandmother won't let me go out. 1 want to
go work with Walsu."

"Never," my mother said. "You were born for
better than that."

"What for?"

"You'll see."

She smiled at me. I knew she meant the House,
where she worked. She had told me often of the
wonderful things in the House, things that shone

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A Woman's Liberation

and were colored brightly, things that were thin and
delicate, clean things. It was quiet in the House, she
said. My mother herself wore a beautiful red scarf,
her voice was soft, and her clothing and body were
always clean and fresh.

"When will I see?"

I teased her until she said, "All right! I'll ask my
lady."

"Ask her what?"

All I knew of my-lady was that she too was del-
icate and clean, and that my mother belonged to
her in some particular way, of which she was
proud. I knew my-lady had given my mother the
red scarf.

"I'll ask her if you can come begin training at
the House."

My mother said "the House" in a way that made
me see it as a great sacred place like the place in our
prayer: May I enter in the clear house, in the rooms of
peace.

I was so excited I began to dance and sing, "I'm
going to the House, to the House!" My mother
slapped me to make me stop and scolded me for
being wild. She said, "You are too young! You can't
behave! If you get sent away from the House, you
can never come back."

I promised to be old enough.

"You must do everything right," Yowa told me.
"You must do everything I say when I say it. Never
question. Never delay. If my lady sees that you're
wild, she'll send you back here. And that will be the
end of you forever."

I promised to be tame. I promised to obey at
once in everything, and not to speak. The more

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frightening she made it, the more I desired to see the
wonderful, shining House.

When my mother left I did not believe she would
speak to my-lady. I was not used to promises being
kept. But after some days she returned, and I heard
her speaking to my grandmother. Dosse was angry at
first, speaking loudly. I crept under the window of
the hut to listen. I heard my grandmother weep. I
was frightened and amazed. My grandmother was
patient with me, always looked after me, and fed
me well. It had never entered my mind that there
was anything more to it than that, until I heard
her crying. Her crying made me cry, as if I were
part of her.

"You could let me keep her one more year," she
said. "She's just a baby. I would never let her out the
gate." She was pleading, as if she were powerless, not
a grandmother. "She is my joy, Yowa!"

"Don't you want her to do well, then?"

"Just a year more. She's too wild for the House."

"She's run wild too long. She'll get sent out to
the fields if she stays. A year of that and they won't
have her at the House. She'll be dust. Anyhow,
there's no use crying about it. I asked my lady, and
she's expected. I can't go back without her."

"Yowa, don't let her come to harm," Dosse said
very low, as if ashamed to say this to her daughter,
and yet with strength in her voice.

"I'm taking her to keep her out of harm," my
mother said. Then she called me, and I wiped my
tears and came-

It is queer, but I do not remember my first walk
through the world outside the compound or my first
sight of the House. I suppose I was frightened and

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A Woman's Liberation

kept my eyes down, and everything was so strange
to me that I did not understand what I saw. I know
it was a number of days before my mother took me
to show me to Lady Tazeu. She had to scrub me and
train me and make sure I would not disgrace her. I
was terrified when at last she took my hand, scold-
ing me in a whisper all the time, and brought me
out of the bondswomen's quarters, through halls
and doorways of painted wood, into a bright, sunny
room with no roof, full of flowers growing in pots.

I had hardly ever seen a flower, only the weeds
in the kitchen gardens, and I stared and stared at
them. My mother had to jerk my hand to make me
look at the woman lying in a chair among the flow-
ers, in clothes soft and brightly colored like the
flowers. I could hardly tell them apart. The woman's
hair was long and shining, and her skin was shining
and black. My mother pushed me, and I did what
she had made me practice over and over: I went and
knelt down beside the chair and waited, and when
the woman put out her long, narrow, soft hand,
black above and azure on the palm, I touched my
forehead to it. I was supposed to say "I am your slave
Rakam, ma'am," but my voice would not come out.

"What a pretty little thing," she said. "So dark."
Her voice changed a little on the last words.

"The Bosses came in ... that night," Yowa said
in a timid, smiling way, looking down as if embar-
rassed.

"No doubt about that," the woman said. I was
able to glance up at her again. She was beautiful. I
did not know a person could be so beautiful. I think
she saw my wonder. She put out her long, soft hand
again and caressed my cheek and neck. "Very, very

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

pretty, Yowa," she said. "You did quite right to bring
her here. Has she been bathed?"

She would not have asked that if she had seen
me when I first came, filthy and smelling of the
cowdung we made our fires with. She knew nothing
of the compound at all. She knew nothing beyond
the beza, the women's side of the House. She was
kept there just as I had been kept in the compound,
ignorant of anything outside. She had never smelled
cowdung, as I had never seen flowers.

My mother assured her I was clean, and she
said, "Then she can come to bed with me tonight.
I'd like that. Will you like to come sleep with me,
pretty little  " She glanced at my mother, who
murmured, "Rakam." Ma'am pursed her lips at the
name. "I don't like that," she murmured. "So ugly.
Toti. Yes. You can be my new Toti. Bring her this
evening, Yowa."

She had had a foxdog called Toti, my mother
told me. Her pet had died. I did not know animals
ever had names, and so it did not seem odd to me to
be given an animal's name, but it did seem strange
at first not to be Rakam. I could not think of myself
as Toti.

That night my mother bathed me again and
oiled my skin with sweet oil and dressed me in a soft
gown, softer even than her red scarf. Again she
scolded and warned me, but she was excited,
too, and pleased with me, as we went to the beza
again, through other halls, meeting some other
bondswomen on the way, and to the lady's bed-
room. It was a wonderful room, hung with mirrors
and draperies and paintings. I did not understand
what the mirrors were, or the paintings, and was

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A Woman's Liberation

frightened when I saw people in them. Lady Tazeu
saw that I was frightened. "Come, little one," she
said, making a place for me in her great, wide, soft
bed strewn with pillows, "come and cuddle up." I
crawled in beside her, and she stroked my hair and
skin and held me in her warm, soft arms until I was
comfortable and at ease. "There, there, little Toti,"
she said, and so we slept.

I became the pet of Lady Tazeu Wehoma
Shomeke. I slept with her almost every night. Her
husband was seldom home and when he was there
did not come to her, preferring bondswomen for his
pleasure. Sometimes she had my mother or other,
younger bondswomen come into her bed, and she
sent me away at those times, until I was older, ten or
eleven, when she began to keep me and have me
join in with them, teaching me how to be pleasured.
She was gentle, but she was the mistress in love, and
I was her instrument which she played.

I was also trained in household arts and duties.
She taught me to sing with her, as I had a true voice.
All those years I was never punished and never
made to do hard work. I who had been wild in the
compound was perfectly obedient in the Great
House. I had been rebellious to my grandmother
and impatient of her commands, but whatever my
lady ordered me to do I gladly did- She held me fast
to her by the only kind of love she had to give me.
I thought that she was the Merciful Tual come down
upon the earth. That is not a way of speaking, that
is the truth. I thought she was a higher being, supe-
rior to myself.

Perhaps you will say that I could not or should
not have had pleasure in being used without my

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FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

consent by my mistress, and if I did, I should not
speak of it, showing even so little good in so great an
evil. But I knew nothing of consent or refusal. Those
are freedom words.

She had one child, a son, three years older than
I- She lived quite alone among us bondswomen. The
Wehomas were nobles of the Islands, old-fashioned
people whose women did not travel, so she was cut
off from her family. The only company she had was
when Owner Shomeke brought friends with him
from the capital, but those were all men, and she
could be with them only at table.

I seldom saw the Owner and only at a distance.
I thought he too was a superior being, but a danger-
ous one.

As for Erod, the Young Owner, we saw him
when he came to visit his mother daily or when he
went out riding with his tutors. We girls would peep
at him and giggle to each other when we were
eleven or twelve, because he was a handsome boy,
night-black and slender like his mother. I knew that
he was afraid of his father, because I had heard him
weep when he was with his mother. She would com-
fort him with candy and caresses, saying, "He'll be
gone again soon, my darling." I too felt sorry for
Erod, who was like a shadow, soft and harmless. He
was sent off to school for a year at fifteen, but his
father brought him back before the year was up.
Bondsmen told us the Owner had beaten him cruel-
ly and had forbidden him even to ride off the estate.

Bondswomen whom the Owner used told us
how brutal he was, showing us where he had
bruised and hurt them. They hated him, but my
mother would not speak against him. "Who do you

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A Woman's Liberation

think you are?" she said to a girl who was com-
plaining of his use of her. "A lady to be treated like
glass?" And when the girl found herself pregnant,
stuffed was the word we used, my mother had her
sent back to the compound. I did not understand
why. I thought Yowa was hard and jealous. Now I
think she was also protecting the girl from our lady's
jealousy.

I do not know when I understood that I was the
Owner's daughter. Because she had kept that secret
from our lady, my mother believed it was a secret
from all. But the bondswomen all knew it. I do not
know what I heard or overheard, but when I saw
Erod, I would study him and think that I looked
much more like our father than he did, for by then
I knew what a father was. And I wondered that Lady
Tazeu did not see it. But she chose to live in igno-
rance.

During these years I seldom went to the com-
pound. After I had been a_halfyear or so at the
House, I was eager to go back and see Walsu and my
grandmother and show them my fine clothes and
clean skin and shining hair; but when I went, the
pups I used to play with threw dirt and stones at me
and tore my clothes- Walsu was in the fields. I had
to hide in my grandmother's hut all day. I never
wanted to go back. When my grandmother sent for
me, I would go only with my mother and always
stayed close by her. The people in the compound,
even my grandmother, came to look coarse and foul
to me. They were dirty and smelled strongly. They
had sores, scars from punishment, lopped fingers,
ears, or noses. Their hands and feet were coarse,
with deformed nails. I was no longer used to people

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

who looked so. We domestics of the Great House
were entirely different from them, 1 thought,
Serving the higher beings, we became like them.

When I was thirteen and fourteen Lady Tazeu
still kept me in her bed, making love to me often.
But also she had a new pet, the daughter of one of
the cooks, a pretty little girl though white as clay.
One night she made love to me for a long time in
ways that she knew gave me great ecstasy of the
body. When I lay exhausted in her arms she whis-
pered "good-bye, good-bye," kissing me all over my
face and breasts. I was too spent to wonder at this.

The next morning my lady called in my mother
and myself to tell us that she intended to give me to
her son for his seventeenth birthday. "I shall miss
you terribly, Toti darling," she said, with tears in her
eyes. "You have been my joy. But there isn't another
girl on the place that I could let Erod have. You are
the cleanest, dearest, sweetest of them all. I know
you are a virgin," she meant a virgin to men, "and I
know my boy will enjoy you. And he'll be kind to
her, Yowa," she said earnestly to my mother. My
mother bowed and said nothing. There was nothing
she could say. And she said nothing to me. It was too
late to speak of the secret she had been so proud of.

Lady Tazeu gave me medicine to prevent con-
ception, but my mother, not trusting the medicine,
went to my grandmother and brought me contra-
ceptive herbs-1 took both faithfully that week.

If a man in the House visited his wife he came
to the beza, but if he wanted a bondswoman she was
"sent across." So on the night of the Young Owner's
birthday I was dressed all in red and led over, for the
first time in my life, to the men's side of the House.

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A Woman's Liberation

My reverence for my lady extended to her son,
and I had been taught that owners were superior by
nature to us. But he was a boy whom I had known
since childhood, and I knew that his blood and
mine were half the same. It gave me a strange feel-
ing towards him.

I thought he was shy, afraid of his manhood.
Other girls had tried to tempt him and failed. The
women had told me what I was to do, how to offer
myself and encourage him, and I was ready to do
that. I was brought to him in his great bedroom, all
of stone carved like lace, with high, thin windows of
violet glass. I stood timidly near the door for a while,
and he stood near a table covered with papers and
screens. He came forward at last, took my hand, and
led me to a chair. He made me sit down, and spoke
to me standing, which was all improper, and con-
fused my mind.

"Rakam," he said  "that's your name, isn't
it?"  I nodded  "Rakam, my mother means only
kindness, and you must not think me ungrateful to
her, or blind to your beauty. But I will not take a
woman who cannot freely offer herself. Intercourse
between owner and slave is rape." And he talked on,
talking beautifully, as when my lady read aloud
from one of her books. I did not understand much,
except that I was to come whenever he sent for me
and sleep in his bed, but he would never touch me.
And I was not to speak of this to anyone. "I am
sorry, I am very sony to ask you to lie," he said, so
earnestly that I wondered if it hurt him to lie. That
made him seem more like a god than a human
being. If it hurt to lie, how could you stay alive?

"I will do just as you say. Lord Erod," I said.

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

So, most nights, his bondsmen came to bring me
across. I would sleep in his great bed, while he
worked at the papers on his table. He slept on a
couch beneath the windows. Often he wanted to talk
to me, sometimes for a long time, telling me his
ideas. When he was in school in the capital he had
become a member of a group of owners who wished
to abolish slavery, called The Community. Getting
wind of this, his father had ordered him out of
school, sent him home, and forbidden him to leave
the estate. So he too was a prisoner. But he corre-
sponded constantly with others in The Community
through the net, which he knew how to operate
without his father's knowledge, or the government's.

His head was so full of ideas he had to speak
them. Often Geu and Ahas, the young bondsmen
who had grown up with him, who always came to
fetch me across, stayed with us while he talked to all
of us about slavery and freedom and many other
things. Often I was sleepy, but I did listen, and heard
much I did not know how to understand or even
believe. He told us there was an organization among
assets, called the Hame, that worked to steal slaves
from the plantations. These slaves would be brought
to members of The Community, who would make
out false papers of ownership and treat them well,
renting them to decent work in the cities. He told us
about the cities, and I loved to hear all that- He told
us about Yeowe Colony, saying that there was a rev-
olution there among the slaves.

Of Yeowe I knew nothing. It was a great blue-
green star that set after the sun or rose before it,
brighter than the smallest of the moons. It was a
name in an old song they sang in the compound:

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0, 0, Ye-o-we,
Nobody never comes back.

I had no idea what a revolution was. When Erod
told me that it meant that assets on plantations in
this place called Yeowe were fighting their owners, I
did not understand how assets could do that. From
the beginning it was ordained that there should be
higher and lower beings, the Lord and the human,
the man and the woman, the owner and the owned.
All my world was Shomeke Estate and it stood on
that one foundation. Who would want to overturn
it? Everyone would be crushed in the ruins.

I did not like Erod to call assets slaves, an ugly
word that took away our value. I decided in my
mind that here on Werel we were assets, and in that
other place, Yeowe Colony, there were slaves, worth-
less bondspeople, intractables. That was why they
had been sent there. It made good sense.

By this you know how ignorant I was.
Sometimes Lady Tazeu had let us watch shows on
the holonet with her, but she watched only dramas,
not the reports of events. Of the world beyond the
estate I knew nothing but what I learned from Erod,
and that I could not understand.

Erod liked us to argue with him. He thought it
meant our minds were growing free. Geu was good at
it. He would ask questions like, "But if there's no
assets, who'll do the work?" Then Erod could answer
at length. His eyes shone, his voice was eloquent. I
loved him very much when he talked to us. He was
beautiful and what he said was beautiful. It was like
hearing the old men "singing the word," reciting the
Arkamye, when I was a little pup in the compound.

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I gave the contraceptives my lady gave me
every month to girls who needed them- Lady Tazeu
had aroused my sexuality and accustomed me to
being used sexually. I missed her caresses. But I
did not know how to approach any of the
bondswomen, and they were afraid to approach
me, since I belonged to the Young Owner. Being
with Erod often, while he talked I yearned to him
in my body. I lay in his bed and dreamed that he
came and stooped over me and did with me as my
lady used to do- But he never touched me.

Geu also was a handsome young man, clean and
well mannered, rather dark-skinned, attractive to
me. His eyes were always on me. But he would not
approach me, until I told him that Erod did not
touch me.

Thus I broke my promise to Erod not to tell any-
one; but I did not think myself bound to keep
promises, as I did not think myself bound to speak
the truth. Honor of that kind was for owners, not for
us.

After that, Geu used to tell me when to meet
him in the attics of the House. He gave me little
pleasure- He would not penetrate me, believing that
he must save my virginity for our master. He had me
take his penis in my mouth instead. He would turn
away in his climax, for the slave's sperm must not
defile the master's woman. That is the honor of a
slave.

Now you may say in disgust that my story is all
of such things, and there is far more to life, even a
slave's life, than sex. That is very true. I can say only
that it may be in our sexuality that we are most eas-
ily enslaved, both men and women. It may be there,

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A Woman 's Liberation

even as free men and women, that we find freedom
hardest to keep. The politics of the flesh are the
roots of power.

I was young, hill of health and desire for joy.
And even now, even here, when I look back across
the years from this world to that, to the compound
and the House of Shomeke, I see images like those in
a bright dream. I see my grandmother's big, hard
hands. I see my mother smiling, the red scarf about
her neck. I see my lady's black, silky body among the
cushions. I smell the smoke of the cowdung fires,
and the perfumes of the beza. I feel the soft, fine
clothing on my young body, and my lady's hands
and lips. I hear the old men singing the word, and
my voice twining with my lady's voice in a love
song, and Erod telling us of freedom. His face is illu-
minated with his vision. Behind him the windows
of stone lace and violet glass keep out the night. I do
not say I would go back. I would die before 1 would
go back to Shomeke. I would xlie before I left this
free world, my world, to go back to the place of slav-
ery. But whatever I knew in my youth of beauty, of
love, and of hope, was there.

And there it was betrayed. All that is built upon
that foundation in the end betrays itself.

I was sixteen years old in the year the world
changed.

The first change I heard about was of no inter-
est to me except that my lord was excited about it,
and so were Geu and Anas and some of the other
young bondsmen. Even my grandmother wanted to
hear about it when I visited her. "That Yeowe, that
slave world," she said, "they made freedom? They
sent away their owners? They opened the gates? My

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FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

lord, my sweet Lord Kamye, how can that be? Praise
his name, praise his marvels!" She rocked back and
forth as she squatted in the dust, her arms about her
knees. She was an old, shrunken woman now. "Tell
mel" she said.

I knew little else to tell her. "All the soldiers
came back here," I said. "And those other people,
those alemens, they're there on Yeowe. Maybe
they're the new owners. That's all somewhere way
out there," I said, flipping my hand at the sky.

"What's alemens?" my grandmother asked, but
I did not know.

It was all mere words to me.

But when our Owner, Lord Shomeke, came
home sick, that I understood. He came on a flyer to
our little port. 1 saw him carried by on a stretcher,
the whites showing in his eyes, his black skin
mottled grey. He was dying of a sickness that was
ravaging the cities. My mother, sitting with Lady
Tazeu, saw a politician on the net who said that the
alemens had brought the sickness to Werel. He
talked so fearsomely that we thought everybody was
going to die. When I told Geu about it he snorted.
"Aliens, not alemens," he said, "and they've got
nothing to do with it. My lord talked with the doc-
tors. It's just a new kind of pusworm."

That dreadful disease was bad enough. We knew
that any asset found to be infected with it was
slaughtered at once like an animal and the corpse
burned on the spot.

They did not slaughter the Owner. The House
filled with doctors, and Lady Tazeu spent day and
night by her husband's bed. It was a cruel death. It
went on and on. Lord Shomeke in his suffering made

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terrible sounds, screams, howls. One would not
believe a man could cry out hour after hour as he
did. His flesh ulcerated and fell away, he went mad,
but he did not die.

As Lady Tazeu became like a shadow, worn and
silent, Erod filled with strength and excitement.
Sometimes when we heard his father howling his
eyes would shine. He would whisper, "Lady Tual
have mercy on him," but he fed on those cries. I
knew from Geu and Ahas, who had been brought up
with him, how the father had tormented and
despised him, and how Erod had vowed to be every-
thing his father was not and to undo all he did.

But it was Lady Tazeu who ended it. One night
she sent away the other attendants, as she often did,
and sat alone with the dying man. When he began
his moaning howl, she took her little sewing knife
and cut his throat. Then she cut the veins in her
arms across and across, and lay down by him, and so
died. My mother was in the next room all night. She
said she wondered a little at the silence, but was so
weary that she fell asleep; and in the morning she
went in and found them lying in their cold blood.

All I wanted to do was weep for my lady, but
everything was in confusion. Everything in the sick-
room must be burned, the doctors said, and the bod-
ies must be burned without delay. The House was
under quarantine, so only the priests of the House
could hold the funeral. No one was to leave the
estate for twenty days. But several of the doctors
themselves left when Erod, who was now Lord
Shomeke, told them what he intended to do. I heard
some confused word of it from Ahas, but in my grief
I paid little heed.

^^- 215 "^

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

That evening, all the House assets stood outside
the Lady's Chapel during the funeral service to hear
the songs and prayers within. The Bosses and cut-
frees had brought the people from the compound,
and they stood behind us. We saw the procession
come out, the white biers carried by, the pyres
lighted, and the black smoke go up. Long before the
smoke ceased rising, the new Lord Shomeke came to
us all where we stood.

Erod stood up on the little rise of ground
behind the chapel and spoke in a strong voice such
as I had never heard from him. Always in the House
it had been whispering in the dark. Now it was
broad day and a strong voice. He stood there black
and straight in his white mourning clothes. He was
not yet twenty years old. He said, "Listen, you peo-
ple: you have been slaves, you will be free. You have
been my property, you will own your own lives
now. This morning I sent to the Government the
Order of Manumission for every asset on the estate,
four hundred and eleven men, women, and chil-
dren. If you will come to my office in the Counting
House in the morning, I wilt give you your papers.
Each of you is named in those papers as a free per-
son. You can never be enslaved again. You are free
to do as you please from tomorrow on. There will
be money for each one of you to begin your new
life with. Not what you deserve, not what you have
earned in all your work for us, but what I have to
give you. I am leaving Shomeke. I will go to the cap-
ital, where I will work for the freedom of every slave
on Werel. The Freedom Day that came to Yeowe is
coming to us, and soon. Any of you who wish to
come with me, come! There's work for us all to do!"

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A Woman's Liberation

I remember all he said. Those are his words as he
spoke them. When one does not read and has not
had one's mind filled up by the images on the nets,
words spoken strike down deep in the mind.

There was such a silence when he stopped
speaking as I had never heard.

One of the doctors began talking, protesting to
Erod that he must not break the quarantine.

"The evil has been burned away," Erod said,
with a great gesture to the black smoke rising. "This
has been an evil place, but no more harm will go
forth from Shomeke!"

At that a slow sound began among the com-
pound people standing behind us, and it swelled
into a great noise of jubilation mixed with wailing,
crying, shouting, singing. "Lord Kamye! Lord
Kamye!" the men shouted. An old woman came for-
ward: my grandmother. She strode through us
House assets as if we were a field of grain. She
stopped a good way from Erod. People fell silent to
listen to the grandmother. She said, "Lord Master,
are you turning us out of our homes?"

"No," he said. "They are yours. The land is yours
to use. The profit of the fields is yours. This is your
home, and you are free!"

At that the shouts rose up again so loud I cow-
ered down and covered my ears, but I was crying
and shouting too, praising Lord Erod and Lord
Kamye in one voice with the rest of them.

We danced and sang there in sight of the burn-
ing pyres until the sun went down. At last the
grandmothers and the cutfrees got the people to go
back to the compound, saying they did not have
their papers yet. We domestics went straggling back

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

to the House, talking about tomorrow, when we
would get our freedom and our money and our
land.

All that next day Erod sat in the Counting House
and made out the papers for each slave and counted out
the same amount of money for each: a hundred kue in
cash, and a draft for five hundred kue on the district
bank, which could not be drawn for forty days. This
was, he explained to each one, to save them from
exploitation by the unscrupulous before they knew
how best to use their money. He advised them to form
a cooperative, to pool their funds, to run the estate
democratically. "Money in the bank, Lord!" an old crip-
pled man came out crying, jigging on his twisted legs.
"Money in the bank. Lord!"

If they wanted, Erod said over and over, they
could save their money and contact the Hame, who
would help them buy passage to Yeowe with it.

"0, 0, Ye-o-we," somebody began singing, and
they changed the words:

"Everybody's going to go.
0, 0, Ye-o-we,
Everybody's going to go!"

They sang it all day long. Nothing could change
the sadness of it. I want to weep now, remembering
that song, that day.

The next morning Erod left. He could not wait to
get away from the place of his misery and begin his
life in the capital working for freedom. He did not say
good-bye to me. He took Geu and Ahas with him- The
doctors and their aides and assets had all left the day
before. We watched his flyer go up into the air.

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A Woman's Liberation

We went back to the House. It was like some-
thing dead. There were no owners in it, no masters,
no one to tell us what to do.

My mother and I went in to pack up our cloth-
ing. We had said little to each other, but felt we
could not stay there. We heard other women run-
ning through the beza, rummaging in Lady Tazeu's
rooms, going through her closets, laughing and
screaming with excitement, finding jewelry and
valuables. We heard men's voices in the hall: Bosses'
voices. Without a word my mother and I took what
we had in our hands and went out by a back door,
slipped through the hedges of the garden, and ran
all the way to the compound.

The great gate of the compound stood wide
open.

How can I tell you what that was to us, to see
that, to see that gate stand open? How can I tell
you?

2. Zeskra

Erod knew nothing about how the estate was run,
because the Bosses ran it. He was a prisoner too. He
had lived in his screens, his dreams, his visions.

The grandmothers and others in the com-
pound had spent all that night trying to make
plans, to draw our people together so they could
defend themselves. That morning when my moth-
er and I came, there were bondsmen guarding the
compound with weapons made of farm tools. The
grandmothers and cutfrees had made an election
of a headman, a strong, well-liked field hand. In

i^-a 219  '''"-s1

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

that way they hoped to keep the young men with
them.

By the afternoon that hope was broken. The
young men ran wild. They went up to the House to
loot it. The Bosses shot them from the windows,
killing many; the others fled away. The Bosses
stayed holed up in the House, drinking the wine of
the Shomekes. Owners of other plantations were fly-
ing reinforcements to them. We heard the flyers
land, one after another. The bondswomen who had
stayed in the House were at their mercy now.

As for us in the compound, the gates were
closed again. We had moved the great bars from the
outside to the inside, so we thought ourselves safe
for the night at least. But in the midnight they came
with heavy tractors and pushed down the wall, and
a hundred men or more, our Bosses and owners
from all the plantations of the region, came swarm-
ing in. They were armed with guns. We fought them
with farm tools and pieces of wood. One or two of
them were hurt or killed. They killed as many of us
as they wanted to kill and then began to rape us. It
went on all night.

A group of men took all the old women and
men and held them and shot them between the
eyes, the way they kill cattle. My grandmother was
one of them. I do not know what happened to my
mother. I did not see any bondsmen living when
they took me away in the morning. I saw white
papers lying in the blood on the ground. Freedom
papers-
Several of us girls and young women still alive
were herded into a truck and taken to the port field.
There they made us enter a flyer, shoving and using

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A Woman's Liberation

sticks, and we were carried off in the air. I was not
then in my right mind. All I know of this is what the
others told me later.

We found ourselves in a compound, like our
compound in every way. I thought they had
brought us back home. They shoved us in by the
cutfrees' ladder. It was still morning and the hands
were out at work, only the grandmothers and pups
and old men in the compound. The grandmothers
came to us fierce and scowling. I could not under-
stand at first why they were all strangers. I looked
for my grandmother.

They were frightened of us, thinking we must be
runaways. Plantation slaves had been running away,
the last years, trying to get to the cities. They
thought we were intractables and would bring trou-
ble with us. But they helped us clean ourselves, and
gave us a place near the cutfrees' tower. There were
no huts empty, they said. They told us this was
Zeskra Estate. They did not want to hear about what
had happened at Shomeke. They did not want us to
be there. They did not need our trouble.

We slept there on the ground without shelter.
Some of the bondsmen came across the ditch in the
night and raped us because there was nothing to
prevent them from it, no one to whom we were of
any value. We were too weak and sick to fight them.
One of us, a girl named Abye, tried to fight. The men
beat her insensible. In the morning she could not
talk or walk. She was left there when the Bosses
came and took us away. Another girl was left behind
too, a big farmhand with white scars on her head
like parts in her hair. As we were going I looked at
her and saw that it was Walsu, who had been my

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

friend. We had not recognised each other. She sat in
the dirt, her head bowed down.

Five of us were taken from the compound to the
Great House of Zeskra, to the bondswomen's quarters.
There for a while I had a little hope, since I knew how
to be a good domestic asset. I did not know then how
different Zeskra was from Shomeke- The House at
Zeskra was full of people, full of owners and bosses. It
was a big family, not a single Lord as at Shomeke but
a dozen of them with their retainers and relations and
visitors, so there might be thirty or forty men staying
on the men's side and as many women in the beza,
and a House staff of fifty or more. We were not
brought as domestics, but as use-women.

After we were bathed we were left in the use-
women's quarters, a big room without any private
places. There were ten or more use-women already
there. Those of them who liked their work were not
glad to see us, thinking of us as rivals; others wel-
comed us, hoping we might take their places and
they might be let to join the domestic staff. But
none were very unkind, and some were kind, giving
us clothes, for we had been naked all this time, and
comforting the youngest of us, Mio, a little com-
pound girl of ten or eleven whose white body was
mottled all over with brown-and-blue bruises.

One of them was a tall woman called Sezi-TuaI.
She looked at me with an ironic face. Something in
her made my soul awaken.

"You're not a dusty," she said. "You're as black
as old Lord Devil Zeskra himself. You're a Bossbaby,
aren't you?"

"No ma'am," I said. "A lord's child. And the
Lord's child. My name is Rakam."

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A Woman's Liberation

"Your Grandfather hasn't treated you too well
lately," she said. "Maybe you should pray to the
Merciful Lady Tual."

"I don't look for mercy," I said. From then on
Sezi-Tual liked me, and I had her protection, which
I needed.

We were sent across to the men's side most
nights. When there were dinner parties, after the
ladies left the dinner room we were brought in to sit
on the owners' knees and drink wine with them.
Then they would use us there on the couches or take
us to their rooms. The men of Zeskra were not cruel.
Some liked to rape, but most preferred to think that
we desired them and wanted whatever they wanted.
Such men could be satisfied, the one kind if
we showed fear or submission, the other kind if we
showed yielding and delight. But some of their visi-
tors were another kind of man.

There was no law or rule against damaging or
killing a use-woman. Her owner might not like it,
but in his pride he could not say so: he was sup-
posed to have so many assets that the loss of one or
another did not matter at all. So some men whose
pleasure lay in torture came to hospitable estates like
Zeskra for their pleasure. Sezi-Tual, a favorite of the
Old Lord, could and did protest to him, and such
guests were not invited back. But while I was there,
Mio, the little girl who had come with us from
Shomeke, was murdered by a guest. He tied her
down to the bed. He made the knot across her neck
so tight that while he used her she strangled to
death.

I will say no more of these things. I have told
what I must tell. There are truths that are not useful.

-CT-S 223 ;--s

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

All knowledge is local, my friend has said. Is it true,
where is it true, that that child had to die in that
way? Is it true, where is it true, that she did not have
to die in that way?

I was often used by Lord Yaseo, a middle-aged
man, who liked my dark skin, calling me "My Lady."
Also he called me "Rebel," because what had hap-
pened at Shomeke they called a rebellion of the
slaves. Nights when he did not send for me I served as
a common-girl.

After I had been at Zeskra two years Sezi-Tual
came to me one morning early. I had come back late
from Lord Yaseo's bed. Not many others were there,
for there had been a drinking party the night before,
and all the common-girls had been sent for. Sezi-
Tual woke me. She had strange hair, curly, in a bush.
I remember her face above me, that hair curling out
all about it. "Rakam," she whispered, "one of the
visitor's assets spoke to me last night. He gave me
this. He said his name is Suhame."

"Suhame," I repeated. I was sleepy. I looked at
what she was holding out to me: some dirty crum-
pled paper. "I can't read!" I said, yawning, impa-
tient.

But I looked at it and knew it. I knew what it
said. It was the freedom paper. It was my freedom
paper. I had watched Lord Erod write my name on
it. Each time he wrote a name he had spoken it
aloud so that we would know what he was writing.
I remembered the big flourish of the first letter of
both my names: Radosse Rakam. I took the paper in
my hand, and my hand was shaking. "Where did
you get this?" I whispered.

"Better ask this Suhame," she said. Now I heard

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A Woman's Liberation

what that name meant: "from the Hame." It was a
password name. She knew that too. She was watch-
ing me, and she bent down suddenly and leaned her
forehead against mine, her breath catching in her
throat. "If I can, I'll help," she whispered.

I met with "Suhame" in one of the pantries. As
soon as I saw him I knew him; Ahas, who had been
Lord Erod's favorite along with Geu. A slight, silent
young man with dusty skin, he had never been
much in my mind. He had watchful eyes, and I had
thought when Geu and I spoke that he looked at us
with ill will. Now he looked at me with a strange
face, still watchful, yet blank.

"Why are you here with that Lord Boeba?" I
said. "Aren't you free?"

"I am as free as you are," he said.

I did not understand him, then.

"Didn't Lord Erod protect even you?" I asked.

"Yes. I am a free man." His face began to come
alive, losing that dead blankness it had when he
first saw me. "Lady Boeba's a member of The
Community. I work with the Hame. I've been trying
to find people from Shomeke. We heard several of
the women were here. Are there others still alive,
Rakam?"

His voice was soft, and when he said my name
my breath caught and my throat swelled. I said his
name and went to him, holding him. "Ratual,
Ramayo, Keo are still here," I said. He held me gen-
tly. "Walsu is in the compound," I said, "if she's still
alive." I wept. I had not wept since Mio's death. He
too was in tears-

We talked, then and later. He explained to me
that we were indeed, by law, free, but that law meant

-r*i 225 ^*-s>

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

nothing on the Estates. The government would not
interfere between owners and those they claimed as
their assets. If we claimed our rights, the Zeskras
would probably kill us, since they considered us
stolen goods and did not want to be shamed. We
must run away or be stolen away, and get to the city,
the capital, before we could have any safety at all.

We had to be sure that none of the Zeskra assets
would betray us out of jealousy or to gain favor, Sezi-
Tual was the only one I tmsted entirely.

Ahas arranged our escape with Sezi-Tual's help-1
pleaded once with her to join us, but she thought
that since she had no papers she would have to live
always in hiding, and that would be worse than her
life at Zeskra.

"You could go to Yeowe," I said.

She laughed. "All I know about Yeowe is nobody
ever came back. Why run from one hell to the next
one?"

Ratual chose not to come with us; she was a
favorite of one of the young lords and content to
remain so. Ramayo, the oldest of us from Shomeke,
and Keo, who was now about fifteen, wanted to
come. Sezi-Tual went down to the compound and
found that Walsu was alive, working as a field hand.
Arranging her escape was far more difficult than ours.
There was no escape from a compound. She could get
away only in daylight, in the fields, under the over-
seer's and the Boss's eyes. It was difficult even to talk
to her, for the grandmothers were distrustful. But
Sezi-Tual managed it, and Walsu told her she would
do whatever she must do "to see her paper again."

Lady Boeba's flyer waited for us at the edge of a
great gede field that had just been harvested. It was

^Ma 226 s-9-s

A Woman's Liberation

late summer. Ramayo, Keo, and I walked away from
the House separately at different times of the morn-
ing. Nobody watched over us closely, as there was
nowhere for us to go. Zeskra lies among other great
estates, where a runaway slave would find no friends
for hundreds of miles. One by one, taking different
ways, we came through the fields and woods,
crouching and hiding all the way to the flyer where
Ahas waited for us. My heart beat and beat so I could
not breathe. There we waited for Walsu.

"There!" said Keo, perched up on the wing of the
flyer. She pointed across the wide field of stubble-

Walsu came running from the strip of trees on
the far side of the field. She ran heavily, steadily, not
as if she were afraid. But all at once she halted. She
turned. We did not know why for a moment. Then
we saw two men break from the shadow of the trees
in pursuit of her.

She did not run from them, leading them
towards us. She ran back at them. She leapt at them
like a hunting cat. As she made that leap, one of
them fired a gun. She bore one man down with her,
falling. The other fired again and again. "In," Ahas
said, "now." We scrambled into the flyer and it rose
into the air, seemingly all in one instant, the same
instant in which Walsu made that great leap, she too
rising into the air, into her death, into her freedom.

3. The City

I had folded up my freedom paper into a tiny pack-
et. I carried it in my hand all the time we were in the

s.a> 227 ws

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

flyer and while we landed and went in a public car
through the city streets. When Ahas found what I
was clutching, he said I need not worry about it. Our
manumission was on record in the Government
Office and would be honored, here in the City. We
were free people, he said- We were gareots, that is,
owners who have no assets. "Just like Lord Erod," he
said. That meant nothing to me. There was too
much to learn. I kept hold of my freedom paper
until I had a place to keep it safe. I have it still.

We walked a little way in the streets and then
Ahas led us into one of the huge houses that stood
side by side on the pavement. He called it a com-
pound, but we thought it must be an owners' house.
There a middle-aged woman welcomed us. She was
pale-skinned, but talked and behaved like an owner,
so that I did not know what she was. She said she
was Ress, a rentswoman and an elderwoman of the
house.

Rentspeople were assets rented out by their
owners to a company. If they were hired by a big
company, they lived in the company compounds,
but there were many, many rentspeople in the City
who worked for small companies or businesses
they managed themselves, and they occupied
buildings run for profit, called open compounds.
In such places the occupants must keep curfew, the
doors being locked at night, but that was all; they
were self-governed. This was such an open com-
pound. It was supported by The Community. Some
of the occupants were rentspeople, but many were
like us. gareots who had been slaves. Over a hun-
dred people lived there in forty apartments. It was
supervised by several women, whom I would have

.3-*- 228 "*

A Woman's Liberation

called grandmothers, but here they were called
elderwomen.

On the estates deep in the country, deep in the
past, where the life was protected by miles of land
and by the custom of centuries and by determined
ignorance, any asset was absolutely at the mercy of
any owner. From there we had come into this great
crowd of two million people where nothing and
nobody was protected from chance or change,
where we had to leam as fast as we could how to
stay alive, but where our life was in our own hands.

I had never seen a street. I could not read a
word. I had much to leam.

Ress made that clear at once. She was a City
woman, quick-thinking and quick-talking, impa-
tient, aggressive, sensitive. I could not like or under-
stand her for a long time. She made me feel stupid,
slow, a clod. Often I was angry at her.

There was anger in me now. I had not felt anger
while I lived at Zeskra. I could not. It would have
eaten me. Here there was room for it, but I found no
use for it. I lived with it in silence. Keo and Ramayo
had a big room together, I had a small one next to
theirs. I had never had a room to myself. At first I
felt lonely in it and as if ashamed, but soon I came
to like it. The first thing I did freely, as a free woman,
was to shut my door.

Nights, I would shut my door and study. Days,
we had work training in the morning, classes in the
afternoon: reading and writing, arithmetic, history.
My work training was in a small shop which made
boxes of paper and thin wood to hold cosmetics,
candies, jewelry, and such things. I was trained in all
the different steps and crafts of making and oma-

9-s 229 T^-S

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

meriting the boxes, for that is how most work was
done in the City, by artisans who knew all their
trade. The shop was owned by a member of The
Community. The older workers were rentspeople.
When my training was finished I too would be paid
wages.

Till then Lord Erod supported me as well as Keo
and Ramayo and some men from Shomeke com-
pound, who lived in a different house. Erod never
came to the house. I think he did not want to see
any of the people he had so disastrously freed. Ahas
and Geu said he had sold most of the land at
Shomeke and used the money for The Community
and to make his way in politics, as there was now a
Radical Party which favored emancipation,

Geu came a few times to see me. He had become
a City man, dapper and knowing. I felt when he
looked at me he was thinking I had been a use-
woman at Zeskra, and I did not like to see him.

Ahas, whom I had never thought about in the
old days, I now admired, knowing him brave, res-
olute, and kind. It was he who had looked for us,
found us, rescued us. Owners had paid the money
but Ahas had done it. He came often to see us. He
was the only link that had not broken between me
and my childhood.

And he came as a friend, a companion, never
driving me back into my slave body. I was angry
now at every man who looked at me as men look at
women. I was angry at women who looked at me
seeing me sexually. To Lady Tazeu all I had been was
my body. At Zeskra that was all I had been. Even to
Erod who would not touch me that was all I had
been. Flesh to touch or not to touch, as they

3-* 230 ^-s>

A Woman's Liberation

pleased. To use or not to use, as they chose. I hated
the sexual parts of myself, my genitals and breasts
and the swell of my hips and belly. Ever since I was
a child, I had been dressed in soft clothing made to
display all that sexuality of a woman's body. When
I began to be paid and could buy or make my own
clothing, I dressed in hard, heavy cloth. What I liked
of myself was my hands, clever at their work, and
my head, not clever at learning, but still learning,
no matter how long it took-

What I loved to learn was history. I had grown
up without any history. There was nothing at
Shomeke or Zeskra but the way things were. Nobody
knew anything about any time when things had
been different- Nobody knew there was any place
where things might be different. We were enslaved
by the present time.

Erod had talked of change, indeed, but the own-
ers were going to make the change. We were to be
changed, we were to be freed, just as we had been
owned. In history I saw that any freedom has been
made, not given.

The first book I read by myself was a history of
Yeowe, written very simply. It told about the days of
the Colony, of the Four Corporations, of the terrible
first century when the ships carried slave men to
Yeowe and precious ores back. Slave men were so
cheap then they worked them to death in a few
years in the mines, bringing in new shipments con-
tinually. 0, 0, Yeowe, nobody never comes back. Then
the Corporations began to send women slaves to
work and breed, and over the years the assets spilled
out of the compounds and made cities  whole
great cities like this one I was living in. But not run

sw 231 -^-s

FOUR   WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

by the owners or Bosses. Run by the assets, the way
this house was run by us. On Yeowe the assets had
belonged to the Corporations. They could rent their
freedom by paying the Corporation a part of what
they earned, the way sharecropper assets paid their
owners in parts of Voe Deo. On Yeowe they called
those assets freedpeople. Not free people, but freed-
people. And then, this history I was reading said,
they began to think, why aren't we free people? So
they made the revolution, the Liberation. It began
on a plantation called Nadami, and spread from
there. Thirty years they fought for their freedom.
And just three years ago they had won the war, they
had driven the Corporations, the owners, the bosses,
off their world. They had danced and sung in the
streets, freedom, freedom! This book I was reading
(slowly, but reading it) had been printed there 
there on Yeowe, the Free World. The Aliens had
brought it to Werel. To me it was a sacred book.

I asked Anas what it was like now on Yeowe, and
he said they were making their government, writing
a perfect Constitution to make all men equal under
the Law.

On the net, on the news, they said they were
fighting each other on Yeowe, there was no govern-
ment at all, people were starving, savage tribesmen
in the countryside and youth gangs in the cities run-
ning amuck, law and order broken down.
Corruption, ignorance, a doomed attempt, a dying
world, they said.

Ahas said that the Government of Voe Deo,
which had fought and lost the war against Yeowe,
now was afraid of a Liberation on Werel. "Don't
believe any news," he counseled me. "Especially

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A Woman's Liberation

don't believe the neareals. Don't ever go into them.
They're just as much lies as the rest, but if you feel
and see a thing, you will believe it. And they know
that. They don't need guns if they own our minds."
The owners had no reporters, no cameras on Yeowe,
he said; they invented their "news," using actors.
Only some of the Aliens of the Ekumen were
allowed on Yeowe, and the Yeowans were debating
whether they should send them away, keeping the
world they had won for themselves alone.

"But then what about us?" I said, for I had
begun dreaming of going there, going to the Free
World, when the Hame could charter ships and send
people.

"Some of them say assets can come. Others say
they can't feed so many, and would be over-
whelmed. They're debating it democratically. It will
be decided in the first Yeowan elections, soon." Ahas
was dreaming of going there too. We talked togeth-
er of our dream the way lovers talk of their love.

But there were no ships going to Yeowe now. The
Hame could not act openly and The Community was
forbidden to act for them. The Ekumen had offered
transportation on their own ships to anyone who
wanted to go, but the government of Voe Deo refused
to let them use any spaceport for that purpose. They
could carry only their own people. No Werelian was to
leave Werel.

It had been only forty years since Werel had at
last allowed the Aliens to land and maintain diplo-
matic relations. As I went on reading history 1 began
to understand a little of the nature of the dominant
people of Werel. The black-skinned race that con-
quered all the other peoples of the Great Continent,

^e 233 "-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

and finally all the world, those who call themselves
the owners, have lived in the belief that there is only
one way to be. They have believed they are what
people should be, do as people should do, and know
all the truth that is known. All the other peoples of
Werel, even when they resisted them, imitated
them, trying to become them, and so became their
property. When a people came out of the sky look-
ing differently, doing differently, knowing different-
ly, and would not let themselves be conquered or
enslaved, the owner race wanted nothing to do with
them. It took them four hundred years to admit that
they had equals.

I was in the crowd at a rally of the Radical Party,
at which Erod spoke, as beautifully as ever. I noticed
a woman beside me in the crowd listening. Her skin
was a curious orange-brown, like the rind of a pini,
and the whites showed in the corners of her eyes. I
thought she was sick  I thought of the pusworm,
how Lord Shomeke's skin had changed and his eyes
had shown their whites. I shuddered and drew
away. She glanced at me, smiling a tittle, and
returned her attention to the speaker. Her hair
curled in a bush or cloud, like Sezi-Tual's. Her cloth-
ing was of a delicate cloth, a strange fashion. It
came upon me very slowly what she was. that she
had come here from a world unimaginably far. And
the wonder of it was that for all her strange skin
and eyes and hair and mind, she was human, as I
am human: I had no doubt of that. I felt it. For a
moment it disturbed me deeply. Then it ceased to
trouble me and I felt a great curiosity, almost a
yearning, a drawing to her. I wished to know her, to
know what she knew.

3-*- 234 s*-si

A Woman's Liberation

In me the owner's soul was struggling with the
free soul. So it will do all my life.

Keo and Ramayo stopped going to school after
they had learned to read and write and use the cal-
culator, but I kept on. When there were no more
classes to take from the school the Hame kept, the
teachers helped me find classes in the net. Though
the government controlled such courses, there were
fine teachers and groups from all over the world,
talking about literature and history and the sciences
and arts. Always 1 wanted more history.

Ress, who was a member of the Hame, first took
me to the Library of Voe Deo. As it was open only
to owners, it was not censored by the government.
Freed assets, if they were light-skinned, were kept
out by the librarians on one pretext or another. I
was dark-skinned, and had learned here in the City
to carry myself with an indifferent pride that spared
one many insults and offenses. Ress told me to
stride in as if I owned the place. I did so, and was
given all privileges without question. So I began to
read freely, to read any book I wanted in that great
library, every book in it if I could. That was my joy,
that reading. That was the heart of my freedom-
Beyond my work at the boxmaker's, which was
well paid, pleasant, and among pleasant compan-
ions, and my learning and reading, there was not
much to my life- I did not want more. I was lonely,
but felt that loneliness was no high price to pay for
what I wanted.

Ress, whom I had disliked, was a friend to me. I
went with her to meetings of the Hame, and also to
entertainments that I would have known nothing
about without her guidance. "Come on, Bumpkin,"

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FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

she would say. "Got to educate the plantation pup."
And she would take me to the makil theater, or to
asset dance halls where the music was good. She
always wanted to dance. I let her teach me, but was
not very happy dancing. One night as we were danc-
ing the "slow-go" her hands began pressing me to
her, and looking in her face I saw the mask of sexu-
al desire on it, soft and blank. 1 broke away. "I don't
want to dance," I said.

We walked home. She came up to my room with
me, and at my door she tried to hold and kiss me. I
was sick with anger. "I don't want that!" I said.

"I'm sorry, Rakam," she said, more gently than I
had ever heard her speak. "I know how you must
feel. But you've got to get over that, you've got to
have your own life. I'm not a man, and 1 do want
you."

I broke in  "A woman used me before a man
ever did. Did you ask me if I wanted you? I will
never be used again!"

That rage and spite came bursting out of me like
poison from an infection. If she had tried to touch
me again, I would have hurt her. I slammed my door
in her face. I went trembling to my desk, sat down,
and began to read the book that was open on it.

Next day we were both ashamed and stiff. But
Ress had patience under her City quickness and
roughness. She did not try to make love to me again,
but she got me to trust her and talk to her as I could
not talk to anybody else- She listened intently and
told me what she thought. She said, "Bumpkin, you
have it all wrong. No wonder. How could you have
got it right? You think sex is something that gets
done to you. It's not. It's something you do. With

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A Woman's Liberation

somebody else- Not to them. You never had any sex.
All you ever knew was rape."

"Lord Erod told me all that a long time ago." I
said. I was bitter. "I don't care what it's called. I had
enough of it. For the rest of my life. And I'm glad to
be without it."

Ress made a face. "At twenty-two?" she said.
"Maybe for a while. If you're happy, then fine- But
think about what I said. It's a big part of life to just
cut out."

"If I have to have sex, I can pleasure myself," 1
said, not caring if I hurt her. "Love has nothing to
do with it."

"That's where you're wrong," she said, but I
did not listen. I would learn from teachers and
books which I chose for myself, but I would not
take advice I had not asked for. I refused to be told
what to do or what to think. If I was free, I would
be free by myself. I was like a baby when it first
stands up.

Ahas had been giving me advice too. He said it
was foolish to pursue education so far. "There's
nothing useful you can do with so much book learn-
ing," he said. "It's self-indulgent. We need leaders
and members with practical skills."

"We need teachers!"

"Yes," he said, "but you knew enough to teach a
year ago. What's the good of ancient history, facts
about alien worlds? We have a revolution to make!"

I did not stop my reading, but I felt guilty. I took
a class at the Hame school teaching illiterate assets
and freedpeople to read and write, as I myself had
been taught only three years before. It was hard
work. Reading is hard for a grown person to learn,

sf-s 237 ^~*>s'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

tired, at night, after work all day. It is much easier to
let the net take one's mind over.

I kept arguing with Anas in my mind, and one
day I said to him, "Is there a Library on Yeowe?"

"I don't know."

"You know there isn't. The Corporations didn't
leave any libraries there. They didn't have any. They
were ignorant people who knew nothing but profit.
Knowledge is a good in itself. I keep on learning so
that I can bring my knowledge to Yeowe. If I could,
I'd bring them the whole Library'"

He stared. "What owners thought, what owners
did  that's all their books are about. They don't
need that on Yeowe."

"Yes they do," I said, certain he was wrong,
though again I could not say why.

At the school they soon called on me to teach
history, one of the teachers having left. These
classes went well. I worked hard preparing them.
Presently I was asked to speak to a study group of
advanced students, and that, too, went well. People
were interested in the ideas I drew from history and
the comparisons I had learned to make of our world
with other worlds. I had been studying the way var-
ious peoples bring up their children, who takes the
responsibility for them and how that responsibility
is understood, since this seemed to me a place where
a people frees or enslaves itself.

To one of these talks a man from the Embassy of
the Ekumen came. I was frightened when I saw the
alien face in my audience. I was worse frightened
when I recognised him. He had taught the first
course in Ekumenical History that I had taken in the
net. I had listened to it devotedly though I never

v*.s 238 3-*

A Woman's Liberation

participated in the discussion. What I learned had
had a great influence on me. I thought he would
find me presumptuous for talking of things he truly
knew. I stammered on through my lecture, trying
not to see his white-cornered eyes.

He came up to me afterwards, introduced him-
self politely, complimented my talk, and asked if I
had read such-and-such a book. He engaged me so
deftly and kindly in conversation that I had to like
and trust him. And he soon earned my trust. I needed
his guidance, for much foolishness has been written
and spoken, even by wise people, about the balance
of power between men and women, on which
depend the lives of children and the value of their
education. He knew useful books to read, from
which I could go on by myself.

His name was Esdardon Aya. He worked in some
high position, I was not sure what, at the Embassy.
He had been born on Hain, the Old World, human-
ity's first home, from which all our ancestors came.

Sometimes I thought how strange it was that I
knew about such things, such vast and ancient mat-
ters, I who had not known anything outside the
compound walls till I was six, who had not known
the name of the country I lived in till I was eighteen!
When I was new to the City someone had spoken of
"Voe Deo," and I had asked, "Where is that?" They
had all stared at me. A woman, a hard-voiced old
City rentswoman, had said, "Here, Dusty. Right
here's Voe Deo. Your country and mine!"

I told Esdardon Aya that. He did not laugh. "A
country, a people," he said. "Those are strange and
very difficult ideas."

"My country was slavery," I said, and he nodded.

'^-6 239 ^e

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

By now I seldom saw Ahas. I missed his kind
friendship, but it had all turned to scolding- "You're
puffed up, publishing, talking to audiences all the
time," he said. "You're putting yourself before our
cause."

I said, "But I talk to people in the Hame, I write
about things we need to know. Everything I do is for
freedom."

"The Community is not pleased with that pam-
phlet of yours," he said, in a serious, counseling
way, as if telling me a secret I needed to know. "I've
been asked to tell you to submit your writings to the
committee before you publish again. That press is
run by hotheads. The Hame is causing a good deal
of trouble to our candidates."

"Our candidates!" I said in a rage- "No owner is
my candidate! Are you still taking orders from the
Young Owner?"

That stung him. He said, "If you put yourself
first, if you won't cooperate, you bring danger on us
all."

"I don't put myself first  politicians and capi-
talists do that. I put freedom first. Why can't you
cooperate with me? It goes two ways, Ahas!"

He left angry, and left me angry.

I think he missed my dependence on him.
Perhaps he was jealous, too, of my independence,
for he did remain Lord Erod's man. His was a loyal
heart. Our disagreement gave us both much bitter
pain. I wish I knew what became of him in the trou-
bled times that followed.

There was truth in his accusation. I had found
that I had the gift in speaking and writing of mov-
ing people's minds and hearts- Nobody told me that

TK-S 240   T-*-

A Woman's Liberation

such a gift is as dangerous as it is strong. Ahas said I
was putting myself first, but I knew I was not doing
that. 1 was wholly in the service of the truth and of
liberty. No one told me that the end cannot purify
the means, since only the Lord Kamye knows what
the end may be. My grandmother could have told
me that. The Arkamye would have reminded me of
it, but I did not often read in it, and in the City there
were no old men singing the word, evenings. If
there had been, I would not have heard them over
the sound of my beautiful voice speaking the beau-
tiful truth.

I believe 1 did no harm, except as we all did, in
bringing it to the attention of the rulers of Voe Deo
that the Hame was growing bolder and the Radical
Party was growing stronger, and that they must
move against us.

The first sign was a divisive one. In the open
compounds, as well as the men's side and the
women's side there were several apartments for cou-
ples. This was a radical thing. Any kind of marriage
between assets was illegal. They were allowed to live
in pairs only by their owners' indulgence. Assets'
only legitimate loyalty was to their owner. The child
did not belong to the mother, but to the owner. But
since gareots were living in the same place as owned
assets, these apartments for couples had been toler-
ated or ignored. Now suddenly the law was invoked,
asset couples were arrested, fined if they were wage
earners, separated, and sent to company-run com-
pound houses. Ress and the other elderwomen who
ran our house were fined and warned that if
"immoral arrangements" were discovered again,
they would be held responsible and sent to the labor

i-*.   241    T^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

camps. Two little children of one of the couples
were not on the government's list and so were left,
abandoned, when their parents were taken oft. Keo
and Ramayo took them in. They became wards of
the women's side, as orphans in the compounds
always did.

There were fierce debates about this in meetings
of the Hame and The Community- Some said the
right of assets to live together and to bring up their
children was a cause the Radical Party should sup-
port. It was not directly threatening to ownership,
and might appeal to the natural instincts of many
owners, especially the women, who could not vote
but who were valuable allies. Others said that private
affections must be overridden by loyalty to the cause
of liberty, and that any personal issue must take sec-
ond place to the great issue of emancipation. Lord
Erod spoke thus at a meeting. I rose to answer him. I
said that there was no freedom without sexual free-
dom, and that until women were allowed and men
were willing to take responsibility for their children,
no woman, whether owner or asset, would be free.

"Men must bear the responsibility for the public
side of life, the greater world the child will enter;

women, for the domestic side of life, the moral and
physical upbringing of the child. This is a division
enjoined by God and Nature," Erod answered.

"Then will emancipation for a woman mean
she's free to enter the beza, be locked in on the
women's side?"

"Of course not," he began, but I broke in again,
fearing his golden tongue  "Then what is freedom
for a woman? Is it different from freedom for a man?
Or is a free person free?"

-^-a 242 -^-

A Woman's Liberation

The moderator was angrily thumping his staff,
but some other asset women took up my question.
"When will the Radical Party speak for us?" they
said, and one elderwoman cried, "Where are your
women, you owners who want to abolish slavery?
Why aren't they here? Don't you let them out of the
beza?"

The moderator pounded and finally got order
restored. I was half-triumphant and half-dismayed. I
saw Erod and also some of the people from the
Hame now looking at me as an open troublemaker.
And indeed my words had divided us. But were we
not already divided?

A group of us women went home talking
through the streets, talking aloud. These were my
streets now, with their traffic and lights and dangers
and life. I was a City woman, a free woman. That
night 1 was an owner. I owned the City. I owned the
future.

The arguments went on. I was asked to speak at
many places- As I was leaving one such meeting, the
Hainishman Esdardon Aya came to me and said in a
casual way, as if discussing my speech, "Rakam,
you're in danger of arrest."

1 did not understand. He walked along beside
me away from the others and went on: "A rumor has
come to my attention at the Embassy. - . . The gov-
ernment of Voe Deo is about to change the status of
manumitted assets. You're no longer to be consid-
ered gareots. You must have an owner-sponsor."

This was bad news, but after thinking it over I
said, "I think I can find an owner to sponsor me.
Lord Boeba, maybe."

"The owner-sponsor will have to be approved

^ 243 ^-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

by the government.... This will tend to weaken The
Community both through the asset and the owner
members. It's very clever, in its way," said Esdardon
Aya.

"What happens to us if we don't find an
approved sponsor?"

"You'll be considered runaways."

That meant death, the labor camps, or auction.

"0 Lord Kamye," I said, and took Esdardon
Aya's arm, because a curtain of dark had fallen across
my eyes.

We had walked some way along the street.
When I could see again I saw the street, the high
houses of the City, the shining lights I had thought
were mine.

"I have some friends," said the Hainishman,
walking on with me, "who are planning a trip to the
Kingdom of Bambur."

After a while I said, "What would I do there?"

"A ship to Yeowe leaves from there."

"To Yeowe," I said.

"So I hear," he said, as if we were talking about
a streetcar line- "In a few years, I expect Voe Deo will
begin offering rides to Yeowe. Exporting intracta-
bles, troublemakers, members of the Hame. But that
will involve recognising Yeowe as a nation state,
which they haven't brought themselves to do yet.
They are, however, permitting some semilegitimate
trade arrangements by their client states. ... A cou-
ple of years ago, the King of Bambur bought one of
the old Corporation ships, a genuine old Colony
Trader. The King thought he'd like to visit the
moons of Werel. But he found the moons boring. So
he rented the ship to a consortium of scholars from

vfss 244 ^-s

A Woman's Liberation

the University of Bambur and businessmen from his
'capital. Some manufacturers in Bambur cany on a
little trade with Yeowe in it, and some scientists at
the university make scientific expeditions in it at
the same time. Of course each trip is very expensive,
so they carry as many scientists as they can when-
ever they go."

I heard all this not hearing it, yet understanding it.

"So far," he said, "they've gotten away with it."

He always sounded quiet, a little amused, yet
not superior-

"Does The Community know about this ship?"
I asked.

"Some members do, I believe. And people in the
Hame. But it's very dangerous to know about. If Voe
Deo were to find out that a client state was export-
ing valuable property ... In fact, we believe they
may have some suspicions. So this is a decision that
can't be made lightly. It is both dangerous and irre-
vocable. Because of that danger, I hesitated to speak
of it to you. I hesitated so long that you must make
it very quickly. In fact, tonight, Rakam."

I looked from the lights of the City up to the sky
they hid. "I'll go," I said. I thought of Walsu.

"Good," he said. At the next corner he changed
the direction we had been walking, away from my
house, towards the Embassy of the Ekumen.

I never wondered why he did this for me. He
was a secret man, a man of secret power, but he
always spoke truth, and I think he followed his own
heart when he could.

As we entered the Embassy grounds, a great park
softly illuminated in the winter night by ground-
lights, I stopped. "My books," I said. He looked his

3-*<s' 245 ^-s'

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

question. "I wanted to take my books to Yeowe," I
said. Now my voice shook with a rush of tears, as if
everything I was leaving came down to that one
thing. "They need books on Yeowe, I think," I said.

After a moment he said, "I'll have them sent on
our next ship. I wish I could put you on that ship,"
he added in a lower voice. "But of course the Ekumen
can't give free rides to runaway slaves. ..."

I turned and took his hand and laid my fore-
head against it for a moment, the only time in my
life I ever did that of my own free will.

He was startled. "Come, come," he said, and
hurried me along.

The Embassy hired Werelian guards, mostly
veots, men of the old warrior caste. One of them, a
grave, courteous, very silent man, went with me on
the flyer to Bambur, the island kingdom east of the
Great Continent. He had all the papers I needed.
From the flyer port he took me to the Royal Space
Observatory, which the King had built for his space-
ship. There without delay I was taken to the ship,
which stood in its great scaffolding ready to depart.

I imagine that they had made comfortable apart-
ments up front for the King when he went to see the
moons. The body of the ship, which had belonged to
the Agricultural Plantation Corporation, still consisted
of great compartments for the produce of the
Colony. It would be bringing back gram from Yeowe
in four of the cargo bays that now held farm machin-
ery made in Bambur. The fifth compartment held
assets.

The cargo bay had no seats. They had laid felt
pads on the floor, and we lay down and were
strapped to stanchions, as cargo would have been.

sffSi 246 sfsi

A Woman's Liberation

i.;

^
^

t
it

There were about fifty "scientists." I was the last to
come aboard and be strapped in. The crew were
hasty and nervous and spoke only the language of
Bambur. I could not understand the instructions we
were given. I needed very badly to relieve my blad-
der, but they had shouted "No time, no time!" So I
lay in torment while they closed the great doors of
the bay, which made me think of the doors of
Shomeke compound. Around me people called out
to one another in their language. A baby screamed.
I knew that language. Then the great noise began,
beneath us. Slowly I felt my body pressed down on
the floor, as if a huge soft foot were stepping on me,
till my shoulder blades felt as if they were cutting
into the mat, and my tongue pressed back into my
throat as if to choke me, and with a sharp stab of
pain and hot relief my bladder released its urine.

Then we began to be weightless  to float in
our bonds. Up was down and down was up, either
was both or neither. I heard-people all around me
calling out again, saying one another's names, say-
ing what must be, "Are you all right? Yes, I'm all
right." The baby had never ceased its fierce, piercing
yells. I began to feel at my restraints, for I saw the
woman next to me sitting up and rubbing her arms
and chest where the straps had held her- But a great
blurry voice came bellowing over the loudspeaker,
giving orders in the language of Bambur and then in
Voe Dean: "Do not unfasten the straps! Do not
attempt to move about! The ship is under attack!
The situation is extremely dangerous!"

So I lay floating in my little mist of urine, lis-
tening to the strangers around me talk, understand-
ing nothing. I was utterly miserable, and yet fearless

'rts> 247 a-*"

FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

as I had never been. I was carefree. It was like dying.
It would be foolish to worry about anything while
one died.

The ship moved strangely, shuddering, seeming
to turn. Several people were sick. The air filled with
the smell and tiny droplets of vomit. I freed my
hands enough to draw the scarf I was wearing up
over my face as a filter, tucking the ends under my
head to hold it.

Inside the scarf I could no longer see the huge
vault of the cargo bay stretching above or below me,
making me feel I was about to fly or fall into it. It
smelled of myself, which was comforting. It was the
scarf I often wore when I dressed up to give a talk,
fine gauze, pale red with a silver thread woven in at
intervals. When I bought it at a City market, paying
my own earned money for it, I had thought of my
mother's red scarf, given her by Lady Tazeu. 1
thought she would have liked this one, though it
was not as bright. Now I lay and looked into the pale
red dimness it made of the vault, starred with the
lights at the hatches, and thought of my mother,
Yowa. She had probably been killed that morning in
the compound. Perhaps she had been carried to
another estate as a use-woman, but Anas had never
found any trace of her. I thought of the way she had
of carrying her head a little to the side, deferent yet
alert, gracious. Her eyes had been full and bright,
"eyes that hold the seven moons," as the song says.
I thought then; But I will never see the moons again.

At that I felt so strange that to comfort myself
and distract my mind I began to sing under my
breath, there alone in my tent of red gauze warm
with my own breath. I sang the freedom songs we

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A Woman's Liberation

sang in the Hame, and then I sang the love songs
Lady Tazeu had taught me. Finally I sang "0, 0,
Yeowe," softly at first, then a little louder. I heard a
voice somewhere out in that soft red mist world join
in with me, a man's voice, then a woman's. Assets
from Voe Deo all know that song. We sang it togeth-
er. A Bambur man's voice picked it up and put words
in his own language to it, and others joined in
singing it. Then the singing died away. The baby's
crying was weak now. The air was very foul.

We learned many hours later, when at last clean
air entered the vents and we were told we could
release our bonds, that a ship of the Voe Dean Space
Defense Fleet had intercepted the freighter's course
just above the atmosphere and ordered it to stop.
The captain chose to ignore the signal. The warship
had fired, and though nothing hit the freighter the
blast had damaged the controls. The freighter had
gone on, and had seen and heard nothing more of
the warship. We were now about eleven days from
Yeowe. The warship, or a group of them, might be in
wait for us near Yeowe. The reason they gave for
ordering the freighter to halt was "suspected contra-
band merchandise."

That fleet of warships had been built centuries
ago to protect Werel from the attacks they expected
from the Alien Empire, which is what they then
called the Ekumen. They were so frightened by that
imagined threat that they put all their energy into
the technology of space flight; and the colonisation
of Yeowe was a result. After four hundred years with-
out any threat of attack, Voe Deo had finally let the
Ekumen send envoys and ambassadors. They had
used the Defense Fleet to transport troops and

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FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

weapons during the War of Liberation. Now they
were using them the way estate owners used hunting
dogs and hunting cats, to hunt down runaway
slaves.

I found the two other Voe Deans in the cargo
bay, and we moved our "bedstraps" together so we
could talk. Both of them had been brought to
Bambur by the Hame, who had paid their fare. It
had not occurred to me that there was a fare to be
paid. I knew who had paid mine.

"Can't fly a spaceship on love," the woman said.
She was a strange person. She really was a scientist.
Highly trained in chemistry by the company that
rented her, she had persuaded the Hame to send her
to Yeowe because she was sure her skills would be
needed and in demand. She had been making high-
er wages than many gareots did, but she expected to
do still better on Yeowe. "I'm going to be rich/' she
said.

The man, only a boy, a mill hand in a northern
city, had simply run away and had the luck to meet
people who could save him from death or the labor
camps. He was sixteen, ignorant, noisy, rebellious.
sweet-natured. He became a general favorite, like a
puppy. I was in demand because I knew the history
of Yeowe and through a man who knew both
our languages I could tell the Bamburs something
about where they were going  the centuries of
Corporation slavery, Nadami, the War, the
Liberation. Some of them were rentspeople from
the cities, others were a group of estate slaves
bought at auction by the Hame with false money
and under a false name and hurried onto this flight,
knowing very little of where they were going. It was,

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A Woman's Liberation

that trick that had drawn Voe Deo's attention to
this flight.

Yoke, the mill boy, speculated endlessly about
how the Yeowans would welcome us. He had a story,
half a joke, half a dream, about the bands playing
and the speeches and the big dinner they would
have for us. The dinner grew more and more elabo-
rate as the days went on. They were long, hungry
days, floating in the featureless great space of the
cargo bay, marked only by the alternation every
twelve hours of brighter and dimmer lighting and
the issuing of two meals during the "day," food and
water in tubes you squeezed into your mouth. 1 did
not think much about what might happen. I was
between happenings. If the warships found us, we
would probably die. If we got to Yeowe, it would be
a new life. Now we were floating.

4. Yeowe

The ship came down safe at the Port of Yeowe. They
unloaded the crates of machinery first, then the
other cargo. We came out staggering and holding on
to one another, not able to stand up to the great pull
of this new world drawing us down to its center,
blinded by the light of the sun that we were closer
to than we had ever been.

"Over here! Over here!" a man shouted. I was
grateful to hear my language, but the Bamburs
looked apprehensive.

Over here  in here  strip  wait  All we
heard when we were first on the Free World was
orders. We had to be decontaminated, which was

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

painful and exhausting. We had to be examined by
doctors- Anything we had brought with us had to be
decontaminated and examined and listed. That did
not take long for me. I had brought the clothes 1
wore and had worn for two weeks now. I was glad to
get decontaminated. Finally we were told to stand in
line in one of the big empty cargo sheds. The sign
over the doors still read APCY  Agricultural
Plantation Corporation of Yeowe. One by one we
were processed for entry. The man who processed
me was short, white, middle-aged, with spectacles,
like any clerk asset in the City, but I looked at him
with reverence. He was the first Yeowan I had spo-
ken to. He asked me questions from a form and
wrote down my answers. "Can you read?"  "Yes."
 "Skills?"  I stammered a moment and said.
"Teaching  I can teach reading and history." He
never looked up at me.

I was glad to be patient. After all, the Yeowans
had not asked us to come. We were admitted only
because they knew if they sent us back, we would
die horribly in a public execution. We were a prof-
itable cargo to Bambur, but to Yeowe we were a
problem. But many of us had skills they must need,
and I was glad they asked us about them.

When we had all been processed, we were sepa-
rated into two groups: men and women. Yoke
hugged me and went off to the men's side laughing
and waving. I stood with the women. We watched
all the men led off to the shuttle that went to the
Old Capital. Now my patience failed and my hope
darkened. I prayed, "Lord Kamye, not here, not here
too!" Fear made me angry. When a man came giving
us orders again, come on, this way, I went up to him

sy-s 252 a^S1

A Woman's Liberation

and said, "Who are you? Where are we going? We
are free women!"

He was a big fellow with a round, white face and
bluish eyes- He looked down at me, huffy at first,
then smiling. "Yes, Little Sister, you're free," he said.
"But we've all got to work, don't we? You ladies are
going south. They need people on the rice planta-
tions. You do a little work, make a little money, look
around a little, all right? If you don't like it down
there, come on back. We can always use more pret-
ty little ladies round here."

I had never heard the Yeowan country accent, a
singing, blurry softening, with long, clear vowels. I
had never heard asset women called ladies. No one
had ever called me Little Sister. He did not mean the
word "use" as I took it, surely. He meant well. I was
bewildered and said no more. But the chemist,
Tualtak, said, "Listen, I'm no field hand, I'm a
trained scientist "

"Oh, you're all scientists, ".the Yeowan said with
his big smile. "Come on now, ladies!" He strode
ahead, and we followed. Tualtak kept talking. He
smiled and paid no heed.

We were taken to a train car waiting on a siding.
The huge, bright sun was setting. All the sky was
orange and pink, full of light. Long shadows ran
black along the ground. The warm air was dusty and
sweet-smelling. While we stood waiting to climb up
into the car I stooped and picked up a little reddish
stone from the ground. It was round, with a tiny
stripe of white clear through it. It was a piece of
Yeowe. I held Yeowe in my hand. That little stone,
too, I still have.

Our car was shunted along to the main yards

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

and hooked onto a train. When the train started we
were served dinner, soup from great kettles wheeled
through the car, bowls of sweet, heavy marsh rice,
pini fruit  a luxury on Werel, here a common-
place. We ate and ate. I watched the last light die
away from the long, rolling hills that the train was
passing through. The stars came out. No moons.
Never again. But I saw Werel rising in the east. It was
a great blue-green star, looking as Yeowe looks from
Werel. But you would never see Yeowe rising after
sunset. Yeowe followed the sun.

I'm alive and I'm here, I thought. I'm following
the sun. I let the rest go, and fell asleep to the sway-
ing of the train.

We were taken off the train on the second day
at a town on the great river Yot. Our group of twen-
ty-three was separated there, and ten of us were
taken by oxcart to a village, Hagayot. It had been an
APCY compound, growing marsh rice to feed the
Colony slaves. Now it was a cooperative village,
growing marsh rice to feed the Free People. We were
enrolled as members of the cooperative. We lived
share and share alike with the villagers until payout,
when we could pay them back what we owed the
cooperative.

It was a reasonable way to handle immigrants
without money who did not know the language or
who had no skills. But I did not understand why
they had ignored our skills. Why had they sent the
men from Bambur plantations, field hands, into the
city, not here? Why only women?

I did not understand why, in a village of free
people, there was a men's side and a women's side,
with a ditch between them.

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A Woman's Liberation

I did not understand why, as I soon discovered,
the men made all the decisions and gave all the
orders. But, it being so, I did understand that they
were afraid of us Werelian women, who were not
used to taking orders from our equals. And I under-
stood that I must take orders and not even look as if
I thought of questioning them. The men of Hagayot
Village watched us with fierce suspicion and a whip
as ready as any Boss's. "Maybe you told men what to
do back over there," the foreman told us the first
morning in the fields. "Well, that's back over there-
That's not here. Here we free people work together.
You think you're Bosswomen. There aren't any
Bosswomen here."

There were grandmothers on the women's side,
but they were not the powers our grandmothers had
been. Here, where for the first century there had
been no slave women at all, the men had had to
make their own life, set up their own powers. When
women slaves at last were sent into those slave-
kingdoms of men, there was no power for them at
all. They had no voice. Not till they got away to the
cities did they ever have a voice on Yeowe.

I learned silence.

But it was not as bad for me and Tualtak as for
our eight Bambur companions. We were the first
immigrants any of these villagers had ever seen.
They knew only one language. They thought the
Bambur women were witches because they did not
talk "like human beings." They whipped them for
talking to each other in their own language.

I will confess that in my first year on the Free
World my heart was as tow as it had been at Zeskra.
I hated standing all day in the shallow water of the

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rice paddies. Our feet were always sodden and
swollen and full of tiny burrowing worms we had to
pick out every night. But it was needed work and
not too hard for a healthy woman. It was not the
work that bore me down.

Hagayot was not a tribal village, not as conser-
vative as some of the old villages I learned about
later. Girls here were not ritually raped, and a
woman was safe on the women's side. She "jumped
the ditch" only with a man she chose. But if a
woman went anywhere alone, or even got separated
from the other women working in the paddies, she
was supposed to be "asking for it," and any man
thought it his right to force himself on her.

I made good friends among the village women
and the Bamburs. They were no more ignorant than
I had been a few years before and some were wiser
than I would ever be. There was no possibility of
having a friend among men who thought them-
selves our owners. I could not see how life here
would ever change. My heart was very low, nights,
when I lay among the sleeping women and children
in our hut and thought. Is this what Walsu died for?

In my second year there, I resolved to do what I
could to keep above the misery that threatened me.
One of the Bambur women, meek and slow of
understanding, whipped and beaten by both
women and men for speaking her language, had
drowned in one of the great rice paddies. She had
lain down there in the warm shallow water not
much deeper than her ankles, and had drowned. I
feared that yielding, that water of despair. I made up
my mind to use my skill, to teach the village women
and children to read.

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A Woman's Liberation

I wrote out some little primers on rice cloth and
made a game of it for the little children, first. Some
of the older girls and women were curious. Some of
them knew that people in the towns and cities could
read. They saw it as a mystery, a witchcraft that gave
the city people their great power. I did not deny this.

For the women, I first wrote down verses and
passages of the Arkamye, all I could remember, so
that they could have it and not have to wait for one
of the men who called themselves "priests" to recite
it. They were proud of learning to read these verses.
Then I had my friend Seugi tell me a story, her own
recollection of meeting a wild hunting cat in the
marshes as a child. I wrote it down. entitling it "The
Marsh Lion, by Aro Seugi," and read it aloud to the
author and a circle of girls and women. They mar-
veled and laughed. Seugi wept, touching the writing
that held her voice.

The chief of the village and his headmen and
foremen and honorary sons. all the hierarchy and
government of the village, were suspicious and not
pleased by my teaching, yet did not want to forbid
me. The government of Yotebber Region had sent
word that they were establishing country schools
where village children were to be sent for half the
year. The village men knew that their sons would be
advantaged if they could already read and write
when they went there.

The Chosen Son, a big, mild, pale man, blind in
one eye from a war wound, came to me at last. He
wore his coat of office, a tight, long coat such as
Werelian owners had worn three hundred years ago.
He told me that 1 should not teach girls to read, only
boys.

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

I told him I would teach all the children who
wanted to learn or none of them.

"Girls do not want to learn this," he said.

"They do. Fourteen girls have asked to be in my
class- Eight boys. Do you say girls do not need reli-
gious training, Chosen Son?"

This gave him pause. "They should learn the life
of the Merciful Lady," he said.

"I will write the Life of Tual for them." I said at
once. He walked away, saving his dignity.

I had little pleasure in my victory, such as it was.
At least I went on teaching.

Tualtak was always at me to run away, run away
to the city downriver. She had grown very thin, for
she could not digest the heavy food. She hated the
work and the people. "It's all right for you, you were
a plantation pup, a dusty, but I never was, my moth-
er was a rentswoman, we lived in fine rooms on
Haba Street, I was the brightest trainee they ever had
in the laboratory," and on and on, over and over,
living in the world she had lost.

Sometimes I listened to her talk about running
away. 1 tried to remember the maps of Yeowe in my
lost books. 1 remembered the great river, the Yot,
running from far inland three thousand kilos to the
South Sea. But where were we on its vast length,
how far from Yotebber City on its delta? Between
Hagayot and the city might be a hundred villages
like this one. "Have you been raped?" I asked
Tualtak.

She took offense. "I'm a rentswoman, not a use-
woman," she snapped.

I said, "I was a use-woman for two years. If I was
raped again, I would kill the man or kill myself. I

i-xs. 258 ^

A Woman's Liberation

think two Werelian women walking alone here
would be raped. I can't do it, Tualtak."

"It can't all be like this place!" she cried, so des-
perate that I felt my own throat close up with tears.

"Maybe when they open the schools  there
will be people from the cities then " It was all I
had to offer her, or myself, as hope. "Maybe if the
harvest's good this year, if we can get our money, we
can get on the train. .. ."

That indeed was our best hope. The problem
was to get our money from the chief and his
cohorts. They kept the cooperative's income in a
stone hut which they called the Bank of Hagayot,
and only they ever saw the money. Each individual
had an account, and they kept tally faithfully, the
old Banker Headman scratching your account out in
the dirt if you asked for it. But women and children
could not withdraw money from their account. All
we could get was a kind of scrip, clay pieces marked
by the Banker Headman, good to buy things from
one another, things people in the village made,
clothes, sandals, tools, bead necklaces, rice beer. Our
real money was safe, we were told, in the bank. I
thought of that old lame bondsman at Shomeke, jig-
ging and singing, "Money in the bank, Lord! Money
in the bank!"

Before we ever came, the women had resented
this system. Now there were nine more women
resenting it.

One night I asked my friend Seugi, whose hair
was as white as her skin, "Seugi, do you know what
happened at a place called Nadami?"

"Yes," she said. "The women opened the door.
All the women rose up and then the men rose up

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

against the Bosses- But they needed weapons. And a
woman ran in the night and stole the key from the
owner's box and opened the door of the strong place
where the Bosses kept their guns and bullets, and
she held it open with the strength of her body, so
that the slaves could arm themselves- And they
killed the Corporations and made that place.
Nadami, free."

"Even on Werel they tell that story," I said.
"Even there women tell about Nadami, where the
women began the Liberation. Men tell it too. Do
men here tell it? Do they know it?-

Seugi and the other women nodded.

"If a woman freed the men of Nadami," I said,
"maybe the women of Hagayot can free their
money."

Seugi laughed. She called out to a group of
grandmothers, "Listen to Rakam! Listen to this!"

After plenty of talk for days and weeks, it ended
in a delegation of women, thirty of us. We crossed
the ditch bridge onto the men's side and ceremoni-
ously asked to see the chief. Our principal bargain-
ing counter was shame. Seugi and other village
women did the speaking, for they knew how far
they could shame the men without goading them
into anger and retaliation. Listening to them, I
heard dignity speak to dignity, pride speak to pride.
For the first time since I came to Yeowe I felt I was
one of these people, that this pride and dignity were
mine.

Nothing happens fast in a village. But by the
next harvest, the women of Hagayot could draw
their own earned share out of the bank in cash.

"Now for the vote," I said to Seugi, for there was

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A Woman's Liberation

no secret ballot in the village. When there was a
regional election, even in the worldwide Ratification
of the Constitution, the chiefs polled the men and
filled out the ballots. They did not even poll the
women. They wrote in the votes they wanted cast-
But I did not stay to help bring about that
change at Hagayot. Tualtak was really ill and half-
crazy with her longing to get out of the marshes, to
the city. And I too longed for that. So we took our
wages, and Seugi and other women drove us in an
oxcart on the causeway across the marshes to the
freight station. There we raised the flag that signaled
the next train to stop for passengers.

It came along in a few hours, a long train of
boxcars loaded with marsh rice. heading for the
mills of Yotebber City. We rode in the crew car with
the train crew and a few other passengers, village
men. I had a big knife in my belt, but none of the
men showed us any disrespect. Away from their
compounds they were timid and shy. I sat up in my
bunk in that car watching the great, wild, plumy
marshes whirl by, and the villages on the banks of
the wide river, and wished the train would go on for-
ever.

But Tualtak lay in the bunk below me. coughing
and fretful. When we got to Yotebber City she was
so weak 1 knew I had to get her to a doctor. A man
from the train crew was kind, telling us how to get
to the hospital on the public cars. As we rattled
through the hot, crowded city streets in the crowded
car, I was still happy. I could not help it.

At the hospital they demanded our citizen's reg-
istration papers.

I had never heard of such papers. Later I found

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FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

that ours had been given to the chiefs at Hagayot,
who had kept them, as they kept all "their"
women's papers. At the time, all I could do was
stare and say, "I don't know anything about regis-
tration papers."

I heard one of the women at the desk say to the
other, "Lord, how dusty can you get?"

I knew what we looked like. I knew we looked
dirty and low. I knew I seemed ignorant and stupid.
But when I heard that word "dusty" my pride and
dignity woke up again. I put my hand into my pack
and brought out my freedom paper, that old paper
with Erod's writing on it, all crumpled and folded,
all dusty.

"This is my Citizen's Registration paper," I said
in a loud voice, making those women Jump and
turn. "My mother's blood and my grandmother's
blood is on it- My friend here is sick. She needs a
doctor. Now bring us to a doctor!"

A thin little woman came forward from the cor-
ridor. "Come on this way," she said. One of the
deskwomen started to protest. This little woman
give her a look.

We followed her to an examination room.

"I'm Dr. Yeron," she said, then corrected herself.
"I'm serving as a nurse," she said. "But I am a doc-
tor. And you  you come from the Old World? from
Werel? Sit down there, now, child, take off your
shirt. How long have you been here?"

Within a quarter of an hour she had diagnosed
Tualtak and got her a bed in a ward for rest and
observation, found out our histories, and sent me
off with a note to a friend of hers who would help
me find a place to live and a job.

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A Woman's Liberation

"Teaching!" Dr. Yeron said. "A teacher! Oh,
woman, you are rain to the dry land!"

Indeed the first school I talked to wanted to hire
me at once, to teach anything I wanted. Because I
come of a capitalist people, I went to other schools
to see if I could make more money at them. But I
came back to the first one. I liked the people there.

Before the War of Liberation, the cities of
Yeowe, which were cities of Corporation-owned
assets who rented their own freedom, had had their
own schools and hospitals and many kinds of train-
ing programs. There was even a University for assets
in the Old Capital. The Corporations, of course, had
controlled all the information that came to such
institutions, and watched and censored all teaching
and writing, keeping everything aimed towards the
maximization of their profits. But within that
narrow frame the assets had been free to use the
information they had as they pleased, and city
Yeowans had valued education deeply. During the
long war, thirty years, all that system of gathering
and teaching knowledge had broken down. A whole
generation grew up learning nothing but fighting
and hiding, famine and disease. The head of my
school said to me, "Our children grew up illiterate,
ignorant. Is it any wonder the plantation chiefs just
took over where the Corporation Bosses left off?
Who was to stop them?"

These men and women believed with a fierce
passion that only education would lead to freedom.
They were still fighting the War of Liberation.

Yotebber City was a big, poor, sunny, sprawling
city with wide streets, low buildings, and huge old
shady trees. The traffic was mostly afoot, with cycles

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FOUR   WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

tinging and public cars clanging along among the
slow crowds. There were miles of shacks and
shanties down in the old floodplain of the river
behind the levees, where the soil was rich for gar-
dening. The center of the city was on a low rise, the
mills and train yards spreading out from it.
Downtown it looked like the City of Voe Deo, only
older and poorer and gentler. Instead of big stores
for owners, people bought and sold everything from
stalls in open markets. The air was soft here in the
south, a warm, soft sea air full of mist and sunlight.
I stayed happy. I have by the grace of the ford a
mind that can leave misfortune behind, and I was
happy in Yotebber City,

Tualtak recovered her health and found a good
job as a chemist in a factory. I saw her seldom, as our
friendship had been a matter of necessity, not
choice. Whenever 1 saw her she talked about Haba
Street and her laboratory on Werel and complained
about her work and the people here.

Dr. Yeron did not forget me. She wrote a note
and told me to come visit her, which I did. Presently,
when I was settled, she asked me to come with her
to a meeting of an educational society. This, I found,
was a group of democrats, mostly teachers, who
sought to work against the autocratic power of
the tribal and regional chiefs under the new
Constitution, and to counteract what they called
the slave mind, the rigid, misogynistic hierarchy
that I had encountered in Hagayot. My experience
was useful to them, for they were all city people who
had met the slave mind only when they found
themselves governed by it. The women of the group
were the angriest. They had lost the most at

cat 264 ^*^'

A Woman's Liberation

Liberation and now had less to lose. In general the
men were gradualists, the women ready for revolu-
tion. As a Werelian, ignorant of politics on Yeowe, I
listened and did not talk- It was hard for me not to
talk. I am a talker, and sometimes I had plenty to
say. But I held my tongue and heard them. They
were people worth hearing.

Ignorance defends itself savagely, and illiteracy,
as I well knew, can be shrewd. Though the Chief, the
President of Yotebber Region, elected by a manipu-
lated ballot, might not understand our counter-
manipulations of the school curriculum, he did not
waste much energy trying to control the schools,
merely sending his inspectors to meddle with our
classes and censor our books. But what he saw as
important was the fact that, just as the Corporations
had, he controlled the net. The news, the informa-
tion programs, the puppets of the neareals, all
danced to his strings. Against that, what harm could
a lot of teachers do? Parents .who had no schooling
had children who entered the net to hear and see
and feel what the Chief wanted them to know; that
freedom is obedience to leaders, that virtue is vio-
lence, that manhood is domination. Against the
enactment of such truths in daily life and in the
heightened sensational experience of the neareals,
what good were words?

"Literacy is irrelevant," one of our group said
sorrowfully. "The chiefs have jumped right over our
heads into the postliterate information technology."

I brooded over that, hating her fancy words,
irrelevant, postliterate, because I was afraid she was
right.

To the next meeting of our group, to my sur-

^-s' 265 ""-

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

prise, an Alien came: the Sub-Envoy of the Ekumen.
He was supposed to be a great feather in our Chiefs
cap, sent down from the Old Capital apparently to
support the Chief's stand against the World Party,
which was still strong down here and still clamoring
that Yeowe should keep out all foreigners. I had
heard vaguely that such a person was here, but I had
not expected to meet him at a gathering of subver-
sive schoolteachers.

He was a short man, red-brown, with white cor-
ners to his eyes, but handsome if one could ignore
that. He sat in the seat in front of me. He sat perfect-
ly still, as if accustomed to sitting still, and listened
without speaking, as if accustomed to listening. At
the end of the meeting he turned around and his
queer eyes looked straight at me.

"Radosse Rakam?" he said.

I nodded, dumb.

"I'm Yehedarhed Havzhiva," he said. "1 have
some books for you from old music."

I stared. I said, "Books?"

"From old music," he said again. "Esdardon Aya,
on Werel."

"My books?" I said.

He smiled. He had a broad, quick smile.

"Oh, where?" I cried.

"They're at my house. We can get them tonight,
if you like. I have a car." There was something iron-
ic and light in how he said that, as if he was a man
who did not expect to have a car, though he might
enjoy it.

Dr. Yeron came over, "So you found her," she
said to the Sub-Envoy. He looked at her with such a
bright face that I thought, these two are lovers.

33^a 266 ^-s

A Woman's Liberation

Though she was much older than he, there was
nothing unlikely in the thought. Dr. Yeron was a
magnetic woman. It was odd to me to think it,
though, for my mind was not given to speculating
about people's sexual affairs. That was no interest of
mine.

He put his hand on her arm as they talked, and
I saw with peculiar intensity how gentle his touch
was, almost hesitant, yet trustful. That is love, I
thought. Yet they parted, I saw, without that look of
private understanding that lovers often give each
other.

He and I rode in his government electric car, his
two silent bodyguards, policewomen, sitting in the
front seat. We spoke of Esdardon Aya, whose name,
he explained to me, meant Old Music-1 told him how
Esdardon Aya had saved my life by sending me here.
He listened in a way that made it easy to talk to him.
1 said, "I was sick to leave my books, and I've thought
about them, missing them, as if they were my family.
But 1 think maybe I'm a fool to feel that way."

"Why a fool?" he asked. He had a foreign
accent, but he had the Yeowan lilt already, and his
voice was beautiful, low and warm.

I tried to explain everything at once: "Well, they
mean so much to me because I was illiterate when I
came to the City, and it was the books that gave me
freedom, gave me the world  the worlds  But
now, here, I see how the net, the holos, the neareals
mean so much more to people, giving them the
present time. Maybe it's just clinging to the past to
cling to books. Yeowans have to go towards the
future. And we'll never change people's minds jim
with words."                              ,ets,

s*-s 267 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

He listened intently, as he had done at the meet-
ing, and then answered slowly, "But words are an
essential way of thinking. And books keep the words
true.... I didn't read till I was an adult, either."

"You didn't?"

"I knew how, but I didn't. I lived in a village. It's
cities that have to have books," he said, quite deci-
sively, as if he had thought about this matter. "If
they don't, we keep on starting over every genera-
tion. It's a waste. You have to save the words."

When we got to his house, up at the top end of
the old part of town, there were four crates of books
in the entrance hall.

"These aren't all mine!" I said.

"Old Music said they were yours," Mr. Yehedarhed
said, with his quick smile and a quick glance at me.
You can tell where an Alien is looking much better
than you can tell with us. With us, except for the few
people with bluish eyes, you have to be close enough
to see the dark pupil move in the dark eye.

"I haven't got anywhere to put so many," I said,
amazed, realising how that strange man. Old Music,
had helped me to freedom yet again.

"At your school, maybe? The school library?"

It was a good idea, but I thought at once of the
Chief's inspectors pawing through them, perhaps
confiscating them. When I spoke of that, the Sub-
Envoy said, "What if I present them as a gift from
the Embassy? I think that might embarrass the
inspectors."

"Oh," I said, and burst out, "Why are you so
kind? You, and he  Are you Hainish too?"

"Yes," he said, not answering my other ques-
tion. "I was. I hope to be Yeowan."

^*-s 268 -a-

A Woman's Liberation

He asked me to sit down and drink a little glass
of wine with him before his guard drove me home.
He was easy and friendly, but a quiet man. I saw he
had been hurt. There were scars on his face and a
gap in his hair where he had had a head injury. He
asked me what my books were, and I said, "History."

At that he smiled, slowly this time. He said
nothing, but he raised his glass to me. I raised mine,
imitating him, and we drank.

Next day he had the books delivered to our
school. When we opened and shelved them, we
realised we had a great treasure. "There's nothing
like this at the University," said one of the teachers,
who had studied there for a year.

There were histories and anthropologies of
Werel and of the worlds of the Ekumen, works of
philosophy and politics by Werelians and by people
of other worlds, there were compendiums of litera-
ture, poetry and stories, encyclopedias, books of sci-
ence, atlases, dictionaries. In a comer of one of the
crates were my own few books, my own treasure,
even that first little crude History of Yeowe, Printed at
Yeowe University in the Year One of Liberty. Most of my
books I left in the school library, but I took that one
and a few others home for love, for comfort-

1 had found another love and comfort not long
since, A child at school had brought me a present, a
spotted<at kitten, just weaned. The boy gave it to
me with such loving pride that I could not refuse it.
When I tried to pass it on to another teacher they all
laughed at me. "You're elected, Rakami" they said.
So unwillingly I took the little being home, afraid of
its frailty and delicacy and near to feeling a disgust
for it. Women in the beza at Zeskra had had pets,

^ 269 -^-f

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

spotted cats and foxdogs, spoiled little animals fed
better than we were. I had been called by the name
of a pet animal once.

I alarmed the kitten taking it out of its basket,
and it bit my thumb to the bone. It was tiny and frail
but it had teeth. I began to have some respect for it.

That night I put it to sleep in its basket, but it
climbed up on my bed and sat on my face until I let
it under the covers- There it slept perfectly still all
night. In the morning it woke me by dancing on
me, chasing dust motes in a sunbeam. It made me
laugh, waking, which is a pleasant thing. I felt that
I had never laughed very much, and wanted to.

The kitten was all black, its spots showing only
in certain lights, black on black. I called it Owner. I
found it pleasant to come home evenings to be
greeted by my little Owner.

Now for the next half year we were planning the
great demonstration of women. There were many
meetings, at some of which I met the Sub-Envoy
again, so that I began to look for him. I liked to
watch him listen to our arguments. There were
those who argued that the demonstration must not
be limited to the wrongs and rights of women, for
equality must be for all. Others argued that it should
not depend in any way on the support of foreigners,
but should be a purely Yeowan movement. Mr.
Yehedarhed listened to them, but I got angry. "I'm a
foreigner," I said. "Does that make me no use to
you? That's owner talk  as if you were better than
other people!" And Dr. Yeron said, "I will believe
equality is for all when I see it written in the
Constitution of Yeowe." For our Constitution, rati-
fied by a world vote during the time I was at

270

A Woman's Liberation

Hagayot, spoke of citizens only as men. That is final-
ly what the demonstration became, a demand that
the Constitution be amended to include women as
citizens, provide for the secret ballot, and guarantee
the right to free speech, freedom of the press and of
assembly, and free education for all children.

I lay down on the train tracks along with seven-
ty thousand women, that hot day. I sang with them.
I heard what that sounds like, so many women
singing together, what a big, deep sound it makes.

I had begun to speak in public again when we
were gathering women for the great demonstration.
It was a gift I had, and we made use of it. Sometimes
gang boys or ignorant men would come to heckle
and threaten me, shouting, "Bosswoman, Owner-
woman, black cunt, go back where you came from!"
Once when they were yelling that, go back, go back,
I leaned into the microphone and said, "I can't go
back. We used to sing a song on the plantation
where I was a slave," and I sang it,

0, 0, Ye-o-we,
Nobody never comes back.

The singing made them be still for a moment.
They heard it, that awful grief, that yearning.

After the great demonstration the unrest never
died down, but there were times that the energy
flagged, the Movement didn't move, as Dr. Yeron
said. During one of those times I went to her and
proposed that we set up a printing house and pub-
lish books. This had been a dream of mine, growing
from that day in Hagayot when Seugi had touched
her words and wept.

^, 271 .^

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

"Talk goes by," I said, "and all the words and
images in the net go by, and anybody can change
them. But books are there. They last. They are the
body of history, Mr. Yehedarhed says."

"Inspectors," said Dr. Yeron. "Until we get the
free press amendment, the chiefs aren't going to let
anybody print anything they didn't dictate them-
selves."

I did not want to give up the idea. I knew that
in Yotebber Region we could not publish anything
political, but I argued that we might print stories
and poems by women of the region. Others thought
it a waste of time. We discussed it back and forth for
a long time. Mr. Yehedarhed came back from a trip
to the Embassy, up north in the Old Capital. He lis-
tened to our discussions, but said nothing, which
disappointed me. 1 had thought that he might sup-
port my project.

One day I was walking home from school to my
apartment, which was in a big, old, noisy house not
far from the levee. I liked the place because my win-
dows opened into the branches of trees, and
through the trees I saw the river, four miles wide
here, easing along among sandbars and reedbeds
and willow isles in the dry season, brimming up the
levees in the wet season when the rainstorms scud-
ded across it. That day as I came near the house, Mr.
Yehedarhed appeared, with two sour-faced police-
women close behind him as usual. He greeted me
and asked if we might talk. I was confused and did
not know what to do but to invite him up to my
room.

His guards waited in the lobby. I had fust the
one big room on the third floor. I sat on the bed and

^ 272 ^s

A Woman's Liberation

the Sub-Envoy sat in the chair. Owner went round
and round his legs, saying roo? roo?

I had observed that the Sub-Envoy took pleasure
in disappointing the expectations of the Chief and
his cohorts, who were all for pomp and fleets of cars
and elaborate badges and uniforms. He and his
policewomen went all over the city, all over
Yotebber, in his government car or on foot- People
liked him for it. They knew, as I knew now, that he
had been assaulted and beaten and left for dead by
a World Party gang his first day here, when he went
out afoot alone. The city people liked his courage
and the way he talked with everybody, anywhere.
They had adopted him. We in the Liberation
Movement thought of him as "our Envoy," but he
was theirs, and the Chief's too- The Chief may have
hated his popularity, but he profited from it.

"You want to start a publishing house," he said,
stroking Owner, who fell over with his paws in the
air.

"Dr. Yeron says there's no use until we get the
Amendments."

"There's one press on Yeowe not directly con-
trolled by the government," Mr. Yehedarhed said,
stroking Owner's belly-

"Look out, he'll bite," I said. "Where is that?"

"At the University. I see," Mr. Yehedarhed said,
looking at his thumb. I apologized. He asked me if I
was certain that Owner was male. I said I had been
told so, but never had thought to look. "My impres-
sion is that your Owner is a lady," Mr. Yehedarhed
said, in such a way that I began to laugh helplessly.

He laughed along with me, sucked the blood off
his thumb, and went on. "The University never

^s 273 ^

FOUR WAYS TO FORGIVENESS

amounted to much. It was a Corporation ploy  let
the assets pretend they're going to college. During
the last years of the War it was closed down. Since
Liberation Day it's reopened and crawled along with
no one taking much notice of it. The faculty are
mostly old. They came back to it after the War. The
National Government gives it a subsidy because it
sounds well to have a University of Yeowe, but they
don't pay it any attention, because it has no pres-
tige. And because many of them are unenlightened
men." He said this without scorn, descriptively. "It
does have a printing house."

"I know," 1 said. I reached out for my old book
and showed it to him.

He looked through it for a few minutes. His face
was curiously tender as he did so. I could not help
watching him. It was like watching a woman with a
baby, a constant, changing play of attention and
response.

"Full of propaganda and errors and hope," he
said at last, and his voice too was tender. "Well, I
think this could be improved upon. Don't you? All
that's needed is an editor. And some authors."

"Inspectors." I warned, imitating Dr. Yeron.

"Academic freedom is an easy issue for the
Ekumen to have some influence upon," he said,
"because we invite people to attend the Ekumenical
Schools on Hain and Ve. We certainly want to invite
graduates of the University of Yeowe. But of course, if
their education is severely defective because of the
lack of books, of information ..."

I said, "Mr. Yehedarhed, are you supposed to sub-
vert government policies?" The question broke out
of me unawares.

A Woman's Liberation

He did not laugh. He paused for quite a long
time before he answered. "I don't know," he said.
"So far the Ambassador has backed me- We may
both get reprimanded. Or fired. What I'd like to
do . .." His strange eyes were right on me again. He
looked down at the book he still held. "What I'd like
is to become a Yeowan citizen," he said. "But my
usefulness to Yeowe, and to the Liberation
Movement, is my position with the Ekumen. So I'll
go on using that, or misusing it, till they tell me to
stop."

When he left I had to think about what he had
asked me to do. That was to go to the University as
a teacher of history, and once there to volunteer for
the editorship of the press. That all seemed so pre-
posterous, for a woman of my background and my
little learning, that I thought I must be misunder-
standing him. When he convinced me that I had
understood him, I thought he must have very badly
misunderstood who ( was and what I was capable
of. After we had talked about that for a little while,
he left, evidently feeling that he was making me
uncomfortable, and perhaps feeling uncomfortable
himself, though in fact we laughed a good deal and
I did not feel uncomfortable, only a tittle as if I were
crazy.

I tried to think about what he had asked me to
do, to step so far beyond myself. 1 found it difficult
to think about. It was as if it hung over me, this
huge choice I must make, this future I could not
imagine. But what I thought about was him,
Yehedarhed Havzhiva. I kept seeing him sitting
there in my old chair, stooping down to stroke
Owner. Sucking blood off his thumb. Laughing.

^s 275 s9.s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Looking at me with his white-cornered eyes. I saw
his red-brown face and red-brown hands, the color
of pottery. His quiet voice was in my mind.

I picked up the kitten, half-grown now, and
looked at its hinder end. There was no sign of any
male parts. The little black silky body squirmed in
my hands. I thought of him saying, "Your Owner is
a lady," and I wanted to laugh again, and to cry. I
stroked the kitten and set her down, and she sat
sedately beside me, washing her shoulder. "Oh poor
little lady," I said. I don't know who I meant. The
kitten, or Lady Tazeu, or myself.

He had said to take my time thinking about his
proposal, all the time I wanted. But I had not really
thought about it at all when, the next day but one,
there he was, on foot, waiting for me as I came out
of the school. "Would you like to walk on the
levee?" he said.

I looked around.

"There they are," he said, indicating his cold-
eyed bodyguards. "Everywhere I am, they are, three
to five meters away. Walking with me is dull, but
safe. My virtue is guaranteed."

We walked down through the streets to the
levee and up onto it in the long early evening light,
warm and pink-gold, smelling of river and mud and
reeds. The two women with guns walked along just
about four meters behind us.

"If you do go to the University," he said after a
long silence, "I'll be there constantly."

"1 haven't yet " I stammered.

"If you stay here, I'll be here constantly," he
said. "That is/ if it's all right with you."

I said nothing. He looked at me without turning

S-MS' 276 ^*-s

A Woman's Liberation

his head. I said without intending to, "I like it that I
can see where you're looking."

"I like it that I can't see where you're looking,"
he said, looking directly at me.

We walked on. A heron rose up out of a reed
islet and its great wings beat over the water, away.
We were walking south, downriver. All the western
sky was full of light as the sun went down behind
the city in smoke and haze.

"Rakam, I would like to know where you came
from, what your life on Werel was," he said very
softly

I drew a long breath. "It's all gone," I said.
"Past."

"We are our past. Though not only that. I want
to know you. Forgive me. 1 want very much to know
you."

After a while I said, "1 want to tell you. But it's
so bad. It's so ugly. Here, now, it's beautiful. I don't
want to lose it."

"Whatever you tell me I will hold valuable," he
said, in his quiet voice that went to my heart. So I
told him what I could about Shomeke compound,
and then hurried on through the rest of my story.
Sometimes he asked a question. Mostly he listened.
At some time in my telling he had taken my arm, I
scarcely noticing at the time. When he let me go,
thinking some movement I made meant I wanted
to be released, I missed that light touch. His hand
was cool. I could feel it on my forearm after it was
gone.

"Mr. Yehedarhed," said a voice behind us: one of
the bodyguards. The sun was down, the sky flushed
with gold and red. "Better head back?"

a?- 277 -^-s>

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

"Yes," he said, "thanks." As we turned I took his
arm. I felt him catch his breath.

I had not desired a man or a woman  this is
the truth  since Shomeke. I had loved people, and
I had touched them with love, but never with desire,
My gate was locked.

Now it was open. Now I was so weak that at the
touch of his hand I could scarcely walk on.

I said, "It's a good thing walking with you is so
safe."

I hardly knew what 1 meant. I was thirty years
old but 1 was like a young girl. I had never been that

girl.

He said nothing. We walked along in silence
between the river and the city in a glory of failing
light.

"Will you come home with me, Rakam?" he
said.

Now I said nothing.

"They don't come in with us," he said, very low,
in my ear, so that I felt his breath.

"Don't make me laugh!" I said, and began cry-
ing. I wept all the way back along the levee. I sobbed
and thought the sobs were ceasing and then sobbed
again. I cried for all my sorrows, all my shames. I
cried because they were with me now and always
would be. I cried because the gate was open and I
could go through at last, go into the country on the
other side, but I was afraid to.

When we got into the car, up near my school,
he took me in his arms and simply held me, silent.
The two women in the front seat never looked
round.

We went into his house, which 1 had seen once

s^s 278 ^

A Woman's Liberation

before, an old mansion of some owner of the
Corporation days. He thanked the guards and shut
the door. "Dinner," he said. "The cook's out-1 meant
to take you to a restaurant. I forgot." He led me to
the kitchen, where we found cold rice and salad and
wine- After we ate he looked at me across the
kitchen table and looked down again. His hesitance
made me hold still and say nothing. After a long
time he said, "Oh, Rakam! will you let me make love
to you?"

"I want to make love to you," I said, "I never
did. I never made love to anyone."

He got up smiling and took my hand. We went
upstairs together, passing what had been the
entrance to the men's side of the house. "I live in
the beza," he said, "in the harem. I live on the
woman's side. I like the view."

We came to his room. There he stood still, look-
ing at me, then looked away. I was so frightened, so
bewildered, I thought I could not go to him or touch
him. I made myself go to him. I raised my hand and
touched his face, the scars by his eye and on his
mouth, and put my arms around him. Then I could
hold him to me, closer and closer.

Some time in that night as we lay drowsing
entangled I said, "Did you sleep with Dr. Yeron?"

I felt Havzhiva laugh, a slow, soft laugh in his
belly, which was against my belly. "No," he said.
"No one on Yeowe but you. And you, no one on
Yeowe but me. We were virgins, Yeowan virgins. .. .
Rakam, araha...." He rested his head in the hollow
of my shoulder and said something else in a foreign
language and fell asleep. He slept deeply, silently.

Later that year I came up north to the University,

^? 279 ^o

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

where I was taken on the faculty as a teacher of his-
tory. By their standards at that time, I was competent.
I have worked there ever since, teaching and as editor
of the press.

As he had said he would be, Havzhiva was there
constantly, or almost.

The Amendments to the Constitution were
voted, by secret ballot, mostly, in the Yeowan Year of
Liberty 18. Of the events that led to this, and what
has followed, you may read in the new three-
volume History of Yeowe from the University Press- I
have told the^story 1 was asked to tell. I have closed
it, as so many stories close, with a joining of two
people. What is one man's and one woman's love
and desire, against the history of two worlds, the
great revolutions of our lifetimes, the hope, the
unending cruelty of our species? A little thing. But a
key is a little thing, next to the door it opens. If you
lose the key, the door may never be unlocked. It is
in our bodies that we lose or begin our freedom, in
our bodies that we accept or end our slavery. So I
wrote this book for my friend, with whom I have
lived and will die free.

^ 280

Notes on Werel
and Yeowe

c^^)

1. Pronunciation of Names and Words

In VOE DEAN (which is also the language of Yeowe) and
GATAYAN, vowels have the usual "European values":

a as in father (ah)

e as in hey (ay) or let (eh)

i as in machine (ee) or it (in)

o as in go (o) or off (oh)

u as in ruby (oo)

In Voe Dean the accent is normally on the next-to-
last syllable. Thus:

Arkamye  ar-KAHM-yeh

Bambur  BAHM-boor

Boeba  bo-AY-bah

Dosse  DOHS-seh

Erod  EH-rod

^ 281 =-'

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

gareot  gah-RAY-ot

Gatay  gah-TAH-ee

gede  GHEH-deh

Geu  GAY-oo

Hame  HAH-meh

Hagayot  hah-GAH-yot

Hayawa  hah-YAH-wah

Kamye  KAHM-yeh

Keo  KAY-o

makil  MAH-kihl

Nadami  nah-DAH-mee

Noeha  no-AY-hah

Ramayo  rah-MAH-yo

rega  RAY-gah

Rewe  REH-weh

San Ubattat  sahn-oo-BAHT-taht

Seugi  say-00-ghee

Shomeke  sho-MEH-keh

Suhame  soo-HAH-meh

Tazeu  tah-ZAY-oo

Teyeo  teh-YAY-o

Tikuli  tee-KOO-lee

Toebawe  to-eh-BAH-weh

Tual  too-AHL or TWAHL

veot  VAY-ot

Voe Deo  vo-eh-DAY-o

Walsu  WAHL-soo

Werel  WEH-rehl

Yeowe  yay-0-way

Yeron  YEH-rohn

Yoke  YO-keh

Yotebber  yo-TEHB-ber

Yowa  YO-wah

^s 282

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

Names formed with the name of the deities Kamye
(Kam) and Tual tend to keep a stress on that ele-
ment, thus:

Abberkam  AHB-ber-KAHM

Batikam  BAH-tih-KAHM

Rakam  RAH-KAHM

Sezi-Tual  SAY-zih-TWAHL

Tualtak  TWAHL-tahk

HAINISH

(The extremely long lineage-names common
among the Hainish are cut down for daily use; thus
Mattin-yehedarhed-dyura-ga-muruskets becomes
Yehedarhed.)

araha  ah-RAH-ha

Ekumen (from an Ancient Terran word)  EK-yoo-
men

Esdardon Aya  ez-DAR-don-AH-ya

Havzhiva  HAHV-zhi-vah

lyan lyan  ee-YAHN-ee-YAHN

Kathhad  KAHTH-hahd

Mezhe  MEH-zheh

Stse  STSEH (like the capitalized letters in English
"beST SEt'^

Tiu  TYOO

Ve  VEH

Yehedarhed  yeh-heh-DAR-hed

2. The Planets Werel and Yeowe

From A Handbook of the Known Worlds, printed in
Darranda, Ham, Hainish Cycle 93, Local Year 5467.

^ 283 -.-*

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Ecumenical Year 2102 is counted as Present when
historical dates are given as years Before Present (BP).

The Werel-Yeowe solar system consists of 16
planets orbiting a yellow-white star (RK-tamo-
5544-34). Life developed on the third, fourth, and
fifth planets. The fifth, called Rakuli in Voe Dean,
has only invertebrate life-forms tolerant of arid
cold, and has not been exploited or colonised. The
third and fourth planets, Yeowe and Werel, are
well within the Hainish Norm of atmosphere,
gravity, climate, etc. Werel was colonised by Hain
late in the Expansion, within the last million
years. It appears that there was no native fauna to
displace, as all animal life-forms found on Werel,
as well as some flora, are of Hainish derivation-
Yeowe had no animal life until Werel colonised it
365 years BP.

Werel

Natural History

The fourth planet out from its sun, Werel has
seven small moons. Its current climate is cool tem-
perate, severely cold at the poles. Its flora is largely
indigenous, its fauna entirely of Hainish origin,
modified deliberately to obtain cobiosis with the
native plants, and further modified through genetic
drift and adaptation. Human adaptations include a
cyanotic skin coloration (from black to pale, with a
bluish cast) and eyes without visible whites, both

oao 284 3^

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

evidently adjustments to elements in the solar radi-
ation spectrum.

Voe Deo: Recent History: 4000-3500 years BP, aggres-
sive, progressive black-skinned people from south of
the equator on the single great continent (the region
that is now the nation of Voe Deo) invaded and
dominated the lighter-skinned peoples of the north.
These conquerors instituted a master-slave society
based on skin color.

Voe Deo is the largest, most numerous, wealthi-
est nation on the planet; all other nations in both
hemispheres are dependencies, client states, or eco-
nomically dependent on Voe Deo. Voe Dean economics
have been based on capitalism and slavery for at
least 3000 years. Voe Dean hegemony permits the
general description of Werel as if it were all one soci-
ety- As the society is in rapid change, however, this
account will be put in the past tense.

Social Classes under Slavery

Class: master (owner or gareot) and slave
(asset). Your class was your mother's class, without
exception.

Skin color ranges from blue-black through
bluish or greyish beige to an almost depigmented
white. (Only albinism affects hair and eyes, which
are dark). Ideally and in the abstract, class was skin
color: owners black, assets white- Actually, many
owners were black, most were dark; some assets were
black, most beige, some white.

OWNERS were called men, women, children.

The unqualified word owner meant either the

CTO 285 "^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

class as a whole or an individual/family owning two
or more slaves.

The owner of one slave or no slaves was a staff-
less owner or gareot.

The veot was a member of an hereditary warrior
caste of owners; the ranks were rega, zadyo, oga. Veot
men almost invariably joined the Army; most veot
families were landed proprietors; most were owners,
some gareots.

Owner women formed a subclass or inferior
caste. An owner woman was legally the property of
a man (father, uncle, brother, husband, son, or
guardian). Most observers hold that the gender divi-
sion of Werelian society was as profound and essen-
tial as the master/slave division, but less visible, as it
cut across it, owner women being considered social-
ly superior to assets of both sexes. Since women
were property, they could not own property, includ-
ing human property. They could, however, manage
property.

ASSETS were called bondsmen, bondswomen,
pups or young. Pejorative terms: slaves, dusties,
chalks, whites.

Luls were work-slaves, owned by a person or a
family. All slaves on Werel were luls, except makils
and asset-soldiers.

Makils were sold to and owned by the
Entertainment Corporation.

Asset-soldiers were sold to and owned by the
Army.

"Cutfrees" or eunuchs were male slaves castrated
(more or less voluntarily, depending on age, etc.) to
gain status and privilege. Werelian histories describe
a number of cutfrees who rose to great power in var-

*ri 286 s-*^

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

ious governments; many held posts of influence
throughout the bureaucracy. The Bosses of the
bondswomen's side of the compound were invari-
ably cutfrees.

Manumission was extremely rare up until the
last century, restricted to a few famous historical/
legendary cases of slaves whose supernal loyalty and
virtue induced their masters to give them freedom.
About the time the War of Liberation began on
Yeowe, the practice of manumission became more
frequent on Werel, led by the owner group The
Community, which advocated the abolition of slav-
ery. A manumitted asset ranked legally, though sel-
dom socially, as a gareot.

In Voe Deo at the time of the Liberation the pro-
portion of assets to owners was 7:1. (About half
these owners were gareots, owners of one or no
assets.) In poorer countries the proportion dropped
lower or reversed; in the Equatorial States the pro-
portion of assets to owners was 1:5. In Werel as a
whole, the proportion was estimated to be about
three assets to one owner.

The House and the Compound

Historically and in the country, on the estates,
farms, and plantations, the assets lived in a fenced or
walled compound with a single gate. The compound
was divided in halves by a ditch running parallel to
the gate wall. Thegateside was the men's quarters, the
inside was the women's. Children lived on the inside,
until boys reaching working age (8 to 10) were sent
over to the longhouse. Women lived in huts, moth-
ers and daughters, sisters or friends usually sharing a
hut, two to four women with their children. The

^.s 287 ^-s'

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

men and boys lived in gateside barracks called long-
houses. Kitchen gardens were maintained by the old
people and small children who did not go out to
work; the old people generally cooked for the work-
ing people. The grandmothers ruled the compound.

Cutfrees (eunuchs) lived in separate houses built
against the outside wall, with a surveillance station
on the wall; they served as Compound Bosses, inter-
mediaries between the grandmothers and the Work
Bosses (members of the owner family, or hired
gareots, in charge of the working assets). Work
Bosses lived in houses outside the compound.

The owning family and their owner-class depen-
dents occupied the House. The term House included
any number of outbuildings, the Work Bosses' quar-
ters, and animal barns, but specifically meant the
family's large house. In conventional Houses the
men's side (azade) and the women's side (beza) were
strictly divided. The degree of restriction on the
women reflected the wealth, power, and social pre-
tension of the family. Gareot women might have
considerable freedom of movement and occupation,
but women of wealthy or distinguished family were
kept indoors or in the walled gardens, never going
out without numerous male escorts.

A number of female assets lived on the women's
side as domestics and for use of the male owners.
Some Houses kept male domestics, usually boys or
old men; some kept cutfrees as servants.

In factories, mills, mines, etc., the compound
system was maintained with some modifications.
Where there was division of labor, alt-male com-
pounds were controlled entirely by hired gareots; in
all-female compounds the grandmothers were

s-w 288 ss^s

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

allowed to keep order as in country compounds.
Men rented to the all-male compounds had a life
expectancy of about 28 years. During the shortage
of assets caused by the slave trade to Yeowe in the
early years of the Colony, some owners formed
cooperative breeding compounds, where bonds-
women were kept and bred annually, doing light
work; some of these "breeders" bore a baby annual-
ly for twenty or more years.

Rentspeople: On Werel, all assets were individual-
ly owned. (The Corporations of Yeowe changed this
practice; the Corporations owned the slaves, who
had no private masters.)

In Werelian cities, assets traditionally lived in
their owners' households as domestics. During the
last millennium it became increasingly common for
owners of superfluous assets to rent them to busi-
nesses and factories as skilled or unskilled labor. The
owners or shareholders of a company bought and
owned individual assets individually; the company
rented the assets, controlled their use, and shared
the profits. An owner could live on the rental of two
skilled assets. Thus rentsmen and rentswomen
became the largest group of assets in all cities and
many towns. Rentspeople lived in "union com-
pounds"  apartment houses supervised by hired
gareot Bosses. They were required to keep curfew
and check in and out.

(Note the difference between Werelian rentspeo-
ple, rented out by their owner, and the far more
autonomous Yeowan freedpeople, slaves who paid
their owner a tithe or tax on freely chosen work,
called "freedom rental." One of the early objectives
of the Hame, the Voe Dean underground asset lib-

^ 289 ^

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

eration group, was to institute "freedom rental" on
Werel.)

Most union compounds and all city households
were gender-divided into azade and beza, but some
private owners and some companies allowed their
assets or rentspeople to live as couples, though not
to marry. Their owners could separate them for any
reason at any time. The mother's owner owned the
children of any such asset couple.

In the conventional compound, heterosexual
access was controlled by the owners, the Bosses, and
the grandmothers. People who "jumped the ditch"
did so at their peril. The owner myth-ideal was of total
separation of male and female assets, with the Bosses
managing selective breeding, chosen stud asset males
servicing the females at optimal intervals to produce
the desired number of young. Female assets were
mainly concerned, on exploitive farms, to avoid unde-
sired breeding and yearly pregnancy. In the hands of
benevolent owners, the grandmothers and cutfrees
often could protect girls and women from rape, and
even allow some affectional pairing. But bonding was
discouraged both by the owners and the grandmothers;

and no form of slave marriage was admitted by law or
custom on Werel.

Religions

The worship of Tual, a Kwan Yin-like maternal
deity of peace and forgiveness, was the state religion of
Voe Deo. Philosophically, Tual is seen as the most
important incarnation of Ama the Increate or Creator
Spirit. Historically, she is an amalgam of many local
and nature deities, and locally often refragments into
multiplicity. Nationally, enforcement of the national

r^a 290 ^-f

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

religion tended to accompany Voe Dean hegemony in
other countries, although the religion is not inherent-
ly a proselytising or aggressive one. Tualite priests can
and do hold high office in the government. Class:

Tualite images and worship were maintained by the
owners in all slave compounds, both on Werel and
Yeowe. Tualism was the owners' religion. The assets'
practice of it was enforced, and while including
aspects of Tualite myth and worship in their rituals,
most assets were Kamyites. By considering Kamye as
"the Bondsman" and a lesser aspect of Ama, the
Tualite priesthood included and tolerated Kamyite
practice (which had no official clergy) among slaves
and soldiers (most veots were Kamyites).

The Arkamye or Life of Kamye the Swordsman
(Kamye is also the Herdsman, a beastmaster deity,
and the Bondsman, having been long in service to
Lord Nightfall): a warrior epic, adopted about 3,000
years ago by the assets, pretty much worldwide, as
the sourcebook of their own religion. It cultivates
such warrior/slave virtues as obedience, courage,
patience, and selflessness, as well as spiritual inde-
pendence, a stoical indifference to the things of this
world, and a passionate mysticism: reality is to be
won only by letting the seeming-real go. Assets and
veots include Tual in their worship as an incarna-
tion of Kamye, himself an incarnation of Ama the
Increate. The "stages of life" and "going into
silence" are among the mystical ideas and practices
shared by Kamyites and Tualites.

Relations with the Ekumen

The First Envoy (EY 1724) was met with
extreme suspicion. After a closely guarded deputa-

a-. 291 -i-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

tion was allowed to land from the ship Hugum,
alliance was rejected. Aliens were forbidden to enter
the solar system by the Government of Voe Deo and
its allies. Werel, led by Voe Deo, then entered on a
rapid, competitive development of space technolo-
gy and intensification of all techno-industrial
development- For many decades, Voe Dean govern-
ment, industry, and military were driven by a para-
noid expectation of the armed return of conquering
Aliens. It was this development that led within only
thirteen years to the colonisation of Yeowe.

During the next three centuries the Ekumen
made contact at intervals with Werel. An exchange
of information was initiated at the insistence of the
University of Bambur, joined by a consortium of uni-
versities and research institutions. Finally, after over
three hundred years, the Ekumen was permitted to
send a few Observers. During the War of Liberation
on Yeowe, the Ekumen was invited to send
Ambassadors to Voe Deo and Bambur, and later
Envoys to Gatay, the Forty States, and other nations.
For some time nonobservance of the Arms
Convention kept Werel from joining the Ekumen,
despite pressure from Voe Deo on the other states,
which insisted on retaining their weaponry. After the
abrogation of the Arms Convention, Werel joined
the Ekumen, 359 years after first contact and 14 years
after the end of the War of Liberation.

As a property of the Corporations, having no
government of its own, Yeowe Colony was consid-
ered by its Werelian owners to be ineligible for
Ekumenical membership. The Ekumen continued to
question the right of the Four Corporations to own-
ership of the planet and its people. During the last

<i*> 292 3-f

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

years of the War of Liberation, the Freedom Party
invited Ekumenical observers to Yeowe, and the
establishment of a regular Envoy there coincided
with the end of the War. The Ekumen helped Yeowe
negotiate an end to the economic control of the
planet by the Corporations and the Government of
Voe Deo. The World Party nearly succeeded in driving
the Aliens as well as the Werelians off the planet, but
when that movement collapsed, the Ekumen sup-
ported the Provisional Government until elections
could be held. Yeowe joined the Ekumen in Year of
Liberation 11, three years before Werel did.

Yeowe
Natural History

The third planet out from its sun, Yeowe has a
warm-moderate climate with little seasonal variation.

Bacterial life is ancient and of normally vast
complexity and adaptive variety. A number of micro-
scopic marine Yeowan species are defined as animals;

otherwise, the native biota of the planet were plants.

On land there was a great variety of complex
species, photosynthetic or saprophytic. Most were
sessile, with some "creepers," colonial or individual
plants capable of slow movement. Trees were the
principal large life-form. South Continent was
almost entirely tropical jungle/temperate rain forest
from the coastlines up to timberline in the Polar
Range and to the taiga of the Antarctic Circle. Great
Continent, forested in the extreme north and south,
was a steppe and savannah landscape at the higher
central altitudes, with immense areas of bog, marsh,

s^s 293 ^.s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

and sea marsh on the coastal plains. In the absence
of pollinating animals, the plants had many devices
to use wind and rain to cross-fertilise and propagate:

explosive seeds, winged seeds, seednets that catch
the wind and float for hundreds of miles, waterproof
spores, "burrowing" seeds, "swimming" seeds, and
plants with mobile vanes, cilia, etc.

The seas, which are warm and relatively shal-
low, and the vast sea marshes nourish a huge variety
of sessile and floating plants, on the order of plank-
ton, algaes, seaweeds, coral-type and sponge-type
plants forming permanent constructions (mostly of
silicon), and unique plants such as the "sailers" and
the "mirrorweed." Vast connected "lily mats" were
harvested by the Corporations so efficiently as to
render the species extinct within thirty years.

Heedless introduction of Werelian plant and
animal species killed off or crowded out about 3/5 of
the native species, aided by industrial pollution and
war. The owners brought in deer, hunting dogs,
hunting cats, and greathorses for their hunts. The
deer thrived and destroyed a great deal of native
habitat. Most introduced animal species failed in the
long run. Werelian animal survivors other than
humankind on Yeowe include:

birds (domestic fowl brought in as game or as
poultry; songbirds were released, and a few
species adapted and survived)
foxdogs and spotted cats (pets)
cattle (domestic; many wild in abandoned dis-
tricts)
deer (wild, called fendeer, adapted to the marsh

regions)
hunting cats (feral, rare, in marshlands)

s-s. 294 sa>

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

The introduction of some fish species in the
rivers was disastrous to the native plant life, and
what fish survived were destroyed by poison. All
attempts to introduce ocean fish failed.

Horses were slaughtered during the War of
Liberation, as symbolic possessions of the owners;

none remain.

The Colony: The Settlement

Early Werelian rockets reached Yeowe 365 years
BP. Exploration, mapping, and prospecting were
eagerly pursued. The Yeowe Mines Corporation,
owned principally by Voe Dean investors, was given
sole right to prospecting. Within twenty-five years,
larger and more efficient ships made mining prof-
itable, and the YMC began regular shipments of
slaves to Yeowe and ores and minerals to Werel.

The next major company established was the
Second Planet Forest Woods Corporation, cutting
and shipping Yeowan timber to Werel, where indus-
trial and population expansion had reduced forests
drastically.

Exploitation of the oceans became a major
industry by the end of the first century, the Yeowan
Shippers Corporation harvesting the lily mats with
immense profit. Having used up that resource, the
YSC turned to the exploitation and processing of
other sea species, especially the oil-rich bladder-
weed.

During the Colony's first century, the Agricultural
Plantation Company of Yeowe began systematic cul-
ture of introduced grains and fruits and of native
species such as the oe-reed and the pini fruit. The
warm, equable climate of most of Yeowe and the

,-rtea 295 ^-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

absence of insect and animal pests (maintained by
scrupulous quarantine regulations) permitted an
enormous expansion of agriculture.

The individual enterprises of these four
Corporations and the regions where they operated,
whether in mining, forestry, mariculture, or agricul-
ture, were catted "Plantations."

The four great Corporations maintained absolute
control over their respective products, though there
were over the decades many battles (legal and phys-
ical) over conflicting rights to the exploitation of an
area. No rival company was able to break the
Corporations' monopoly, which had the full, active
support  military, political, and scientific  of the
Government of Voe Deo, a major beneficiary of
Corporation profits. The principal investment of
capital in the Corporations was always from the
government and capitalists of Voe Deo. A powerful
country at the time of the Settlement, after three
centuries of the Colony Voe Deo was by far the rich-
est country on Werel, dominating and controlling
all the others. Its control over the Corporations on
Yeowe, however, was nominal. It negotiated with
them as with sovereign powers.

Population and Slavery

For the first century only male slaves were export-
ed to Yeowe Colony by the Corporations, whose
monopoly on slave shipment, via the Interplanet
Cartel, was complete. In the first century, a high pro-
portion of these slaves were from the poorer nations
of Werel; later, as slave-breeding for the Yeowan mar-
ket became profitable, more of them were sent from
Bambur, the Forty States, and Voe Deo.

af@ 296 s'"

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

During this period, the population grew to
about 40,000 of the owner class (80% male) and
about 800,000 slaves (all male).

There were several experimental "Emigration
Towns," settlements of gareots (owner-class people
without slaves), mostly mitts and service communi-
ties. These settlements were first tolerated, then
abolished, by the Corporations, who induced the
Werelian governments to limit emigration to
Corporation personnel. The gareot settlers were
shipped back to Werel and the services they had set
up were staffed by slaves. The "middle class" of
townsfolk and tradespeople on Yeowe thus came to
be composed of semiindependent slaves (freedpeo-
ple) rather than gareots and rentspeople as on
Werel.

Prices on bondsmen kept going up, as the
Mining and Agricultural Corporations in particular
squandered slave life (a mine slave during the first
century was expected to have a "worklife" of five
years). Individual owners increasingly often smug-
gled in female slaves as sexual and domestic ser-
vants. The Corporations, under these pressures,
changed their rule and permitted the importation of
bondswomen (238 BP).

At first bondswomen, considered as breeding
stock, were restricted to the compounds on the
plantations. As their usefulness for all kinds of work
became evident, these restrictions were eased by the
owners on most plantations. Slave women, howev-
er, had to fit into the century-old social system of
slave men, which they entered as inferiors, slaves'
slaves.

On Werel. all assets were personally owned,

^-e" 297 ^-s

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

except the makils (bought from their owners by the
Entertainment Corporation), and asset-soldiers
(bought from their owners by the government). On
Yeowe, all slaves were Corporation-owned, bought
by the Corporation from their Werelian owners. No
slave on Yeowe could be privately owned. No slave
on Yeowe could be freed. Even those brought in as
personal servants, such as maids of plantation own-
ers' wives, had their ownership transferred to the
Corporation that owned the plantation.

Though manumission was not allowed, as the
slave population increased very rapidly, causing a
surplus on many plantations, the status of freedper-
son became increasingly common. Freedpeople
found work for hire or independently and "rented
freedom," paying one or more Corporations month-
ly or annually whatever fee (usually about 50%) was
levied on them as a tax on their independent work.
Most freedpeople worked as sharecroppers, shop-
keepers, or mill hands, and in service industries;

during the Colony's third century a professional
class of freedpeople became well established in the
cities,

By the end of the third century, when the pop-
ulation growth had slowed somewhat, the total
population of Yeowe was about 450 million; the
proportion of owners to slaves was less than one to
one hundred. About half the slave population were
freedpeople. (The population 20 years after
Liberation was again 450 million, all free.)

On the plantations, the original all-male social
structure set the pattern of slave society. Work gangs
early developed into social groups (called gangs), and
gangs into tribes, each with a hierarchy of power:

a-* 298 ^-s

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

Tribesmen under a slave Headman or Chief, under
the Boss, under the owner, under the Corporation.
Bonding, competition, rivalry, homosexual privi-
leges, and adoptive lineages became institutionalised
and often elaborately codified. The only safety for a
slave was membership in a tribe and strict adherence
to its rules. Slaves sold away from their plantation
had to serve as slaves' slaves, often for years, before
they were accepted into membership of the local
tribe.

As women slaves were brought in, most of them
became tribal, as well as Corporate, property. The
Corporations encouraged this. It was to their advan-
tage to have slave women controlled by the tribes, as
the tribes were controlled by the Corporations.

Opposition and insurrection, never able to
organise widely, were always crushed with the
instant and brutal finality of infinitely superior
armaments. Headmen and chiefs colluded with the
Bosses, who, working in the-interest of owners and
Corporations, exploited the rivalries between tribes
and the power struggles within them, while main-
taining an absolute embargo on "ideology," by
which they meant education, information of any
kind from outside the local plantation. (On most
plantations, well into the second century, literacy
was a crime. A slave caught reading was blinded by
dropping acid in the eyes or scraping the eyes from
the sockets. A slave caught using a radio or network
outlet was deafened by white-hot picks thrust
through the eardrums. The "Fit Punishment Lists"
of the Corporations and plantations were long,
detailed, and explicit.)

In the second century, as slave population shot

^s 299 '^>

FOUR  WAYS  TO   FORGIVENESS

up to the point of surplus on most plantations, a
gradual trickle of both men and women towards the
"shop-strips" run by freedpeople grew to a steady
stream. Over the decades, the "shop-strips" grew
into towns and the towns into cities entirely popu-
lated by freedpeople.

Although doomsayers among the owners began
to point to the ever-increasing size and indepen-
dence of the "Assetvilles" and "Whiteytowns" and
"Dustyburgs" as a looming threat, the Corporations
considered the cities safely under control. No large
buildings were allowed, no defensive structures of
any kind; possession of a firearm was punished by
disembowelment; no slave was allowed to operate
any flying vehicle; the Corporations kept tight
guard on raw materials and industrial processes that
could provide weaponry of any kind to the slaves or
freedpeople.

"Ideology," education, did exist in the cities.
Late in the second century of the Colony, the
Corporations, while censoring, filtering, and altering
information, formally gave permission for freedpeo-
ple's children and some tribal children to be
schooled up to age 14. They allowed slave commu-
nities to set up schools, and sold them books and
other materials. In the third century the
Corporations instituted and maintained an informa-
tion and entertainment network for the cities.
Educated workers were becoming valuable- The limi-
tations of the tribes had become increasingly evi-
dent. Rigidly conservative, most tribal chiefs and
Bosses were unable or unwilling to change any prac-
tices in any way, at a time when the abuse of the
planet's resources called for radical changes in meth-

a-O 300 v^-s

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

ods and objectives. It was clear that profit on Yeowe
would increasingly come not from strip-mining.
clear-cutting, and monoculture, but from refined
industry, modem plants staffed by skilled workers
capable of learning new techniques and following
unfamiliar orders.

On Werel, a capitalist slave society, work was
done by people. Slave labor, whether simple brawn-
work or highly skilled, was hand labor, aided by an
elegant but ancillary machine technology: "The
trained asset is the finest machine, and the cheap-
est." Production, even of very high-technology
items, was essentially traditional craft of very high
quality. Neither speed nor great volume was particu-
larly valued.

On Yeowe, late in the third century of the
Colony, as raw material exports failed, slave labor was
used in a new way. The assembly line was developed,
with the conscious purpose not only of speeding and
cheapening production, but also of keeping the work-
er ignorant of the work process as a whole. The
Second Planet Corporation, dropping the words
Forest Woods from its name, led the new manufac-
ture. The SPC quickly surpassed the old giants. Mines
and Agriculture, reaping huge profits from the sale of
mass-produced finished goods to the poorer nations
of Werel. By the time of the Uprising, more than half
the freedworkers of Yeowe were owned by or rented
to the Second Planet Corporation.

There was far more social unrest in the mills
and mill towns than on the tribal plantations.
Corporation executives ascribed it to the increase in
the number of "uncontrolled" freedpersons, and
many advocated closing the schools, destruction of

TW     301      SW

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

the cities, and reinstitution of sealed compounds for
all slaves. The Corporations' city militia (gareots
hired and brought from Werel, plus a police force of
unarmed freedmen) increased to a considerable
standing army, its gareot members heavily armed.
Much of the unrest in the cities and attempts at
protest centered on mills that used the assembly
line. Workers who, feeling themselves part of an
intelligible process, would tolerate very harsh condi-
tions, found meaningless work intolerable, even
though working conditions were in some ways
improved.

The Liberation began, however, not in the cities,
but in the compounds of the plantations.

The Uprising and the Liberation

The Uprising had its origin in organisations of
tribal women in plantations of Great Continent,
joining together to prevent ritual rape of girl-
children and to demand tribal laws against sexual
enslavement of bondswomen by bondsmen, gang
rape, and the beating and murder of women, for
none of which was there any penalty.

They acted first by educating women and chil-
dren of both sexes, then by demanding proportion-
al voice in the all-male tribal councils. Their organi-
sations, called Woman Clubs, spread across both
continents throughout the third century of the
Colony. The Clubs spirited so many girls and
women off the plantations into the cities that the
chiefs' and Bosses' complaints began to be heard by
the Corporations. Local tribesman and Bosses were
encouraged to "go into the cities and get their
women back."

sws 302 a-*.

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

These incursions, often led by plantation police
and aided by the Corporation city militia, were
often carried out with extreme brutality. City freed-
people, unused to the kind of violence normal on
the plantations, reacted with outrage. City bonds-
men were drawn to defend and fight with the
women.

In 61 BP, in Eyu Province, in the town of
Soyeso, the slaves' successful resistance to a police
raid from Nadami Plantation (APC) escalated into
an attack on the plantation itself. The police bar-
racks were stormed and burned. Some of the chiefs
of Nadami joined the uprising, opening their com-
pounds to the rebels. Others joined in the defense
of their owners in the Plantation House. A slave
woman unlocked the doors of the plantation
armory to the insurrection  the first time in the
history of Yeowe Colony that any large group of
slaves had access to powerful weapons. A massacre
of owners followed, but it was partially restrained:

most of the children of the Plantation House, and
twenty women and men, were spared and put on
a train to the capital. No adult slave who had
fought against the uprising was spared.

From Nadami the Uprising spread, by way of
guns and ammunition, to three neighboring planta-
tions. All the tribes joined, defeating Corporation
forces in the quick, fierce Battle of Nadami- Slaves
and freedpeople from neighboring provinces poured
into Eyu. The chiefs, the grandmothers of the com-
pounds, and the leaders of the insurrection met at
Nadami and declared Eyu Province a free state.

Within ten days, Corporation bombing raids
and land troops had smashed the insurrection.

a^ 303 -^tf-

FOUR  WAYS  TO  FORGIVENESS

Captured rebels were tortured and executed.
Particular revenge was taken on the town of Soyeso;

all the people left there, mostly children and the
old, were herded into the town squares and trucks
and tread-wheeled ore-carriers ran over and over
them. This was called "paving with dust."

The Corporations' victory had been quick and
easy, but it was followed by a new insurrection at a
different plantation, the murder of an owner's fam-
ily here, a strike of city freedworkers there, all over
the world.

The unrest did not cease. Many attacks on plan-
tation armories and militia barracks were successful;

the insurrectionists now had weapons, and learned
how to make bombs and mines. Hit-and-run warfare
in the jungles and the great marshes gave the guer-
rillas' advantage to the rebels. It became clear that
the Corporations needed more armaments and
more manpower. They imported mercenary soldiers
from the poorer nations of Werel. Not all of these
were loyal or effective troops. The Corporations
soon persuaded the government of Voe Deo to safe-
guard its national interest by investing troops in the
defense of the Owners of Yeowe. At first the com-
mitment was reluctant, but 23 years after Nadami,
Voe Deo decided to put down the unrest once and
for all, sending 45,000 troops, all veots (members of
the hereditary warrior caste) or owner-volunteers.

Seven years later, at the end of the war, 300,000
soldiers from Werel had been killed on Yeowe, most
of them from Voe Deo, and most of them veots.

The Corporations began to take their people off
Yeowe several years before the end of the war, and
during the final year of fighting there were almost

a-*- 304 T*-S

Notes on Werel and Yeowe

no civilian owners left on the planet.

Throughout the thirty years of the War of
Liberation, some tribes and many individual slaves
sided with the Corporations, which promised them
safety and rewards and furnished them with weapons.
Even during the Liberation there were battles between
rival tribes. After the Corporations and the army
pulled out, tribal wars smouldered and flared up all
over Great Continent. No central government was
able to establish itself until Abberkam's World Party,
defeating the Freedom Party in many local elections,
seemed to be on the point of setting up the first World
Council elections. In Year 2 of Liberation the World
Party collapsed abruptly under accusation of corrup-
tion. The Envoys of the Ekumen (invited to Yeowe by
the Freedom Party during the final year of the war)
supported the Freedom Party in activating their con-
stitution and setting up elections. The First Election
(Year 3 of the Liberation), managed by the Freedom
Party, established the new Constitution on rather
shaky ground; women were not allowed to vote,
many tribal votes were cast by the chiefs alone, and
some of the hierarchic tribal structures were retained
and legalised. There were several more fierce tribal
wars and years of unrest and protest while the society
of free Yeowe constructed itself. Yeowe joined the
Ekumen in Year II of the Liberation, 19 BP, and the
First Ambassador was sent in that year. Major amend-
ments to the Yeowan Constitution, assuring all people
over 18 the vote by secret ballot and guaranteeing
equal rights, were voted by free general election in
Year 18 of the Liberation.

305

0 Yeowe



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0, 0, Ye-o-we, No-bo-dy ne-ver come back

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