The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin

Sutty was strong enough to visit home, it was strange to be there with Mother and Father and not with Aunty. She kept turning her head, thinking Aunty was standing in the doorway or sitting in her chair in the other room in her ragged blanket cocoon. Mother gave Sutty Aunty's bangles, the six everyday brass ones, the two gold ones for dressing up, tiny, frail circlets through which Sutty's hands would never pass. She gave them to Lakshmi for her baby girl to wear when she got bigger. "Don't hold on to things, they weigh you down. Keep in your head what's worth keeping," Uncle Hurree had said, preaching what he'd had to practice; but Sutty kept the red-and-orange saree of cotton gauze, which folded up into nothing and could not weigh her down. It was in the bottom of her suitcase here, in Okzat-Ozkat. Someday maybe she would show it to Iziezi. Tell her about Aunty. Show her how you wore a saree. Most women enjoyed that and liked to try it on themselves. Pao had tried on Sutty's old grey-and-silver saree once, to entertain Sutty while she was convalescing, but she said it felt too much like skirts, which of course she had been forced to wear in public all her life because of the Unist clothing laws, and she couldn't get the trick of securing the top. "My tits are going to pop out!" she cried, and then, encouraging them to do so, had performed a remarkable version of what she called Indian classical dance all over the futons.
    Sutty had been frightened again, very badly frightened, when she discovered that everything she'd learned in the months before she got the flu—the Ekumenical history, the poems she'd memorised, even simple words of Hainish she had known for years—seemed to have been wiped out. "What will I do, what will I do, if I can't keep things even in my head?" she whispered to Pao, when she finally broke down and confessed to the terror that had been tormenting her for a week. Pao hadn't comforted her much, just let her tell her fear and misery, and finally said, "I think that will wear off. I think you'll find it all coming back." And of course she was right. Talking about it changed it. The next day, as Sutty was riding the streetcar, the opening lines
of The Terraces of Darranda
suddenly flowered out in her mind like great fireworks, the marvelous impetuous orderly fiery words; and she knew that all the other Words were there, not lost, waiting in the darkness, ready to come when she called them. She bought a huge bunch of daisies and took them home for Pao. They put them in the one vase they had, black plastic, and they looked like Pao, black and white and gold. With the vision of those flowers an intense and complete awareness of Pao's body and presence filled her now, here in the high quiet room on another world, as it had filled her constantly there, then, when she was with Pao, and when she wasn't with her, but there was no time that they weren't together, no time that they were truly apart, not even that long, long flight down all the coast of the Americas had separated them. Nothing had separated them.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment
..."O my true mind," she whispered in the dark, and felt the warm arms holding her before she slept.
    ***
    Tong Ov's brief reply came, a printout, received at a bureau of the District Prefecture and hand-delivered, after inspection of her ZIL bracelet, by a uniformed messenger.
Observer Sutty Dass: Consider your holiday the beginning of a field trip. Continue research and recording personal observations as you see fit.
    So much for the Monitor! Surprised and jubilant, Sutty went outdoors to look up at the bannered peak of Silong and think where to start.
    She had gathered in her mind innumerable things to learn about: the meditation exercises; the double-cloud doors, which she had found all over the city, always whitewashed or painted over; the inscriptions in shops; the tree metaphors she kept hearing in talk about food or health or anything