The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin Page B

went on, telling herself that she should be sorry for him. He was sincere. Most bigots are sincere. The stupid, arrogant fool, trying to tell her that religion was dangerous! But he was merely parroting Dovzan propaganda. Trying to frighten her, angry because his superiors had put him in the wrong. That he couldn't control her was so intolerable to him that he'd lost control of himself. There was absolutely no need to think about him any more.
    She walked on up the street to the little shop to ask the Fertiliser what the double-cloud doors were, as she had intended.
    When she entered, the high dim room with its word-covered walls seemed part of a different reality altogether. She stood there for a minute, letting that reality become hers. She looked up at the inscription:
In the dark cloud's descent from sky the twice-forked lightning-tree grows up from earth.
    The elegant little pot the Fertiliser had given her bore a motif that she had taken to be a stylised shrub or tree before she saw that it might be a variation on the cloud-door shape. She had sketched the design from the pot. When the Fertiliser materialised from the dark backward and abysm of his shop, she put her sketch down on the counter and said, "Please, yoz, can you tell me what this design is?"
    He studied the drawing. He observed in his thin, dry voice, "It's a very pretty drawing."
    "It's from the gift you gave me. Has the design a meaning, a significance?"
    "Why do you ask, yoz?"
    "I'm interested in old things. Old words, old ways."
    He watched her with age-faded eyes and said nothing.
    "Your government"—she used the old word,
biedins,
'system of officials,' rather than the modern
vizdestit,
'joint business' or 'corporation'—"Your government, I know, prefers that its people learn new ways, not dwelling on their past." Again she used the old word for people, not
riyingdutey,
producer-consumers. "But the historians of the Ekumen are interested in everything that our member worlds have to teach, and we believe that a useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past."
    The Fertiliser listened, affably impassive.
    She forged ahead. "I've been asked by the official senior to me in the capital to learn what I can about some of the old ways that no longer exist in the capital, the arts and beliefs and customs that flourished on Aka before my people came here. I've received assurance from a Sociocultural Monitor that his office won't interfere with my studies." She said the last sentence with a certain vengeful relish. She still felt shaken, sore, from her confrontation with the Monitor. But the peacefulness in this place, the dim air, the faint scents, the half-visible ancient writings, made all that seem far away.
    A pause. The old man's thin forefinger hovered over the design she had drawn. "We do not see the roots," he said.
    She listened.
    "The trunk of the tree," he said, indicating the element of the design that, in a building, was the double-leafed door. "The branches and foliage of the tree, the crown of leaves." He indicated the five-lobed 'cloud' that rose above the trunk. "Also this is the body, you see, yoz." He touched his own hips and sides, patted his head with a certain leafy motion of the fingers, and smiled a little. "The body is the body of the world. The world's body is my body. So, then, the one makes two." His finger showed where the trunk divided. "And the two bear each three branches, that rejoin, making five." His finger moved to the five lobes of foliage. "And the five bear the myriad, the leaves and flowers that die and return, return and die. The beings, creatures, stars. The being that can be told. But we don't see the roots. We cannot tell them."
    "The roots are in the ground...?"
    "The mountain is the root." He made a beautiful formal gesture, the backs of his fingers touching at the tip to shape a peak, then moving in to touch his breast over his heart.
    "The mountain is the root," she repeated. "These are