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-a.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 usefulness 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 compressed, 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 surface of that river was sometimes distressing, sometimes 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 centers, currently called the temple. Many of the people of the temple, the historians, spent their lives traveling 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 intellectual organising patterns of the different pueblos were entirely different one from another, wildly different, 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 distressing. 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 necessary. They are the local knowledge of Stse.
They are childish, irrational beliefs' he said.
They looked at him, and he knew he had said something childish and irrational.
sA-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 temple.
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-
