they told, might point out that that had been a good way or a right way of doing something, but they never talked about
the
right way. And good was an adjective, always: good food, good health, good sex, good weather. No capital letters. Good or Evil as entities, warring powers, never.
This system wasn't a religion at all, Sutty told her noter with increasing enthusiasm. Of course it had a spiritual dimension. In fact, it
was
the spiritual dimension of life for those who lived it. But religion as an institution demanding belief and claiming authority, religion as a community shaped by a knowledge of foreign deities or competing institutions, had never existed on Aka.
Until, perhaps, the present time.
Aka's habitable lands were a single huge continent with an immensely long archipelago off its eastern coast. Dovza was the farthest southwestern region of the great continent. Undivided by oceans, the Akans were physically all of one type with slight local variations. All the Observers had remarked on this, all had pointed out the ethnic homogeneity, the lack of societal and cultural diversity, but none of them had quite realised that among the Akans there
were no foreigners.
There had never been any foreigners, until the ships from the Ekumen landed.
It was a simple fact, but one remarkably difficult for the Terran mind to comprehend. No aliens. No others, in the deadly sense of otherness that existed on Terra, the implacable division between tribes, the arbitrary and impassable borders, the ethnic hatreds cherished over centuries and millennia. 'The people' here meant not
my
people, but peopleâeverybody, humanity. 'Barbarian' didn't mean an incomprehensible outlander, but an uneducated person. On Aka, all competition was familial. All wars were civil wars.
One of the great epics Sutty was now recording in pieces and fragments concerned a long-running and bloody feud over a fertile valley, which began as a quarrel between a brother and sister over inheritance. Struggles between regions and city-states for economic dominance had gone on all through Akan history, flaring often into armed conflict. But these wars and feuds had been fought by professional soldiers, on battlefields. It was a very rare thing, and treated in the histories and annals as shamefully, punishably wrong, for soldiers to destroy cities or farmlands or to hurt civilians. Akans fought each other out of greed and ambition for power, not out of hatred and not in the name of a belief. They fought by the rules. They had the same rules. They were one people. Their system of thought and way of life had been universal. They had all sung one tune, though in many voices.
Much of this communality, Sutty thought, had depended on the writing. Before the Dovzan cultural revolution there had been several major languages and innumerable dialects, but they had all used the same ideograms, mutually intelligible to all. Clumsy and archaic as nonalphabetic scripts were in some respects, they could bond and preserve, as Chinese ideograms had done on Earth, a great diversity of languages and dialects; and they made texts written thousands of years ago readable without translation even though the sounds of the words had changed out of all recognition. Indeed, to the Dovzan reformers, that may have been the chief reason for getting rid of the old script: it was not only an impediment to progress but an actively conservative force. It kept the past alive.
In Dovza City she had met nobody who could, or who admitted they could, read the old writing. Her few early questions concerning it met with such disapproval and blank rejection that she promptly learned not to mention the fact that she could read it. And the officials dealing with her never asked. The old writing had not been used for decades; it probably never occurred to them that, through the accident of time lapse during space travel, it had been the writing she learned.
She had not been entirely foolish to wonder,
the
right way. And good was an adjective, always: good food, good health, good sex, good weather. No capital letters. Good or Evil as entities, warring powers, never.
This system wasn't a religion at all, Sutty told her noter with increasing enthusiasm. Of course it had a spiritual dimension. In fact, it
was
the spiritual dimension of life for those who lived it. But religion as an institution demanding belief and claiming authority, religion as a community shaped by a knowledge of foreign deities or competing institutions, had never existed on Aka.
Until, perhaps, the present time.
Aka's habitable lands were a single huge continent with an immensely long archipelago off its eastern coast. Dovza was the farthest southwestern region of the great continent. Undivided by oceans, the Akans were physically all of one type with slight local variations. All the Observers had remarked on this, all had pointed out the ethnic homogeneity, the lack of societal and cultural diversity, but none of them had quite realised that among the Akans there
were no foreigners.
There had never been any foreigners, until the ships from the Ekumen landed.
It was a simple fact, but one remarkably difficult for the Terran mind to comprehend. No aliens. No others, in the deadly sense of otherness that existed on Terra, the implacable division between tribes, the arbitrary and impassable borders, the ethnic hatreds cherished over centuries and millennia. 'The people' here meant not
my
people, but peopleâeverybody, humanity. 'Barbarian' didn't mean an incomprehensible outlander, but an uneducated person. On Aka, all competition was familial. All wars were civil wars.
One of the great epics Sutty was now recording in pieces and fragments concerned a long-running and bloody feud over a fertile valley, which began as a quarrel between a brother and sister over inheritance. Struggles between regions and city-states for economic dominance had gone on all through Akan history, flaring often into armed conflict. But these wars and feuds had been fought by professional soldiers, on battlefields. It was a very rare thing, and treated in the histories and annals as shamefully, punishably wrong, for soldiers to destroy cities or farmlands or to hurt civilians. Akans fought each other out of greed and ambition for power, not out of hatred and not in the name of a belief. They fought by the rules. They had the same rules. They were one people. Their system of thought and way of life had been universal. They had all sung one tune, though in many voices.
Much of this communality, Sutty thought, had depended on the writing. Before the Dovzan cultural revolution there had been several major languages and innumerable dialects, but they had all used the same ideograms, mutually intelligible to all. Clumsy and archaic as nonalphabetic scripts were in some respects, they could bond and preserve, as Chinese ideograms had done on Earth, a great diversity of languages and dialects; and they made texts written thousands of years ago readable without translation even though the sounds of the words had changed out of all recognition. Indeed, to the Dovzan reformers, that may have been the chief reason for getting rid of the old script: it was not only an impediment to progress but an actively conservative force. It kept the past alive.
In Dovza City she had met nobody who could, or who admitted they could, read the old writing. Her few early questions concerning it met with such disapproval and blank rejection that she promptly learned not to mention the fact that she could read it. And the officials dealing with her never asked. The old writing had not been used for decades; it probably never occurred to them that, through the accident of time lapse during space travel, it had been the writing she learned.
She had not been entirely foolish to wonder,
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