The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Because we remember really comforting each other," he said. "When it was more than this." For a moment there was something virile and intemperate in his voice, as though for that instant his passion had been more than merely memory. His arms tightened about her, strong arms still, capable of stirring her own recollection so that her mind lusted briefly over old visions while her body laid aside, like some discarded garment.

  "It isn't fair," she complained. "Why can we still feel pain so very well when all the other feelings are gone?"

  "All the other feelings aren't gone," he said patiently, knowing she knew, knowing she needed to hear him say it. "Only lust. And lust is gone because the Payment is a Talker gift." He did not need to explain that. They both understood it. The Talkers died if they bred. Therefore they did not breed or value breeding. They did not lust. They had no experience of passion. Though they perceived it intellectually, their bodies rejected it, and the elixir made of their blood rejected it as well. "We could have refused the elixir, Kessie."

  Refused it. She thought of having refused it, of having grown old with Tharius Don. There were old lovers in Baristown whom she had watched over the years. She had seen them, too, aged past passion, walking hand in hand in the market square. She imagined them snuggled side by side in their beds, complaining to one another like old barnyard fowl, full of clucks and chirrs, grinding the day's events in their leathery gizzards to make each one reasonable and useful to them. "My, my," they would say. "Did you see? Did you ever? What's the world coming to?"

  How was it different for them, those old people? Remembering the loves and lusts of youth? Little different, perhaps, except that their twilight was brief, the memories strong enough to last that little time between age and the end, their flavor and fragrance scarcely dimmed by the years, death coming at last while the perfume lingered, making their old lives redolent of youth. They breathed the scents of childhood, a potpourri of their green years. But for Kesseret? And Tharius? What remained?

  "Dust," she whimpered. "All our love, dust."

  "Not while I hold you," he told her urgently. "Not while I grieve for your pain."

  The memory of pain made her fleetingly angry. "Pain and anger," she said. "Those we keep."

  "And curiosity. And laughter. And determination. So you see, it isn't all hopeless."

  "It seems so sometimes," she said, remembering the pincers at her fingers, the wedges driven beneath her toenails. "Ah, gods, Tharius, but it seems so."

  He buried his face in her hair so she would not see his tears, thinking to himself. "Pity. We haven't lost pity. Which is why we go on plotting, always plotting. Oh, gods, when will the plots be thick enough to clot into action!"

  She moved in his arms, as though aware of her pain. "You shouldn't be here," she said.

  "Because of Martien? He wouldn't say a word to anyone."

  "No, not because of your musician friend, love. Because you shouldn't be here. You shouldn't be showing any interest in me at all. Someone may be watching the corridor to this suite, to see if you come and go - or come and stay."

  "You are thinking in township terms, Kessie. Those of us here at the Chancery no longer have the habit of thinking in terms of sexual misconduct. We are beyond scandal."

  She hid her face in his shoulder, very white at his words. "I know. Stupid of me."

  "Yes, my dear. Stupid of you."

  "Do you ever... are you ever sorry?"

  "Sorry to have outlived my passions? Yes. Sorry to have time, still, to do what we are trying to do? No."

  She shuddered, trembling at his words, fearful of what they were trying to do. In the past, the cause had seemed the only righteous way to live, and it had not brought her pain. Now it had brought her more than she was ready to bear. "Still, love, they may wonder at your interest in me. What am I, after all? Superior of a Tower. There are thousands of those."

  "I made my interest very clear," he said, folding her more closely in the robe. "I said before the questioning started that it was shameful treatment of a loyal member of the service. I've said it in the interim, several times, and I've capped it by demanding they recognize your courage by providing you with care and attention until you can be restored to duty."

  "Which I could have been yesterday, or last week."

  "Not true, Kessie. You may have come here the direct route, by flying. The road back is not so easy."

  "Easy! By the true God, Tharius, I hope you didn't think that was easy!"

  "You lived through it," he said, caressing her. "That's the important thing. You lived."

  "I lived because I dragged the most ambitious and viciously self-serving Awakener in my Tower into my problem and linked his future to mine. He's one I should have rid the Tower of early on. I didn't. I saved him, for just such a need. As a stratagem it worked, but I'm not proud of it, Tharius." She trembled again, and the slow tears gathered at the curve of her eyes. She blinked, driving them back, willing that he would not see her so weakened. "Now he is loose out there, a Laugher. And I am among those who sent him."

  "You lived," he said again. "That's all that matters."

  She had begun to feel real pain again, but it was too soon to take more of the waters of surcease that Tharius had provided. "Tell me," she whispered in an attempt to distract herself from her pain. "Tell me how far we have come?"

  He looked around carefully, being sure they were not watched or overheard, a movement made habitual through a hundred years of conspiratorial conversations. "The cause has members in over five thousand Towers," he murmured at last, like a litany, well learned, often rehearsed. "One-fifth of all Towers. Over half of them include the Superiors of those Towers. We have strong lay groups in ninety percent of all the towns. Over half the signal routes are ours, at least on some shifts. I am now informed within a day or two of things happening anywhere on Northshore."

  She concentrated, remembering conversations held long ago. "The cause is about where we planned it would be, then. Somehow I had thought it lagged."

  "No. It has not lagged. The suspicions of Mitiar and Bossit were planned for. The only thing we had not foreseen was this untimely suspicion on the part of the fliers. Now there must be some kind of diversion, something to draw them away. At the moment, they are too much focused upon the Chancery."

  "What are you planning?"

  "I've sent an actor friend to the tents of the Noor, to visit Queen Fibji."

  "Oh, Tharius, haven't those poor devils suffered enough?" Her own pain was forgotten for the moment in the pain she felt for the Noor, constant victims of the Jondarites. "Can't we leave them out of it?"

  He shook his head sadly. "It will mean nothing worse for them than they already suffer, Kessie. I've sent someone to talk of Southshore, that's all. I've had him say nothing which wasn't in the palace library. There's every possibility Southshore really exists, just as I've had it described to her. If I know Queen Fibji, she'll send an expedition within the year. General Jondrigar would try to stop them, of course, if he heard of it. He would not let all those possible slaves go. He enjoys his expeditions among the Noor too much to let them escape. We must make sure he does not hear of it. The fliers will be much confused if they hear of it. So, we must make sure they do."

  "And it will turn eyes away from us. When do you think, Tharius? Soon?"

  "I think soon. If nothing else happens to upset our plans. If no other junior Awakener goes off with a pitful of workers. If no eager Riverman starts the uprising ahead of time. If there is no spontaneous religious uprising of one kind or another." He brooded over this while Kessie moved restlessly in his arms.

  So much to keep track of; so much to control. Many years ago there had been two factions within their movement. One for immediate war; one for the hope of peace. The war faction had plotted to kill the fliers, all of them. They had planned to pick a time when the Talkers would be out of the Talons and simply murder them all. Tharius had been a leader of the peace party. He recalled impassioned speeches h
e had made, phrases he had used. "We would be forever guilty of the murder of an intelligent species." He believed it. Much though he detested the fliers, including the Talkers, still he believed it. Moral men did not do such things. Not to another species with intelligence, with speech, with a culture of its own.

  Some years of covert exploration into the actual attitudes of Talkers had followed. He laughed bitterly sometimes when he recalled that time. His thesis had been so simple. What the fliers were doing was immoral, unethical. They were eating intelligent beings. They were raising the dead, who were possibly aware of that fact. If they ate fish, they could continue to live, but in a moral way. Wouldn't that be preferable? Wouldn't it be a better arrangement? He had asked this of Talker after Talker during convocations. "Wouldn't it be better?"

  To which they had cawed hideous laughter or turned to deposit blobs of shit at his toes, showing what they thought of the idea. Eventually he had been forced to understand. Morality was not an absolute. Theirs was not his. His was not shared even by all humans, much less by this nonhuman species.

  He had quit trying to sell the idea after a time. He had been warned it wouldn't work, and it was becoming difficult to disguise his stubborn efforts as anything but what they were. He had called it research, but research was not Tharius's affair, after all. Council member Koma Nepor was Chief of Research. Questioning the fliers was not Tharius's responsibility, either. Ezasper Jorn was Ambassador to the Thraish. When it became evident Tharius's efforts were drawing unpleasant attention from both the Talons and the Chancery, what had been confidential attempts at negotiation became deeply covert. There were to be no more attempts at persuasive conversion of fliers. Which left, he was convinced at last, only conversion by necessity. If there were no bodies to eat, then the fliers would eat fish or nothing.

  And in that belief, the cause had been born. From that statement all else had followed. Agents moving among the towns, increasing the fisheries against the day when fliers would need fish to eat. Superiors of Towers sending worker crews to build more jetties. Rivermen holding themselves ready for the day when every worker pit would be emptied in the deep of the night. Even now agents moved across Northshore seeking patches of Tears to spray with fungicide, reducing the number of locations where they were found. When the day came, there would be no human bodies available, at least none treated with Tears. And when the morning of the revolution came, fliers would eat fish or die.

  His arms tightened around his burden once more. The fliers would eat fish or die. And the humans in the Chancery? Those in the Towers? Well, they would eat fish or whatever else they liked, but in a little time they would die as well. When the cause struck, there would be no more elixir to keep their superannuated bodies alive.

  On some days, Tharius actually looked forward to that time. It was not so much that he tired of life as that he tired of the lives of others. His mouth quirked, thinking of this. Oh, to see the end of Gendra Mitiar!

  "Why are you smiling?" asked the lady Kesseret, amused at his expression despite herself.

  "Because what we are doing is right," he said. "Because it is right."

  The flame-bird left its nest to swing out across the courtyard, the vivid circle of its flight seeming to linger on the air. Then it returned to the ledge and began to dance, wings out, legs lifted alternately as it hopped to and fro on the narrow stone, bowing, stretching, stopping occasionally to shift the little stones, sharp-edged with red in the ruddy evening light, as though bloodstained.

  "Do you think it will light the nest soon?" She could ask this without crying, distracting herself.

  "Probably."

  "I always feel so sorry for them."

  "Shh. Kessie. Don't waste your time feeling sorry for them. If you must feel sorry, feel sorry for yourself, or for me, come to that."

  The flame-bird danced gravely to a music and song it alone could hear, forward on one leg, then back, on the other leg forward, then back, bowing with wings wide, pointing its beak upward as though invoking some far-off presence. In the adjoining room, Martien seemed to sense the rhythm of its lonely ballet, for the music began to accompany the performance.

  "I wonder what the bird thinks."

  "I'm afraid we'll never know."

  Whirling rapidly, the feathered dancer picked up a stone and held it firmly in its beak to strike it against the ledge with a tiny battering sound. Sparks flew, dwindled, died. It struck again, and again.

  "Oh, Tharius. Can't you stop it?"

  "I could. But then the young ones wouldn't hatch, Kessie. The eggs won't break without it."

  "I know." She turned her face into the hollow of his throat, not wanting to see.

  A spark caught the tinder. The flame-bird picked up a beakful of burning tinder and laid it upon the nest, fanning it with her wings. Smoke rose in a white coil. The sticks and straw of the nest began to burn with tiny, almost invisible flames.

  "Did it catch?" A muffled question from her hidden mouth.

  "Yes. It caught."

  The flame-bird began to roll one of the golden eggs about on the burning nest, charring the surface of the shell, seeming not to notice its own feathers were on fire, the flesh of its legs crisping, its bill beginning to blister.

  The first egg cracked wide in the heat, the tiny nestling within it pushing out a questing beak, then thrusting the shell fragment aside with strong, infant wings as it flew upward in a wild flutter of damp feathers amid the smoke. The mother turned to the second egg, then the third. Only when this last nestling flew did the flame-bird raise itself into the air, singing, alive amidst its flaming plumage, spiraling as though in a frantic attempt to escape its own immolation. "Oh," cried Kessie. "I hate hearing them sing like that."

  "Shh. They say it sings in ecstasy, Kessie." Above them in the sky, the singing faded into a whisper of sound, the wings stopped beating. A black speck planed away, trailing a line of misty smoke beyond the walls of the palace.

  "I don't believe that," she wept, raising her stained face to look at the fading trail of smoke. "I think it sings in agony. It would scream if it could." She trembled, suddenly aware of her own pain, wanting not to think of that, wanting to forget, to think of anything else instead.

  "Pamra used to use the flame-bird as a parable in recruitment homilies," she chattered, letting the first thing that came to mind flow from her mouth like water. "She tried to liken the Awakeners to the mother flame-bird, sacrificing itself for its children. It wasn't a successful parable at all. Too painful. The last year or so she'd been using one about the Candy Tree which worked better. She was a marvelous recruiter."

  His mouth turned down, reminded now of the cause of all their recent pain. "Where is she, do you think?"

  "Oh, Tharius, I hope she got away. I hope she's safe somewhere, if anywhere can be called safe. Perhaps there was enough time before Ilze got onto her trail for her to find safety."

  "Or the River."

  "I think not, somehow. There was a toughness about her. A kind of impenetrable naiveté but tough, nonetheless."

  "The last of the Dons," said Tharius. "My great-great grandchild. I had such hopes for her, somehow. I thought she might be another you, another Kesseret... "

  "I know. I know you wondered about her, cared for her. That's why I kept close track of her. Though not close enough, it seems. She came very close to ruining everything."

  "How could you keep track of her at all without attracting notice? Superiors don't normally interest themselves in novices or junior Awakeners. Not as I remember."

  "Oh, my dear. You of all people to ask such a question, when you taught me every subterfuge I know. I kept track of her through my servant, Threnot. Threnot always goes veiled, and she goes everywhere. And sometimes it was Threnot herself, and sometimes it was me, listening to a recruitment parable or watching someone at the worker pits. I spent a lot of time watching Pamra."

  He shook his head, drawing her closer. "Risky, love. But kind of you in this case. Great-grea
t-granddaughter Pamra. Well. I hate her causing you this agony, but it wasn't the child's fault. Perhaps we can locate her, provide some kind of assistance. It would be sensible to do that. I don't want the Laugher to get her. I don't want the fliers to get her. Not alone that she's kin; more important, it would set them off again. When I heard it was she who had started all this, I thought how ironic it was - my own great-great-grandchild, without knowing it, coming close to betraying us. I'd like to help her, since she's the last. Not that the intervening generations were much to brag about."

  She ticked them off on her bandaged fingers. "Your son, Birald. Your granddaughter, Nathile - bit of a fishwife, that one, so I've heard. Pamra talked to Jelane about her unpleasant grandma. And then your great-grandson, Fulder Don... "

  "Useless. Like a piece of fungus. All sweaty and damp. Not much of an artist, either, I'm afraid."

  "And finally your great-great-granddaughter, Pamra Don. Something about that one, Tharius, love. Something more to her than to the others. A kind of shining, sometimes."

  "Awakener, heretic, and now fugitive," he said bleakly. "The best of the lot, and what an end to come to."

  She squeezed his hand. "Old Birald wasn't that bad, actually."

  "You knew him?" He was astonished at this.

  "I knew everyone in Baristown. I knew Birald before I came to the Tower. I was twenty then. He was a couple of years younger than I, a stiff, fussy youth, always looking over his shoulder. He ended as a crotchety old man who carved leaves and flowers on door lintels, holding on to the artist's caste by his fingernails. Oh, God, Tharius, but speaking of fingernails, my hands hurt... "

  He reached for the carafe on the table and poured a glass of its waters for her. "Kessie. Oh, Kessie, you did get the drugs I sent? You did get them in time."

  "You know I did." She drank what he had given her, thankfully. "I've told you over and over. It was all that kept me going. Knowing I wouldn't actually feel the pain, not in my body, at least. Knowing you were here, doing whatever you could to get me out of that... that nightmare."