The Awakeners - Northshore & Southshore

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "Aiee, Medoor Babji, but those were old, old folk. Tharius Don told me he'd lived hundreds of years. More than you and me put together ever will."

  "I know," she wept. "It's just they loved each other, Thrasne."

  She would not be comforted, but she did stop crying. The late evening mist hid the waters, and he couldn't see whether the island was really near or not, though he smelled it, or another one like it, and had been doing so all day. There was a peculiar odor about the Island of the Dead, a tree fragrance unlike any other, and he could detect it now, faintly borne on the light wind. The two old people lay on the deck, side by side, and the Noor Queen came out of the owner-house to say some words over them in a high, singsong voice before Obors-rom slid their bodies into the River.

  They sank down, out of sight, quickly, as though eager to depart. Medoor Babji clung to Thrasne almost fearfully, and he held her close beside him, bringing her into his bed that night, big belly and all, feeling the babe kicking inside her with a kind of quiet joy and fear all at once. There had still been no words, no real words, between them. They had not talked of Pamra Don or of Thrasne's feelings.

  He did not know how she felt about him, really, or how a queen's daughter would be allowed to feel. He was afraid to ask. And yet she lay there beside him, deeply asleep, and he took it to mean something.

  In the night he dreamed of Lila.

  She had become a creature wholly strange, not human at all and yet, one could have said, not totally unlike. There was something one thought of as a head, with organs of sight and smell and perhaps taste and hearing, this part already fringed at the edges. There were parts that could have been arms and legs on their way to being something else, not flippers or fins, precisely, and yet fulfilling those functions as well as other, unimaginable ones. Her voice, when she spoke, was Lila's voice, a child's chuckling voice using words that set up unfamiliar chains of association in his mind as he heard her demanding to know why Medoor Babji was grieving.

  "Medoor Babji was crying because they died, and they loved one another," he explained to her.

  "My people tell me humans are maddened by death," she said. "It comes too quickly, severing love. People need time to become accustomed to it. Either they dwell on it all the time, worrying their lives away to make monuments to themselves, or they refuse to think of it at all, like Queen Fibji's young warriors. It becomes an obsession with men, one way or the other, so they forget to live. Like you, Thrasne."

  "I don't understand," Thrasne said in his dream. "What has that to do with me?"

  "Your mother died, Thrasne, and you could not bear that she was gone. So you created her again, as Suspirra, a carving, which was safe because it could not die.

  “And then you found the drowned woman, and she was safe, too, because she was already dead. Then, when she fell into dust - I know; I was there - when she fell into dust, you chose Pamra to continue to be Suspirra. You told yourself you wanted her to love, to bear your children. In truth you only wanted her never to change. You wanted her to be Suspirra.

  "It is easier to honor the dead than it is to love the living."

  "That's crazy," he said in his dream, but weakly.

  "Oh, but men are crazy," Lila said in her bubbling voice.

  "Only crazy people would have had things like Awakeners and workers. Only crazy people would dream of an eternal life in Potipur's arms." She laughed. "A baby, held in arms, rocked to and fro, unchanging. Ah, ah, that is not eternal life, Thrasne. That is eternal death. Only a crazy man would have loved Pamra...."

  "But I did love her," he argued, angry even in his dream, knowing he did not quite believe it.

  "Only because she was Suspirra. What was she otherwise? A narrow, ignorant woman. Maddened by death into rejecting life. Holding fast to a childish naivete which protected her from seeing reality. A believer in impossible futures. A simple, totally selfish woman who saw no one's need but her own, who invented a doctrine to meet that need and voices to validate it, who walked a way upon the world convincing others her myth was better than their myths, letting others suffer and die in the service of her madness, starving herself into spasms of self-generated rapture, not seeing, not hearing, only to be burned at last by that which she would not hear or see."

  "She wanted to free the slaves. She wanted to stop the workers. She was a saint," he muttered.

  "There are those who say so now. There are those who will say so," Lila whispered. "What is a saint? Delia was a saint."

  "You're saying she never could have loved me!" he cried, angry at this in the dream, though he knew it was true,

  "I'm saying you never should have loved her," Lila said, her voice somehow changed into something remote and terrible. "For she was like the blight, a terrible thing that kills...."

  "And preserves," whispered Thrasne in his dream. "And preserves," whispered Lila as the dream whirled about him, giving way to the sounds of the River, the soft, eternal sluff of water.

  He woke then, the dream at first clear, then fading from his mind. Medoor Babji lay heavily beside him, her cheek flushed and warm where it had rested against his own. He rose without waking her and went out of the owner-house onto the deck. In the dawn light the Island of the Dead loomed to the south, mist and tree behind mist and tree and yet again, mist and tree to the limit of sight, with the blessed ones - for so he now called them in his mind - the blessed ones moving slowly in the mists, like swimmers. There on the water the strangeys danced, calling to one another in their terrible voices, and among them their young sported themselves, standing winged upon the waves.

  One of these came very close to the ship and looked up at Thrasne with eyes that seemed somehow familiar.

  "Thrasne," it said to him in a bubbling voice. "Kesseret is here, Thrasne. And Tharius Don. They have been given the time we created for them. They live. You live, too, Thrasne. And come to us." It sank beneath the flowing surface, its eyes still fixed on Thrasne's face.

  There was a hand on his shoulder.

  "Come," said Medoor Babji, her dry and watchful eyes on the waves where the strangeys danced. "Let us go on to Southshore, Thrasne. This is not the place for us."

  He heard the rattle of the anchor tackle, the call of the sailors as the sails were raised. On the shore of the island, one of the blessed raised its hand to wave.

  Tharius Don? Too soon for Tharius Don. Someone else. Bending across the rail, Thrasne let a few tears come and fall and wash away the last of whatever thing there had been tight inside himself.

  And then he stood to take Medoor Babji's hand and nod acceptance. "To Southshore."

  As they sailed on into the south, Thrasne rigged a chair over the bow and laboriously chiseled away two of the three words that had been carved into the prow of the ship. The Gift of Potipur became simply the Gift. The winged figure that had leaned into the wavelets of the River for decades was replaced with another carving, one that Medoor Babji called, only to herself, "Suspirra in ecstasy," taking comfort in the fact that Thrasne had carved it, for it was not a face or figure any living man would lust for. It was Pamra's face, but a face beatified, glorious, and inhuman, the face of a departing spirit. Before her in her wooden hands she held the gift, a strangely shaped being that might have had either wings or flippers and was carved as though eternally poised to drop into the waters below. Tharius Don, before his death, had told Thrasne about Lila as he had seen her, Lila transformed, the child of the strangeys.

  On a calm and starry night when there were no moons, the child was born. When it had been cleaned and wrapped and laid in a blanket, Thrasne stood by the basket and the baby grasped his hand, curling infant fingers around one of his own in a gesture as old as time and demanding as life itself. "Mine," said Thrasne wonderingly. "This is mine."

  "Ours," said Medoor Babji firmly. "He belongs to us, and to the Noor."

  "And to the Gift," said Thrasne stubbornly. "And to Southshore."

  "That, too. I pray we find good fortune there, for ou
r ancestors alone know what is happening behind us." She reached for Thrasne's other hand. The birth had been more than she had expected; more in the way of pain, of effort, and of fulfillment when it was done. It was time to say. Time for words. "And what of the baby's mother, Thrasne? Do you claim her, too, or only the child?"

  "Oh, yes," he said, suddenly surprised that it should need saying. "Oh, yes! She, too, is mine if she will be."

  "And Suspirra?"

  He shrugged, rather more elaborately than the question warranted at this stage, but he needed to be sure that both of them understood what he meant. "At the prow of the Gift, Doorie. Where dreams are put. That was a different thing from this."

  She was content, and Queen Fibji, hearing this exchange from outside the door, sighed a great sigh of relief.

  They had come to the baby's tribal day, that day on which he was to be given a name, when the hail came from the steering deck. They thought it might be only another island and sent someone scurrying up the mast to spy out the cloudy land.

  He came back down to say there was no end to the land he could see, not south nor east nor west, but ahead of them were white beaches and a great, towering smoke. They gave up any thought of ceremony then, preferring to crowd the rails for the earliest glimpse of the new land.

  By the time dusk came they had anchored in a shallow bay rimmed with pale dunes. On the beach were three boats that Thrasne recognized, and scattered across the dunes were the tents of many earlier arrivals. High above them to the west was a towering scaffold bearing a clay firefox, and in this a great beacon burned, smoke roiling above it as from a chimney.

  Some of those aboard the Gift splashed into the water and swam ashore while others plied to and fro on hastily rigged rafts. The Cheevle bore Queen Fibji, Medoor Babji, Thrasne, and the child, with Strenge plying the rudder as they ran the little boat up on the sand. The Noor crowded around, not too closely, making obeisance, pointing at the child, who regarded them with wide, wondering looks from his not altogether Noorish eyes.

  "Let me see this land," the Queen called, waving them aside as she staggered toward the tops of the dunes to peer inland, seeing there a vast prairie of grass and scattered copses in the light of the moons.

  Thrasne came up behind her, one arm around Babji's shoulders, the baby in the other. From behind them, far down the beach, came a hail, and they turned to see another ship against the darkening sky, and beyond that one still another.

  "The Noor are gathering. On Southshore," said the Queen. "We have made landfall. All my hopes, Doorie. All my hopes. I feel - oh, I feel I might die now, knowing the best thing I could have done is done."

  "Do not talk of dying," said Thrasne, shaking her by one shoulder, much to her astonishment, for the Noor did not presume to touch their Queen. "There is much planting to do if all this mob is to be fed, and who will see to that if not you?" He sounded, she thought, really angry at her. "And this one is a month old today and still has no name. Who will name him if you go dying?"

  "Ah, babe, babe." She laughed, half crying as she turned to take the child. "Your father speaks the truth. You have no name." She held the baby high so he might peer away, as she did, toward the wide plains before her and the nearest line of hills. She wondered what mysteries would lie behind them, for it was sure that something wonderful awaited, just beyond the horizon. Then she turned to look into Medoor Babji's eyes, full of trust and pain, wonder and joy intermixed, then to Thrasne's craggy face, which held the same mixture of feelings. So they stood for some time, regarding each other without speaking.

  "I name this child Temin M'noor," she said at last, passing him into Thrasne's keeping as she moved away from them down the hill. "Temin M'noor," she called again, her voice like that of a shore bird, hunting.

  "What does it mean?" Thrasne asked, thinking he had heard the words somewhere before.

  Medoor Babji was smiling at him, holding out her arms for the child, her eyes swimming with tears.

  "Temin, which is to say a key, and M'noor, that which is spoken...."

  He did not understand, and she explained it to him. "We have given him to one another between our worlds, Thrasne.

  "His name is Password."

  A Brief Autobiography

  When I was four, I was told by my grandmother, who was my main caregiver(?) that I had a baby brother. I said, innocently, “I’ll still be your grandbaby, won’t I Nana?” To which she replied, with great satisfaction, “I have a grandson now, I don’t need you girls anymore.” The girls referred to were my cousins and I. I have never forgotten it. This is my earliest memory. It was also my introduction to the worth of females in my world. In the family of grandparents, parents, uncles, a great aunt, later events only made it more clear.

  On the farm where we lived there were no other children anywhere near. When I went to school at six, I was the only girl there who did not know how to play jump-rope, hop-scotch, or jacks. (I was also the only girl able to identify ten kinds of snakes which gave me a little street cred with a couple of boys who had not yet decided to hate girls.) I asked the girls where they learned “the girls on the block.” It was obvious they weren’t going to interrupt their game to teach me. I asked Mother if she could do those things, and she said, ‘of course.’ She didn’t offer to teach me, either. Mother belonged to two bridge clubs, (one for couples, one for women only) one sorority, and two other women’s clubs. She was very busy. I spent most of my time alone writing very bad poetry. It rhymed and scanned well. It was still very bad, though I didn’t know it at the time.

  On graduating high school, I wanted to go to a university that was known to have a good creative writing course. My parents told me it was too far away ”for a girl.” They had already picked where I was to go. I therefore did the equivalent of repeating a couple of years of high school in a local two year college for girls: a kind of holding-tank for girls between high school and marriage. It had no creative writing course or anything else helpful. My brother, four years later, asked to go to the university I had chosen (only because I had chosen it) and was sent there without question.

  Therefore, I can honestly attribute any success I may have had in writing to four years of high school English with a remarkable English Teacher named Dorothea Benkleman. Dorothea was older, gray haired, rotund, had a raspy voice, and was the butt of many jokes behind her back, mostly by boys who saw no sense in Chaucer or Shakespeare, punctuation or spelling, except that they had to get a passing grade in order to be on the football and basketball teams. Nonetheless, she was a fine teacher who loved what she taught, and any skill I may have was learned at her instigation and through her encouragement. That is the sum and total of my writing education: I usually don’t read critics. Too many of them say I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m sure they’re perfectly right. Mostly I don’t. Or if I do it right, I don’t know the right literary name for what I did.

  It was in the two year holding tank, however, that I was introduced to the ideas of Malthus, and for the first time considered what overpopulation was doing to our planet; perhaps re-discovered, for much of the wild area around the farm where I had grown up was by that time already covered in houses, and the wildlife there had been displaced or killed - probably including all ten varieties of snake. The farm had been my home, my friend, my family. I grieved over it more than I grieved at the death of any member of my family because I was closer to it than I was to any of them - or they to me.

  I married. I can admit now, over sixty some odd years later, that I did it simply to get away from a home that had never been at all nourishing or kind, though it was not abusive by the standard of that time. Hitting children wasn’t called abusive unless you did it with a knife or heavy stick. I was, however, the only one hit. I never saw anyone hit my brother. Maybe it wasn’t nice for grown up women to hit little boys. I worked throughout my marriage in between having the requisite girl child and boy child. Except for peeing standing up, the boy-child never got to do anything the
girl-child didn’t. To my astonishment, after five or six years of marriage, my then husband, purely in order to avoid the brief service in the military to which his college education through the navy V12 program had obligated him, suddenly chose a new career which would have required my lifetime, full time assistance in a field in which I could make no genuine or willing contribution. We divorced and I subsequently supported the children through a varied job career, with no time left over for writing.

  When the position of director of the local Planned Parenthood became vacant, I applied, took the job, and worked as the director for some twenty years. I believed in that job and did it out of conviction. When my children went off to college, I started writing once more, in dibs and dabs, then settled into a year long dedication to work on The Revenants - all my off-work time -, helped by a friend who really listened and offered sensible help! When I had finished the book, I sent it to a publisher. They kept it forever. I phoned to ask that it be returned - 700 pages, typewritten, not on computer, and I didn’t have a copy! They said they rather liked it, but it was too long to publish by a beginning writer... Would I give the publisher something more “accessible.” I put a junior high kid in the front of my mind as the probable reader and King’s Blood Four was written by the end of the month. So? It was a short book. “Give us another one like that, we’ll publish the first one.” I gave them a dozen all told, nine in the True Game series and three in the "Mariannes." They did publish The Revenants.

  So..., it is from my tap-root that I come by both feminism and concern for ­ecology (also racial prejudice, which is another true story about a lonely little girl who was not allowed to play with the children of the Syrian farmer who rented our land because he was ‘a darky.’) All those talking animals and ETs in my books are just different races. I am eighty-three years old, and I remember the whys.