Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Well, no sir,” he lied without a change of expression. “That’s a wig I bought in Tsillis. Somehow the carved hair didn’t look … well, it didn’t look soft.” Her hair had not looked soft, either, when he had raised her that last time, matted and filthy as it was from the frag leaf and sulphur. He had rinsed her time and again with buckets of clean water, brushed her hair, and run soap through it. Now it lay gleaming on her shoulders, not unlike the color of frag, yet more silken. The rest of her gleamed in nut-brown colors, also, with a hint of rose at nipples and lips.

“What do you call her?” asked Blint.

“Her name is Suspirra. It was the name of a girl I knew onee back in Xoxxy-Do, where you found me.”

“And where you’ll be again in a year or so. What will she think of this, your having a life-size doll of her to keep you company?” Blint was roguish, twinkling.

“She wouldn’t mind.” Since Thrasne had invented such a girl on the spot, he was not concerned about what she might think. What Blint would think had concerned him, but evidently Blint thought nothing untoward. If a boatman wished to have a life-size carving of a beautiful woman in his cabin, well, so be it. It took all kinds, as Blint would say, to do all the things needing doing.

At first Thragne merely looked at her in the lantern light before he slept or in the early morning before he rose. He touched her face sometimes, almost reverently. He did not presume to touch her breasts, though once he laid his cheek against them, almost sobbing as the promise of softness was betrayed. After a time he stopped touching her at all and began talking to her instead. At a short distance he could forget the blight, forget her petrifaction, believe that she was living flesh. He still called her Suspirra. He told her all the things he had never been able to tell anyone, not even Blint.

“Blint saved my life,” Thrasne told her.

“I lived in Xoxxy-Do. Halfway round North shore from anywhere. A mountainous place, where the falls come over the cliffs into World River, and the ships have to tie up behind great shattered rocks along the sheer walls and the boatmen climb steep, twisty stairs to reach the towns above. My father was a builder there, a builder in stone. My mother was an artist-though there was not so much of the caste system there in Xoxxy-Do as I have seen elsewhere. It was she who taught me to carve-or let me learn it, I suppose. She gave me a knife when I was only five. She was a wonderful carver. When Father finished a place, it was she who ornamented it. They had a great success together. They were very happy. So was I.”

He was silent then, waiting for Suspirra to say something, to comment. He heard her saying, “I was not happy. I envy your happy family, Thrasne. My own was not like that.”

“I saw your husband’s mother,” he replied. “My father’s sister was like that. All pinch-lipped and hating. She could not bear it that they were happy. Could not bear it that they were in love. She had predicted doom on them, and the doom did not come. Not the kind she threatened.” He fell silent again, this time out of pain. The memory still had this power to undo him, to turn his muscles to water, his bowels to aching void.

“Ah,” said Suspirra. “Then we have much in common.”

“They died. They had gone to the quarry together, and there was a great storm. The worker-built road was inadequate even in calm weather. In the storm it dissolved like sugar. They were found at the bottom of the gorge, crushed beneath the stone. My father’s sister took me in.”

“I know that kind of taking-in,” said Suspirra.

“The first thing she said to me was that my father and mother were in the worker pits of Ghasttown to the east, being raised up by the Awakeners. I could not stop crying, but she went on saying it. She took my knife away, saying I might hurt myself. It was the knife Mother had given me. I stayed with her for almost a season, but then I lay awake one night planning to kill her.”