Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“You had to get away,” prompted Suspirra.

“I had to get away. Blint found me along the Riverside, half-starved, talking to a little carving of Mother I had made.” It had been his first attempt at carving Suspirra, but he did not remember that.

“A kindly man, Blint.”

“Blint is kindness itself.” He stopped talking, appalled. She could not have spoken, and yet he had heard her speak. He left the little room to go out on deck and stride about, back and forth, hour on hour.

“What’s troubling you, boy?”

“Do you ever find yourself talking to yourself, Blint?”

“All us boatpeople do, Thrasne. Never known one that didn’t. Married Blint-wife just to have someone to talk to and found out it didn’t work. Have to talk to yourself. How would you find out what you think about things otherwise?”

“Did you ever-did you ever pretend it was someone else answering you?”

“Always. Makes it more interesting that way.”

So he came to accept it. Boatpeople came to the River because on that ever flowing current they could talk to themselves about North shore without that world forcing its own opinions on them. On the River one could repudiate the Awakeners, hate the workers-both for their hideous existence and for the shoddiness of the work they did-cogitate upon Potipur and Abricor and Viranel, question their very existence, perhaps, without being accused of heresy.

“Do you think Potipur is loving?” whispered Suspirra.

“I don’t think Potipur is anything,” he answered. “Except a moon which pulls the tide around. And a moon-faced god in the Temples with the priests all bowing and waving incense and sparking their staffs at the congregation every tenth day and twice at the end of the month.” Ten days make a week, and when five weeks are gone, then you’ve a month with a holy day tacked on. Or so Thrasne’s mother had always said.

“Then why?” Suspirra murmured. “Why, why, why? … “

They had been on the River some forty days from Shabber when Blint complained that the pamet stacked in the forward hold smelled of mildew. “Must be something blocking the ventilation duct,” he said with a sigh. “We’ll see to it next mooring.”

Thrasne was annoyed with himself. The wooden likeness of Suspirra was undoubtedly blocking the duct, and he should have seen to it long since. “Let me do it, Blint, I’ve a cubby up top where I sit and watch things. Perhaps I’ve let something fall into the duct.”

“Have you now? Well then, you see to it. I’ll leave it in your good hands.”

He did it at night, with all the crew ashore, the fitful light of torches from the pier throwing orange stripes across the netted burden as it came out of the shaft. Once lowered on the roof, he stripped the net away to have a long look at it before giving it to the tide.

There was something wrong.

He had carved it to be like the blighted woman. Like her line for line, eye for eye, lip for lip. And this was not like. These eyes were half-shut, these lips not quite curved, as though about to smile, but the Suspirra in his cabin had wide-open eyes, her lips were compressed. Leaving the statue where it was, he went below to make sure. Her eyes met his as he entered the room, her lips set tight as though humming, as though admonishing, as though about to say something.

“I’m going mad,” he whispered to himself, knowing he was not. “Suspirra, am I going mad?”

“The world is mad,” she said. “You see what you see.”

He put the carving into the tide, watching it until it vanished on the wavelets, casting a glance at the moons. Slack water would not come until early morning. It would travel far by then. He would never catch up with it again. Perhaps someone would fish it out along a pier and wonder at it.

Below in his room he began a small carving like the one just thrown away, line for line. When it was done, he did another of Suspirra as she was now. If the drowned woman was changing, he would make a record of those changes.