Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

Thrasne, remembering, was not sure. “She had a child. Suspirra did.”

“Yes. .Our child. We want our child returned.”

Thrasne had meant Pamra. After a moment he realized it was Lila they spoke of. “Why do you say Lila is your child, strangey? I meant her other child, Pamra Don.”

“Lila is our child because she carries our seed. We know of Pamra Don. …” The voice trailed away in a sadness too deep to bear, the anguish beating at Thrasne’s flesh like hammers.

Thrasne cried out against it. “Don’t. Oh, don’t. Strangey! Don’t you have another name I may call you for courtesy’s sake?”

Again that indefinable emotion, the trembling of the water. And then, “The name you call us does well enough. We are strangers, strangers to you and to this place. Aliens. Explorers. Though we were already here when your people came, you will remain here when we go. When our examination—our crusade— is done.”

Strangers! Aliens? And yet, why not? If humans had come to this place, why not others, others with their own labyrinthine ways of thought, their own arcane judgments? It should have made no difference, yet it made all the difference. He tried to remember the questions he had wanted answers to. They did not seem so important now. The tone they had used in referring to Pamra Don closed that subject away. He did not want to hear Pamra’s name spoken in that voice. There remained only one mystery, and stubbornly he asked about it.

“Why do you bring the blighted ones to these islands?”

Again that gigantic emotion that Thrasne could not identify. A troubling. A monstrous disturbance that had both laughter and tears in it. “Blight is your word, Thrasne. We call it rather ‘extension.’ It seems a good thing. The human people do not live long; their ends come suddenly. They . . . look beyond too much. Or they refuse to look beyond at all. This gives them time. …”

“The blight—you brought it?”

“We created it. Our gift. Just for you.”

Again that vastness, rolling around him. He could feel it without understanding it at all. He bent forward, trying to protect the core of himself from whatever it was. He did not understand anything they had said. The words they used were insufficient to explain what they had meant. The vast, rolling emotion came closer, overwhelming him, but he could not apprehend the content of the wave in which he drowned. It passed. He lay gasping on the raft, unsure he was alive.

They spoke again, sadly.

“Bring us our child, boatman. In payment for receiving your lost one back.”

Then the water flattened, all at once, as though oil had been poured upon it. There was no reaching swell, no tattered carpets of foam. Only silence, the flap of the sail, and from the distant Gift, muted by the mist, the sound of excited voices.

He steered toward it by sound. The cook banging on a pan. Taj Noteen’s voice raised. Obers-rom, giving an order. The clatter of wood and the loose flap of the sail. The sound of laughter, cries of joy. Then he saw it, saw the little boat with the Cheevle tied at its stern. He called out, in a great, hoarse voice, and saw Eenzie and Medoor Babji waiting at the rail.

“Have you finished with the strangeys? Come aboard, have your breakfast, then let us sail for home!”

He gaped at her, staring into her face, unbelieving. There was a lively intelligence there, a self-interested concern. She reached down and lifted him upward with a strong arm, and his skin woke at the feel of her own against it. He was aware of nothing but this as he took her hand and let her lead him toward the cooking smells, thinking only of what was at that moment and not at all, in that moment, of the strangeys or of Pamra. He had come to a place within himself where he could no longer bear to go back or to stay where he was, unchanging, and yet he hesitated to go forward. With that mighty, enigmatic emotion of the strangeys still washing through him, he hung upon the moment, poised, unmoving within himself, aware of a stillness within himself and at the core of all the liquid shifting of the River’s surface, all the windblown agitation of the island, becoming part of it for a time, rather than choose—anything.