Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Until we know a bit more.”

“Such as why they are suspected?”

“Among other things, yes,” sighed the Maintainer. “I was much tempted to send this Talker packing. Something told me it would be a mistake to do it or not do it, either way.” Shavian pondered this. Prudence had come with age and was as tasteless in his mouth as food had become. Lacking the spice of feeling.

“And the Talker won’t say why the treaty does not apply.”

“I think we can figure it out,” Shavian murmured, moving across the room to the tea service, taking a cup with him to a comfortable chair, where he sat, face wreathed in fragrant steam, making owl eyes at them through the mists. “At the recent convocation with the Talkers, we learned they are barely reasonable upon the subject of the Riverman heresy.”

“That’s true,” said Tharius Don carefully. “It was all they wanted to talk about. We traveled a great, uncomfortable distance to cross the pass to the place of meeting. There were matters of true import to discuss. This demand of theirs for a higher food quota in order to increase their numbers, for example. Gods, but that needed talking of. But no! All they wanted to do was huddle in dusty groups, ruffling their feathers-full of dander as they are to make me sneeze endlessly-and fulminate about the heresy.” He fished a handkerchief out of his sleeve and erupted into it with a great play of gloomy recollection. Let them think him a fool. It was safer than the truth. Besides, the kerchief helped to hide his face.

“True.” Gendra considered this. “It was the same with all of them. They spoke of nothing else, always watching out of the corners of their eyes, as though to catch us in some cover-up. The Riverman heresy, and was it connected to the homosexuals or the celibates? As though they had anything in common!”

“And we?” Shavian smiled a tiny, three-cornered smile, a mouse smile, wicked on that small face. “What did we do?”

“I told them it was all nonsense,” said Tharius. “No more to it than the usual few Awakeners who can’t get past their junior vows and a coven or two of recalcitrants who put their dead in the River out of misplaced sentimentalism. I told them in my opinion it was not a widespread heresy, and not a conspiracy of any magnitude. Probably not more than a dozen or two Rivermen per town, mostly individual families. I doubt there’s a Riverman anywhere in the towns who even knows that Talkers exist, so it would be hard to imagine a conspiracy against them. And I told them the boy lovers were only aberrants! Genetic, if anything. Not a matter of politics or belief at all. And the same with the celibates. They want to believe all humans think of nothing but endless breeding, and it’s hard to disabuse them of the notion. Though the gods know, Talkers ought to understand that if any creature can. They don’t breed. They can’t.”

“And I told them the same thing,” sneered Gendra, as though having agreed with him for any reason was of questionable taste.

Bossit bowed. “Your Graces were no doubt right to do so. However, if I were one given to paranoia, deeply suspicious that some human group was plotting my downfall, and if the Propagator of the Faith told me it was all nonsense and then the Dame Marshal of the Towers told me it was all nonsense-both of them telling me this as a mere aside, mind you, not with any appearance of grave consideration-might I not feel even more suspicious? Why would the leader of the humans be so offhand unless he wished to mislead me?”

“You mean the Talkers thought we were lying? That there is indeed some vast Riverman plot which we know about?” Tharius kept his voice calm, unmoved, feeling the sweat crawling on his forehead but trusting the shadows of the corner where he sat to hide him.

Trust Shavian, thought Bormas Tyle, drawing no attention to himself whatsoever. If there is one conspiratorial breath inhaled within ten thousand paces, trust Shavian to hear it and smell upon it what rotten fish the speaker ate for dinner. He sat quiet, watching the others think about this.