Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Then you swear by nothing!” Her face was wild. She would have-run from him if she had had anywhere to go. She would have screamed, except to do so was to attract attention, and only in being quiet and unnoticed did she have any chance of life at all.

“I swear by the River, then, the River you have planned to go into, the River where your mother went. Come with me.”

He coaxed her as he might have coaxed a frightened animal, until at last, terrified of him but more afraid of the looks being cast their way by those in the place, she consented to come with him to the place the Gift was moored. He led her along to the owner-house, letting her stand there in the door while he fumbled with the lantern, she ready to run, but too weary and beaten to do it.

The light shone down on Suspirra, facing the door, lips slightly open, though they had been closed when he’d left. And it was Suspirra’s twin who stood in the doorway, eyes wide and lips open in surprise. They were alike, line for line. From the drowned woman came a sound, the only sound ever heard from her, almost a sigh, or perhaps a sigh of dissolution.

“Mother?” Pamra cried. “Mother!” She went to touch the still face, drawing back her hand in horror. “You lied. A carving.”

“No,” said Thrasne, heartbroken. “She is as I brought her from the River.”

Pamra sobbed, laying her hand on the hard breast. Above that head the lips curved upward, moving visibly. The lips moved, seemed to utter a word. “Remember?” A question, perhaps. In that instant the smile vanished, smoothing like windswept sand, becoming a hinted curve, coherent only for the moment, cloud-edged, shining with light, as Pamra reached out to hold it.

“Mother?” she said.

The word released the last ties that held the figure whole. Suspirra went, all at once, the golden cloud falling in the instant into a hillock of powdery dust, leaving behind a transparent golden pillar in the beam of light as though something incredibly tenuous maintained its structure still, after all that was dross had fallen away. Something solid fell as well, resting upon the dust like a little moon, softly glowing. Pamra knelt to pick k up; Thrasne was too late to stop her as he muttered, “Blight!”

Undeterred, she knelt there, stroking the thing, round and heavy as a melon. “Was that what made her like that, the blight?”

He nodded, watching her hands. The globe seemed to breathe between them. “Out of her womb,” Pamra whispered. “She was pregnant when she died. I was too young to know at the time, but Grandma saw that I heard the story often as I grew up. Mother almost died when she had me, and the midwives told her she would die next time. She was afraid. Afraid of the Awakeners. Of us … “

“You are not an Awakener now.”

She turned her haunted eyes upon him. “Once past the junior vows, an Awakener is an Awakener forever. They will remind me of that when they send a Laugher with the flask of Tears for me. I have been lucky to escape them this far.”

“What would they do to you?”

“They will feed me Tears of Viranel. I will remember who I am, but I will have no will of my own. I will exist for long years until I truly die and can be eaten by the Servants of Abricor. Perhaps, since I will not be dead and stinking, the senior Awakeners may use me for a while. Jelane says they do that. I saw a woman like that in the Tower once. They have almost caught me twice already. I cannot sleep, cannot live, for fear of them. They will find me. I have nowhere to go”

“You have somewhere to go.” He took the strange Toundness from her hands, turning it in his own. It shifted as though something within it moved, turning in slow sleep. “What shall we do with this?”

“It lives,” she breathed. “See, that place on the side seems to swell, like a pamet pod opening.”