Awakeners by Sheri S Tepper

“Did you ever dream of anyone, Medoor Babji?”

She had climbed onto the rail and teetered there now, trying to make sense of his question. “Of anyone? I guess so. Mostly people I know, I suppose.”

“Did you ever dream of someone you didn’t know? Over and over again?”

She shook her head. This conversation was not going as she had thought it might. Nonetheless, it was interesting. “No, Thrasne owner. I never have.”

“I used to. When I was only a boy. A woman. Always the same woman. I called her Suspirra. A dream woman. The most beautiful woman in the world. I made a little carving of her. I still have it.” He was silent again, then, and she thought he had talked all he would. Just as she was about to get down from the rail and bid him a polite farewell, he began again.

“When I was near grown, I found a woman’s body in the River. It had been blighted. You know what that is?”

She nodded. She had never seen it, but she had a general idea.

“It was the woman I’d dreamed of. Line for line. Every feature. Face. Eyes. Feet. Everything. I brought her out of the River and kept her, Medoor Babji. Kept her for many years. And then one day I met the daughter of that woman. Found her, I guess you’d say. Truly, her daughter. The daughter she had borne long ago, before she had drowned. And the daughter was alive and the same, line for line. And she came onto the Gift of Potipur. It was before Conjunction, winter, when I found her. And that was more than a year, now.”

“And it was that woman you had to leave on the island?”

“That woman, yes.”

“Why? Is someone after her?”

He looked her in the eyes for the first time. “Can I trust you not to go talking about this business, Babji? It could be my life. And hers.”

“Laughers?” She held, her breath. This was the stuff of nightmare and romance. Laughers and dream women.

Seeing his discomfort, she changed the subject. “It’s nice you found your dream woman, Thrasne. Things like that don’t often happen.”

“I don’t know what’s happened,” he said in a kind of quiet sadness. “Her body lives on the Gift. But her spirit-it isn’t here yet, Babji. So, I’m patient about it.”

He went on then, for some time, talking. He told her everything he knew of Pamra Don, everything he had ever thought, even some of the things he had hoped, though he did not realize that. Far off along the shore she heard the sound of “Moor count” shrilling over the water.

“I must go, Thrasne owner,” she whispered, interrupting him. “My leader will whip me with my own whip if I am not in place very soon.” Though he would not if he knew who she was, she thought. Still, it was important he not know.

“Ah,” he said, his unfocused gaze coming to rest on her and gradually clearing to reveal the girl perched there before him, dark smooth skin gleaming like the surface of the River. Her hair fell in a heavy fringe all the way to her knees, twisty strands of fifty or so hairs, each of which hung together, never tangling, like lengths of shiny black twine beneath a beaded headband, all gold and blue in the evening light. The scales of her fish skin vest gleamed also, laced tight over the long, full-sleeved shirt she wore tucked into pamet trousers died blue with mulluk shell. Her dark hand rested upon the rail, inches from his own, and he took it, turned it over to examine the pink brown of her palm, scarred and calloused from the whip. Her eyes were dark, and her pink lips parted in complaint.

“Come now, owner. I must go.”

“Go, Babji. I didn’t mean to keep you. It’s just I had not really seen you until now.”

She ran down the plank and along the shore, wondering at the expression on his face. A kindly, surprised alertness, like a child finding something interesting and unexpected. Well. What to make of that. Nothing. Nothing at all.