Northshore by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page A

constant drain on their numbers, producing was important. And rumor was that human numbers needed to be slightly increased for a … well, for a reason. No way it could be done unless the birth rate went up.
    Seeing him redden, she went on relentlessly, ‘You’d be laughed out of Thou-ne. And if word got back to the Chancery you was wasting your time on such silliness – and I’d see it got there, one way or another – they’d put an end to any hopes you might have. Give it up, Haranjus. Find your ugly girl some other housemate, but give it up so far as Peasimy’s concerned.’
    He argued some, but it was only halfhearted, a kind of face saving before he went away with scant courtesies. It had been a silly idea. Everyone in Thou-ne knew Peasimy, and the idea of Peasimy with a wife would strike them all as a mighty funny thing. Compromising to the dignity of the Tower. Meeting the letter of the law, but contrary to its spirit. Besides, it wouldn’t gain the favor of the Merchants’ Hetman, either, if he got no grandkids as part of the deal. Widow Flot was right. Leave it alone.
    Behind him in the little house, Widow Flot wiped one or two tears away. Hadn’t she suffered enough? No hope for grandbabes. No hope for someone to care for her in her old age. Just Peasimy, sweet as any toddler, and with no more sense. ‘There, there,’ she told herself, cheering a little. ‘Still, he’s good as a pet anyday.’
    In the bedroom, Peasimy sprawled in moist, infant sleepas he always did daytimes, unaware of the catastrophe that had narrowly missed him, dreaming of a time when all the darkness should be driven away and the light made whole. There were no words in these dreams, only visions in which winged figures moved through radiant space. Dreams, not unlike those dreamed by many, except that Peasimy remembered them when he woke. When he rose, walked, prowled through the dark, splashing light where he could, he always remembered them and longed to be deep in that dream again.
    Days and nights go by. Moons swing up from the east in round, ripe glory and fade to mere slivers of rind on the western sky as time passes. Conjunctions come and go.
    Comes a night. Dusk in Thou-ne, a misty dusk in which all is veiled, mystery made manifest, ghost faces in the wisps of fog that waft in from the River, ghost voices, too, which become, on long listening, the sounds of song-fish, wooden bells, the tinkle of glass chimes, the crier’s call. Only the Tower has a brazen bell, metal being too scarce to waste on anything except coin and holy purposes, but it is silent tonight, its voice withheld. Tower bell only rings when something is wrong. There is seldom anything wrong in Thou-ne, edged as it is on the east with the scarps and valleys of the Talons. No workers come to Thou-ne from the east. Potipur knows what the Awakeners beyond the Talons do with their dead, though Peasimy supposes a workers’ pit somewhere. Peasimy has it all figured out. Lies, all lies what they say. It was lies what they said about his father being Sorted Out. It was lies what the body fixer said about his arm, that time it broke. There hadn’t been any Sorters, and the arm had hurt, terribly. Peasimy no longer listens to what they say. Only what they do is true, so he watches but does not hear. He has turned his ears off, long and long ago, to most words. Sounds, now, those he will condescend to hear, and tonight he listens from his post beside the warehouse wall. Chimes and woodbells and the crier’s call.
    Night along the River in Thou-ne. Mist, tonight,blowing in from the slupping surface, softly suffused globes of it gathered around each of the lanterns, holding the light in glowing spheres that hang along the jetties like a string of ghosdy balloons. Song-fish making a chorus under the shore reeds, harummm, rumm, lummm, rumm. Three of them. One soprano-fish and two deep-voiced droners. Harumm, sloo, harumm.
    Light cannot get far enough from the lanterns to