Read Online Raising The Stones by Sheri S. Tepper - Free Book Online Page B

quick-heal, while he was given a painkiller of his own and told to go home and rest for the remainder of the day.
    “Sorry,” said Sam to the Phansuris. “It’s not broken, but I don’t feel much like going back to work.”
    “That’s all right,” murmured Theor Close. “Really, Sam, that’s all right.”
    “You can go back and finish what we’d started,” Sam suggested. He stumbled a little, and they both caught him, one at either side and turned him in the direction of his brotherhouse.
    “We could do that,” said Betrun Jun. “Tell me, Sam, was that man—Hever, was he a friend of yours?”
    Sam looked at him blankly. “Not particularly. No.”
    “Ah,” said Jun. “Well. I guess we could go do a little work. Then maybe we could … oh, go sightseeing until you’re feeling better.”
    “I don’t know what you’d sightsee. It’s all pretty much like this,” Sam gestured at the fields around them with his good arm. “North of us is the escarpment,” he pointed again, toward the single upland that twisted like an angular snake around the girdle of the world, edged on both sides by precipitous and columned cliffs. “That’s where all the ruins of the Owlbrit villages are, if you’re interested in ruins. There are some lakes up there, some wildlife, a thing called the upland omnivore. It eats most everything, including rocks for its gizzard. You might see one of those.”
    dangerous, I mean, I’d rather like someone like that to be in charge.”
    “I’d already decided that.”
    Theor patted his colleague on the shoulder. “Let’s go get that fuel pod put away before someone else gets hurt.”
    • Sam went into his brotherhouse in no very pleasant mood. He was hurting, and now that the whole incident was over, he felt a little foolish getting injured that way. It wasn’t … well, it wasn’t heroic. He should have moved faster. Old Hever wasn’t that quick, not usually. The painkiller was making him feel drugged and remote, and on top of all that he was annoyed at the two Phansuris. He knew Hobbs Land wasn’t much, from the point of view of adventure—Theseus himself said that—but it wasn’t up to two damned smart-ass Phansuris to tell him so.
    Sam dug a bottle of wine from the place he had hidden it and sat down in his own room to drink it and play with his books until he got sleepy or felt better, one. Playing with his books generally improved his mood.
    He had taken up the craft of bookbinding a few years before he became Topman, and he kept it up, despite the many claims on his attention and the assumptions of others that he would not be able to continue with the hobby.
    “You won’t have time for your books anymore,” his mother had sympathized after he had been selected Topman. “What a pity. Oh, I do like them, Sammy. They smell so good.” Which, indeed, they did, being rare leathers and woods, whatever he could lay hands on at the artisans’ market at CM. The pages were generated by Archives, of course, though Sam had taken some pains in determining the size of them, and the type style and the spacing and arrangement of paragraphs. He had selected the pictures also, deciding for each book whether it was to be illustrated in the style of woodcuts or of engravings or of paintings, or even with something that looked like photographic images, any of which Archives could produce as easily as it could spew plain print. Each book had one or more of the stories he had found in the Archives—he had done Theseus’s story first—each one modified and augmented by Sam, written and rewritten until it suited him, until it was properly heroic. When they were printed, he enclosed them in hard, well-made covers with fancy endpapers handmade by a woman in one of the other settlements, and with titles embossed in gold. When Sam finished a volume, it looked very much like the ones the Archives showed him, the ones the museums kept in vacuum containers, their millenia-old names going back