Nightside the Long Sun Read Online Free Page B

cards were good enough to fool the sellers of animals, that was all that mattered, though he would be a thief. A prayer, in that case, to Tenebrous Tartaros, Pas’s elder son, the terrifying god of night and thieves.
    *   *   *
    Maytera Marble sat watching, at the back of her class. There had been a time, long ago, when she would have stood, just as there had been a time when her students had labored over keyboards instead of slates. Today, now—in whatever year this might be … Might be …
    Her chronological function could not be called; she tried to remember when it had happened before.
    Maytera Marble could call a list of her nonfunctioning or defective components whenever she chose, though it had been five years or fifty since she had so chosen. What was the use? Why should she—why ever should anyone—make herself more miserable than the gods had chosen to make her? Weren’t the gods cruel enough, deaf to her prayers through so many years, so many decades and days and languid, half-stopped hours? Pas, Great Pas, was god of mechanisms, as of so much else. Perhaps he was too busy to notice.
    She pictured him as he stood in the manteion, as tall as a talus, his smooth limbs carved of some white stone finer grained than shiprock—his grave, unseeing eyes, his noble brows. Have pity on me, Pas, she prayed. Have pity on me, a mortal maid who calls upon you now, but will soon stop forever.
    Her right leg had been getting suffer and suffer for years, and at times it seemed that even when she sat so still—
    A boy to a girl: “She’s asleep!”
    â€”that when she sat as still as she was sitting here, watching the children take nineteen from twenty-nine and get nine, add seven and seventeen and arrive at twenty-three—that when she sat so still as this, her vision no longer as acute as it Once had been, although she could still see the straying, chalky numerals on their slates when the children wrote large, and all children their age wrote large, though their eyes were better than her own.
    It seemed to her that she was always on the point of overheating any more, in hot weather anyway. Pas, Great Pas, God of Sky and Sun and Storm, bring the snow! Bring the cold wind!
    This endless summer, without snow, with no autumn rains and the season for them practically past now, the season for snow nearly upon us, and no snow. Heat and dust and clouds that were all empty, yellow haze. What could Pas, Lord Pas, Husband of Grain-bearing Echidna and Father of the Seven, be thinking of?
    A girl: “Look—she’s asleep!”
    Another: “I didn’t think they slept.”
    A knock at the Sun Street door of the palaestra.
    â€œI’ll get it!” That was Asphodella’s voice.
    This was Ratel’s. “No, I will!”
    Fragrant white blossoms and sharp white teeth. Maytera Marble meditated upon names. Flowers—or plants of some kind, at least—for bio girls; animals or animal products for bio boys. Metals or stones for us.
    Both together: “Let me!”
    Her old name had been—
    Her old name had been …
    A crash, as a chair fell. Maytera Marble rose stiffly, one hand gripping the windowsill. “Stop that this instant!”
    She could bring up a list of her nonfunctioning and defective parts whenever she chose. She had not chosen to do so for close to a century; but from time to time, most often when the cenoby lay on the night side of the long sun, that list came up of itself.
    â€œAquifolia! Separate those two before I lose my temper.”
    Maytera Marble could remember the short sun, a disk of orange fire; and it seemed to her that the chief virtue of that old sun had been that no list, no menu, ever appeared unbidden beneath its rays.
    Both together: “Sib, I wanted—”
    â€œWell, neither of you are going to,” Maytera Marble told them.
    Another knock, too loud for knuckles of bone and