Hot Sleep

by Orson Scott Card

  “Tonight? In the dark?”

  “There’s a moon. And Stipock says that the night wind is from the southwest and will help us fight the current. We’re going to cross the river.”

  Hoom immediately began pulling trousers over his naked legs. “Cross the river, and doing it tonight!”

  “Coming then?” Wix asked, laughing silently again.

  “Think I’d miss it?”

  “What about your father?” Wix’s eyes taunted him.

  “This one’s worth another beating,” Hoom said. “And maybe he won’t know.” Hoom opened the window and Wix climbed out, falling lightly on his feet in the soft earth below. Hoom paused a moment in the window, dreading another huge quarrel with his father, wondering if taking this jump was worth it. But the thought of taking the big boat out into the river—across the river— ended his inward debate, and he jumped, landing on all fours and rolling.

  Wix scrambled back up the wall enough to close the window, so that discovery wouldn’t be easy, while Hoom smoothed the dirt where they had landed. A few meters out from the house the dirt was covered by a thick mat of grass—no tracks there. And the dew was cold on their feet as they ran. A cow lowed as they sped through the pasture, almost three kilometers before they reached the forest’s edge. There they rested, panting, out of breath, until their eyes got used to the denser darkness under the thick leaves. They followed a path known only to children’s feet, a narrow winding that seemed deliberately to take the most dangerous descents, the steepest slopes, and it took almost a half hour for them to reach the edge of the river, in a little bay protected by a finger of rock that protruded into the river, blocking the current. There the boat lay rocking on the water; there a half-dozen shadowy people were busy at a half-dozen nameless, invisible tasks in the darkness.

  “Who’s that?” hissed a voice, and Wix answered, aloud, “Me, of course.”

  “Hurry, then, we’re nearly done. Did you get Hoom?”

  “I’m here,” Hoom said, clambering down the slope after Wix. Closer, he could distinguish the features of the people there, and he immediately sought out Dilna, who smiled at him and let him help her with her task, which was folding and loading on the extra sail.

  A few minutes later, Wix and Stipock pushed the boat out of the tiny cove and then were helped aboard as Hoom held the tiller. He had been tillerman on the last two boats, too, and as the boat hit the first currents (still not as strong as the main current a kilometer farther out—they had never tried to cross that before) he laughed with pleasure at how lightly and easily the boat responded to his touch.

  Wix, in the meantime, with Dilna and Cirith, was putting up the sail, and the wind from the southwest caught it, pulling the boat forward, making it dance across the water.

  There were four oars on the boat, just in case the sail didn’t work, but Hoom laughed and said, “Won’t be needing to row, now, will we?” and Wix laughed and said, “We could sleep our way across in this boat,” and Stipock said, “Shut up and mind the tiller and the sail. The real current’s still ahead.”

  When they reached the main stream, the bow of the boat yawed widely to the left, and for a moment there was a flurry of activity until the sail was turned to take the boat virtually into the current. Hoom plied the tiller vigorously, and kept the boat on course, and when they finally passed out of the main current and into the gentle eddies of the opposite side of the river, they gave a quiet cheer. Quiet, because Stipock had warned them that sound flew across water better than through forest.

  Ahead loomed the highest hill of the opposite shore, and just to the west of it there was a beach. They unshipped the oars now, and pulled down the sail, rowing gently into the shore. This time everyone but Hoom jumped out of the boat into the water, pulling it ashore. Hoom got out then, patting the firm structure of the boat as he swung from the bow.

  “Well,” said Dilna, “it doesn’t feel much different from the sand on the other side.”

  “What did you expect?” Stipock asked. “Gold?”

  “What’s gold?” Hoom asked, and Stipock shook his head and laughed. “Never mind. Let’s climb that hill, and see how the world looks from this side of the water.”

  So they climbed up the hill, Wix pointedly taking the shorter, steeper way, and Hoom following him. At the top, they waited for the others to come. Stipock was smiling when he reached them, and as they stood together in the wind, he laughed and said, “It’s not too many years off, my friends, when you’ll be as glad as I am to find the path that’s not so steep!”

  “The hill’s high enough,” Hoom said, looking at how small their boat seemed down on the shore. The moon was full and high, and without trees around them, it seemed they could see forever.

  “Well,” said Stipock, after they had all had ample time to look around, “what do you see over there?” And he pointed toward the shore they had come from.

  “I can see my house,” Hoom said immediately, because his house crowned the bald hill of the Pasture. There were others near it, of course, but his grandfather’s house, where he lived, was highest.

  “There’s a light in my father’s house,” Wix said, pointing to the many houses that skirted Linkeree’s Bay, where Wix’s father, Ross, still lived in the house that his father, Linkeree, had built.

  “My family lives in the Main Town,” Dilna said. “I can’t see it from here.”

  Stipock chuckled softly behind them. “And is that all you see?”

  Cirith said, “What I mostly see is trees. The houses look pretty damn small when you compare them to the forest.” Stipock patted her arm.

  Hoom wondered what in the world he was supposed to see as he looked across the river. Sure enough, everything did look smaller from farther away, but everyone knew that. What did Stipock want them to see?

  Wix finally kicked a rock off the hill and turned back to Stipock. “Quit the guessing game. You want to show us something, show us.”

  “Right,” Hoom said. “All that we can see from here is forest and Heaven City.”

  “And there’s the answer,” Stipock said, clapping Hoom on the back. “That’s Heaven City. Over there, isn’t it?”

  “Where else would it be?” Cirith asked.

  “Look down on this side. Is Heaven City here?”

  No, of course not, they said.

  “Well then. What if a man crossed the river with his wife, and they built a house here. Would that house be in Heaven City or not?”

  And now they began to catch a glimmer of the idea. “It wouldn’t have to be, would it?” Dilna said.

  And Hoom added, “And if the people who lived here had the boats, they could pretty much decide who came and who didn’t.”

  “They could even keep the damned Warden and his stupid laws on the other side,” Wix said. “We could vote on everything, like you’ve been saying!”

  But the excitement was dampened when Stipock said, “And could you keep Jason on the other side?”

  They shrugged. They shuffled. They didn’t know. After all, you never knew what Jason could do.

  “Let me tell you, then,” Stipock said. “You can’t keep Jason away. Because Jason has machines that let him fly.”

  Fly! Hoom stared in wonderment at Stipock. The man was strange—for hours he would talk to them about how Jason was just a man, like any other; and then he would say things like this, or talk about Jason piloting a great ship between the stars. Who could know? Even Stipock himself couldn’t seem to make up his mind as to whether Jason was God, as the old people said, or whether he was just a man.

  “And not just Jason. Which of you owns a cow?”

  None of them did.

  “Or an ax? Or anything at all?”

  “I have my tools,” Wix said, but he was the oldest of those who followed Stipock, and few of the others had turned fourteen and reached adulthood.

  “Are your tools enough to build a town?”

  Wix shook his head.

  “Then we’re back wh
ere we started, aren’t we? Because you can’t be free from Heaven City until you don’t need Heaven City anymore. But it’s still worth thinking about, isn’t it? Still worth, perhaps, planning for. Perhaps?”

  “Perhaps,” Hoom said, so solemnly that he earned several punches and jests from the others all the way down the hill. But as he sat at the tiller on the way back, he couldn’t keep from looking back often at the shore they had left. Land as good as any at Heaven City. But perhaps there the young, who, like Hoom and Wix, cared little for the old people’s single-minded attention to every word that dropped from Jason’s mouth, might be able to set up another city, one that depended on the will of those governed, as Stipock had so often said, rather than the will of those governing.

  Now as they crossed the river, the current was trickier. They had to steer into it again, though it took them far from the direction they wanted to go, because the wind was directly against them returning. Once they had crossed the main stream, though, they let the eddies carry them lazily back across Linkeree Bay, around the point, and into the shallow cove where they had built the boat.

  They splashed to shore (except Hoom at the tiller) and tied the boat to three trees, and then they all laughed with each other and made funny remarks about having to go back to the old people again, and then they parted.

  Because Dilna lived in the Main Town, she and

  Hoom had to go back in the same direction, which was perfectly all right with Hoom. He wanted to talk to her anyway, had wanted to ever since he had met her in the group that met to listen to Stipock months ago, while he was still talking about the stars and planets and billions of people on other worlds (as if anyone much cared what really existed in heaven). As they wound their way through the forest toward the Pasture, Hoom held her hand, and she only held the tighter when he tried to do the courteous thing, and let go as they reached level, open ground.

  That was encouragement enough for Hoom. “Dilna,” he whispered as they walked through the Pasture. “Dilna, in a month I’ll be fourteen.”

  “And I’ll be fourteen in two weeks,” she said.

  “I’m moving out of my father’s house that day,” Hoom said.

  “I’d move, too,” she answered, “if only I had a place to go.”

  Hoom swallowed. “I’ll build you a house, if you’ll come to live in it with me.”

  She tossed back her head and laughed softly. “Yes, I’ll marry you, Hoom! What did you think I was hinting at so much all these months?”

  And then they kissed each other, clumsily, but with enough fervor to make the experience all they had hoped it would be. “How long will I have to wait?” Dilna asked.

  “I’ll have it built before Jason’s Day.”

  “Will he come back, do you think?”

  “This year?” Hoom shook his head. “This year he won’t come. Not with grandfather as Warden.”

  “I was hoping he would be able to marry us himself,” Dilna said, and then they kissed again and she took off running, heading for Noyock’s Road, which would take her down into the Main Town. Neither of them noticed the incongruity of wanting Jason himself to perform their marriage, even as they planned and worked to remove themselves from the city he governed. After all, Jason may not be God, as Stipock always told them. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t Jason. And everyone knew that Jason could read what was in people’s hearts, and that made him more than anybody else. God or no God, Jason still wasn’t, in any way, ordinary.

  Hoom reached the house and quickly scrambled up the horizontal logs to his window. He pulled it easily ajar, and slipped through, barring the window behind him.

  His tallow lamp was sputtering, but hadn’t gone out. He doused it, and undressed in the darkness. The room was cold, and his blankets were colder still, He shivered and he slid his naked body under the wool—but he was tired enough, and he was quickly asleep.

  He woke when his door crashed open violently and his father shouted, “Hoom!” The boy sat up in bed, holding his blankets around him as if they would offer some protection. “Father—I—”

  “Father!” Aven said in a high voice, mocking him cruelly. “Father.” And then he roared, “Don’t you call me father, boy! Never again!”

  “What is it? What have I done?”

  “Oh, are we innocent this morning? Didn’t I tell you not even to unbar the window? And certainly not to leave this room for a week! Do you remember why I told you that?”

  “Because,” Hoom said, “because I disobeyed you and went on the river—”

  “And have you obeyed me when I told you to stay here as punishment?”

  Hoom knew then that the beating was coming. He had long since learned that when he was caught, it was better not to lie. The beating was easier then, and the shouting was over sooner.

  “I have not obeyed you,” Hoom said.

  “Come to the window, boy,” Aven said, his voice lower and so all the more frightening. Hoom climbed uncertainly out of bed. The early autumn air was chilly, and when his father unbarred the window and flung it open, it became freezing cold on Hoom’s naked and sleep-slowed body. “Look out the window!” Aven commanded, and Hoom became really afraid—he had never seen his father so furious.

  Down at the foot of the wall of the house, the dirt showed clearly Hoom’s footprints leading from the grass to the wall. In two hours, they would not have showed—but the slantwise morning sun made the prints black on the dark brown soil.

  “Where did you go?” Aven asked, softly, menacingly.

  “I went—I went—” and Hoom saw some of his brothers and uncles and cousins, passing by with tools for mending fences. They had stopped. They were staring at the window. Had they heard Aven’s shouting?

  “You went to the river?” Aven prompted. Hoom nodded, and Aven roared again. “This is how I’m obeyed! You’re not my son! You’re an untrainable animal I’ve been cursed with! I won’t have you in my house anymore! You won’t live here anymore!”

  Hoom could see some of his cousins, and he thought he could see them pointing, laughing, mocking. He whirled on his father and shouted back, as loudly as he could, though his young voice cracked twice, “That’s no punishment at all, you old hog! I’ve been wishing for the day that I could get out of here, and you’ve set me free all the sooner!” With that, Hoom started for the chair where his clothes were piled. But his father caught his arm in a tight, savage grip, and pulled him back.

  “Want your clothes, is it? Well, none of that. My sweat earned those clothes for you, and your mother’s.”

  “I’ve worked too,” Hoom said, defiant but terribly afraid as his father’s fingers dug viciously into his arm.

  “You’ve worked too!” Aven shouted, “You’ve worked! Well, you’ve been paid for it. You’ve eaten my food and slept in my house! But I swear when you leave me you’ll leave as naked as you came! Now get out, and never come back!”

  “Then let go of me, so I can,” said Hoom, sick with embarrassment at the thought of having to go out naked in front of everyone, wondering where he would go.

  “I’ll let go of you,” Aven said, “but you won’t use the door, boy. You’ll go out the way you snuck out last night, hoping to deceive your father! You’ll dance out that window, boy.” And Aven flung him toward the open window again.

  Hoom stood at the window, looking at the ground below him. It suddenly looked farther than it had last night, and his cousins had come closer, were no more than twenty meters off now, could hear every word, would watch him jump, naked, with nothing to cover his shame.

  “I said jump!” Aven said, “Now climb up on the sill and jump!”

  Hoom climbed on the sill, trying to cover himself with his hand, his mind an agony of humiliation and indecision and hatred.

  “Jump, dammit!” Aven bellowed.

  “I can’t,” Hoom whispered. “Please!”

  “You could damn well jump last night!” his father shouted; and just at that moment Hoom heard his grandfather’s voice, fr
om back by the door, saying, “Aven, be careful with the boy,” and Hoom turned to call out to his grandfather, to cry for help, for relief from the intolerable. But at the moment he turned, Aven finished the gesture he had begun, and struck Hoom hard. If Hoom hadn’t been turning, it would have struck him on the back and stung bitterly; instead it struck him in the ribs, crushingly, and because he was offbalance Hoom teetered for a moment on the sill and then fell from the window.

  He wasn’t prepared for the fall. He landed with his right leg only, and the knee popped somehow, and with an agonizing grinding the leg buckled under him. He lay there, terribly, acutely, sharply conscious, though the only reality was the vast pain that pressed on him and shortened his breath and threatened to suffocate him utterly. He heard a distant scream. It was his mother. She ran to him, screamed again, crying, “Hoom, my boy, my son,” and then in the distance (far up in the sky) he heard his father’s voice call out, “Stay away from him, woman!”

  “My name is Esten, man!” shouted his mother in fury. “Don’t you see the boy’s leg is broken?”

  Broken? Hoom looked down and nearly vomited. His right leg was bent backward at a ninetydegree angle at the knee. Only a little below the knee, a new joint, from which a strange whiteand-bloody bone protruded, bent his leg back again the other way.

  “Jason!” he heard his father cry out, as if the call would bring God from his tower. “What have I done to the boy?” And then the pain subsided for a second, Hoom gasped his breath, and the pain washed back, twice as powerfully as before. The wave of agony swept him away; everything went bright purple; the world disappeared.

  Hoom woke to hear a knocking at a door. He was immediately conscious of being hot; sweat dripped from him, and the wool of the blankets over him prickled in the heat. He tried to push the blankets off, but the movement was pain, and he moaned.

  Someone had come in, and he heard, in the distance (a couple of meters away), an argument.

  “You’ll stay away from my boy, damn you,” said Aven’s voice.

  “I can heal his leg, Aven,” said another voice, “and you have no right to stop me.”