Devices and Desires by K.J. Parker

Author:K.J. Parker [PARKER, K.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316077477
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2009-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

They had told her that Orsea was in the arbor behind the chestnut tree. She called his name a few times, but he didn’t reply, so she assumed he’d gone back inside. Then she caught sight of a flash of blue through the curtain of trailing vine. He hadn’t answered her because he was asleep.

Like an old man, she thought, snoozing in the afternoon. Orsea never slept during the day; indeed, he resented sleep on principle, the way people resent paying taxes. It wasn’t fair, he’d told her once, that nature only gave you a very short time on earth, and then saw fit to steal a third of it back from you. At one time he’d tried to train himself to make do with less of it — like a devious banker, he’d said, clipping little bits off the edges of coins. If he learned how to get by on seven hours a night instead of eight, he’d told her, at the end of a year he’d have gained fifteen days. Suppose he lived another forty years; that’d be over eighteen months, absolutely free. But it hadn’t lasted, of course. He struggled through six weeks of the new regime, yawning and drifting off into daydreams, and then issued a revised opinion. Scrounging extra time by neglecting a vital function like sleep was counterproductive. For every waking hour gained you sacrificed two or three spent in a daze halfway between concussion and a bad hangover. In fact, eight hours wasn’t really enough. Nine hours, on the other hand; nine hours would lose you eighteen months, theoretically speaking, but the extra energy and zest you’d get from being properly rested would mean you’d fit more activity into your voluntarily truncated life than you’d manage to wring out of your unnaturally extended one.

He was asleep now, though; dead to the world, with his head cradled on his arms, his face buried in the extravagant sleeves of his blue slash-cut doublet. Men say that the sight of a man asleep touches a woman’s maternal instinct; for once, she thought, men might have a point. He looked about twelve years old, his hair scrambled, the tip of his nose visible in the crook of his elbow. She felt a deep-seated urge to tuck a blanket round him.

“Orsea,” she said. He didn’t stir, so she came closer. “Orsea.”

At least he didn’t snore. She could never have endured a snorer. Her brother had snored so badly, all through her early years, when he slept at her end of the great solar, no barrier to the excruciating noise except a tapestry screen, that her first thought when they told her he was dead was that now she’d be able to sleep at night. False optimism; by the time she’d driven his face out of her dreams, her father’s had replaced it. Lately, she’d dreamed about Orsea, dead on the battlefield or hanging by his hair from the low branches of a tree.

“Orsea,” she said. He twitched a little, like a pig.

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