Doors of Sleep by Pratt Tim;

Author:Pratt, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6434378
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

World 85. A full nine hundred and twenty-eight worlds ago. I’d been traveling for fewer than three months, not even a full season back home, still falling asleep after sixteen or eighteen or at most twenty hours awake. I was dirty, dressed in clothes I’d stolen from a shop on World 83 staffed by artificial beings that looked like moving assemblages of steel rods. The automatons, or mechanical people, pursued me for several blocks after I snatched up the clothes, their voices shrieking at me incomprehensibly, but I was pretty much used to such reactions by then.

I was usually hungry, always terrified, and so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so lonely. In the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies everyone who doesn’t intentionally opt for a life of solitude is constantly enmeshed in social structures: intimate groups, family groups, occupational groups, avocational groups, philosophical affinity groups, geographical groups, and more. We largely define ourselves by our relationships to others. Those in opposing systems sometimes called us hive-minded or groupthinkers, but that’s not fair; we’re individuals in many ways, but we’re not individualists – we don’t venerate the singular over the collective. The goal is to find satisfaction and autonomy within a set of overlapping systems of mutual support and assistance. In the Realm, everyone helps everyone else become their best selves.

The night I first traveled, I lost that. I was a single cell torn from a body. One musical note excised from a symphony. A grain of sand that had once been part of a beautiful beach. I was traumatized, because in those days, even the worlds that weren’t wild or hostile were terribly alien. There was nothing worse than finding myself in a village or town or city, as I did every tenth or twelfth world, meeting people who looked a lot like those I’d known, but speaking in languages that were completely unfamiliar… or, worse, maddeningly close to my own, with the odd sound or string of syllables or false cognate that seemed for a moment to make sense, until the absence of comprehensible context washed away the illusion.

In my old life I occasionally dealt with people from places newly annexed to the Realm of Spheres and Harmonies and who hadn’t yet learned our tongue, so being in a crowd of foreign speakers wasn’t inherently unbearable. The temporary lack of a common language isn’t so bad. It can even be exhilarating, and expand your sense of the limits of your own worldview. The endless and inescapable lack of a common tongue, though, and the knowledge that I would never, ever have time to learn more than a word or two of any given language before sleep snatched me away to another place, was an ongoing engine of despair. I spent a lot of time being yelled at or chased for reasons I still don’t understand.

World 84 was peaceful, with a lagoon full of slow fish who’d never learned to fear predatory land-dwelling bipeds, a sky full of whale-sized

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.