WHEN REEN walked into the Cousin Place, the first thing he noticed was the peppery acid smell of sleep. The second thing stopped him, brought him up short with a jolt of pleasure: the blandness of the gray monolithic room. The room was empty but for one Cousin. The Sleep Master sat quietly, his dark eyes full of slumber.
Reen, Thural at his heels, turned to enter the right-hand room.
“Wait.”
The raspy voice came from behind. Hand to the soft wall, Reen turned. The Sleep Master’s gaze was focused on him.
“You may not go forward.”
Reen stood back to let Thural pass. He cast one look of longing into the chamber, at the Cousins packed quietly into their niches, before he made his way across the floor to sit at the Sleep Master’s feet.
A light airy silence settled around them like mist.
“I am very tired,” Reen said pointedly.
“I know. But you bring humanity with you when you come. Wash yourself of the humans, and I can allow you in with the others.”
Reen fixed his eyes on the curve between wall and floor, willing his mind blank; but his brain fussed against rest like a recalcitrant child at bedtime. Gradually he became aware he was thinking again, picking at the problem of Marian, sorting through his worries about Womack and Jonis.
“Even in here, Reen-ja, you disturb the sleepers. I feel them stir.”
“Should I leave?” he asked dully, hoping the Sleep Master wouldn’t take him up on the offer. His tiredness was ponderous and inescapable, like a weight about his neck. More than anything he wanted to crawl into a niche, feel the stiff embrace of the close walls, and relinquish, for a few hours, the strain of individuality.
“No. Talk to me. If you talk to me, perhaps your mind will not shout.”
Reen looked into the Sleep Master’s pocked gray face. “What do you wish to discuss?” he asked, wondering if this would lead to another lecture.
“I have found that if you talk about your day, you steal the power from it.”
Reen dropped his weary eyes to the old Cousin’s black boot. “Jonis has been kidnapped, Europe threatens war with China, and President Womack is still on strike.”
“Yes?”
The room was cloying with the spice of sleep, and Reen found himself nearly dozing where he sat. And I love my daughter and her mother to my own detriment. “That is all.”
“Those are small things to disturb the sleepers so.”
“Complications are made of small things.”
“Better that you put these small things away to come here.”
As though I could put my troubles in a pocket. But the Sleep Master, insulated from human minutiae, could not understand. Reen tried to relax again, his mind peeling away the day in tiny patches, as though it were the clinging skin of an orange. Suddenly his consciousness lay stripped in his palm, tender and naked to the veins.
“Go, Reen-ja. Go before you fall asleep on the floor.”
Reen staggered as he stood. He shuffled his way through the chamber door and into the blue-lit niches beyond. Finding a vacant hole, he clambered in and lay down, unblinking eyes to the ceiling, arms rigid at his sides, as comfortable as a larva in its egg.
Angela slept like a human. Standing over her bed, Reen would often marvel at the way her lids shuttered her eyes. Her arms would curl to her side, her legs bend. She would press her head into the pillow and give herself to the dark.
The idea of darkness terrified Reen. It was darkness that bred human dreams. The closest Reen came to dreaming was when he felt the ghosts of long-dead consorts near him and heard their whispery voices.
Reen, the Old Ones said, and he knew he was sleeping.
Reen, you disappoint us.
They didn’t speak with the anger he had been expecting but with a serene sort of dismay. Within arm’s length of his niche stood three gigantic shadows.
The people are dying, Reen. Who will guard the eggs? Who will guard the sleepers?
Go away. Reen wished that he could sleep as Angela did. He would close his eyes on the ghosts. We are all dying, and the egg cases are barren.
The shadows at his shoulder began to dissipate into the gloom. You are a father. You should understand, the Old Ones hissed.
“Reen-ja?”
The Old Ones were back again for more of their fruitless lectures, only this time the ghosts were small.
“Reen-ja?”
A curt sound. A ssst. “Quiet, Thural,” Tali said. “You will wake everyone.”
Putting his hand to the close roof, Reen slid himself out of his niche. Thural and Tali were standing in the hazy blue aisle, the Sleep Master behind them, wringing his hands.
“Yes?” Reen whispered, wondering what time it was and whether their interruption of his sleep meant that Jonis and the rest of the kidnapped Cousins had been found.
“The police have discovered a body, Reen-ja,” Thural said, keeping his voice down.
“The body of Bernard Martinez,” Tali added importantly.
Around the three talkers, Cousins began to wake.
“The homeless man that Jonis often spoke with,” Thural said. “He has been found strangled. I think it best you get up.”