Sheri S. Tepper

Mendost is not long on thinking, but he has a clear picture of himself as he believes he is.

I have discovered something else, Throsset of Dowes. And that is that men give women jewels when they have absolutely no idea what might please them and are not willing to take time to think about it.

“Oh, but I am soiled beyond all cleansing.…”

“Nonsense,” said Mavin impatiently. “You are silly beyond all belief, but that is your sole sin I am aware of, young man.”

You have not reared him to care what others do, or think, or say. How then should he care for education, for is that not the study of what others care about?

“Parasites,” hissed Aunt Six, just loud enough that he could not fail to hear. “No skills of their own, so they must live by preventing others from using common sense.”

If one may not sleep and one may not act, then what use is there sitting about?

“Every promise is like that,” she whispered to herself as she stopped counting strides for a moment. “Every promise has arms and legs and tentacles reaching off into other things and other places, strange bumps and protrusions you don’t see when you make the promise. Then you find you’ve take up some great, lumpy thing you never knew existed until you see it for the first time in the light of morning.”

“He is a Seer,” Mavin said sullenly, aware of her lack of logic.

“Poof. Seers. Sometimes they know everything about something no one cares about. Often they know nothing about something important.”

“Wisdom,” growled the Agirul. “Painful, isn’t it? We assume so much and resist learning to the contrary.”

“It is hard to do good,” the voice whispered.

“Nonsense,” she muttered. “You only have to do it.”

Learning more was merely ordinary to me, but traveling—that was a wonderful treat.

At least so I thought until we had done some of it. Then it turned out that traveling was doing everything one had to do at home with none of the conveniences for doing it.

Mavin shook her head, but withheld any judgment. If there was anything she had learned in long travels here and there, it was that to most people in the world, every unfamiliar thing was considered unacceptably strange.