The Child Goddess (22 page)
Jacob Boyer sat stiffly behind his desk. Isabel sensed his effort to be silent, to let her conduct her interview. She turned to him. “Mr. Boyer, you can add whatever you like. This isn’t official. I just want to understand what happened before I go to meet the other children.”
Boyer opened his mouth, but Ice broke in. “Mother Burke, I don’t think they’re children. They may look like children, but they carry knives and they throw stones the size of baseballs. If you’re going to that island, and they’re still there, you better go armed.”
Isabel touched her cross. There was danger in this moment. Jacob Boyer was nodding slightly. The man called Ice was watching her with absolute sincerity in his weathered face. She wanted to remind them both that violence begets more violence, that it had already done so in this case. But there was more she needed to know.
*
SIMON FOUND ISABEL
and Oa in the meal hall. Oa huddled beside Isabel, shrinking from the regard of the Port Forcemen and women. Jacob Boyer sat across from them. “Where are Adetti and Boreson?” he murmured to Isabel.
“Gretchen’s not feeling well,” Isabel told him. “She couldn’t eat anything.”
Simon nodded, frowning. “Twilight sleep didn’t help, I imagine,” he said.
A server came to the table with a plate of food, and set it before Simon. It appeared to be some kind of pink fruit, and there was a creamy wedge of something he couldn’t identify.
“Eat, Simon,” Isabel urged, pointing to the wedge. “It’s delicious.”
He sliced a bit of it with his fork. “Biotransforms?” he asked Boyer.
“Not that. There’s a kind of nut here,” Boyer said. “High protein content, easily digestible. The cooks found a way to make this sort of cake with it.”
Simon tasted it. “It’s good,” he said. “What do you call it?”
“The cooks decided to call it coconut. Everyone seems to like it, and we can all eat it. It’s the one thing we haven’t had to transform.”
Across the table, Oa was whispering in Isabel’s ear. Isabel nodded.
“Nuchi,” she said. “That’s Oa’s word for it.” She smiled. “It’s nice to put something real to one of the words we haven’t been able to translate.” Oa ducked her head again under Boyer’s stare.
He looked back at Simon. “It’s just unbelievable,” he said bluntly.
“I know.”
Oa slumped lower.
A server came to refill coffee cups and pick up their empty plates. The meal hall was beginning to clear, the hydros talking and laughing together as they went off to work.
“How did the interview go, Isabel?”
“I didn’t learn much that’s new.” She glanced down at Oa, hiding behind her curtain of hair. “He thinks he saw about a dozen children, maybe more. They wore rags, and carried crude weapons. Ice—the cryotech—says they burst out of the forest, throwing stones and knives. He and the other man carried shock guns . . .” She looked at Boyer. “Why were they armed, Jacob?”
Boyer looked uncomfortable. “I’ve explained this,” he said sadly. “New world, maybe new animals . . . we didn’t know. Men have to protect themselves.”
Isabel made her voice deliberately mild. “The children had to protect themselves, too, didn’t they? That’s the problem with carrying weapons. They get used.”
Oa moved at her side, and pushed back her fall of hair. She whispered to Isabel, so softly Simon could hardly hear her, “Anchens protect Raimu-ke. Not anchens. Raimu-ke.”
Isabel sighed. “I’ve explained to Oa that Ice tried to save her. That he brought her here so the doctor could treat her.”
“Oa, did you understand what Isabel said to you?”
Oa’s eyes looked ancient in her childish face. “Oa understands,” she whispered. “Anchens are frightened. Men are—” She lifted a hand, making a claw of the fingers. “Men are touching kburi. Taking stones.”
“The kburi is sacred to the anchens,” Isabel said. “Ice and his buddy were curious about it, but the anchens thought they were stealing it, or trying to.”
“Ice isn’t the only one who doesn’t think they’re children,” Boyer said bluntly. “Twice I’ve had to intervene, stop a few rowdies bent on revenge.”
“It’s good you did,” Simon said. “Come to the infirmary with me, and I’ll show you what we’ve found. It’s best you see for yourself.”
*
ISABEL WANTED TO
go with Simon, and Oa didn’t want to leave Isabel. She trailed behind as they all walked to the infirmary. She understood what the tall, sad-looking man had said, that his people suspected the anchens were not children. They seemed to know what Isabel would not believe. They frightened Oa with their hard eyes, their stiff necks when they looked at her.
Only the scent of the breeze from Mother Ocean spoke of Virimund to Oa. What she had said to Jin-Li and Isabel was true. She was as alien here, at the power park, as she had been on Earth. She yearned to go to the island, to know that Ette and Bibi and the others were still there. She longed to take Isabel to Raimu-ke.
The sad-faced man opened the door to the infirmary and stood back to let everyone enter. Oa followed Isabel inside, her eyes on her feet. Doctor Simon started into the data room, but a sound from the small surgery distracted him, and he stopped. The others stopped, too, crowded into the too-small reception area.
Doctor Simon stood before the closed door. “Someone’s in there.”
Oa recognized the noise. It was the hiss and click of the spider machine doing its work. She remembered that room too well.
They had landed on the top of the island, that man and the other one, the one Nwa stuck with his digging knife. They had come down in their noisy flyer that was like the fables of the ancestors, passed down in songs and stories. Their flyer had been so close to the kburi that it seemed its strange whirling wings might bring it tumbling down. The anchens had been digging for pishi on the beach, and at the noise, despite their fear, they ran up the mountain to the kburi, their digging knives still in their hands. And the men, those strange big men in their odd clothes, had been taking the kburi apart, tearing at the stones the anchens had painstakingly carried and placed and revered. The anchens thought the men wanted Raimu-ke.
Oa had been utterly confused when she came to at the power park the first time. Even the concept of a door, a hard thing that closed and locked, had been beyond her understanding. Still stunned by the death of Nwa, her leg gushing blood, she had been forced onto the table of the spider machine in the small surgery. Its cold legs trailed over her, testing her wrists and ankles and temples, searching for her soul, hissing its fury that it wasn’t there. She had thought she was dead, that she should be dead, but surely, death meant no more fear, no more suffering! Yet she lay on the table, trembling, more afraid than ever.
The man had brought her back in his flyer, thrown her in beside Nah-nah’s still small body, and the bloodstained, lifeless body of the other man. The man shouted, and he smelled utterly different from anyone she had ever encountered. He smelled of fear and anger and of his sunburned white skin and thinning yellow hair, and other things she couldn’t identify. He had carried her as if she were a rolled-up mat, and he and Doctor tied her onto the table. They let the spider machine attack her with its terrifying shining eyes and long, long legs. She didn’t understand, then, that it was a machine. She didn’t know what a screen was, or a reader, or a computer. She didn’t know that a Doctor could be like Doctor Simon, kind and helpful and warm-handed. In this very place, in that very room, she had lain sick with fear and grief and pain, and her new ordeal had begun.
Doctor Simon went into the small surgery. As the door opened, Oa caught a glimpse of bare white feet twitching against the paper sheet, silver hair beneath the master syrinx of the medicator. The door closed again.
Boyer said awkwardly to Isabel, “The Administrator—she’s pressing to go to the island, to see the other . . .” He broke off, his eyes sliding to Oa, past her.
“The other children, Mr. Boyer? Is that what you mean?”
Boyer cleared his throat, and nodded, looking mournful. “If they are children.”
“Oh, they are.” Isabel’s arm was warm and steady around Oa.
But Oa saw the disbelief in Boyer’s face, the way he avoided looking at her. He knew. They all knew. Except Isabel.
23
SIMON CLOSED THE
surgery door and joined Adetti beside the medicator. “Anything I can do?” he asked. Gretchen Boreson’s closed eyelids twitched, and her legs jerked with spasms.
Adetti glanced up at him. “She’ll sleep through the treatment.” He looked back at Boreson’s face, his dark features drawn with fatigue. “Gretchen has Crosgrove’s chorea.”
“I guessed as much. She takes dimenasphin, I assume?”
“Yes, but she’s developed a tolerance. Relief from the tremors is lasting a shorter and shorter interval after each treatment.” Adetti straightened, keeping his eye on the readout screen. The medicator clicked softly, the master syrinx vibrating slightly at the passage of the medicine through the tube.
“You must have brought a supply,” Simon said. “Or did you make it up here?”
“She included it in her own weight allowance.”
Boreson’s twitching seemed to ease slightly as Simon watched her. “Twilight sleep won’t have helped,” he mused. “Exacerbates neurological problems.”
“She knew that. She was determined.”
Simon tapped the screen once to slow the scrolling. “What is it she wants here?”
Adetti folded his arms. “What we all want,” he said flatly. “Delayed senescence factor. If it works, it will reverse her illness.”
“But we’re ages away from understanding it,” Simon said.
“Are we? It seems fairly simple to me. We know there’s a virus. We can see its effect on Oa. We need to see what’s happening to the others, the ones like her. What are we waiting for, Edwards?”
The clicking of the medicator stopped, and Boreson, on the table, gave a slight sigh, beginning to wake. As Adettti turned to begin removing the patches, Simon said, “It’s bad science, my friend. Rushing things. We have one death already.”
Adetti’s eyes came up to meet his. “Would you care about that? If you knew you were dying anyway, by inches?”
Obscurely, Simon thought of Anna and her fading youth, her hair graying too early, her body thickening. He shook his head. “We don’t know enough yet,” he said. “She’ll have to wait.” He turned to the door, and then looked back over his shoulder at the other physician. “You will, too,” he said.
Adetti’s flat black eyes flickered, and shifted away. A moment later, Gretchen Boreson opened her eyes, and Adetti helped her to sit upright. Her hands, Simon saw, had steadied, and when she stood, her back was straight and her eyes flashed with their old authority. She was a remarkable woman, really. A determined woman, rather like Anna in her own way. Although Anna, Simon knew perfectly well, would never apply her energies to her own ambitions.
When they all emerged from the surgery, they found only Jin-Li and Boyer waiting for them. Isabel had taken Oa to the barracks to go to bed. Simon led Jacob Boyer into the data room. “Jin-Li, did you find the biologist?”
“I did, Dr. Edwards. She has a few specimens you can examine. No spiders, though. She’s working on it. Couple of hydros volunteered to help.”
“Good. Okay.” Simon tapped his reader, and the autopsy report appeared. “Here, Administrator, I’ll show you what we found.”
*
AN HOUR LATER
, Simon walked slowly toward his own barracks with Jin-Li. The sky was bright with stars, the wind from the ocean soft, perfumed with Virimund’s unique fragrance. The resilient sand of the paths made him feel like taking his shoes off.
“In the Victoria Desert,” he said, “the sand was too hot to touch. The natives there walked barefoot where I couldn’t even put my hand.”
Jin-Li nodded. “Irustan was hot, too. And dry.”
“But this . . .” Simon gestured up into the star-strewn sky. “This is paradise.”
“Except for the crawlies,” Jin-Li said, and then laughed at Simon’s startled look. “That’s what the hydros call the spiders. Crawlies. ”
Simon grinned. “Paradise with crawlies, then.” They reached the first barracks, where Isabel and Jin-Li both had their rooms. Light still streamed from several windows. The night shift in the storage facility had begun hours ago, he knew, because they had watched four cryotechs cross the airfield. “Looks like everybody’s up,” he said.
Jin-Li pointed to a darkened window. “That’s Isabel’s room.”
A twinge of disappointment marred Simon’s mood. “She probably went to bed,” he said. “Well. See you in the morning, then.”
When Jin-Li opened the door, Simon saw several people. Port Forcemen and women, seated around a table in the common room, cards spread out between them. They weren’t playing, though. He caught a glimpse of Isabel’s bare head, bent forward as she listened to someone. Every face was turned to her. She was being a priest, he supposed, hearing confidences, sharing concerns. He imagined the sparkle of her eyes, the intensity of her fine features as she listened. She always listened with perfect focus, as if nothing existed for her at that moment but the speaker. It was one of the things that had first drawn him to her, that quality of listening, of opening herself.
If only Anna . . . But he pushed away the thought. Anna couldn’t help what she was. Nor could Isabel. Nor, for that matter, could he.
*
IN GAY SUNSHINE
, Isabel stood before a simple casket fashioned of scavenged materials. It was her first visit to the nascent cemetery of the Virimund Power Park. Its two graves were already carpeted with the native yellow grass. Someone had carefully trimmed it to show the flat foamcast headstones, one inscribed with the name of
GARCIA
, the Port Forceman who had died on the island of the anchens. The other read simply
UNKNOWN CHILD
. Isabel’s heart ached at the thought that it might have been Oa who lay beneath the grass and sand. She had to tell someone the child’s name, find a helpful soul to reinscribe the stone, to record Nwa’s passing.
She had worked with the men and women in her barracks the night before to create a short liturgy. One of the women had suggested a poem from The Prophet, another a passage from The Rubaiyat. No one objected when Isabel offered the text of “In Paradisum,” and she recited it as the casket was lowered into the freshly dug grave.
MAY THE ANGELS ESCORT THEE TO PARADISE.
MAY THE MARTYRS RECEIVE THEE AT THY COMING,
AND BRING THEE INTO THE HOLY CITY.
MAY THE CHOIR OF ANGELS RECEIVE THEE.
AND MAYST THOU HAVE ETERNAL REST.
Everyone who could be spared from the work of the power park was present. They had gathered first in the meal hall, where several who had been close friends of the deceased offered memories. The hydros already had their own ceremonies of greeting and farewell, and when it was time to form a procession, they shouldered their tools, long-handled diggers, a kind of spatula-shaped tool for cleaning solar collectors, coils of connecting cable. They began a song that had developed here, on Virimund, and they walked in ragged single file to the cemetery on its gentle hill overlooking the ocean. The incoming shuttles would sweep above it, their passage stirring the leaves of the low-lying shrubbery.
Isabel was moved by the simplicity of the place, the sincerity of the Port Forcemen and women sharing their feelings through the ceremony. Human beings throughout the centuries, she reflected, had marked their comings and goings just so. The trappings differed from age to age, the details changed, but the essence remained the same, on Earth or off world, human beings struggling to see past the veil to what lay beyond.
The graveside ritual ended, and the man’s friends sprinkled farewell gifts into his grave before it was filled in, dropping flower petals, scraps of paper scrawled with handwriting. One laid a small book gently on the casket lid. Isabel stood with her head bowed, praying for the soul of the departed, for the safety of the survivors, for her own guidance.
She meant every word, every thought. She yearned toward the divine, her heart longing for the wellspring of inspiration, of comfort. She failed to find it except in memory.
The mourners began to wander back to the power park, walking in twos and threes, on to the feast they had felt it was appropriate to have. Only Oa and Isabel remained. Isabel turned her face up into the pale blue Virimund heaven, murmuring, “Sometimes I feel soulless.”
“Isabel doesn’t feel well?” Oa asked.
Isabel startled, hardly aware she had spoken aloud. She gave a humorless laugh. “Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant, Oa.” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. It was silly, anyway. I meant that sometimes I feel as if I have lost my soul.”
Oa gave her a quizzical look. “What is soul?”
Isabel took Oa’s hand, and they started after the others. “Soul,” she said. “Let’s see. Soul is spirit, the spirit that each person has. It’s our consciousness, our sense of self—but more than that. It’s what makes us human, not like a rock, or a machine, but a living, feeling being.”
Oa’s fingers went cold in hers, flooding her hand with a strange sensation, a feeling of shock, almost of horror. “Soul,” Oa breathed slowly.
“Yes, Oa. Everyone has a soul . . . I didn’t mean it, really, it was foolish . . .”
But Oa’s expression was bleak. “Soul,” she repeated. “Oa is not having a soul. Anchens are not having a soul.” She glanced back over her shoulder. Two men were shoveling dirt into the grave. “The man’s soul is gone.”
Isabel felt she had done something terribly wrong and yet. . . was this what the child had been trying to tell her all along? “Oa, the man’s soul has left his body. It’s not gone. It’s what the ‘In Paradisum’ is about, asking for God to accept his soul into paradise.”
“Anchens,” Oa said, and her bitterness flowed through her fingers and made Isabel’s hand ache as if she had plunged it into ice. “Anchens are having a body. Are not having a soul.”
*
ISABEL SAT BESIDE
Oa’s cot until she slept, and then she sat in the darkness, gazing at her. Her long lashes lay like birds’ wings against her dark cheeks, stirring now and again as she began to dream. Isabel touched her forehead and whispered a blessing. Silently, she apologized for being slow to understand, for the lack of inspiration that left her blind. Oa needed someone unencumbered, who could make the intuitive leap that would bring it all clear. What good would she be, on the island of the anchens, if she couldn’t understand this one precious old child?
Loneliness overwhelmed her. She went to the door and looked out into the corridor. Jin-Li’s door was closed, the light off. The Port Forcemen and women had feasted, mourned, and now slept. The barracks were dark, with only one covered light left burning in the common room, enough to find the way down the corridor to the bathroom, or the other way, out into the compound. Quietly, Isabel slipped out of her room and pulled the door closed. She wouldn’t go far, she thought. Just out to see the stars, to breathe the night air, to search for something to soothe her troubled soul.
Soul. That word again.
The sand glowed beneath her feet, slightly phosphorescent in the starlight. Around her the barracks were quiet, and the power park itself stretched in somnolent darkness to the east and west. She knew the night shift was working in the storage facility, across the airfield, but she couldn’t see past the terminal. The terminal building, too, was dark, even the r-wave center left unattended on this ceremonial night. It was as if she were alone on the island.
Her feet led her unerringly to the beach, the same path she and Jin-Li and Oa had found on their first day. Later she was to think that it was not her feet that led her, but her heart. Her heart betrayed her while her spirit lay dormant, as still and dark as the buildings she passed. She found herself standing on the crescent of sand, watching the waves of Mother Ocean wash the little beach with gentle strokes. The water glimmered with reflected stars.
To her right a slender figure stood at the edge of the water, a dark silhouette framed by the starlight. Isabel knew without asking that it was Simon. She couldn’t distinguish the pulsing of the surf from the beat of her own heart.
“Isabel.” She didn’t know if he had come to her, or she to him. They stood at the edge of the night-dark ocean, the unfamiliar constellations stretching above their heads, the pale sand glittering at their feet. The touch of his hand on hers was as intimate as the deepest lovemaking.
They didn’t kiss, or touch beyond that clasping of hands. She looked up into his familiar, ordinary face, and she knew that this was the moment of decision, a moment she had postponed by fleeing the Victoria Desert without a word.
“I’ve missed you so damned much,” he said in a low tone.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
“Why did you leave Victoria the way you did, Isabel? With no word, no warning.”
“I was a coward,” she said simply. “I was afraid, if I faced you . . . I wouldn’t go.”
“I didn’t want you to go.” His hand tightened on hers.
Her throat ached with remorse and longing. “Simon. We’re not free, either of us.”
“We could be.”
“Do you really think so?” Her voice caught, and she turned her head to gaze out on the glassy starlit water.
“You’re thinking of Anna.”
“Not just Anna, Simon, although, yes, of course I think of her, and your promise to her. But the Order, as well. My vow.”
“People change, Isabel. It’s part of being alive.” He took a half-step closer, and the temptation to step back, to feel his lean body against hers, almost overwhelmed her. He said, “Even if you won’t come to me, I can’t go back to Anna. It could never be the same.”
“Because of me,” she said sadly.
“Because I’ve changed. Because I’m not the man she married. And Anna—” He hesitated. She knew, by the sensation in her hand, that he was loath to speak disloyally of Anna. “Anna doesn’t change. She can’t change. It’s not in her character.”
“It doesn’t matter.” She made herself turn her body away from him, though her flesh protested. “Before I met you, Simon, the vow of celibacy was a pale sacrifice for me. It cost me nothing. And then, when faced with a real challenge to my commitment . . . I failed.”
She felt his anger through his fingers, prickling in her hand like rose thorns. His voice was rough when he spoke again. “Why should you consider loving me to be a failure, Isabel? How does it help your order to deny your feelings?”
