The Child Goddess Read online

  “Can you ask her what samples she has so far? I know a lot of this isn’t in your job description, but we’re shorthanded all around.”

  “Happy to do it.” Jin-Li hesitated in the doorway.

  Simon looked up, brow creased again. “Something else?”

  “Yes. Isabel—”

  At her name, Simon’s face brightened. “Oh, lord. Right. Lunch.”

  He laughed. “I’m going, Jin-Li. Promise. I don’t want Isabel to worry.”

  Simon’s grin dropped years from his lean face. Jin-Li thought of Simon and Isabel, isolated in the Victoria Desert, spending hours together every day, eating their meals together every evening, falling in love under the blistering Australian sky. Surely it had been inevitable, if complicated. And where did it leave them now?

  Simon hurried off toward the meal hall, and Jin-Li turned to go into the terminal, to ask at the comm center for the biologist. Above the drab buildings the sky was a vault of clear blue, punctuated by fluffs of white cloud. Grains of pastel sand glittered on every surface, and wherever the eye turned, the emerald waters stretched to the horizon. Jin-Li paused for a long moment, savoring it, breathing the spicy air, wondering what dark secret marred the perfect beauty of the planet.

  *

  THE CRYOTECH CALLED Ice was small, with thinning hair that had once been blond, but had faded to a yellowish-white. His sunburned scalp showed through in ragged patches. He perched on the edge of a chair in Jacob Boyer’s office, his red-knuckled hands resting uneasily on his knees. He spoke with an accent Isabel recognized.

  “You’re from Australia,” she said with a smile. “I worked there two years ago, in the Victoria Desert. ”

  “Other side,” he said in a reedy tenor. “I’m from Adelaide.”

  Isabel nodded. She pointed to her reader, set up on Boyer’s desk. “I thought you might be more comfortable with fewer people present, so I told our archivist I’d record everything, if it’s all right with you, Mr. Foster.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” he said. “But call me Ice.” He managed a wan grin. “I don’t answer to much else these days.”

  Isabel put out her hand, and he took it diffidently, giving it a tentative shake. “Ice.” The touch of his fingers gave her a faint feeling of sadness, as of long-suppressed grief.

  “Yeah.” His smile faded, and he crossed his legs, then uncrossed them. “Listen, Mother Burke. It all happened a long time ago, and I’ve kinda tried to forget it. I told Mr. Boyer, here, everything at the time.”

  “I know you did, and I read the report. But it would help me to hear it for myself. You understand how important it is, not only to the children on the island, but to your colleagues.”

  The look that crossed the man’s weathered face had only one meaning. Without thinking, she breathed, “You blame yourself.”

  He nodded, mutely.

  She watched him trying to disguise his emotion. “You couldn’t have known.”

  “Should have.”

  “Mr. Foster. I mean, Ice,” she said gently. “Let’s work together. Perhaps we can prevent more deaths. Sometimes a tragedy can be turned into something positive.”

  “Won’t bring my buddy back.” His voice was strained.

  “No.” She shook her head. It may have been, as he said, a long time, but she suspected it was as fresh to Ice as if it had happened yesterday. As fresh as it was to Oa. Oa had difficulty talking about it, but at least Ice could express himself. She leaned forward and tapped her reader to begin recording.

  “Ice, tell me why you landed on the island.”

  “Well. No need for cryo that early in construction. No product yet, you know? So we were checking out the other islands. Not looking for anything, just . . . looking. New planet, lots of islands . . . Other guys were doing it, going in different directions.”

  “And when you reached this particular island?”

  “Well, we picked that one because we thought we saw smoke. Just a little, a thin stream . . . could have been from one of the old volcanoes, or even a grass fire. But then we saw this monument kind of thing. Square on top, wider at the bottom, piled-up stones. It didn’t look natural.” He dropped his eyes to his work-roughened hands. “We were just curious,” he muttered. “We never meant—” His eyes came up to hers, slid to Boyer, came back to Isabel. “We never meant for anyone to be hurt. They came at us!”

  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 co
uld 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.