The Child Goddess (23 page)

24

JIN-LI WOKE EARLY
to the clatter of a flyer lifting off from the airfield. The sky was just paling beyond the small window. It was still early, too early for the shift change. Jin-Li lay still for a moment, wondering. Leo had said the flyers were grounded, had been sitting idle in the hangar ever since the order came from Earth Multiplex. Jin-Li pushed back the covers and sat up. Sleep was gone.

A few hardy stars still flickered on the western horizon. The terminal blocked the view of the airfield, but the flyer’s passage was audible as it banked above the island and veered to the southwest. Jin-Li frowned. Where was it headed?

In sleep shorts and shirt, Jin-Li went to the door and opened it. Across the hall a woman stood blinking sleepily. “What’s on?” she asked. “I heard something.”

“Flyer took off,” Jin-Li answered.

The woman yawned, and turned back to her bed. “Multiplex must have lifted the restriction.”

But Jin-Li didn’t think so.

*

SIMON HAD RETURNED
to the infirmary after leaving Isabel at her barracks, and had worked late over the specimens the biologist had supplied. He still had no spider as large as the one Jin-Li had described, but he had several small ones, two snakes, a dozen birds, and an assortment of water and sand creatures. The biologist had helped him set up a sampling program, and he worked until almost dawn, without success. He overslept, missing breakfast in the meal hall, startling awake at a knock on the door of his room. The window was closed, and the light streaming in made the room hot and close. He staggered to his feet, heavy with sleep.

He found Isabel and Adetti waiting for him in the common room. He fell into a chair opposite them, rubbing his eyes, knowing he must look like hell. “Something wrong?” he asked thickly. “Where’s Oa?”

“With Jin-Li,” Isabel said tersely. “Simon. She’s gone. Gretchen is gone. She took a flyer out this morning, and she hasn’t come back. Jacob didn’t know until he heard the flyer.”

“Who’s the pilot?”

Adetti said grimly, “She is. Gretchen keeps a house in the San Juan Islands. She flies up there all the time.”

“Bloody hell,” Simon said. “This is a direct violation of the agreement with the regents.”

“I know,” Adetti said with evident misery. “I told her not to go. I never thought she’d go alone. She’s half out of her mind wanting to get that virus.”

“She’s all the way out of her mind,” Simon snapped. “We don’t know the vector yet.”

“That’s what I told her.”

“And she’s put all of our efforts at risk. The power park could be decommissioned. ”

“We can deal with that later.” Isabel leaned forward, her whole body a picture of tension. “Simon, I have to go after her. I’m so worried about the children. She might do anything!”

“Good god,” Simon muttered.

“She won’t be able to talk to them, Simon. They won’t understand who she is, what she wants . . . I have to go after her! I have to go now, with Oa. Oa can translate for me.”

Her eyes were dark with worry. He wished he could reassure her, but a sense of foreboding dragged at him. “Isabel, I haven’t found it yet, found the source of the virus. I worked half the night—”

“Talk to Jacob, Simon. He’ll listen to you. He can send us, Oa and me, and Jin-Li, too.”

“And me,” Adetti said hurriedly. “She may need medical attention.”

“If we leave now, right away, maybe we can intervene before there’s another tragedy.”

“Isabel—until we know—you can’t go. It’s not safe.”

“But we must, Simon, don’t you see that? There’s no time to waste arguing about it! Please, Simon. Talk to Jacob.”

She was right, of course. He wanted to offer more objections, present arguments. His weary brain struggled through them, discarded them one by one.

“It’s too dangerous,” he said weakly. “Until we identify the vector . . .”

But Isabel was shaking her head, pulling him to his feet. “That doesn’t matter now, Simon,” she said tightly. “It just doesn’t matter. Please hurry. Jacob is waiting in his office.”

*

ISABEL THOUGHT SHE
would go mad with tension as Simon and Boyer and Jin-Li discussed details, planned equipment. They were trying to hurry, she knew, but still two hours passed before the flyer lifted off.

Isabel had tried to explain the situation to Oa.

“Gretchen goes to the anchens?” Oa had said.

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Oa had answered with intensity. “Oa, too. Oa is afraid.”

They were on their way to the hangar at last, Jin-Li with a portable for recording, Jacob Boyer as pilot. The flyer was stocked with food and water and an emergency medical kit. Boyer had one of the dreaded shock guns tucked in his belt. Isabel had wasted precious moments trying to talk him out of carrying a weapon, but in this case the normally mild Boyer had been adamant. Isabel herself came almost empty-handed, leaving her tent and all her equipment stored in the terminal. She didn’t want to take the time to transfer it to the flyer. And she thought, as the flyer lifted off with a clatter of whirling blades, that all she could really bring to the anchens was herself. If there was anything to be done for them, any way to protect them, it would come from her goodwill and determination. She had nothing else she could offer.

As the flyer banked and turned to the southwest, she held her cross in her fingers, and bent her head. The moment was at hand, the moment for which she had traveled months in twilight sleep, for which she had risked being in Simon’s company again, the moment that would lead, she hoped, to the solution of the mystery of Oa. Silently, fervently, she prayed.

SAINT MARY OF MAGDALA

PATRONESS OF THOSE WHO ASK
,

GUIDE ME TO SHINE LIGHT IN THE DARK PLACES . . .

*

OA CLUNG TO
the seat belt and pressed her face to the window to watch the play of light on the face of Mother Ocean. Anxiety twisted in her stomach like a live thing. She felt tears well in her eyes at the intensity of it.

Would they be there, Po and Ette and Bibi and Usa and Likaki? And if they were, what would pale Gretchen do to them? She remembered Gretchen seizing her half-eaten meal, crumbs of it glued to her painted lips . . . the people pushed the anchens away, discarded them, but Gretchen wanted to capture them, to use them. To devour them.

Jacob Boyer wore a shock gun. If Po still lived—what would he do when he saw it?

Oa remembered the din of the first flyer as it landed on the island of the anchens. It had been a peculiar, startling noise. They ran out of the forest, all of them, just in time to see the craft land in the grassy hollow below the kburi. Its side opened like a great mouth stretching wide, and two strange pale men came out. The anchens huddled among the trees, whispering to themselves, wondering, confused.

They stayed there while the men in their curious clothing stood in front of the kburi. The men circled it, touching it with their hands, chattering together in words the anchens couldn’t understand. And then one of them bent to the base, pointing. The other man joined him, and they squatted before the layered stones.

The anchens had chosen each rock with care, had built the kburi to protect and preserve Raimu-ke. The kburi was meant to save Raimu-ke until the time she could make the miracle happen, and all the anchens would become people. Raimu-ke would give them souls.

Raimu-ke had been the first of the anchens, ancient and venerable child, precious to each anchen who came after her. An anchen lost everything, parent and sibling and home and hope. They had nothing in the world except each other and Raimu-ke. When the strangers had begun to disassemble the construction the anchens had labored over, they were attacking the anchens’ only true ancestor.

And when Po and Nwa and Oa cried out to them to stop, the men turned and stared, openmouthed. They didn’t care that the anchens pleaded with them. One of the men had a stone in his hand, a stone he had stolen from the kburi. Po shouted at him to put it back, and when he didn’t respond, Po brandished his knife, which only minutes before had been innocently digging pishi from the sand. The man dropped the stone at his feet, and pulled his ugly black hand weapon to point it at the anchens.

And poor Nwa, little Nah-nah, always determined to show that though he was small, he was brave, charged at the men, throwing his knife as he ran.

It had been a beautiful day, with small puffy clouds very white against the blue of the sky, Mother Ocean mild and welcoming as they splashed in and out of the surf, digging for the pishi exposed by the receding waves. The day turned dark as Nwa threw his knife, and the man’s weapon made a sickening noise, a sort of hissing crackle. Nwa fell where he was, even as his knife struck the man. Nwa was silent, but the strange man screamed, a strange, inhuman noise like the cry of a seabird. The other man fired his weapon, and Oa, running after Po, felt a sharp tearing in her thigh. Her leg failed her and she collapsed, tumbling helplessly through the yellow grass of the steep meadow.

Oa struggled to sit up, to see what was happening. Her wound didn’t hurt at first, but the horizon swung wildly around her and she struggled to draw a breath. Po turned back to help her, but the man lifted his weapon again and pointed it at Po’s naked back.

Oa screamed at Po to run.

He obeyed her. There was nothing else he could do, and they both knew it. The anchens raced down the slope to vanish among the trees, their bare feet flashing up the buttress roots and into the concealing thickness of the canopy. Oa lay where she was, watching her blood stain the grass. She listened for Nwa to make a sound, to moan, to cry out, but she heard nothing. The world faded around her, and she felt herself slipping away.

Po would sorrow over her. The anchens would mourn her, and place her body in the kburi with Raimu-ke. She remembered thinking, with distant sadness, that she had lost her chance to find her soul. She closed her eyes, and prepared to die.

Would she find the anchens alive? A hundred things could have happened to them. They could, like Lili, have become people and left the island. They could have fallen, like Ulan, or drowned as Tursi had. Young men from the people’s island could have come in their canoes, leaving hurt and broken bodies behind them. Or perhaps Gretchen would hurt them. Could Gretchen use one of the shock guns? Oa didn’t know.

A whimper of fear escaped her.

Isabel’s hand found hers, and Oa turned to bury her face against Isabel’s shoulder.

*

JIN-LI, IN THE
copilot’s seat, squinted against the light reflected from the ocean, peering ahead for the first glimpse of the island. Jin-Li Chung had reason to know how cruel people could be, with or without intention. The streets of Hong Kong had been lonely and dangerous for unprotected children. The thought of Gretchen Boreson in pursuit of the old children of Virimund was a terrifying one.

Jin-Li leaned forward, wishing the flyer could go faster. The flight should take no more than forty-five minutes. But Gretchen Boreson had a long head start.

The noise of the rotors defeated conversation. They quickly left the power park behind, and green ocean stretched all around them. Adetti, in the back, sat with his arms folded, his jaw set. In the middle seats, Isabel held Oa in her arms. Boyer pointed to the horizon, and Jin-Li leaned forward.

A small peak rose in the distance, dark against the blue of the sky. Clouds were rolling in from the east, casting deep emerald shadows here and there on the water. Jin-Li glanced back at Isabel. Their eyes met, and Jin-Li gave a small nod. They would be there soon.

The Magdalene touched her cross. No doubt she was offering prayers. Jin-Li hoped they would help.

*

SIMON WATCHED THE
flyer take off, every instinct rebelling against letting Isabel go without him. But he had work to do.

The biologist had located a nest of forest spiders. She had been unwilling to try to capture them live, but with the help of one of the offduty hydros she had brought two ugly black corpses to the surgery and prepared them for analysis. They waited there for Simon, their forward eyes dull, their remarkably long legs splayed and limp. Simon had no particular fear of spiders, but these were particularly nasty specimens. He could understand why Oa hated them. The biologist and the hydro made it clear that the Port Forcemen and women agreed with her.

As the flyer clattered off to the southwest, the biologist said mournfully, “I hope we won’t have another incident.”

“That’s why Isabel is going,” Simon said. He hoped he sounded reassuring, but he was worried. Unlike Isabel, he had supported Boyer’s arming himself. “And Jin-Li is with her. Jin-Li has a lot of experience.”

They turned toward the terminal, facing into a breeze from the east that drove a bank of clouds before it. The biologist said hesitantly, “What is it she wants, Dr. Edwards? Administrator Boreson, I mean.”

“Her disease is degenerative,” Simon said grimly. In the circumstances, he felt no compunction about privileged information. “She wants the virus.”

“But—” The biologist lifted her hands in confusion. “What will she do with it?”

“A good question. A damned good question.”