The Child Goddess (31 page)

33

ISABEL CONVINCED JACOB
Boyer to let her go back to the island of the anchens alone, with only Oa as companion. “Oa will translate for me, until I begin to learn more of their language.”

“At least wait for Chung,” Boyer said gloomily. “Some protection.”

“Jacob,” Isabel said with a smile. “I don’t need protection from the anchens.”

He shook his head, and frowned, but he granted her request. He promised to fly Oa and Isabel to the island himself.

Adetti came to say good-bye the night before they left. Like Boreson, he seemed to have aged, not dramatically, but in some obscure way Isabel couldn’t quite put her finger on. She had the impression he wanted to say something more, but he stood beside the door of the barracks, staring off toward the sea as if having difficulty meeting her eyes.

“Would you like to take a walk, Paolo?” she asked finally. “Talk a bit?”

He glanced up at her, and gave her a rueful smile. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

They strolled together down the sandy path toward the little crescent beach, listening to the night birds twittering from the nuchi trees. Isabel tipped her head back to appreciate the brilliance of the stars, to wonder if the anchens would have names for the constellations. Adetti walked in silence beside her. He didn’t speak until they stood on the narrow shore of pale sand.

“Gretchen’s going to be okay,” he said finally.

“That’s good,” Isabel said, knowing this was not what he had come to tell her.

“Well, except for the Crosgrove’s. I can’t help her with that. No one can, I guess.”

“It doesn’t seem so.”

Adetti shuffled his feet. “Look, Mother Burke . . .”

“Isabel.”

He nodded, and cleared his throat. “Yes. Isabel. Look, I feel terrible about Edwards. About Simon.”

“I know you do, Paolo. We all do.”

A silence stretched again, broken only by the distant birdsong and the whisper of the waves against the shore. The starlight shone on the dark planes of Adetti’s face. Isabel put her hand on his forearm, and she felt a rush of pain and something like shame pour through her fingers.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?” she murmured. “Just say it out loud? It helps, I think.”

He gave a deep sigh, and hung his head like a sorrowing child. “If I hadn’t been greedy,” he said. “If I hadn’t wanted to make a name for myself, somehow, someway . . .”

“Paolo . . .”

He lifted his head again to stare out over the water, misery in every line of his body. “It never occurred to me that anyone could be hurt,” he said in a gravelly tone. “And if I were a better scientist—even a better physician—I might have figured it all out first. And then Simon wouldn’t have died.”

“No one knows why things happen the way they do.” Isabel followed Adetti’s gaze out over the calm face of Mother Ocean. “Perhaps this was always Simon’s destiny. And yours—to be part of this discovery.”

He made a hard sound that was almost a chuckle. “Some destiny,” he said bitterly.

Isabel patted his arm again. “Mistakes are part of being human, Paolo. I know Simon wouldn’t want you to go on blaming yourself. You’ve worked hard these last days, tirelessly. Who knows how many lives you may have saved? And we could never have done it without you.”

“You’re being kind, Isabel.”

She nodded. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone needs kindness from time to time. It’s no different for you. Or for me.”

He chuckled again, a softer sound this time. “Thank you, Mother Burke. Thanks for listening. And for your kindness.”

*

AS ISABEL WALKED
with Oa to the terminal, she thought how appropriate it was that it was the Feast of the Transfiguration. Oa herself was transfigured. There was no sign of any physical change in her, not yet, but her belief in the coming miracle was unshakable. She glowed with an inner light, an absolute conviction that her prayers had been answered.

Who am I to doubt? Isabel thought. She chided herself with St. Mark’s gospel: “All things are possible to one who has faith.” Oa’s faith shone bright as Virimund’s star.

The evening before, the two of them had visited Simon’s grave, carrying water for the rhody, and a handful of wildflowers to lay at the base of his simple headstone. They stood before it, the evening breeze playing with Oa’s unbound hair.

“Can you read it, Oa?”

“Yes. It says Doctor Simon’s name. But there are numbers, too.”

“Yes, those are dates. The day of his birth, and the day of his death.”

Oa bent to lay the posy on the stone. When she straightened, she stood tugging on the ends of her hair. “Isabel?”

“Yes?”

“This is Doctor Simon’s kburi.”

“Is it, Oa?”

“Yes. Doctor Simon’s kburi. Not like Raimu-ke’s kburi.”

Isabel held her breath. This was a train of thought she did not want to derail.

“Isabel—Doctor Simon is dead now. Is he god?”

Isabel took a long moment to phrase her answer. She wasn’t sure that Oa’s vocabulary, though it had grown so much, was up to abstract concepts. “Oa, my belief is that Simon is not God, but is with God. Is part of God.”

“God is man?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Oa.”

“Oa means . . . Raimu-ke is god, but is not man. A man.”

Isabel started to speak, but then stopped. The moment had a feeling of being crucial, of being pivotal. She said slowly, “There is a word, in English, for a god that is not male, Oa. Not a word I use much.” She gave a deprecating shrug. “But a perfectly good word, for a god that is female. It’s ‘goddess.’ ”

Oa’s eyes came up to her, wide, shining with intelligence. “Goddess. Raimu-ke is goddess, to the anchens. Raimu-ke. God that is female, but is anchen. A child. Like Christ child.”

“Child Goddess, perhaps,” Isabel said. “You could say Child Goddess, to translate Raimu-ke.”

For the first time since Simon’s death, Oa flashed her wide white smile. “Raimu-ke is the Child Goddess!” she said triumphantly. “The Child Goddess hears the prayers of the anchens!”

*

ISABEL AND OA
unpacked the things they had brought with them, some food to offer the anchens, clothes, a small kit of medicines and other things Isabel thought might be useful. They stood in the long yellow grass with their jumble of cartons and cases around them, and Boyer reluctantly lifted the flyer to return to the power park. He had at least persuaded Isabel to carry a wavephone, and a backup in case anything should happen to it. Jin-Li would join them in a week. Isabel took a deep breath, relieved to be alone with the anchens at last. She could make a much-delayed start on the work she had come to Virimund to do.

They sat down on a nearby rock to wait. An hour passed before the anchens began to come out of the forest. Po came first, alone, bravely. He wore the rusty knife at his braided belt, and stood before Oa, firing questions at her. Oa answered, and then turned to Isabel. “Po is wanting—wants to know what happened to Doctor Simon. Oa is explaining.” The two anchens chattered at each other a little longer, and Oa said, “Isabel, Po is being very sorry that Doctor Simon died.”

“Thank him for me.”

“Yes. And Oa is explaining antiviral, and re-versing e-ffect.”

The exchange went on, Oa talking, translating, gesturing. It was hard to believe that Po could understand all that she had to say, but it seemed Oa was making progress.

Little, quick Bibi appeared next, trotting up through the scattered boulders. She was followed by Ette and Likaki and Kwima. Bibi grinned at Isabel, and made a stroking gesture over her matted tangle of hair. Isabel smiled back, and mirrored the gesture, passing her palm over her naked scalp. The rest came then, dropping down from the canopy, dashing up through the meadow. They stood in a semicircle around Isabel and Oa, talking with each other, with Oa, the whites of their eyes flashing at Isabel. It was Bibi who touched one of the cartons, and directed a question to Oa.

“Isabel, anchens are wanting to know what is in boxes. If there is being something to eat.”

“Is this a good time, Oa, to share the food we brought?”

Oa’s smile flashed, and she laughed, beautiful in her joy. “There are being no bad times for food, Isabel!”

Transfigured indeed, Isabel thought. Even to making jokes.

*

BY THE TIME
Isabel’s tent had bloomed on the sandy beach, to the awe of the anchens, and her cartons had been arranged inside, the light was beginning to fade over the eastern sea. Bibi and Ette were already trying out English words for things, brush, pot, fish, bread. Po stood watching everything with a fierce eye, as if daring Isabel to make a mistake, but when she offered him entrance to the tent, and a chair to sit on, he accepted. Oa stood by, translating a stilted conversation between Po and Isabel. The others poured in after a time, tumbling through the entrance in twos and threes, filling the tent with their unwashed body scents and their high, quick prattle.

The nest, Isabel had known, would not be possible for her to sleep in. The tent was large enough to admit as many of the anchens who wanted to come inside. As night fell, the old children were still there, exclaiming over her things, watching the blinking lights of her portable and reader and computer with avid interest. Isabel heard or saw no signal, but when the darkness was complete, the anchens stood as one and filed out of the tent.

“Are they going to the nest, Oa?”

Oa shook her head. “No. Is time for the remembering.”

“Remembering?”

“Yes. Come now, Isabel. Come with the anchens.”

Isabel gathered up her portable, and a light jacket, and followed Oa out of the tent and onto the beach path. The stars, and their light reflected from Mother Ocean, made the path easy to see. Oa stayed beside her as the others walked ahead in an uneven line. The air was cool and fragrant, and Isabel treasured the odd moment, the alien surroundings, her strange companions.

Their destination was a great black rock, an outcrop of lava flow, Isabel guessed, on the north side of the little island. Its glossy surface rippled toward the sea, leaving a great flat place well back from the edge. Waves splashed halfway up the height of the rock, but the top was mostly dry. The anchens sat crosslegged, and Isabel did the same, finding the stone warm against her bare thighs. Oa sat close beside her.

“Now the anchens are remembering,” she whispered to Isabel.

“Remembering?”

Oa nodded, solemn-faced. The starlight softened the old children’s thin faces, their bony arms and legs. The ocean murmured accompaniment for the anchens’ voices, a deep, monotonous note beneath their lilting tones. Isabel listened, fascinated, to the strange music they made, almost forgetting to follow Oa’s translation.

“Likaki is remembering a day when the wind is being very strong and three nuchi trees are falling.”

“A storm,” Isabel whispered.

“A storm. Yes. A storm.”

Another of the anchens began to speak. “Kwima is remembering Mamah, and making pang with Mamah in shahto.”

How old that memory must be! Isabel could hardly take it in. The ritual went forward, oddly formal, almost hypnotic in its practiced drama. Another anchen spoke, and another, and Oa whispered the stories into Isabel’s ear. The anchens listened to each other with solemn and complete attention, neither wriggling nor coughing nor interrupting. Isabel began to feel as if she were dreaming, as if she would waken any moment and find she had imagined it all. The stories seemed to jump about in time, far back to the anchens’ infancy, then forward to events that had happened recently. If there was a pattern, Isabel couldn’t recognize it. She was startled when Oa said, “And now is the last, Isabel. Now Po is remembering the day Oa is coming back to the island. And the anchens are not knowing if Oa is Oa.”

“What do you mean, Oa? They didn’t recognize you?”

Oa’s whisper tickled Isabel’s ear. “The anchens are thinking Oa is dead,” she breathed. “Anchens are thinking Oa is—” In the half-dark, Isabel saw the familiar gesture, the little hand grasping in air for the word.

“Ghost,” Isabel supplied. “Or spirit.”

Oa nodded slowly. “Ghost,” she repeated. “Anchens are thinking Oa is ghost.”

Clouds rolled in as they walked back over the beach path to Isabel’s tent. Isabel stumbled in the darkness, but the anchens walked surely, their bare feet fitting neatly into the worn track. Isabel struggled to accept that the anchens had walked the path for a century or even more. She hadn’t an idea, yet, who among these children was the oldest. She had not seen a single arm that was not littered with tattoos. In time, she hoped, they would trust her enough to let her count. And even then, she thought, it would take a scan to know for certain. Oa had said there had been no tatwaj for some time, and the children were vague about the passing of years. The white column of smoke, marking the tatwaj of the people, was all the calendar they had.

To Isabel’s relief, Oa decided to stay with her in the tent, while the anchens set off through the forest to their nest. Isabel watched them go, feeling uneasy. She had to remind herself that they had slept in their nest every night for years, that they were not the defenseless children they appeared to be. They looked back at her, eyes shining in the darkness, and then melted into the forest.

Isabel and Oa went into the tent, and sealed the opening. Isabel brushed Oa’s hair for her, wondering if the others would let her untangle their hair, if they would learn to bathe and brush their teeth, all the things Oa had learned to do. “We’ll need a place to replenish our water,” Isabel said.

“Oa shows. Tomorrow.”

Isabel tucked Oa into her cot, and stroked her forehead lightly. Such moments might be numbered. Oa might grow up after all. Isabel touched her cheek with the back of her fingers, and then went to her own cot. She lay listening to Oa’s light breathing, the slight creak and flutter of the tent’s panels, and the comforting chuckle of the waves washing the beach.

“Isabel?”

“Yes, Oa?”

“Jin-Li looks for the people?”

“Yes. Jin-Li will try. But you understand, Oa, we don’t think the people are there anymore.”