The Child Goddess (9 page)

10

A WEAK SUNSHINE
briefly overcame the rain. Isabel tipped her face up to feel it on her cheeks, breathing deeply of the damp air. Simon stood beside her on the sidewalk as they waited for a driver. Boreson’s secretary stood with them, twittering something about linens in the guest suite. Isabel didn’t listen. She would have preferred a hotel or apartment away from the Multiplex, but she wanted to stay close, hoping for word of Oa.

Simon didn’t speak until they were in the car, with the partition to the driver’s compartment closed. “The World Health office will find a room for me by tonight,” he said. “You’ll have to put up with me till then.”

“Of course,” Isabel said. She gave him a rueful smile. “You look tired, Simon.” She thought how ordinary his face was, really, lean, slightly lined, with deep furrows framing his narrow mouth. Those furrows deepened when he smiled, making her irrational heart turn over. It made no sense, of course. But there was nothing rational about falling in love.

He answered her smile with a weary one of his own. “I’m all right,” he said. “But I didn’t sleep much on the plane. Anna was upset when I left.”

A fresh wave of guilt made Isabel’s cheeks hot. “Anna knows . . .”

He nodded, his face grim. “She guessed. And I couldn’t lie to her.” He lifted a shoulder in a deprecating way. “Anna is a remarkably persistent woman. It’s one of her assets.”

“Oh, Simon. I’m so sorry. About hurting Anna—about everything. I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye to you. I just had no words for it.”

He put up one hand. “Don’t, Isabel. There’s no need. I understand.”

She twisted her hands together. “Simon, Oa must be terrified. We have to find her.”

“I’ll call the Seattle office, but what I told Boreson was true. They’ll have to bring the regents together, and for that they have to go through channels.”

“How long will it take?”

The car rolled to a stop in front of a foambrick building. Thick rhododendron bushes flanked its glass doors, and an awning bore the circled star logo. Simon said tiredly, “It can take days, sometimes even weeks, to convene a review board.”

Isabel’s heart sank. “Oh, no, Simon. What can we do?”

“First, I’m going to look at the rest of the medicator reports. Try not to worry, Isabel.”

“I can’t help it.” The driver opened her door, and she climbed out, saying over her shoulder, “She’s just a child, and she’s alone and frightened.” A doorman hurried out to help the driver unload the car, a porter following with a rolling dolly. Isabel watched to make sure that none of the cartons were left behind, and then followed the doorman up the steps. “And I don’t know what they might do to her. I don’t even know why they want her.”

“I don’t think she’s in danger,” Simon murmured as they followed the porter across the faux-marble lobby. “They need her, or at least they believe they do. They won’t hurt her.”

“There are different kinds of hurt, Simon.” She tried not to see the look that crossed his face, the reminder of his own hurt, and hers. She had to concentrate on Oa.

*

OA KNELT TO
sniff the white carpet. It had that machine smell, the notfragrance that was now familiar to her. The little bathroom had white towels and bits of white pottery. There was a round mirror on the wall, with a scalloped silvery edge. Oa touched the glass, and put her ear to it, but she couldn’t tell if it was a trick.

She circled the big room, looking at the pieces of bright glass that rested on every surface, in every niche. One was a transparent oblong with yellow and blue blobs suspended in it, looking a bit like blurry fish. Another, slender, with slashes of scarlet and gold, reminded her of sunsets over Mother Ocean. There were others, all different shapes and colors. None seemed to have a purpose.

When she drew near the medicator, she stopped and turned to retrace her steps. She trailed her fingers along the cold glass of the tall windows. The sunshine had given way again to the dreary, endless rainfall. Did it always rain like that here, she wondered? Perhaps the sun of Earth was not very strong.

She looked out over the choppy gray waters of the bay. There were floating craft there, but they were oddly shaped and clumsy-looking, not the sleek, swift canoes of the three islands. These not-canoes were tall, with shahto built right on their decks. They had no oars that she could see and they floated aimlessly to and fro, to and fro, going nowhere. To the north, she saw a building with a great white cross on it, and another with a sort of wheel at the top. She wondered what they meant.

She had been foolish to think things could be different, to think things could ever change. Probably Isabel knew, now, that Oa was an anchen. That she was a not-person. Probably Isabel had let the pale lady take her, bring her here, where the spider machine worked. Perhaps Oa would never see Isabel again. Something hurt in her chest at that thought, and the pain spread up into her throat. She crouched beside the window to rest her forehead on the sill, closing her eyes as she thought of Isabel.

Oa remembered the airy scent of Isabel’s skin, the sweetness of her breath. She remembered the touch of Isabel’s hand in the darkness, warm fingers closing around Oa’s as if they were anchens together. Or people. She thought of Isabel’s house with all the women in it, the priests, and the girls who would be priests. She remembered Isabel kneeling before the tiny flame of her candle, and her prayer that began, “Saint Mary of Magdala . . .”

When Oa stopped remembering, she opened her eyes and stared out over the gray water to the white mountains. She didn’t even have the fuzzy toy now. Oa had nothing.

When Doctor came to make her he down under the spider machine, she found herself wishing the spider machine would take all her blood, take away her mind, suck out all her feelings. She hardly noticed that Doctor no longer wore a quarantine suit, that his bare fingers were cold and hard. It didn’t matter.

*

ISABEL AND SIMON
spread the medicator reports on the table, the couches, the chairs, the floor of her suite. For two hours, Simon pored through them, while Isabel unpacked her things in one of the two bedrooms and then stood by the window, holding Oa’s teddy bear. The little soft, inanimate thing felt lonely in her hands. She set it in the windowsill, face turned out to the flat roofs and narrow streets. The rain had closed in again. She could barely make out the outlines of the Seattle hills rising beyond the Multiplex. It lent a feeling of intimacy to the room. If she hadn’t been so worried about Oa, it would have been a perilous feeling, she and Simon alone together. But at this moment, Oa was all she could think of.

In the late afternoon, she ordered coffee and a plate of sandwiches. When they arrived, she set them on a small side table and went to touch Simon’s shoulder.

“Simon, you’d better take a break. You must be exhausted.”

He was bent over a sheaf of flexcopies laid out on a chair. “You’re right,” he said, straightening, rubbing his back. “In any case, just as you said, the figures hardly change.”

“What do you think is happening?” Isabel poured coffee for both of them as Simon came to sit across from her. Isabel avoided Simon’s eyes, aware of their closeness. “Oa is well, Simon, isn’t she.”

“I don’t find anything to indicate otherwise.” He took a sip of coffee, and leaned back with a sigh of fatigue. “Your instincts were right about the hormone levels. They’re remarkably stable. And look at this—” He reached behind him to snag one of the flexcopies, and ran down it with his forefinger. “This designation—” He tapped an entry that was a mix of letters and numbers. “It’s an antibody the medicator doesn’t recognize. Monoclonal, apparently, so I would guess it’s a specific immunological response, undoubtedly to a virus native to Virimund. It could be the reason Adetti kept the girl in quarantine. You were with her for four days, right?”

Isabel nodded.

“We should test you, too, see if you’ve developed the antibody.”

“There were hydro workers exposed, at the Virimund power park.”

Simon shook his head. “I saw all their scans. They’re routinely transmitted to World Health in Geneva. I didn’t see this.” He reached for a sandwich. “All the imaging data is missing, by the way. Chemical spectroscopy might have already identified the virus, but Adetti kept some things back.”

Isabel had a sandwich on her plate, but she couldn’t eat it. She drank coffee, looking away from Simon to the streaks of fresh rain on the windows.

“Adetti’s fixed on his own purpose. He doesn’t see Oa as a human being.”

“No,” Simon said. “I’m sure he doesn’t. He sees her as an opportunity.”

Isabel set down her cup, and looked into Simon’s eyes. “For what, Simon? What in God’s name does he want with her?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is that’s strange about her, he plans to profit from it.” He shook his head slightly. “He’s not much of a scientist, I’m afraid. It looks like he kept doing the same tests over and over, hoping the answer would fall into his lap by chance. Hoping the medicator would do his job for him.” He sighed and rubbed his eyes again. “Ambition without ability. It’s a damned disaster waiting to happen.”

“And Gretchen Boreson?”

Simon shrugged. “I imagine he’s convinced her there’s profit in it. ESC always needs cash, always has big plans. There’s nothing wrong with that, essentially. But the way they achieve it is what organizations like World Health have to monitor.” He laughed a little. “Big business is both a curse and a blessing, Isabel. They work wonders, sometimes, and feed a lot of people. Profit is a powerful motive, but it’s a dangerous one.”

“Oa isn’t a business,” Isabel said bitterly. “She’s a little girl. We were just making progress—she had begun to talk to me, and to trust me—I allowed her to trust me! She will think I abandoned her.” She stood up, moving away to the window. She picked up the teddy bear from the sill and hugged it to her. “We must find her, Simon, and soon. We must.”

*

JIN-LI PUT IN
a long day unloading a shuttle and transferring its cargo of rhodium to the insulated storage bay. The containers were small and heavy, and it took several trips to finish the job. When the last container was in the storage bay, Jin-Li shut the door with a bang, and went in search of Matty Phipps.

Matty was in the cafeteria, hollow-eyed with lack of sleep. She lifted a freckled hand in greeting. “Johnnie. You as tired as me?”

“Yes.” Jin-Li slipped into a chair opposite. “Did you locate the priest?”

“I haven’t seen her, but I found the driver who took her from Admin to the guest suites. Got a buddy over in the garage. She had somebody with her, too, he said.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, some man. Not too tall, little bit older.”

“Not a priest?”

“Well, apparently not. No collar.” Phipps grinned. “Has hair.”

Jin-Li smiled a little. “Lots of priests have hair, Matty.”

“Yeah, I know. But this Magdalene . . . don’t you find it sort of strange?”

Jin-Li shrugged. “I don’t know. Everyone takes their own path, I guess.”

“Yeah, I guess. Just seems like she gave up a lot.”

“We need to tell her where the girl is.”

“Sure, Johnnie. But she won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“Maybe she will. If we help.”

“That’s a secure complex,” Phipps said, shaking her head. “And we don’t know which building she’s in, either.”

Jin-Li frowned, thinking. “The question we need to ask is why they moved her. And why, after ExtraSolar brought the Magdalene here, they’re keeping her away from the girl.”

“Oh, that’s an easy one.”

“It is?”

“Sure. They thought they could hire this Enquirer, then use her to cover their asses. They didn’t know she’d have a mind of her own.”

“That makes sense, Matty. She stepped right in the middle of whatever’s on.”

“Yeah.” Phipps leaned forward, her pale blue eyes intent. “And listen, Johnnie, I watched that bastard for fourteen months. He’s obsessed with the little girl.”

“Obsessed? You mean, sexually?”

“No, no, that’s the strange thing. He examined her constantly, had her under the medicator every damn day. Yet he never touched her, not skin to skin. Frankly, if I had thought it was something else, I would have reported him to the captain. But he wore a quarantine suit every time he went into her room. I know, because he kept me on the hop replacing them!”

“So he won’t harm her,” Jin-Li said slowly.

“Well, he didn’t in all that time,” Phipps said, leaning back now, crossing her arms. “But who knows when the poor kid reaches the end of her rope?”

They sat in silence for a few more minutes. Jin-Li’s eyes were dry with lack of sleep. Dinner had tasted like sawdust. “Come on, Matty. Let’s go over to the guest suites. See if we know anyone in housekeeping.”

*

SIMON SPENT THE
evening on the wavephone in Isabel’s suite. She paced, listening to his side of the conversations, marveling at his patience with the web of bureaucracy he was trying to pierce. They had been at it for hours, and it was dark beyond the window, a dark that came early to this rainsoaked northern city.

When Simon finally put the wavephone back in its cradle, he sighed and rested his head in his hands. “Isabel, there’s nothing more I can do tonight. The regents are agreeable to the review board, and they’ll convene it as soon as the members can get to Seattle. But apparently the extraordinary empowerment provision allows Adetti and Boreson to isolate the child. They claimed there were concerns about contamination and infection, both to her and to others.”

“It’s not true.” Isabel’s voice scraped in her throat, and she told herself she must drink some water. She tried to think when they had eaten.

“I know,” Simon said wearily. He stood up, and came to join her, looking out into the sodden, joyless night. She noticed, with mingled sadness and relief, that he stood an arm’s length away. “You know, Isabel, the medicator is a great tool, but it’s only a tool, and only as effective as the people who use it. Adetti’s not much of a physician.”

“I don’t suppose they send the best doctors to the expansion worlds,” Isabel said. She managed a small smile at Simon. “We need them too much here.”