The Child Goddess

by Louise Marley

  The food was odd, too, almost without odor. There was a kind of pale, soft bread, unfamiliar fruits, a variety of meats that were bland on her tongue. But she was hungry, and she ate. She had noticed on the ship that if she ate all of something, the same food would appear again.

  No one touched her, or showed her their faces except through thick glass or translucent masks, but they noticed what she ate. She didn’t understand that. Since the tatwaj, no one had cared whether she ate, or slept, or bathed. Or lived.

  Oa remembered the day of the tatwaj. The pricks of the bone needle and the sting of the ink blended in her memory with the column of thick white smoke rising from the bonfire. The people of the three islands swayed in the great circle, singing, naming the ancestors. And then there was the counting. And the weeping. She remembered the smell of the wind from Mother Ocean, the smell of her own mother’s skin, the scent of her tears.

  Oa pushed the tray away and got up to wander in an aimless circle around the space she was trapped in. The bed fit against one wall, covered with smooth sheets and fat pillows. A low table and two hard chairs filled the opposite corner. As on the ship, everything was made of materials that were not real, and smelled of machines. There was no wood. There were no vines, or leaves, or feathers. A great mirror filled one wall, shinier than still water. The opposite wall held more glass, a square of blank gray with buttons beneath. There were pictures on the walls of things for which Oa had no names, in her own language or in the language of Earth. Sometimes she felt like one of the little tree lizards of her home, slithering round and round in her cage and finding no way out.

  Doors opened from her central room into three smaller rooms. One held a bed like her own, though it had no sheets or blankets. The second had a tub for bathing and a toilet, like the ones she had learned to use on the ship. In the third a high padded table waited beneath the thing she hated most of all.

  She knew its name. She had become acquainted with it on her long journey, when Doctor first sent its nasty feelers crawling and nipping over her body. It was called a medicator, that humming machine that dripped with tubes and wires. Its touching and probing set her shaking with horror, as she had trembled before the forest spiders of Virimund. It was the worst part of being here. Every day Doctor came in, wearing his crinkly suit with its plastic mask and slick gloves and booted feet. He made her lie on that cold table and he set the spider machine to crawling over her body. Oa suspected the spider machine was searching for her soul. If that was its purpose, she would never be free of it.

  On the ship, Oa had been kept in one room with blinking lights and a narrow bed that folded down from the wall. Even then she longed for the touch of natural materials, familiar textures. She missed the aroma of drying vines and sweet wood, the close warm scents of the anchens’ nest. The days on the ship had seemed to go on forever. At first she saw only Doctor. She couldn’t understand what he said to her, and she didn’t know how to speak to him. Then, after a time, a ship lady brought her a reader, and pantomimed how to use it. There were three books for it, miracles of pictures and sounds and squiggly marks that told how the sounds should be made. Oa looked at the books, and listened to the words, and began to learn.

  She understood now that she had been carried to Earth. The long journey on the ship had ended with a short, noisy trip on something called a shuttle. She was wrapped in one of the crinkly suits, far too large for her, and she was brought here, to a room called infirmary. She still saw Doctor every day, and had her reader and her three books. One of the guards who stood outside infirmary brought her a box with an assortment of strange objects. She slipped it through the quarantine bubble, saying she wanted Oa to have something to play with. Toys, the guard said. So Oa wouldn’t be lonely.

  The guard wasn’t allowed to come into infirmary. Only the man called Doctor and the people who cleaned were allowed inside, and they always wore the crinkly suits. They made her wait in the empty room, sitting on the bare mattress of the bed, while they washed the floors and walls. She couldn’t come out until they were done, and then the smell made her eyes sting.

  Oa puzzled over the things the guard had brought her. The toys.

  There was a tiny ship like the one she had made her journey in. There was a paper book with blank pages, and a box of colored sticks that smelled a bit like food but tasted very bad. There was a plastic baby, dark like Oa, but plump, with a lot of stiff hair on its head. Oa lifted its gaily colored clothing and found there was nothing at all between its dimpled legs. It was blank there, smooth and empty. It made Oa shiver with revulsion.

  There was an assortment of little mechanical objects. Oa figured out that the pieces fit together to make different shapes, but she didn’t see the point. The only toy she liked was a soft, fuzzy creature with button eyes and stubby arms and legs. It had no fingers or toes or claws. She didn’t know what it was, but it was somehow comforting to hold. When she squeezed it against her, it grew warm from the heat of her body.

  What Oa really wanted was more books, to learn more words. But she didn’t dare ask for books. Anchens knew better than to ask for anything from people. Anything given to an anchen came at a cost.

  Someone had brought a basket from the island. Bibi, or perhaps Ette, had dropped it in the meadow when they seized up their spears and knives to defend the kburi. Oa knew the people on the ship had put it through a machine, because she could smell it, but the woven vines had been soaked in Mother Ocean, and the salt tang still clung to them. Sometimes when her homesickness was at its worst, when she found herself tortured by the shocked face of Nwa as he fell, she sniffed the tang of salt and seaweed and fish, and remembered.

  When she wasn’t remembering, Oa prowled the little rooms, or curled up on the bed with her back against the wall, holding the fuzzy toy, waiting for something to happen. Anchens knew how to wait. Sometimes she called out to Raimu-ke, but she worried that Raimu-ke couldn’t hear her so far away. The ship lady, through the glass, had showed her a picture of their journey, and talked about stars, and worlds, and space. Oa didn’t understand all of it, but she grasped that it was a long, long way, much farther than the distance between the island of the anchens and the three islands of the people.

  Oa wondered if those who kept her here knew she wasn’t one of them. Maybe they didn’t know about the tatwaj. When she began to understand what they said, when the words began to form ideas in her mind, the man called Doctor had asked her how old she was. She held up her arms for him to count, but he didn’t seem to understand. They must not understand, or they wouldn’t bring her food, and toys, and books. Yet they let the spider machine crawl over her every day. It made no sense to Oa.

  She pulled the sweater tighter around her shoulders. Sometimes she thought she had not been warm since she left Virimund, since they took her in the awful noisy flyer that stank of fear and anger, and then up to the ship, which smelled of nothing. She huddled on the bed, the fuzzy toy nestled close in her arms. It, too, was not-real, but it had picked up the scent of a person. A child, perhaps. She buried her face in its plush body.

  *

  ISABEL WAS SURPRISED at what Gretchen Boreson had referred to as the infirmary. It looked more like a small hospital, with a waiting room, several treatment rooms, each with a medicator, and a small inpatient ward, three single rooms and a tiny lounge. All the rooms were deserted now, dark and empty, except for the inpatient ward. Outside the building, three armed Port Force guards clustered under the eaves, out of the rain. Inside, one woman stood guard before the quarantine bubble that had been erected around the door to the ward. A long window opened on the room, obviously mirrored on the opposite side. Isabel and Boreson and Markham stood before it, looking in on the child.

  Someone had tried to turn the little lounge into a bedroom, with a small plastic table and two child-sized chairs, and a bed fitted into the corner. A wavephone receptor and wand hung on one wall, antenna glistening. A large reader was built into the opposite wall. A small portable
reader lay on one of the chairs. A doll and an assortment of mechanical playthings were lined up in a neat row on the table.

  The girl crouched on the bed, her back to the corner. She wore a vivid pink sweater. She held a brown teddy bear, her face buried against it. All Isabel could see of her were thin legs, sharp knees, a cascade of kinky black hair. A child, snatched from her people, transported through space, without concern for her welfare. Isabel trembled with fury.

  “Why is she still in quarantine?” she asked in a tight voice. “It’s been more than fourteen months! Surely if she had any sort of communicable illness, the medicator’s taken care of it?”

  She felt, rather than saw, Boreson and Markham glance at each other. Boreson said, “We wanted to be certain.”

  “How can you not be certain? Who has been examining her?”

  Boreson said, “The doctor’s on his way now.”

  “But you know what he’s found.”

  “I’m not a doctor. Mother Burke. Dr. Adetti says he’s still assessing.”

  The girl lifted her head as if she could sense their presence. Her great eyes glittered under the lights, irises dark against astonishingly clear whites.

  Isabel put her hand to her throat. “So young,” she breathed.

  No one else spoke. Isabel watched the child unfold her legs, pull her hair free of the pink sweater, and climb off the bed. She laid the teddy bear carefully on her pillow, and walked toward the mirrored window.

  Isabel turned abruptly to the guard. “Let me in.” The guard nodded.

  “Wait, Mother Burke,” Boreson said uneasily. “Wait for the doctor.”

  “You really should,” Markham said. “A few more minutes can’t hurt.”

  Isabel ignored them. “Open the door, please,” she said to the guard. The Port Forceman’s eyes kindled, and Isabel knew the woman had been waiting for someone, anyone, to do something for this child.

  “Mother Burke,” Boreson began again.

  Isabel spun to face her. “Administrator,” she said. “Am I to be the girl’s guardian?”

  Boreson glanced sidelong at Markham, as if for help. “Yes, of course, but—”

  Isabel turned again to the guard. “If you please.”

  The guard pulled aside the flap of the quarantine bubble. Disposable sterile suits hung from a dowel, their plastic masks and empty feet drooping like corpses on a gibbet. The guard took one down and held it out.

  Isabel shook her head. “Maximum quarantine protocol is six months,” she murmured. “We’re well past that.” The guard’s lips curved and she spoke to the door hastily, before anyone else could intervene. It swung open.

  Isabel smiled her thanks. She stepped through the bubble and into the ward, leaving Boreson and Markham sputtering behind her. The door closed silently, and she and the child were alone.

  The girl turned from the false mirror to face her.

  Isabel smiled, and said simply, “Hello, Oa. Did I say your name right? Oh-uh? My name is Isabel. I’ve come to talk to you.”

  The girl neither shrank back nor came toward her. She stood, her full lips slightly apart, her eyes bright with—fear? Suspicion? Isabel opened her hands, showed her empty palms. “Will you talk with me?”

  The child’s thin hand lifted to her face to mime a mask over the nose and mouth.

  “Ah,” Isabel said. “Yes, I see.” She took a step closer. “No, I won’t be wearing a mask.”

  Now the girl’s fingers lifted to her head, where her abundant hair sprang from her scalp like a black fountain. Isabel chuckled, and she mimicked the child’s gesture, touching her own naked scalp. “No, it’s true. I have no hair at all. Perhaps I seem very strange to you.”

  Silence stretched in the room. The sounds beyond the walls seemed to grow louder, the fans, the ventilation, the hum of carts and trucks on the street outside. Isabel watched the girl, waiting. The child’s hair was a glory, a deep, shining black. Her skin glowed like chocolate satin. Her willowy limbs promised that she would be tall when she grew up. And how old must she be now? Ten, perhaps eleven, Isabel thought. Certainly no older. She still had the flat chest and narrow body of childhood. She was six or eight centimeters shorter than Isabel.

  “Oa,” Isabel said. “Can you understand me? Do you understand my words?”

  The child’s voice was high and sweet. “Oa understands,” she said.

  Isabel hardly breathed. The girl, walking as if her shoes didn’t quite fit, moved forward, stopping an arm’s length away. The length, Isabel thought instantly, of a blow. The child’s nostrils flared as if she were testing the air, and Isabel kept very still as the girl’s hand rose, reached, came slowly up to Isabel’s breast. She leaned forward, a movement full of caution, and she put her forefinger on the Magdalene cross.

  She looked up into Isabel’s face, and she said, with a wide flashing grin like the sun shining through winter clouds, “Oa likes it.”

  *

  OA HAD NEVER seen a person with no hair. The elders of the people sometimes had gray hair, and some of the crones had very thin hair like the moss that hung from the nuchi trees, which padded the anchens’ nest. But she had never seen anyone whose head was utterly naked.

  The woman in black had arching thin eyebrows as dark as Oa’s own, and delicate bones in her face. Her eyes were clear and light like a tidepool at dawn, and her bare head was a graceful shining curve, with slight shadows here and there. Oa was somehow pleased that she wore no mask. It seemed to mean something, yet it was as incomprehensible as being served a food she liked.

  When she went close to the woman called Isabel, there was no cloying scent to offend the nose, nothing to interfere with the fragrance of clean skin and sweet breath and good nature. When Oa opened her nostrils, the woman didn’t step back, or look at her with distaste. Her eyes glowed as if she understood.

  No one else seemed to understand. They didn’t like her doing it, but Oa couldn’t help it. How could she know, if she didn’t smell the person, what they were like, what they intended? When one of the people was angry, a sharpness came to the breath, a whiff of acid rose from the skin. But this one—called Isabel—smelled as fresh as a newly sprouted nuchi leaf.

  And when she touched the pretty ornament Isabel wore around her neck, the lady took it off and handed it to her so she could hold it, stroke the carving, smell real wood at last. And all the while, this woman called Isabel stood smiling at Oa as if she were a person.

  “If you like it, Oa,” the woman called Isabel said with that gentle voice, “I will give it to you. A gift. And later I will explain to you what it means.”

  Oa’s back stiffened. Could she have been wrong? Gifts from people were dangerous. What could she want, this Isabel? What would she want of Oa? To use her body, perhaps? Or was it about the medicator, something about the spider that kept sucking and sucking from her body, never satisfied? Or perhaps some new torture, something Oa couldn’t yet imagine.

  She thrust the little carving back into Isabel’s hands.

  *

  ISABEL FROZE, HER cross in her fingers. What had she done, or said? She hadn’t touched the girl, she had been very careful in handing her the cross. But the child pulled away, scurried backward across the room to fold herself onto the bed, her knees pulled up, her head buried against them, her hair tumbling to her ankles.

  Isabel wished she could call back her words. A gift. She would remember. A gift was something not to be trusted, not to Oa. Isabel had thought, because of the toys ranged on the table . . . but no. There must be something else.

  “Oa,” she said softly. “I’m sorry. My friends and I give gifts to each other, and it doesn’t mean anything. The person who receives the gift can say yes or no, and it’s all the same.”

  For a long moment neither of them moved. Then Isabel saw how the child’s fingers sought the buttons of her sweater. Her hair had tangled in them. She didn’t look up, only blindly struggled, her hair pulling tighter and tighter. Isabel said softly, “Oa? Will
you let me help you.”

  The child’s fingers stopped moving. Her whole body froze.

  “I would never hurt you, Oa. I promise you. May I help you with your sweater?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  Isabel leaned wearily against the wall. She should have known it wouldn’t be easy. She eyed the row of toys on the table, the little mechanical bits stuck together in various configurations. It looked as if the reader was the only thing the girl used. Her room was as pristine and neutral as a hotel room—a hospital room. Through the open door Isabel saw the exam bed with the medicator poised above it, the long thin tubes of its syrinxes drooping over the paper sheet.

  “Oa,” she murmured. There was no answer. “Oa,” Isabel said again, even more softly. “I will leave my cross for you to look at. If you want to.” She moved to the table to lay the cross on it, and then, following her hunch, she placed it on the chair beside the little reader instead. “I’ll go now,” she said. “But I’ll come back. I came a long way to see you.” No answer.

  Isabel felt Markham and Boreson watching her through the mirrored window. She raked the glass with an angry gaze, and then turned her back on it to call to the guard to release her.

  4

  THE DOOR DIDN’T open.

  Isabel knocked again, two sharp raps. Behind her, Oa looked up with wide eyes. Isabel waited a moment, then turned on her heel and strode to the mirrored window.

  She put her hands on her hips and glared into the silvered glass. “What’s happening?” she demanded. “Open the door, please.”

  The little speaker on the wall beside the window crackled as someone turned on the intercom. Oa jumped at the sound, making the bed creak. Isabel supposed the speaker had not been used since Oa’s arrival. This further evidence of the child’s isolation fueled her anger.

  “Mother Burke.” Even through the speaker, Gretchen Boreson sounded tense. “Dr. Adetti has arrived. He’s coming in.”

  Isabel stepped back. Oa had knocked her teddy bear to the floor. Isabel crossed the room to pick it up and set it beside the child’s knee. “Don’t worry, Oa,” she murmured. “I’m sure I can deal with the doctor.” There was no response. The girl curled around herself again, and lay unnaturally still. Isabel recognized the coping mechanism, one she had seen once or twice in Australia among children who were victims of violence. But surely no one here at the Multiplex, or on the transport, had been violent with Oa. Isabel’s jaw tightened. There were all too many ways to hurt a child.