The Child Goddess

by Louise Marley

  *

  IN GAY SUNSHINE, Isabel stood before a simple casket fashioned of scavenged materials. It was her first visit to the nascent cemetery of the Virimund Power Park. Its two graves were already carpeted with the native yellow grass. Someone had carefully trimmed it to show the flat foamcast headstones, one inscribed with the name of GARCIA, the Port Forceman who had died on the island of the anchens. The other read simply UNKNOWN CHILD. Isabel’s heart ached at the thought that it might have been Oa who lay beneath the grass and sand. She had to tell someone the child’s name, find a helpful soul to reinscribe the stone, to record Nwa’s passing.

  She had worked with the men and women in her barracks the night before to create a short liturgy. One of the women had suggested a poem from The Prophet, another a passage from The Rubaiyat. No one objected when Isabel offered the text of “In Paradisum,” and she recited it as the casket was lowered into the freshly dug grave.

  MAY THE ANGELS ESCORT THEE TO PARADISE.

  MAY THE MARTYRS RECEIVE THEE AT THY COMING,

  AND BRING THEE INTO THE HOLY CITY.

  MAY THE CHOIR OF ANGELS RECEIVE THEE.

  AND MAYST THOU HAVE ETERNAL REST.

  Everyone who could be spared from the work of the power park was present. They had gathered first in the meal hall, where several who had been close friends of the deceased offered memories. The hydros already had their own ceremonies of greeting and farewell, and when it was time to form a procession, they shouldered their tools, long-handled diggers, a kind of spatula-shaped tool for cleaning solar collectors, coils of connecting cable. They began a song that had developed here, on Virimund, and they walked in ragged single file to the cemetery on its gentle hill overlooking the ocean. The incoming shuttles would sweep above it, their passage stirring the leaves of the low-lying shrubbery.

  Isabel was moved by the simplicity of the place, the sincerity of the Port Forcemen and women sharing their feelings through the ceremony. Human beings throughout the centuries, she reflected, had marked their comings and goings just so. The trappings differed from age to age, the details changed, but the essence remained the same, on Earth or off world, human beings struggling to see past the veil to what lay beyond.

  The graveside ritual ended, and the man’s friends sprinkled farewell gifts into his grave before it was filled in, dropping flower petals, scraps of paper scrawled with handwriting. One laid a small book gently on the casket lid. Isabel stood with her head bowed, praying for the soul of the departed, for the safety of the survivors, for her own guidance.

  She meant every word, every thought. She yearned toward the divine, her heart longing for the wellspring of inspiration, of comfort. She failed to find it except in memory.

  The mourners began to wander back to the power park, walking in twos and threes, on to the feast they had felt it was appropriate to have. Only Oa and Isabel remained. Isabel turned her face up into the pale blue Virimund heaven, murmuring, “Sometimes I feel soulless.”

  “Isabel doesn’t feel well?” Oa asked.

  Isabel startled, hardly aware she had spoken aloud. She gave a humorless laugh. “Oh, no, that wasn’t what I meant, Oa.” She made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know how to explain it to you. It was silly, anyway. I meant that sometimes I feel as if I have lost my soul.”

  Oa gave her a quizzical look. “What is soul?”

  Isabel took Oa’s hand, and they started after the others. “Soul,” she said. “Let’s see. Soul is spirit, the spirit that each person has. It’s our consciousness, our sense of self—but more than that. It’s what makes us human, not like a rock, or a machine, but a living, feeling being.”

  Oa’s fingers went cold in hers, flooding her hand with a strange sensation, a feeling of shock, almost of horror. “Soul,” Oa breathed slowly.

  “Yes, Oa. Everyone has a soul . . . I didn’t mean it, really, it was foolish . . .”

  But Oa’s expression was bleak. “Soul,” she repeated. “Oa is not having a soul. Anchens are not having a soul.” She glanced back over her shoulder. Two men were shoveling dirt into the grave. “The man’s soul is gone.”

  Isabel felt she had done something terribly wrong and yet. . . was this what the child had been trying to tell her all along? “Oa, the man’s soul has left his body. It’s not gone. It’s what the ‘In Paradisum’ is about, asking for God to accept his soul into paradise.”

  “Anchens,” Oa said, and her bitterness flowed through her fingers and made Isabel’s hand ache as if she had plunged it into ice. “Anchens are having a body. Are not having a soul.”

  *

  ISABEL SAT BESIDE Oa’s cot until she slept, and then she sat in the darkness, gazing at her. Her long lashes lay like birds’ wings against her dark cheeks, stirring now and again as she began to dream. Isabel touched her forehead and whispered a blessing. Silently, she apologized for being slow to understand, for the lack of inspiration that left her blind. Oa needed someone unencumbered, who could make the intuitive leap that would bring it all clear. What good would she be, on the island of the anchens, if she couldn’t understand this one precious old child?

  Loneliness overwhelmed her. She went to the door and looked out into the corridor. Jin-Li’s door was closed, the light off. The Port Forcemen and women had feasted, mourned, and now slept. The barracks were dark, with only one covered light left burning in the common room, enough to find the way down the corridor to the bathroom, or the other way, out into the compound. Quietly, Isabel slipped out of her room and pulled the door closed. She wouldn’t go far, she thought. Just out to see the stars, to breathe the night air, to search for something to soothe her troubled soul.

  Soul. That word again.

  The sand glowed beneath her feet, slightly phosphorescent in the starlight. Around her the barracks were quiet, and the power park itself stretched in somnolent darkness to the east and west. She knew the night shift was working in the storage facility, across the airfield, but she couldn’t see past the terminal. The terminal building, too, was dark, even the r-wave center left unattended on this ceremonial night. It was as if she were alone on the island.

  Her feet led her unerringly to the beach, the same path she and Jin-Li and Oa had found on their first day. Later she was to think that it was not her feet that led her, but her heart. Her heart betrayed her while her spirit lay dormant, as still and dark as the buildings she passed. She found herself standing on the crescent of sand, watching the waves of Mother Ocean wash the little beach with gentle strokes. The water glimmered with reflected stars.

  To her right a slender figure stood at the edge of the water, a dark silhouette framed by the starlight. Isabel knew without asking that it was Simon. She couldn’t distinguish the pulsing of the surf from the beat of her own heart.

  “Isabel.” She didn’t know if he had come to her, or she to him. They stood at the edge of the night-dark ocean, the unfamiliar constellations stretching above their heads, the pale sand glittering at their feet. The touch of his hand on hers was as intimate as the deepest lovemaking.

  They didn’t kiss, or touch beyond that clasping of hands. She looked up into his familiar, ordinary face, and she knew that this was the moment of decision, a moment she had postponed by fleeing the Victoria Desert without a word.

  “I’ve missed you so damned much,” he said in a low tone.

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  “Why did you leave Victoria the way you did, Isabel? With no word, no warning.”

  “I was a coward,” she said simply. “I was afraid, if I faced you . . . I wouldn’t go.”

  “I didn’t want you to go.” His hand tightened on hers.

  Her throat ached with remorse and longing. “Simon. We’re not free, either of us.”

  “We could be.”

  “Do you really think so?” Her voice caught, and she turned her head to gaze out on the glassy starlit water.

  “You’re thinking of Anna.”

  “Not just Anna, Simon, although, yes,
of course I think of her, and your promise to her. But the Order, as well. My vow.”

  “People change, Isabel. It’s part of being alive.” He took a half-step closer, and the temptation to step back, to feel his lean body against hers, almost overwhelmed her. He said, “Even if you won’t come to me, I can’t go back to Anna. It could never be the same.”

  “Because of me,” she said sadly.

  “Because I’ve changed. Because I’m not the man she married. And Anna—” He hesitated. She knew, by the sensation in her hand, that he was loath to speak disloyally of Anna. “Anna doesn’t change. She can’t change. It’s not in her character.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” She made herself turn her body away from him, though her flesh protested. “Before I met you, Simon, the vow of celibacy was a pale sacrifice for me. It cost me nothing. And then, when faced with a real challenge to my commitment . . . I failed.”

  She felt his anger through his fingers, prickling in her hand like rose thorns. His voice was rough when he spoke again. “Why should you consider loving me to be a failure, Isabel? How does it help your order to deny your feelings?”

  “How can I love you, Simon,” she said slowly, “if I fail in my love for God?”

  “Does your God require you to reject me? Wouldn’t He be just as pleased with you if you joined a noncelibate order?”

  Isabel didn’t answer at first. Simon understood, she knew, that there was only one Order for her. And that the Magdalenes, with everything to prove, had decided as a community to make the absolute commitment that so many orders no longer made. How far away her community seemed now! She thought of the Mother House, the sprawling castello, its lights beckoning from the hilltop, the ancient chapel bell calling the Magdalenes to prayer.

  And she thought of Simon, in his stifling tent in the Victoria Desert, the two of them utterly alone in the vast empty night. She remembered with an aching clarity the touch of his lips, the smoothness of his body, the cooling fire that blazed between them. For a long moment she couldn’t speak at all. Only one small step, a shifting of her feet, and she could feel it again, that ecstatic, forgetful, exhilarating sensation . . .

  She stiffened her back, and closed her eyes, lifting her face into the breeze to let it cool her cheeks and eyelids. “It’s not God’s requirement, Simon.” The words hurt her throat, brought a swell of longing into her chest. “It’s my own, and my Order’s. It’s a discipline we chose.” She took a deep breath, and turned to face him. “What good are promises, Simon, if they’re not kept? What kind of people are we, any of us, if we can’t honor our vows?”

  He lifted his free hand to her cheek, and traced it lightly with his fingers. His sensitive fingers were warm on her skin. “I love you, Isabel Burke,” he said softly. “Everything about you. Including your damnable honor.”

  She tried to smile, but her lips trembled. “I love you, too. You know that.”

  “But you won’t be with me.”

  “No.” She stepped back, away from his beguiling touch. It was like a renewal of her vow, a recommitment to her purpose. She felt God’s eye looking down on her from the field of stars, gazing up at her from the expanse of Mother Ocean. Her body felt suddenly light, set free from the dragging weight of guilt and regret. “No, my darling Simon. It’s not a question of being faithless to you. It’s a matter of being true to myself. I won’t be with you. But I will love you just the same.”

  “I won’t go back to Anna,” he said.

  “Then I am terribly sorry for Anna,” Isabel said. “Because I know what it is to love you.”

  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.

  I
sabel 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?