The Child Goddess Read Online Free Page A

crawl. “No,” Boreson said. “Not so far as we know. It seemed the safest place.”
    “Who has been caring for her?”
    “There’s a nurse. And Dr. Adetti sees her every day. Naturally her health is of prime concern to us.”
    “Naturally,” Isabel murmured.
    “But, Mother Burke—the more time that passes, the more money we lose. We have men and women on Virimund, equipment, supplies. They’re ready to begin.” She laid down the transmission wand with a little click. “Can you try to work quickly?”
    Isabel looked out the window again, away from the tightly stretched features of Gretchen Boreson and into the soft grayness of the January day. “Please take me to the child,” she said.

3
    OA SHIVERED DESPITE the garment they had brought her. She didn’t like it. It scratched at her elbows and neck, and smelled strange. Her hair caught on its fastenings. She would have preferred her arms to be bare, but this gray place was too cold for that. She had arrived in a chill drizzle, and now, even indoors as she had been ever since, the air felt damp. They had brought things for her feet, too, that made her feel clumsy. She felt as if she would fall, or step on something and not know it. On the ship she had gone barefoot, become familiar with the odd materials of its floors, hard or spongy, slick or textured. The ship had been warmer.
    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