The Child Goddess Read Online Free Page B

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