Stations of the Tide (6 page)

In the hallway Linogre made an exasperated noise. Her footsteps descended the stairs.

“It’s the only way to keep her from listening at the door,” the old woman whispered. Then, louder, almost shouting, “But I’ll stay here, I’ll die here. In this bed.” Quieter, conversationally, “This was my bridebed, you know. I had my first man here.” On the ghostcandling television, he could see Byron staring out his window again. “It’s a good bed. I’ve taken each of my husbands to it. Sometimes more than one at once. Three times it’s been my childbed—four, if you count the miscarriage. I intend to die in it. That’s little enough to ask.” She sighed, and pushed the tray of cards away. It swiveled into the wall. “What do you want of me?”

“Something very simple, I hope. I wish to speak with your son but don’t have his address, and I was hoping you’d know where he is now.”

“I haven’t heard from him since he ran away from me.” A crafty look came on her face. “What’s he done to you? Taken off with your money, I expect. He tried to run off with mine, but I was too clever for him. That’s all that’s worth anything in life, all that gives you any control.”

“So far as I know, he hasn’t done anything. I’m only going to ask him a few questions.”

“A few questions,” she said disbelievingly.

He did nothing to break their shared silence, but let it flower and bloom, content to discover when she would finally speak again. Finally Mother Gregorian frowned with annoyance and said, “What kind of questions?”

“There’s a possibility, nothing more, that some controlled technology may be missing. My agency wants me to ask your son whether he knows anything about it.”

“What’ll you do to him when you catch him?”

“I am not going to catch him at anything,” the bureaucrat said testily. “If he has the technology, I’ll ask him to return it. That’s all I can do. I don’t have the authority to take any serious action.” She smiled meanly, as if she’d just caught him out in a falsehood. “But if you don’t mind telling me just a little about him? What he was like as a child?”

The old woman shrugged painfully. “He was a normal enough boy. Full of the devil. He used to love stories, I remember. Ghosts and haunts and knights and space pirates. The priest would tell little Aldebaran stories of the martyrs. I remember how he’d sit listening, eyes big, and tremble when they died. Now he’s on the television, I saw one of his commercials just the other day.” She fiddled with the control, fanning through the spectrum of stations without finding the ad, and put it down again. It was an expensive set, sealed in orbit and guaranteed by his own department as unconvertible. “I was a virgin when he was born.”

“I beg your pardon?” he said, startled.

“Ah, I
thought
that would draw your attention. It has the stench of offworld technology to it, doesn’t it? Yes, but it was an ancient crime, when I was young and very, very beautiful. His father was an offworlder like yourself, very wealthy, and I was just a backwoods witch—a pharmacienne, what you’d call an herbalist.”

Her pale, spotted eyelids half closed; she lay her head further back, gazing into the past. “He came down from the sky in a red-enameled flying machine, on a dark night when Caliban and Ariel were both newborn—that’s an important time for gathering the roots, your mandragon, epipopsy, and kiss-a-clown especially. He was an important man, he had that glitter about him, but after all these years I somehow cannot remember his face—only his boots, he had wonderful boots of fine red leather he told me came from stars away, nothing you could buy on Miranda even if you had the money.” She sighed. “He wanted a motherless child, of his own genes and no others. I have no idea why. I could never wheedle that from him, for all the months we stayed together.

“We haggled up a price. He gave me money enough to buy all this”—she gestured with her chin to indicate all her cluttered domain—“and later, several husbands more to my liking than he. Then he carried me away in his batwinged machine to Ararat, far deep in the forests. That’s the first city was ever built on Miranda. From the air it looked like a mountain, built up in terraces like a ziggurat, and all overgrown. I stayed there for all my pregnancy. Don’t believe those who say that haunts live there. I had it to my own, all those stone buildings larger than anything this side of the Piedmont, nobody there but myself and the beasts. The father stayed with me when he could, but it was usually just me and my thoughts, wandering among those overgrown walls. They were green with mosses, trees growing out of windows, fields of wildflowers on every roof. Nobody to talk to! I tell you, I earned that money. Sometimes I cried.”

Her eyes were soft and distant. “He spoke very fondly to me, as if I were his house pet, his soft cat, but he never once thought of me as a woman, I could tell. I was only a convenient womb to him, when you come down to it, there was that reserve to him.

“I broke my hymen with these two thumbs. I’d been trained as a midwife, of course, and knew my diet and exercises. When he brought me offworld food and medicines, I threw them away. It amused him when he found out, for by then he could see that I was healthy and his bastard safe. But I made my plans. He was away the week of the birth—I’d told him the wrong date—and I gave him the slip. I was young then, I took two days’ rest, and then I left Ararat. He thought I’d be lost, you see, that I could never find my way out. But I was born in the Tidewater, and he on some floating metal world, what did he know? I’d saved up supplies in secret, and I knew what plants I could eat, so food was never a problem. I followed the flow of streams, took the easy way around marshes, and eventually I ended up at Ocean. There was nowhere else I could have ended up at, given I was consistent. It wasn’t a month before I had come here, and set workmen to building this house.”

She laughed lightly, and the laugh caught in her throat, causing her to choke. Her face twisted and reddened, until the bureaucrat feared she might be in serious distress. Then she calmed somewhat, and he poured her a glass of water from a nearby carafe. She took it without thanking him. “I fooled the bugger, all right. I bested him. I had his money safe in Piedmont banks, and his bastard with me. He never knew where to look, and he couldn’t inquire openly. Probably never bothered. Probably thought I died out there. It’s marshy around Ararat.”

“That’s a remarkable story,” the bureaucrat said.

“You think I was in love with him. It’s what anyone would think, but it’s not so. He’d come and bought me with his offplanet money. He thought himself important, and me nothing compared to him, a convenience he could pick up and put down as he wished. And he was right, damn him, that’s what made me mad. So I took his son from him, to teach him otherwise.” She cackled. “Ah, the pranks I used to play!”

“Do you have any pictures of him?”

She lifted a hand, pointed to a wall where petty portraits and ancient photomechanicals vied for space. “That picture there, in the tortoiseshell frame, bring it here.” He obeyed. “The woman, that tall goddess, was me, believe it or not. The child is young Aldebaran.”

He looked carefully. The woman was heavy and slatternly, but clearly proud of her solidity, her flesh: She’d’ve had her admirers. The child was a spooky thing, staring straight at him with eyes that were two dark circles. “This is a picture of a girl.”

“No, that’s Aldebaran. I dressed him like that, in skirts and flounces, for the first several years, to hide him from his father in case he came looking. Until he was seven. He turned willful then, nasty creature, and wouldn’t wear his proper clothes. I had to give in; he walked out in the street buck naked. But I didn’t give in easy. Three days he went bare before the priest came and said this could not be.”

“How did Aldebaran come to have an offworld education?”

She ignored the question. “I wanted a daughter, of course. Girls are so much more tractable. A girl would not have run off to find her father, the way he did.” Abruptly she commanded, “Put your hand under my bed. Pull out what you find there.”

He reached into the vaginal shadows under the bedskirts, drew out a shallow trunk carved with half-human figures. Mother Gregorian rolled over, grunting with effort, to look. “Under that green silk—there ought to be a brown package. Yes. That. Unwrap it.”

It was alarmingly easy to obey this monster, she was so sure of her commands. He held a battered notebook in his hand, a faded scrawl of sigils running across its cover.

“That belonged to Aldebaran. He lost it just before he ran away.” Her smile hinted at stories untold. “Take it with you, perhaps it’ll tell you something.” She closed her eyes, let her face relax into a flaccid mask of pain. She was panting now, steadily as a dog in summer, but quieter.

“You’ve been very helpful,” the bureaucrat said cautiously. He could sense the old woman about to name a price for information given.

“He thought he was so clever. He thought that if he went far away enough, he could escape me. He thought he could escape me!” Her eyes flickered open, glittered venomously. “When you find him, give him a message for me. Tell him that no matter how far you go, in miles or learning or time, you cannot escape your mother.”

He could think of nothing to say. So instead, he bowed politely and turned to leave.

“Oh, and you needn’t bother about the broken saucer. We have more, and it was an incomplete set anyway.”

He smiled. “That’s a good trick. How did you know that?”

She reached a hand up in the air, a gesture that managed to be both languid and laborious, like a drowning woman reaching for the water’s surface, and tripped a switch beam. The lights went out, and the room was plunged in darkness, save for a snowflake of light on the ceiling. It was a rosette of small circles, like a festival cookie. He looked down, and there was a smaller rosette on the floor, and brighter.

Her voice came out of the darkness, gloating. “The hot-air register. When it’s open, I can hear every word in the room below. I heard the saucer crack, and Esme scuttling out into the pantry and back.” She laughed at him. “Too straightforward for you, eh? You offworlders think yourselves so sophisticated. Something as simple as our ventilation system is beyond you.”

*   *   *

In the room below, he met a dignified-looking man with a dark mustache, holding a glass of the daughters’ thin beer. His hair was slicked down, Piedmont style. “You must be the appraiser,” the bureaucrat said.

They shook hands. “Yes, I come here every few weeks, to draw up another schedule of prices. A year ago, these pieces were worth a fortune; now, shipping costs have gone up and they’re not so valuable. Most will have to be left behind.” The appraiser held up a battered sheaf of papers and sighed piously. “These are the figures, anyone can check them. There’s no profit in it for me. The only reason I agree to come back so often is that there are so many beautiful things here, it would be a pity if they were lost to the tides.”

Linogre and Ambrym stood nearby, and Esme out of sight. Yet he could feel her watchful from some dim recess, all tiny black beadglass eyes and quivering whiskers.

“Esme,” Linogre said. “Please show mother’s visitor to the door. We must see to her wardrobe.”

The elder two sisters swept away in the wake of the appraiser. As soon as they were gone, Esme emerged from shadow. The bureaucrat glanced up at the air register and impulsively took her hand. He felt the sudden, urgent need to get her out of this poisonous atmosphere. To save something from disaster. “Listen to me: Your mother has told me she’s cut you out of her will,” he said. “She’s not willing you a thing. Leave this house tonight, child. Right now. I’ll help carry your things. There’s nothing here for you.”

The girl’s dusty-glass eyes took on a dull sheen of malice. “I want to see her die!” she spat. “She can keep her money, I just want to see her dead and never coming back!”

*   *   *

It was night when he left the house, but Caliban was high in the sky and full, Ariel low but gibbous and bright, so the river road was well-lit, and the trees had ghostly pairs of shadows arcing away from each other. The tree stars had come down from their high perches and, faintly luminous, were rooting for mites in the humus. The walk was peaceful, and the bureaucrat used it to sort out his impressions. It seemed to him that the house he’d just left was frozen in time. When the tides come, everything will change. Only some have rendered themselves beyond change, and caught by the sun, will be revealed as lifeless stone.

It wouldn’t hurt to find out who the magician’s father was. Even given that he’d doubtless broken tariff when he brought his money planetside, he must’ve been a rich and quite likely influential man. He thought again of the three sisters, unaged and unsexed by greed and inertia.

I could almost like Gregorian, he said to himself, just for escaping that woman.

At last he asked his briefcase, “Well—what is it?”

“Judging by the sketches and diagrams scattered within, it’s a magical diary—the account book an aspiring sorcerer maintains to keep track of his spiritual progress. It’s written in a floating cypher, using obsolete alchemical symbols, the sort of thing an extremely bright adolescent might invent.”

“Decode it, then.”

“Very well.” The briefcase thought for a moment, and then said, “The first entry begins:
I killed a dog today.
”

4

Sibyls in Stone