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The bureaucrat coughed into his hand. “I must have a few words in private with you, if I may, Mother Gregorian.”
She favored Linogre with a cold look. “Leave.”
As the daughter closed the door, her mother said loudly, “They want to put me away. They conspire against me, and think I don’t notice. But I notice. I notice everything.”
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 hadn’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 a
“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, fa
“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 pharmacie
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 ca
“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 rne 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 ofrworld 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.”