Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [16]
“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