Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [17]
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.