“Etaa—?” I said. “Won’t you share my S’elec’eca?” In a voice like glass, she said, “I couldn’t take Silver, Tam. I love her, I do—but how could I teach her what she was meant to be? And my people wouldn’t understand her. It wouldn’t be fair. I will try ... try to help them be ready for my son. And maybe someday for Silver, too. Will you bring her to see me then?”
“I will,” I said, wanting to say something else. Tears crept down my face like glue.
“Will you always be with him, and Silver too?”
“Yes, always . . . and never let him forget you.” I hesitated, looking down. “Etaa, you’ll have more children. And it doesn’t have to be eight years again. There are ways, we can help you, if you want us to.”
Her mouth stiffened in angry refusal; but then, softening, she bent her head to kiss Alfilere and said very faintly, “I would like that . . . Tam, I should hate you too, for everything you’ve done. But I don’t. I can’t. Good-bye, Tam. Take care of our children.” She knelt and stroked my mottled hide, while I caressed her with the sighing hands of the wind, the only hands I had.
Etaa left the cabin, and Iyohangziglepi came to pick up Silver, who began to cry at being held in a stranger’s arms. Together we watched the viewscreen as Etaa presented Alfilere to the waiting deities, with the small speech I had trained her to recite for effect. She delivered it flawlessly, standing as straight and slender as a rod of steel, and if there was any sign on her face of the agony inside her, I couldn’t see it. But Archbishop Shappistre stood nearby, still tolerated by the grace of the Gods, watching with an expression that surprised and disturbed me. And then after one of the Goddesses had accepted Alfilere, Etaa turned on him with pointing finger and charged him in sign language with treason, in the name of Alfilere III and his father Meron IV before him. The archbishop turned pale, and the Gods glanced back and forth among themselves. Then one of them made a sign, and guards appeared to lead King Meron’s betrayer away.
Fleetingly, as if for someone beyond sight, I saw Etaa smile.
But already she was searching the Human crowd, and I saw it part for the tall dark man in Kotaane dress, the warrior known as the Smith—Etaa’s husband. A fresh puckered scar marked his cheek above the line of his beard, and he still walked with the small limp that bespoke his terrible fall. He stopped beyond the crowd’s edge, across the clear space from Etaa, and his grim, bespectacled young face twisted suddenly with uncertainty and longing.
Etaa stood gazing back at him across the field, a bizarre figure in a flapping dusty jacket, her face a mirror of his own. Two strangers, the Mother’s priestess who had found her voice and lost her faith, the peaceful smith who had taken heads; strangers to each other, strangers to themselves. And between them they had lost the most precious possession this crippled people knew, a new life to replace the old. The frozen moment stretched between them until I ached.
And then suddenly Etaa was running, her dark hair flashing behind her. He found her and they clung together, so lost in each other that two merged into one, as though nothing could ever come between them again.
AFTERWORD—
MOTHER AND CHILD
People often ask me, “Where do you get those weird ideas?” And they frequently go on to ask if I get them from dreams. Most of my dreams are not all that interesting, unfortunately. (I find far more inspiration for my work in the world around me when I’m awake.) I do get bits and pieces of image from dreams that I can sometimes work into my stories, but “Mother and Child” is the only thing I’ve written that comes entirely out of a dream.
In the dream I happened to be reading a story in an anthology; I had begun browsing somewhere in the middle of it and became more and more engrossed as I went along, until I was reading the second half of the story very carefully. (This is something I have a habit of doing when I’m awake, as well.) The story was illustrated, and, in the way of dreams, it began to have more and more illustrations, until at the end it had actually become a kind of animated film instead of a story. When I woke up I wrote down what I remembered and then set out to plot for myself what had happened in the first half of the novella. (The dream began where Etaa and Tam are stranded on the second moon together.)
I couldn’t remember the name that I’d seen at the top of the pages while I was “reading” it in my dream, but I remembered that the name had begun with an O. After I wrote the novella, I ended up selling it to the anthology Orbit—which led me to wonder a little about precognition.
A lot of fantasy readers tell me that they really enjoyed this “fantasy”; like some of my other stories, the anthropological backgrounding I did in “Mother and Child” gives it something of a fantasy feel. (I’d been reading a lot of historical fiction just before I began the novella, and some of what I’d read influenced its tone, as well.) But unlike “The Storm King,” I consider this to be strictly science fiction. One of my favorite aspects of this story is the way that many of the characters regard hearing, which under normal circumstances is a perfectly normal sense, as a kind of extrasensory magic. I’m also particularly fond of Tam, the alien, who is probably my personal favorite among all the alien characters who have appeared in my work.