"Fairy tales," Dihya replied. Her smile was positively manic. "Magic pools. You should attend the evening storytellings sometimes, Ayan. They're very enlightening."
"I have other demands on my time," Ayan said. She kept her voice flat as a warning: her patience was past gone.
"You've missed many good stories," Dihya said. "I once told a tale which upset some of the women, about the Amazons. Not that Greek nonsense of women who cut off their breasts and used men like houris. I told them the version that has been passed down through my people, who once rode the desert as warrior-women themselves. In my version the Amazons had no need to cut off a breast, for they grew only one. They had no desire for violence, either, though they were fierce in defending themselves if necessary. And they had no need of men." Her lips quirked. "That was what upset the others. Such pure women are we, to regard celibacy as heretical."
Umina abruptly grew very still. Ayan frowned at her, but it was the expression on Dihya's face which held Ayan's attention. Like a child, she realized at last. Dihya looked like a child bursting to tell some juicy secret. It had been so long since Ayan had seen a child, she had almost missed it. But did that mean all Dihya's prior calm had been an act? She thought back, trying to recall when Dihya had changed, and realized: when Ayan had grown tired of humoring her. When it no longer made a difference whether she witheld the truth or not.
"Not heretical," Ayan said. She spoke slowly to cover her unease. "Just nonsensical. God made men and women to complement one another, after all."
"That was not an issue for the Amazons," Umina interrupted. Her knuckles, Ayan noticed, had turned white above the loose dark silk of her pants. "I recall that version of the Amazon myth. Some claim it represents the ideal woman, free from material or fleshly obsessions. When one of their kind wanted a child, she went into the forest and found a sacred pool. When she waded in it and prayed, God sent a child into her womb."
Ayan's blood chilled as Dihya smiled her smug, triumphant little smile again.
"Yes," she said to Umina. "You understand."
"Give me a child," Dihya whispered to the pool.
The little spheres churned at the sound of her voice. Near the center of the pool, something stirred, and after a moment a tendril rose — several dozen of the spheres linked together in a delicate-looking chain. It was beautiful; a string of translucent pearls winking in the pale light. When it was the length of Dihya's arm, it turned and began to sway towards her.
Taking a deep breath, Dihya reached out to it.
The tendril whipped around her hand at once. She braced herself for pain, but there was none, just the peculiar touch of something moist and gelid and surprisingly warm. The tendril wound about her palm several times, several of the spheres separating off to track their way down her fingers before returning to the mass. One of them moved down her arm a ways, leaving a damp trail, before it too hastened back to rejoin the tendril. Examining? Judging? There was no way to tell.
She summoned up all the yearning within herself, all the ache of all the years of loneliness and unfulfillment, and said again, "Give me a child."
The tendril released her. It withdrew into the pool, and suddenly the roiling mass of spheres grew still. The dark spots faded, vanished. Dihya frowned at this until she realized that the spheres were melding back into one another. After a few moments, the pool was as she had first seen it — still, silent. Waiting.
Yes.
She got to her feet and undressed. Kneeling on her garments, she bowed to the eastern sky and prayed for God to find her worthy, to take away her fear, to show her the true way. Then, trying to hold the peace of the prayer in her heart, she steeled herself and stepped into the pool.
Liquid surrounded her, like warm oil. A step brought her in up to her knees; another step and the liquid surrounded her thighs and tickled her labia; a third step and the ground dropped away beneath her feet alarmingly. She cried out in spite of herself, but the drop was not far, just a foot or two. She was up to her chin in the white pool now, deeper than she'd meant to go.
But submission to God was the way of faith.
So she closed her eyes and prayed again as the liquid began to shift around her, tickling and touching, sensual against her skin. She shivered in pleasure and took it as a sign of God's approval. And when the moment came, when she felt something enter her body and go up and up until it touched her very womb, she cried out again. But this time her cry was the ecstasy of the exalted, of those who receive the reward for their faith after long waiting. God was great, His purpose had been revealed, and now at last Dihya and her sisters could be saved.
Now at last, Illiyin could become the paradise for which it had been named.
Ayan's hands trembled as she pressed them against her desk, rising to her feet. "You lunatic," she breathed. "What in God's name have you done?"
"Everything in God's name." Dihya lifted her chin, the light of rapture shining in her eyes. "I have kept faith like no other in this colony. That is why I was the first rewarded. But I had a duty to share His blessing with all of you."
The door opened to admit one of the younger women, who set a tray of food and a flask of water on Ayan's desk. It also admitted Zamra, who carried a clear plastic jug in her hands.
"We've searched three times," the policewoman said. "The only thing we found was this. I thought at first it was from the facility's cleaning supplies, but it's the kind that fits into a landcrawler's storage bin. And look—" She tilted the jug for Ayan to see. Its inner surface was damp, empty but for a scrim of thick, cloudy liquid sloshing about.
Ayan looked at the flask of water sitting on the tray. Faint iridescence sheened the water's surface.
"Stalling," she whispered, staring at the flask but speaking to Dihya. "You were stalling for time."
It was almost dawn. The women of the colony would be rising to begin the day's work. Bathing before their morning prayers. Drinking water with breakfast.
As Ayan herself had done, before coming to begin the interrogation.
She sat back down; her knees would no longer support her. Umina was silent as well, her expression hollow. Dihya smiled again and reached for the food, picking up a piece of fruit with only a little awkwardness given her bound hands. She had been a good mother before Aytarel's death, Ayan recalled through a haze of horror. She would be diligent now about caring for herself and whatever was growing inside her.
Ayan put her face into her hands and wept.
