“I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand how a goddess can lose her power.”
She drew back slightly, looking at him with a kind of dangerous wonder, before she smiled. “Oh, very good. I never thought you would ever use that word. Well, with power it is the same for everyone—if you don’t want it quite enough, it just leaves you. Power always knows, you see. And gods always lose their power, because we lose our pleasure in it, we all come to want other things, sooner or later. This is where we are different from human beings.”
“What did you want?” Farrell asked. “What was it you wanted more than being a goddess?” Sia slipped the silver ring off and began slowly to unweave her thick, straggly braid, as she had done on the night she tried to bend the universe for Micah Willows. Farrell thought, It’s the opposite of that thing the Finnish sailors do. They tie up the winds with bits of string, they tie magic into knots. She’s turning it loose, and I’m watching her.
“Brush my hair, please,” she said, “Ben forgot last night. The brush is on that little table.
So Farrell stood behind her strange, flowing chair, in a room that did not exist, and he brushed her hair, as he had always wanted to do, feeling the black and gray sea-weight of it murmur and burn over his hands, feeling the freed winds stretching themselves like cats waking to hunt. Once, showing him how to use the brush correctly, she touched his face, and he remembered lying all one day in a summer meadow, watching a Monarch butterfly being born.
“I like it here,” she said softly. “Of all worlds, this one was made for me, with its silliness and its cruelty, and its fine trees. Nothing ever changes. For every understanding, a new terror—for each foolishness at last pulled down, three little new insanities sprouting. Such mess, such beauty, such hopelessness. I talk to my clients, but I can never know how they can get up in the morning, how any of you can even get out of bed. One day, nobody will bother.” She put her head further back, closing her eyes, as he continued brushing; and he saw how, with the small coquettish movement, the ruts and flutings of her throat at once softened and tautened, like stream beds under the first rain of the season. Her hair breathed calmly now between his hands.
“And still you desire one another,” she said. “And still you invent and reinvent yourselves, you manufacture entire universes, just as real and fatal as this one, all for an excuse to stumble against one another for a moment. I know gods who have come into existence only because two of you wanted there to be a reason for what they were about to do that afternoon. Listen, I tell you that on the stars they can smell your desire—there are ears of a shape you have no word for listening to your dreams and lies, tears and gruntings. There is nothing like you anywhere among all the stones in the sky, do you realize that? You are the wonder of the cosmos, possibly for embarrassing reasons, but anyway a wonder. You are the home of hunger and boredom, and I roll in you like a dog.”
Abruptly she turned, took hard hold of his shoulders, and kissed him on the mouth, pulling herself to her feet as she did so. Farrell, who had wondered often enough what that could be like and flinched slightly in his imagination from the muscular contact, dry as cast snakeskin, found that her breath was noisy and curious and full of flowers, and that kissing her was as shocking and undoing a revelation as the first chocolate he had ever tasted. The chair purred under them, pouring itself across the floor. Farrell sank through the night-colored gown to swim in Sia’s absolute welcome with the frightened ease and eagerness of the small fourhanded land creature that remembered the sea and became the grandfather of whales. Her breasts were as softly shapeless as he had supposed, her belly as mottled; and Farrell kissed and prowled her, laughing as she did in bedazzlement at such bounty until she put her arms around his neck and told him, “Now look at me, now don’t stop looking at me.” That became quickly hard to do, but they held tightly to each other, and Farrell never looked away from her, even when he saw the black stone and what lay before it. He only closed his eyes at the last, when her face became too beautiful and sorrowful to bear. But she smiled straight into his head like someone else, and all his bones went up in sunlight.
As soon as he could speak, he said, “Nicholas Bonner is your son.” They were still joined, still shivering, sprawled together like sacrifices; and she was silent for so long that he was dozing a little when she answered him. “Sleep with a mortal and lose your secrets. Ben wakes up each morning knowing one more thing that I did not tell him.”
“Oh, lord,” Farrell said. “Ben. Oh, Ben. Oh, no wonder he looks like that.”
He began touching his face and peering down along himself, while Sia laughed at him, saying “Don’t be an idiot.” Let me remember this, please, when everything else goes let me remember a goddess laughing after love. She said, “You have not changed. I am not a virus, you haven’t caught me. For that you would have to enter my life, as Ben has, you would have to be exposed.” She slipped away from him and sat up, hugging her knees. “Nicholas Bonner is my son, yes, or at least that was the idea. No, there is no father, none at all. Is there anything else you would like to know?”
“I would dearly like to know why you still have clothes on and I don’t.” The blue-and-silver garment had no buttons, no zippers, no least stain or rumple. He said, “I never saw you put that thing back on.”
“It was never off. Mortals should not see the gods naked, it’s very dangerous. No, you didn’t see me, Joe, you were overexcited. Be quiet and listen.” The chair stood up with her, dumping Farrell to the floor as he began gathering his clothes. He kissed her foot as it went by toward the windows. Briseis came and sniffed at him, neither wagging nor whining. He said to her, “We will talk about this later.”
Sia said, “I was lonely. It is an occupational hazard for us, and we deal with it in different ways. Some gods create worlds, entire galaxies, just to have someone intelligent and sympathetic to talk to. They are usually disappointed. Others go in for having children—they mate with each other, with humans, animals, trees, oceans, even with the elements. It is all very exhausting and takes up most of their time. But they do have the children in the end. Some of them have thousands.”
“And, would you believe it, not one of the little bastards ever writes?” Sia looked at him, and he said, “Sorry. I don’t know how Ben is at such moments, but I feel like Central Park, or a birdbath or something. So. You wanted a child.”
“I am not sure what I wanted anymore. It was long ago, and I was different. Your world existed, I remember that, but it was all fire and water then, nothing else. I had no idea that I would come to love it so much.” She paused for a moment. “We have no word for love, you know. Hunger, degrees of hunger, that is as close as we can come. If you were a god, we would have been making hunger together.”
“So you had Nicholas Bonner,” Farrell said gently. “Conceived in hunger, out of loneliness. Does he know he’s your son?”
“He knows I did not have him,” she said. “He knows I made him. Do you understand me?” Her voice was as sad and cruel as wind crawling around the corners of a house. “What he knows is that I made him in myself, by myself, not even really out of loneliness, but out of contempt, such contempt for mysteries, oracles, temples, all those warrens of little half-gods and quarter-gods, that helpless vampire need that illusions have for adoration. I was going to make a child who could exist without fraudulence, who would be a god if nothing in the universe ever worshiped him. Contempt and vanity, you see. Even for a goddess, I have always been vain.”