Fourteen
Prosaic enough, you would say, so you would. A young girl comes home from school with her book-bag in one hand and her gym-bag in the other, wearing her white blouse and her pleated St. Ann's tartan skirt and the knee-socks with the bows on the side (orange and black, the school colors). Her mother, sitting at the kitchen table, looks up and offers her daughter a piece of the gingerbread that just came out of the oven. It is only one moment in an unmarked million, a single atom of event in a lifetime of them. But it stole Mia's breath
(you lookgood,girl )
and showed her in a concrete way she had previously not understood how rich motherhood could be...if,that was, it was allowed to run its course uninterrupted.
The rewards?
Immeasurable.
In the endyou could be the woman sitting in the shaft of sun.You could be the one looking at the child sailing bravely out of childhood's harbor. You could be the wind in that child's unfurled sails.
You.
Odetta, come and sit with me.
Mia's breath began to hitch in her chest.
Have something sweet.
Her eyes fogged over, the smiling cartoon pig on the awning first doubling, then quadrupling.
You lookgood,girl.
Some time was better than no time at all. Even five years - or three - was better than no time at all. She couldn't read, hadn't been to Morehouse, hadn't been tono house, but she could do that much math with no trouble: three = better than none. Even one = better than none.
Oh...
Oh, but...
Mia thought of a blue-eyed boy stepping through a door, one that was found instead of lost. She thought of saying to himYou look good,son!
She began to weep.
What have I donewas a terrible question.What else couldI have done was perhaps even worse.
O Discordia!
Fifteen
This was Susannah's one chance to do something: now, while Mia stood at the foot of the steps leading up to her fate. Susannah reached into the pocket of her jeans and touched the turtle, thesk?ldpadda. Her brown fingers, separated from Mia's white leg by only a thin layer of lining, closed around it.
She pulled it out and flipped it behind her, casting it into the gutter. From her hand into the lap of ka.
Then she was carried up the three steps to the double doors of the Dixie Pig.
Sixteen
It was very dim inside and at first Mia could see nothing but murky, reddish-orange lights. Electricflambeaux of the sort that still lit some of the rooms in Castle Discordia. Her sense of smell needed no adjusting, however, and even as a fresh labor pain clamped her tight, her stomach reacted to the smell of roasting pork and cried out to be fed. Herchap cried out to be fed.
That's not pork, Mia,Susannah said, and was ignored.
As the doors were closed behind her - there was a man (or a manlike being) standing at each of them - she began to see better. She was at the head of a long, narrow dining room. White napery shone. On each table was a candle in an orange-tinted holder. They glowed like fox-eyes. The floor here in the foyer was black marble, but beyond thema?tre d 's stand there was a rug of darkest crimson.
Beside the stand was a sai of about sixty with white hair combed back from a lean and rather predatory face. It was the face of an intelligent man, but his clothes - the blaring yellow sportcoat, the red shirt, the black tie - were those of a used-car salesman or a gambler who specializes in rooking small-town rubes. In the center of his forehead was a red hole about an inch across, as if he had been shot at close range. It swam with blood that never overflowed onto his pallid skin.
At the tables in the dining room stood perhaps fifty men and half again as many women. Most of them were dressed in clothes as loud or louder than those of the white-haired gent. Big rings glared on fleshy fingers, diamond eardrops sparked back orange light from theflambeaux.
There were also some dressed in more sober attire - jeans and plain white shirts seemed to be the costume of choice for this minority. Thesefolken were pallid and watchful, their eyes seemingly all pupil. Around their bodies, swirling so faintly that they sometimes disappeared, were blue auras. To Mia these pallid, aura-enclosed creatures looked quite a bit more human than the low men and women. They were vampires - she didn't have to observe the sharpened fangs which their smiles disclosed to know it - but still they looked more human than Sayre's bunch. Perhaps because they once hadbeen human. The others, though...
Their faces are only masks,she observed with growing dismay.Beneath the ones the Wolves wear lie the electric men - the robots - but what is beneath these?