Goddesses Part 9

"Did Gharia pay the dowry?" "No, but it was understood-"

"I expect none of you understood the same thing. You each heard only what you could tolerate.

Understand this, Michael. Rajban is the childless wife of a dead man. Rao can gain nothing by letting her marry. He will refuse her the AIDS treatment and keep the money for himself. Mark my words: If we do not find Rajban and get her out of her brother-in-law's house, then she will die there, most likely in a matter of days."

Cody linked into the Terrace on a full sensory connection. The private VR chat room had been designed as a flagstoned California patio, embedded in a garden of pepper trees and azaleas. Everyone had a personal animation stored on the server, an active, three-dimensional image of themselves that reflected their habitual postures and gestures, so they would seem to be present even when they weren't fully linked through a VR suit.

Cody's image looked a good deal younger than it ought to-a sharp reminder of how many years had gone by since she'd visited the Terrace. The last time had been during those nebulous months between the abortion and the divorce. Not the best of days, and returning now made her feel a bit queasy.

Still, she had come with a purpose. She set about it, sending a glyph to Etsuko, Ryan, and Jaya, asking them to come if they could-and within a minute, they were all represented. Etsuko was involved in a meeting, so she sent only a pa.s.sive image of herself to record the chat: an alabaster statue dressed in formal kimono. Her flirtatious eyes and the cant of her head as she looked down from a pedestal gave an impression of sharp and regal attention.

Ryan and Jaya were able to interact in real time. Their images lounged in the French patio chairs behind steaming cups of coffee. Jaya had a half-smile on her face. Ryan looked uncertain. He and Michael were very close, Cody knew, and questions of loyalty were probably stirring in his mind.

She drew a deep breath. "Thank you for coming. Jaya, Michael told me about your newest daughter.

Congratulations."

"That was an adventure!" Jaya said. "I don't know what I would have done without Michael. He's a wonderful man."

Cody felt herself stiffen. "He is a good man, but he made a mistake this morning when he let Rajban return to her husband's family."

"The girl who's been staying with him?" Ryan asked. "But that's good, isn't it?"

"No," Michael said.

Cody turned, to find Michael's image standing a few steps to the side.

"Cody's right. I made a mistake. I didn't want to believe this was an abusive situation."

"I'm afraid for her," Cody said. "Michael, we need to find her as soon as we can. I came here to ask theTerrace for help. I know I have not been part of this group for many years, but I still trust you all more than anyone, and you're already familiar with Rajban. Will you help? I've rented two drone planes. I know you're busy, but if you could rotate shifts every few minutes, the three of you might be able to guide one plane, while I inhabit the other. We don't know where she lives, but we know some things about her."

Michael said, "I'm opening up the Global Shear census data. That'll speed things up. When we do find her, m.u.t.h.aye and I will go after her on the ground."

Inside the house there were oranges on the table, and clean water, and sweetened tea, but no one invited Rajban in. She stole a half-ripe orange off one of the trees. Its rind was swirled with green and the flesh was grimly tart, but she ate it anyway, her back to the house. She wondered at herself. She had never stolen fruit before. In truth, she did not feel like the same person.

The orange peels went into her heap of magic soil.

m.u.t.h.aye had laughed at the idea that it might be magic.

Rajban picked up a damp clump. It was soft and warm, and smelled of fertility. If magic had a smell, this would be it; yet m.u.t.h.aye had laughed at the idea.

Rajban rocked back and forth, thinking about it, and about m.u.t.h.aye's mother and her dead baby girl. It was better the baby had died. A girl without a father would only know hardship, and still it must have been a terribly painful thing. For a moment, she held the baby in her arms, acutely aware of its soft breath and warm skin, its milky smell. When she thought about it dying, grief pushed behind her eyes.

m.u.t.h.aye's mother had married again ... and had another daughter. Not a son, but the school she owned earned money, so perhaps she could afford a daughter.

She was just like you, Rajban.

What did that mean? Rajban did not feel at all like the same person. There was an anger inside her that had never been there before. It felt like a seed planted under her heart, and it was swelling, filling with all the possibilities she had seen or heard of in the last two days.

Her fists clenched as the seed sprouted in a burst of growth, rooting deep down in her gut and flowering in her brain, thriving on the magic soil of new ideas.

Cody was a point of awareness gliding over the alleys and lanes of Four Villages. Linked to the GS census, the town became a terrain of information. Addresses flashed past, accompanied by statistics on each building and the families that owned them-occupation, education, income, propensity for paying taxes. At the same time the drone's guidance program spun a tiny camera lense, recording the people in the streets, sending their images to the GS census, where a search function matched them against information on file, spitting back identifications in less than a second.

No way this search could be legal. There had to be privacy strictures on the use of the GS census data. What did privacy mean anymore?

It didn't matter. Not now. Cody only wanted to find the combination of bits that would mean Rajban.

Rajban was a nonent.i.ty. She did not appear anywhere in the census-and that was a clue in itself.

Some heads of households refused to answer the census questions, forcing the field agent to guess at their names and family members. Michael had used that fact in his search parameters. It was likely such a house was in a fundamentalist neighborhood and that it had an intensely cultivated private courtyard, where a young wife could be hidden from an agent's prying eyes ... but not from the eyes of a drone aircraft.

The plane was powered by micropumps that adjusted its internal air pressure, allowing it to sink and rise and glide through the heated air. The pumps were powered by solar cells on the plane's dorsal surface, backed up by tiny batteries built into its frame. It could stay aloft for months, maybe for years. Its only drawback was that it was slow.

Cody's fingernails had dug crescent impressions in her data glove by the time the drone cruised over the first household on Michael's list. A woman was hanging laundry in the shade, but she was older than Rajban, with two children playing near her feet. At the next house the courtyard was empty, and the garden it contained was yellow and sickly. Cody tapped her glove, sending the plane on.

Recorded names and faces slid past her, until finally, the camera picked out a familiar face. "Gharia." The GS census confirmed her guess.

Cody ordered the drone lower. It hovered over the street as Gharia stumbled along, head down, each sandaled foot ramming into the mud like a crutch, while chickens scurried to get out of his way and children ran indoors, or behind their mothers until he pa.s.sed. Rage and helplessness were twisted into his posture. Cody's heart rate tripled, knowing something terrible had happened.

The drone's shadow was a cross in the mud. Gharia saw it and pulled up short. He looked up, while Cody let the plane sink lower.

She had expected to hate him, but now, seeing the pain and confusion in his eyes, she could feel only a desperate empathy. The old ways were dissolving everywhere. Her own tangled expectations neatly echoed his.

Then Gharia crouched. Still staring at the plane, he groped blindly, clawing a fistful of mud from the street. Cody's eyes widened as he jumped to his feet and flung the mud at the plane. Just a little extra weight could upset the plane's delicate balance. She started to order it up, but the guidance AI responded first, activating micropumps that forced air out of the fuselage. The plane shot out of reach, and Gharia became a little man.

He threw his head back. He opened his mouth in a scream she could not hear. His shoulders heaved as he looked around for some object upon which to vent his rage. He found it in the white cart of a water station being set up at the end of the street. The startled technician stumbled back several steps as Gharia attacked the cart, rocking it, kicking at it, but it was too heavy to turn over. Even the plastic frame would be very hard to dent.

After a minute of frantic effort, Gharia gave up. Chin held high, he walked away through a crowd ofbemused spectators, as if nothing had happened.

Cody touched her belly, wondering if there was life growing in there, and if it was a boy or a girl-if it would die, or live.

What difference is there, between me and this unhappy man?

Both of them had let antique expectations twist the balance of their lives.

A winged shadow pa.s.sed over the courtyard. Rajban looked up from where she crouched in the shade of the mandarin tree. Her hands left off their work of pulling tiny weed seedlings from the mossy soil.

Squinting against the glare, she searched the sky. There. It was the little airplane that had flown over Michael's house, blue like the sky and very hard to see. More like a thought than any solid thing.

She reached to touch the necklace her mother had given her, before remembering it was gone. The life she'd lived before was fading, and she was not the same person anymore.

When she first came to her husband's house this thriving mandarin tree had been ill. The soil in which it was rooted had been unclean, until she tended it, until she prayed the magic into existence. A worm had hatched from the barren dirt, and the mandarin tree had been reborn, no longer the same tree as before.

Rajban felt that way: as if she had been fed some potent magic that opened her eyes to undreamed possibilities. Perhaps m.u.t.h.aye's mother had felt this way too?

Rajban rose unsteadily to her feet. The heat of her fever was like a slow funeral fire, made worse because she had been allowed no water. Her mouth felt like ashes. No matter. Like m.u.t.h.aye's mother, she was ready to step away from this empty round of life.

Michael waited with m.u.t.h.aye in the cramped pa.s.senger seat of an air-conditioned zip. The driver had parked his vehicle between two market stalls set up under a spreading banyan tree. Young men lounged in the shade, eating flavored ice. Michael idly watched three tiny screens playing at once in his shades.

Two were the feeds from the searching drones. The third was the bioremediation demonstration out at Kanwal's farm.

There was Kanwal, hungrily watching Pallava explain the activity of the technicians gathered around the well. Kanwal's ambitions were an energy, waiting to be shaped.

"Michael!"

Cody's tense voice startled him. His gaze swept the other two screens, and he caught sight of Rajban, gazing upward, her golden face washed in the harsh light of the noon sun. "Michael, we've found her."

He whooped in triumph. "She looks all right!"

m.u.t.h.aye squeezed his arm. "Why is she outside at noon? It's so terribly hot. Look at her cheeks. Look how flushed they are. We must hurry." She leaned forward, to tell the address to the driver of the zip.

The driver's eyes widened. Then he laughed in good humor. "I no go there. Too many of the politics there. Don't like any new way. Throw mud my zip."

m.u.t.h.aye sighed. "He's right. It's a bad neighborhood. Michael, you won't be welcome there."

"If it's that kind of neighborhood, you won't be welcome either. You'll be as foreign as me."

A ghost of a smile turned her lips. "Maybe not quite so, but-"

"I can't send a security team in, you understand? This isn't company business, and I've already stretched my authority by using the census. But I can go after her myself."

"We can both go after her," m.u.t.h.aye said. She used a cash card to pay the driver. "I only hope she is willing to leave."

The silent drone floated above the courtyard. From this post, Cody looked down and saw that something had changed. Rajban had moved out of the shade of the little potted tree. She stood in the sunshine now, her back straight, no sign of timidity in her posture. Her gaze was fixed on the house. She seemed in possession of herself and it made her a different person. The timorous girl from Michael's garden was gone.

Cody swallowed against a dry throat. Clearly, Rajban intended something. Cody feared what it might be.

A woman who has been cornered and condemned all her life should not protest, but Rajban's obedience had been corrupted-by the whisperings of m.u.t.h.aye, by her glimpse of a different life.

Cody felt as if she watched herself, ready to burst in the close confines of Victoria Glen. She wanted to cry out to Rajban, tell her to wait, not to take any risks ... but the plane had no audio.

Rajban stepped toward the house with a clean, determined stride.

Cody ordered the drone to follow. The micropumps labored and the plane sank, but with excruciating slowness. It was only halfway down when Rajban disappeared inside.

m.u.t.h.aye hid her face with her sari. She walked a step behind Michael but no one was fooled. Change had risen in a slow flood over Four Villages, dissolving so many of the old ways, but here was an island.

The people of Rao's neighborhood had resisted the waters, throwing up walls of h.o.a.ry tradition to turn the flood away. It was as if history had run backward here. Girls received less schooling every year, they were married at younger and younger ages, they bore more children ... or at least they bore more sons.

The s.e.x selection implant was an aspect of modernity that had worked its way inside the fundamentalist quarter. It was a breach in the walls that must ultimately bring them tumbling down ... but not on this day.

Michael walked at a fast, deliberate pace, following the directions whispered to him by Jaya as she watched from the second drone aircraft. He felt the stares of unemployed men, and of hordes of boys munching on sweets and flavored ice. Tension curled around him like a bow wave.

A link came in from his chief of security. "Mr. Fielding, I don't like this at all. Let me send some people in."

"No," Michael muttered, keeping his voice low, trying not to move his lips. "Sankar, you send your people in here, you're going to touch off a riot. You know it."

The brand of fundamentalism didn't matter, and it didn't even need a religious affiliation. Michael had encountered the same irrational situation as a boy when he'd gotten off the bus at the wrong stop, finding himself in a housing project where the presence of a prosperous mixed-race kid was felt like a slap against the hip-hop culture.

Fundamentalism was so frightening because it taught the mind to not think. Such belief systems cramped people's horizons, sabotaging rational thought while virulently opposing all compet.i.tive ideas.

Michael heard m.u.t.h.aye gasp. He turned, just as a clump of mud hit him in the cheek. A pack of boys hanging out at the entrance of a TV theater erupted in wild laughter. "Keep walking," m.u.t.h.aye muttered through gritted teeth. Mud had splashed across her face. Her sari was dirtied. More clumps came flying after them. Michael wanted to take her arm, but that would only make things worse. Boys jeered. They made kissy noises at m.u.t.h.aye. A few ma.s.saged their crotches as she pa.s.sed.

Jaya was watching over them from the drone. "Turn here," she said, her voice tight. "There is hardly anyone in the alley to your left. All right, now go right-walk faster, some of the boys are following you-keep going, keep going. Turn again! Left. There. Now you're out of their sight."

"How much farther?" m.u.t.h.aye whispered into the open line. Michael glanced back over his shoulder, but the boys were not in sight.

Mother-in-Law looked up as Rajban stepped across the threshold. Surprise and anger mingled in herwrinkled face as she scurried to guard the water cube. Rao pretended not to notice. Women's business.

Rajban drew a deep breath. The little airplane had been a sign, pure as the searing sky, that the time hadcome to follow m.u.t.h.aye's mother into another life. So, without looking at Mother-in-Law again, she walked past her. She kept her face calm, but inside her soul was trembling. Rajban pa.s.sed the table. She approached the door. Only then did Rao admit her existence. "Stop." His voice ever stern. "Get back to your work."

Her insides felt soft and hot as she told herself she did not hear him. She took another step, then another, the concrete floor warm and hard against her toes.

"I said stop."

The doorway was only five steps away now, a blazing rectangle, like a portal to another existence.

Rajban walked toward it, her steps made light by the tumbling rhythm of her heart.

Rao stepped in front of her, and the light from the doorway went out.

Rajban made no effort to slip around him. Instead she reached for her sari and pulled it farther over her head, so that it partly concealed her face. Then she stood motionless, in silent protest.

At last.

The drone dropped to the level of the doorway. Through the cameras, Cody gazed into the house-and could not believe what she was seeing.

Rajban was walking out. She was heading straight for the door. Cody watched her pa.s.s the fl.u.s.tered old woman, and the table where Rao sat. It seemed certain she would reach the door, when abruptly, Rao rose to his feet. In two steps he stood in front of Rajban, blocking her exodus. Rajban stopped.

For several seconds nothing more happened. Rajban stood in calm serenity, refusing to yield or to struggle. It had the flavor of a Gandhian protest, an appeal to the soul of the oppressor. Rao did not seem to like the taste of guilt. Outrage convulsed across his face. Then Cody saw a decision congeal.

Warmth fled her gut. What could she do? She was half a world away.

"Michael," she whispered. "It would be good if you were here now."

"Two or three more minutes," Jaya said. "That's all."

It was too much.

Cody ordered the drone forward. The autopilot guided it through the door, its wingtips whispering scant millimeters from the frame.

She could not defend Rajban, but she could let Rao know that Rajban was no longer alone.

Rajban kept her head down, knowing what would happen, but so much had changed inside her she could not turn back. Her heart beat faster, and still the expected blow failed to arrive. Cautiously, she raised her eyes-to encounter a sheen of unexpected blue. The little airplane! It hovered at her shoulder like a dream image, so out of place did it seem in the hot, cloistered room.

Brother-in-Law stared at it as if he faced his conscience.