“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.”
Farrell wanted to go to her as she stood at the window with her back to him, but, like Briseis, he dared not cross the border of her pain. He said only, “Well, he scares the pure hell out of me, but he’s not a god. Not if you are.”
“He is not anything. You cannot make anything useful out of contempt and vanity, no matter who you are. Nicholas Bonner is not a god, not human, not a spirit of power—he is nothing, nothing but immortal and eternally enraged at me. As he should be. Can you begin to imagine what I did to him?” She turned to look at Farrell, and her face was gray and small. “Can you imagine what it might be like to know certainly that you have no business existing anywhere—that there is no possible place for you from one end of the universe to the other? Can you imagine how that would feel, Joe? Knowing that you can never even die and be free of this terrible not-life, never? That is what I did to my son, Nicholas Bonner.”
Farrell said, “You must have tried to—l don’t know—to unmake him. You were stronger then, you must have tried.”
Sia nodded impatiently. “I could not do it, I was never strong enough. I was exactly like your little witch, just playing with power for every wrong reason and stumbling onto something that would take a miracle to undo. The most I have ever been able to do is to send him very far away, to a place you might call limbo. I don’t want to talk about it. There is nothing to do there but try to sleep and wait for someone to summon you by mistake. Someone always does.” She chuckled suddenly, grimly, and added, “He always looks like that, by the way. My bodies all seem to be older and uglier each time, but Nicholas Bonner is fourteen years old forever.”
“He hates it there,” Farrell said, remembering that first long cry of terror in the redwood grove: Hither then, swiftly, for I’m cold, I’m cold. Sia nodded, looking away. Farrell said, “Something is squeezing this house like a nutcracker. I can’t feel it here, but everywhere else. What’s going on?”
“It has begun.” Her voice was placid, almost indifferent. “In time, maybe a few days, they will try again to come into my house, and he will try to make me go to that place where I have sent him before. I wonder if the girl is strong enough to enter this room. The house, yes, I think so, but perhaps not here.” She took Farrell’s hand between her square, stubby-fingered ones, smiling at him, but not drawing him across the invisible line. She said, “Joe, goodness, don’t look that way. There is nothing Nicholas Bonner can do but destroy me for the sake of some justice. The dreadful thing is that it is all he can do.”