Sometimes, at night, the Mother comes to her chamber and gathers information or expresses expectations directly. On these nights Gaila lies flat on the mattress, face buried in a cushion that has poetry written in the pattern of the threads, raw on her cheek, while the Mother's ludicrous, sprawling weight crushes artificial straw, and the Mother runs soft fingers down the ridged length of Gaila's spine.
Body language. Oblique suggestions encoded in her chemical signature and in the rhythm of her polished nails scraping through tender skin to bone.
And while it is a rare evening that Gaila has not spent entertaining a client (and herself), the Mother never seems perturbed by the pheromone waves that inevitably permeate the cloying, sweet, heat-hazy air after such transactions, like blood soaking through a woman's skirts. On occasion, Gaila does detect a subtle tremor in the Mother's strong, dangerous hands, near the end of their longest conversations, the ones wherein the fewest spoken words are exchanged, the ones that leave her shoulders bruised purplish green.
Waiting for that slight tremor distracts her from the conversations themselves, though, and that is reason enough to do it.
Oh, spirits above, the conversations.
Gaila knows she is famous, and extraordinary, and desired. She knows her DNA is being sold for the making of beautiful children who will serve the Syndicate. (At sixteen years of age, she has a hundred daughters. Sisters? Clones. There are more to come.) She knows her long-eyed pirate owners only bring her to world after world because of this; because connoisseurs of flesh want to glut feast on her heady scent, the muscle-ringed curve of her bared throat, and that she might explore them, and return to Orion, brimming with secrets.
She knows she used to be content trading knowledge, happy, even, that the price for crossing the length and breadth of the galaxy was so cheap: that all it took was learning to control men very willing to be controlled, and having a great deal of sex, the one thing she enjoyed almost as much as visiting other planets. That was why she let her biological mother sell her, after all, when she was six and on the cusp of everything that mattered, instead of going into the jungle and not coming back, as her still-immature friends advised her. The strange, perverted science of manipulating her own pheromones for a purpose other than open communication didn't terrify her when she was five. It didn't terrify her all through the years of learning it.
But it terrifies her now, now that she is good at it, perhaps the best at it of her age; now, feeling the Mother's advice sink into her latissimus dorsi.
16. I am going away...to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name... (Gaila) (1/2)
Body language. Oblique suggestions encoded in her chemical signature and in the rhythm of her polished nails scraping through tender skin to bone.
And while it is a rare evening that Gaila has not spent entertaining a client (and herself), the Mother never seems perturbed by the pheromone waves that inevitably permeate the cloying, sweet, heat-hazy air after such transactions, like blood soaking through a woman's skirts. On occasion, Gaila does detect a subtle tremor in the Mother's strong, dangerous hands, near the end of their longest conversations, the ones wherein the fewest spoken words are exchanged, the ones that leave her shoulders bruised purplish green.
Waiting for that slight tremor distracts her from the conversations themselves, though, and that is reason enough to do it.
Oh, spirits above, the conversations.
Gaila knows she is famous, and extraordinary, and desired. She knows her DNA is being sold for the making of beautiful children who will serve the Syndicate. (At sixteen years of age, she has a hundred daughters. Sisters? Clones. There are more to come.) She knows her long-eyed pirate owners only bring her to world after world because of this; because connoisseurs of flesh want to glut feast on her heady scent, the muscle-ringed curve of her bared throat, and that she might explore them, and return to Orion, brimming with secrets.
She knows she used to be content trading knowledge, happy, even, that the price for crossing the length and breadth of the galaxy was so cheap: that all it took was learning to control men very willing to be controlled, and having a great deal of sex, the one thing she enjoyed almost as much as visiting other planets. That was why she let her biological mother sell her, after all, when she was six and on the cusp of everything that mattered, instead of going into the jungle and not coming back, as her still-immature friends advised her. The strange, perverted science of manipulating her own pheromones for a purpose other than open communication didn't terrify her when she was five. It didn't terrify her all through the years of learning it.
But it terrifies her now, now that she is good at it, perhaps the best at it of her age; now, feeling the Mother's advice sink into her latissimus dorsi.