Geomancer (Well of Echoes) Read Online Free PDF Page A

thrown out, uneaten. She salivated.
    The breeding factory was the most visible propaganda of all, a sign of a future when women might be valued only because they produced the next generation of fodder for the battlefields and maternity wards.
    With a heavy sigh she pushed open the door of her mother’s rooms and went in. As one of the best breeders in the history of the place, Marnie had the largest suite with the most luxurious furnishings.
    Her bed was larger than Tiaan’s living cubicle in the manufactory. The silk sheets were crimson, the cushions velvet. Marnie lay asprawl on the tangled sheets, a sleeping baby on her belly. A satin nightgown, which to Tiaan’s prudish mind looked positively indecent, was hitched up to the top of her plump thighs. One enormous breast, milky from the baby’s attentions, was fully exposed.
    Marnie opened her eyes. ‘Tiaan, my darling!’ she beamed. ‘Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in ages.’
    Tiaan bent down to kiss her mother’s cheek. She looked like a pig in a wallow, and neither covered her breast nor drew down her gown. Tiaan could smell her lover on her and was disgusted. Pulling the chair away from the bed, she sat down.
    ‘I’m sorry, mother. We’ve all been working seven days a week.’
    ‘Don’t call me mother, call me Marnie! What are you doing way over there? Come closer. I can’t see you.’
    ‘Sorry, Marnie. I just don’t get any time to myself.’
    Marnie’s eyes raked over her. ‘You look awful, Tiaan. Positively
thin!
Why won’t you listen to me? It’s no life for you, working day and night in that horrible manufactory. Come home. Any daughter of mine can have a position here tomorrow. We’ll fatten you up nicely. You can lie in bed all day if you like. You’ll need never work again.’
    ‘I like to work! I’m good at it and I feel that I’m doing something worthwhile.’ As always, Tiaan could feel her temper going. She tried to rein it in.
    ‘Any fool can do what you do, fiddling about with dirty bits of machinery!’ One chubby hand found a box of sweetmeats on the bedside cupboard. Tipping the contents onto her ample belly, Marnie sorted through them irritably. One disappeared into her navel. ‘Damn it! All the best ones are gone. Would you like one, darling?’
    ‘No thanks!’ Tiaan said, though she was starving. Her temper began to flood. Marnie, despite her image as the wonderful earth mother, was as selfish a person as ever lived. She loved her children only while they were infants. Once off the breast she sent them to the creche, and at six indentured them to whoever offered the most for their labour. Marnie was one of the wealthiest women in Tiksi, but her children saw none of it.
    Tiaan changed the subject. ‘Marnie, there’s something I’ve always wondered …’
    Marnie bristled. ‘If it’s about your wretched father …’
    ‘It’s not!’ Tiaan said hastily. ‘It’s about me, and you.’
    ‘What about me, darling?’ Marnie picked fluff off a chocolate-coloured delicacy and tasted it with the point of her tongue. She settled back on her cushions. No subject was dearer to her than herself.
    ‘It’s about where I got my special talent from – of thinking in pictures. When I think about something I see it in my mind as clearly as if I was looking at it through a window.’
    ‘You got it from me, of course! And I got it from my mother. The fights we had when I wanted to come here.’
    Tiaan could well imagine them. Marnie’s mother had been a court philosopher, a proud and feisty woman.
Her
mother had been scribe to the governor, her sister an illusionist of national repute. How Marnie had let the family down!
    Marnie, of course, did not think so. She closed her eyes, smiling at some particular memory. ‘Ah, Thom,’ she whispered, ‘I remember every one of our times together, as if you lay beside me now …’
    Tiaan rose hastily. In this mood Marnie was prone to go into raptures about past lovers,