Grass (51 page)

The serpent raised her up and took her far away. She came to a door made of flame and He invited her in, but she was afraid and would not go … 

When she returned, she was lying on the short grass against his chest, between his forelegs, cushioned in the softness of his belly fur. His breath made wind sounds in her ear. Her face was wet, but she could not remember crying. Her hair was loose, spread around her like spilled silk.

He stood up and went away, leaving her there. She rose in the dark, glad it was dark so He could not see her face, hot with embarrassment as she realized He did not need to see her face. She fumbled with her clothes, thinking she needed to dress herself, realizing only then that she was dressed, that the nakedness lay within. Her mind. Changed. Something that had covered it stripped away.

After a few moments, He came back, offering His shoulders again. She mounted and He carried her, discreetly, neatly, an egg in a basket, while the dance faded into memory. Something marvelous and awful. Something not quite completed.

Maenads, she thought. Dancing with the god.

He was talking to her. Explaining. He said
names,
but she saw only a few females, obviously not as many as the males. Only a few of them capable of reproduction. Many of them deciding not to bother. Grieving over that. Now only melancholy. Dark brown-gray distress.

Hopelessness. The future opening like a sterile flower, its center empty. No seed.

How did the foxen know flowers? There were no flowers here on Grass. Yours, He said. Your mind. Everything there. I took it all … A time of wonder. So he knew her. Really knew her. We are guilty, He said. All should die, perhaps, He suggested. Expiation. Sin. Not original sin, maybe, but
sin,
nonetheless. The sound of the word in her ears. The sound of the word
wickedness.
Collective guilt. (A picture came into her mind of Father Sandoval, talking. Evidently Father Sandoval had thought of that diagnosis.) The foxen had let it happen. Not they, but others like them, long ago. She saw the pictures, foxen elsewhere while Hippae slaughtered the Arbai. Screams, blood; then, elsewhere, disbelief. Clearly. As though it had been yesterday. They were guilty, all the foxen.

Postcoital depression? Part of her mind giggled hysterically and was admonished by some other part. No. Real sadness.

It wasn't your fault,
she said.
Not your fault.

She felt cold from the images. So much death. So much pain. Why would she say that?

Because it's true,
she thought.
Damned sure. Not your fault.

But suppose some of us did it. When we were Hippae. Some of us.

Not your fault,
she insisted.
When you were Hippae, you didn't know. Hippae have no morals. Hippae have no sense of sin. Like a child, playing with matches, burning down the house.

More pictures. Time past. Hippae were better behaved long ago. Past memory. Before the mutation. Didn't kill things then. Not when foxen laid the eggs. A picture of a foxen bowed down with grief, head bent between the front paws, back arched in woe. Penitence.

Her fingers were busy with her hair, trying to braid it up. She thought,
Then you must go back. Make things the way they used to be. Some of you can still reproduce.

So few. So very few.

Never mind how few. Don't waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better!
It was true. She knew it was true. She should have known it was true years ago, back in Breedertown. Lack of understanding.

She thought the kneeling figure, the foxen crouched in woe while Hippae pranced and bellowed. She crossed it out, negated it. She thought a standing figure, claws like sabers, a foxen rampant, laying eggs.
Better. Much better.

This militancy fell as though into an umplumbable well, a vacancy. They had gone beyond that. They had decided they should no longer care about things of the world. They felt responsible without wanting to be responsive.

She cried, not knowing whether He had not heard her or whether she had merely been ignored as of no consequence. Changed as she was, she knew she should make Him hear, but there were others around and His thoughts were diluted and disarranged.

The night had gone on without their notice. Ahead and above hung glowing globes of Arbai light which they climbed toward. She heard the contented whicker of horses, grazing on their island below. She was very tired, so tired she could scarcely hold on. He knelt and rolled her off and went away.

"Marjorie?" She was looking up at Father James' concerned face. "Is Stella – "

"Alive," she said, licking her lips. Saying words felt strange, as though she were using certain organs for inappropriate ends. "She knows her name. I think she recognized us. I sent the others to take her to Commons."

"The foxen took them?"

She nodded. "Some of them. Then the others went away, all but … all but Him."

"First?"

She couldn't call Him that. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have committed adultery. Bestiality? No. Not a man, not a beast. What? I am in love with – Am I in love with … ?

He said, "You've been a very long time. The night's half gone."

She blurted desperately, trying not to talk about what most concerned her, "I thought all that business about sin was just Brother Mainoa being a little contentious. It wasn't. The foxen are obsessed with it. They either have considered or are considering racial suicide out of penitence." Though it was not suicide merely to stand still, doing nothing. Or was it?

He nodded, helping her up and guiding her into the house she had selected, where she half sat, half fell onto her bedding. "You've picked that up, have you? Mainoa says so, too. There's no doubt the Hippae killed the Arbai. There's little doubt the Hippae are killing mankind. I don't know how. The foxen don't tell us how. It's something they're withholding. As though they're not sure whether we're worthy … 

"It's like playing charades. Or decoding a rebus. They show us pictures. They feel emotions. Once in a while, they actually show us a word. And difficult though it is with us, seemingly they communicate with us better than they do with the Hippae. They and the Hippae transmit or receive on different wavelengths or something "

It was no longer charades or rebuses to Marjorie. It was almost language. It could have been language if only she had gone on, entered in, if she had not drawn back there, at the final instant. How could she tell Father that? She could tell Mainoa, maybe. No one else. Tomorrow, maybe. "I think you're right, Father. Since the mutation they have not communicated with the Hippae, though I get a sense that in former ages, when the foxen laid the eggs, they exercised a lot of guidance toward their young."

"How long ago?" he wondered.

"Long. Before the Arbai. How long was that? Centuries. Millennia?"

"Too long for them to be able to remember, and yet they do."

"What would you call it, Father? Empathetic memory? Racial memory? Telepathic memory?" She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling the braid into looseness. "God, I'm so tired."

"Sleep. Are the others coming back?"

"When they can. Tomorrow, perhaps. There are answers here, if only we can lay our hands upon them. Tomorrow – tomorrow we have to make sense of all this."

He nodded, as weary as she. "Tomorrow we will, Marjorie. We will."

He had no idea what she had to make sense of. He had no conception of what she had almost done. Or actually had done. How much was enough to have done whatever it was? Was she still chaste? Or was she something else that she had no word for?

She could not tell anyone tomorrow, she knew. Maybe not ever.

Very early in the morning, while the sun hung barely below the horizon, Tony and his fellow travelers were deposited just below the port at the edge of the swamp forest. The foxen vanished into the trees, leaving their riders trying to remember what they had looked like, felt like. "Will you wait for us?" Tony called, trying to make a picture of the foxen waiting, high in a tree, dozing perhaps.

He bent in sudden pain. The picture was of foxen standing where they stood now while the sun moved slowly overhead. Rillibee was holding his head with one hand, eyes tight shut, as he clung to Stella with the other arm.

"You'll wait here for us," Tony gasped toward the forest, receiving a mental nod in reply.

"Tony, what is it?" Sylvan asked.

"If you could hear them, you wouldn't ask," said Rillibee. "They think we're deaf. They shout."

"I wish they could shout loud enough for me to hear them," Sylvan said.

"Then the rest of us would have our brains fried," Tony said irritably. While he had immediately warmed up to Rillibee, Tony wasn't at all sure he liked Sylvan, who had a habit of commanding courses of action. "We'll go over there." "We'll stop for a while."

Now Sylvan said, "Someone in the port will give us transport to Grass Mountain Road. We'll speak to the order officer there." He moved toward the port.

Though Tony felt arguing wasn't worth the energy it would take, he wanted to get Stella to a physician quickly. "The doctors are at the other end of town?" he asked.

Sylvan stopped, then flushed. "No. No, as a matter of fact, the hospital is just up this slope, near the Port Hotel."

Rillibee said, "Then we'll go there," admitting no argument. He picked Stella up and staggered up the slope toward the hospital. "Can I help you carry her?" Tony asked.

Stella had slipped into a deep sleep, and Rillibee wondered if she would even know who held her. Still, he shook his head. He was unwilling to give up the burden to anyone else, though he had become exhausted by carrying it. Though he thought of her as a child, she was not a small girl. He had been holding her on the foxen for hours. She was his heart's desire, so he thought, without trying to figure out why.

"I'll manage," he said. "It's not much farther." It was at the top of a considerable slope, a long climb for men already weary. They came at the place from the back, where blank walls confronted them on either side of a wide door. A white-jacketed person stuck his head out, saw them, and withdrew. Others came out, with a power-litter. Rillibee handed over his burden with the last of his strength, then leaned on one of the attendants to get himself inside.

"Who is she?" someone asked.

"Stella Yrarier," Tony said. "My sister."

"Ah!" Surprise. "Your father's here as well."

"Father! What happened?"

"Speak to the doctor. Doctor Bergrem. In that office. She's there now."

Minutes later Tony was staring down at his father's sleeping face.

"What's wrong with him?" He asked the doctor.

"Nothing too serious, luckily. We wouldn't be able to do systems cloning and replacement here the way they do elsewhere. We have no SCR equipment."

Cloning! Systems replacement! The mortality rate for systems replacement was high. Besides, Old Catholics were prohibited from using cloned systems, though there were always backsliders who had a system cloned and confessed it later.

The doctor frowned at him. "Don't get into a state, boy. I said not too serious. Some cuts and a bit of bruising on the brain. All that's taken care of. Some nerve injury, his legs. That's healing. All he needs to do is stay here and simmer quietly for a day or two more." The slight, snub-nosed woman hovered over dials, twitching at them. Her plentiful dark hair was drawn back in a tight bun and her body appeared almost sexless in the flapping coat.

"You've got him sedated," Tony commented.

"Machine sleep. He's too nervous a type to leave conscious for long. He frets."

That was one way of saying it, Tony thought with an ironic twist to his lips. Roderigo Yrarier frets. Or fumes. Or roars.

The doctor went on, "Your sister, now, that's something else. Mind reconstruction, I wouldn't doubt the Hippae have been at her."

"You know about that!"

"Seen a bit of it when the bons come in with broken bones or bitten-off appendages. They don't respond normally, so I tell them I'm testing their reflexes when I'm actually looking at their heads. Strangeness there, usually, though I'm not allowed to do anything about it. Not with the bons. They choose to keep their warps and twists, however strange it makes them."

"We don't want Stella twisted!"

"Didn't think you did. Didn't think so for a moment. May not be able to straighten her totally, though. There's limits to what we can do."

"Should we ship her out?"

"Well, young man, at the moment I'd say she's safer here, warped or not, than she may be out there. You'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"

"What do you mean?" He stared, unwilling to understand.

"Plague," she said. 'We're getting a pretty good idea of what's going on out there."

"Do you know anything about it? What causes it? Do you know if there's any here?"

"None here. That I can be almost sure of. Why didn't you ask us medical people? Didn't you think we'd be capable of doing anything? Me, for instance. I've got degrees in molecu-bio and virology from the University at Semling Prime. I studied immunology on Repentance. I could have been working on this." She turned an open, curious face toward him. "The word is you've been trying to find out in secret."

"It was secret," he whispered. "To keep the Moldies from knowing. If they knew … "

She considered this, her face turning slowly white as she realized what he meant. "They'd bring it here? Purposely?"

"If they found out, yes. If they once knew."

"My God, boy!" She laughed bitterly. "Everybody knows."

Everyone knew, the doctor said, and it seemed she told only the truth. Everyone knew there was plague. Everyone knew there might be Moldies already on Grass. Everyone knew there was a trail half a mile wide out there in the grasses, ending next to the swamp forest, which all at once seemed a fragile and penetrable curtain rather than the impassable barrier they had always relied upon. Hysteria mounted as the talk gathered both volume and speculative intensity, here and there, about the town.