The Arbai ruin on Grass is, in most respects, like all Arbai ruins: enigmatic, recently abandoned — in terms of archaeologic time — and speaking of some mystery which man can feel without comprehending. Other cities of the Arbai, those found elsewhere, are populated by wind and dust and a scattering of Arbai bones. So few Arbai remains have been found in those other cities that man has questioned why, with such a meager population, the cities should have been so large. They are large in terms of size, of perimeter, if not in terms of height or mass. They sprawl. Their much-crafted streets curve and recurve; their carved housefronts arc gently in concurrence. No vehicles have ever been found in any of the cities. These people walked or ran about their mysterious business, whatever it may have been.
Each city has a library. Each has a mysterious structure in the town square which is identified variously as a sculpture or a religious icon. Outside each city are other enigmatic mechanisms which are thought to be garbage disposers or crematories. A few have suggested they might be transportation devices, no ships having ever been found. Some people think they may be all three. If they are furnaces, the bodies of the inhabitants of the cities could have been burned, which would explain the sparse scattering of remains. Equally well, the inhabitants might have moved on somewhere else. The diggers and theoreticians cannot agree upon either alternative, though they have argued learnedly for generations.
In the more representative Arbai cities only a few whole skeletons have been found, always in ones or twos behind closed doors, as though those Arbai who had stayed behind after the others had gone were too few to attend to the obsequies of departure. Not so upon Grass.
On Grass bodies lie by the hundreds in the houses, in the streets, in the library and the plaza. Everywhere the Green Brothers dig, they find mummified remains.
Most of the digging over the years has been done by strong young men who have had little interest in what they uncovered. Inevitably, however, there have been a few who found themselves fascinated and enthralled by the ancient walls, the ancient artifacts, the ancient bodies. Some few have willingly given their lives to this work, applying all their intelligence to it. Sometimes there have been two or three of these fanatics at a time.
But only one man is currently focusing his intelligence upon the Arbai. He, like others before him, has learned to hide his genuine interest from those in authority. Brother Mainoa, once a miserable young acolyte of Sanctity, long since exiled and grown to suck-toothed age, to the shaggy gray locks and the wrinkled eye-pockets of an elder though to none of the honors some find in that estate; Brother Mainoa, like his predecessors an amateur, a lover of his work, has found his heart’s home amid these ancient stones. He has come to consider these trenchlike streets his own, these his dwellings and plazas, these his shops and libraries, though there is nothing in any of them that he can use or believes he will ever truly understand. Mainoa has uncovered almost half of the Arbai bodies himself. He has named them all. He lives out most of his life among them. They have become his friends, though not his only friends.
Of an evening, Brother Mainoa sometimes went away from the dig to a nearby copse where he could sit on a kneed-up root with his evening pipe, leaning against the trunk of the tree as he talked to the air. Tonight he reclined on his accustomed root with a sigh. His bones hurt. Not unusual. Most nights his bones hurt and some mornings, as well. Sleeping in barely heated quarters on a sack stuffed with grass didn’t help much, though he’d been less achy since he’d fixed the roof. He took a deep puff of fragrant smoke, let it out slowly, then spoke, as though to himself.
“The purple grass, now, not that Cloak of Kings stuff but the lighter purple with the blue bloom on it. that goes well with the rose. Tests out a complete protein mixed about two to one, very sustaining. Flavor’s nothing to proclaim at daily prayers, but it’ll come, it’ll come.”
A sound as of some huge, interested purring came from the tree, high above the old man’s head.
“Well, of course the yellowgrass is the old standby, just before I left the Friary last time to come down here to the dig, Elder Brother Laeroa told me he’d improved on it. I don’t know whether to believe that or not; it’d be hard to do. Yellowgrass is almost perfect as it is, just that there’s so little of it. It wants the tall orange stem on the sun side of it and something lower, like little green or middle ’zure, on the shade side, the blessed angels know why, but that’s the way it is. Elder Laeroa says he’s tempted to plant it in stripes and see how it does, but that’d stick out like a sore thumb…”
The purring again, with a note of interrogation.
“Of course they watch us,” sighed Brother Mainoa. “Listen to the young Brothers, the cloud crawlers, the ones that wallow around up on that net among the towers. Listen to them tell it. What they see is eyes out there in the grass, staring at the Friary. Of course they watch us. That’s what makes it so hard finding things out.”
Nothing from above. Brother Mainoa risked a look straight up, seeing nothing but the pale sky through a thatch of twig and leaf, one star pricking out at the zenith, like a single sequin dropped from the skirt of a careless angel. A little to his left, so high that it caught the final rays of the sun with a silken glimmer, he could see a few strands of the net among the towers at the Friary itself, just over the horizon.
“Talking to yourself again, Brother?” said a reproving voice. Brother Mainoa started. The figure under the neighboring tree was half hidden in shadow. The voice was that of Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi, deputy head of the office of Security and Acceptable Doctrine at the Friary, and what the blazing hell was he doing down here at the dig!
“Just muttering, Elder Brother,” Mainoa murmured as he rose and stood respectfully, wondering if the man had followed him, and if so, how long he’d been standing there. “Muttering about the dig, trying to figure it out.”
“Sounded like gardening to me, Brother.”
“Well, yes. That, too. Trying out effects in my head, so to speak.”
i"Bad habit to get into, Brother Mainoa. Disruptive of the silence and demeanor of the order. Clinging to such bad habits is probably why you’re still assigned to digging up ruins rather than to the more dignified duties your age would warrant. If you’d behaved properly, you’d have been assigned to a desk job back at the Friary a long time ago.”
“Yes, Elder Brother,” said Brother Mainoa obediently while thinking something not at all obedient about those who were assigned to desk jobs at the Friary. “I’ll try to curb the habit.”
“See that you do. I wouldn’t want to call you up before Eldest Brother Jhamlees Zoe. Eldest Brother Jhamlees takes his Doctrine very seriously.”
At least that was the truth. Jhamlees Zoe was too recently arrived to have calmed down yet. Still trying to find something on Grass to convert. Mainoa sighed. “Yes, Elder Brother.”
“I came down here to tell you you’re assigned to escort duty. We have a recalcitrant acolyte coming in from Sanctity. Brother Shoethai and I brought a car down from the Friary for you to use when you pick him up tomorrow morning.”
Brother Mainoa bowed obediently and kept his mouth shut. Elder Brother Fuasoi belched and rubbed his stomach reflectively. “Boy had less than a year to go and he went jerky. Lost his demeanor and had a fit in refectory, so I’m told. He traveled under his birth name. Rillibee Chime. Think up a Green Friar name for him.”
“Yes, Elder Brother.”
“The ship will be in early, so be ready. And no more talking to yourself.” Brother Fuasoi rubbed at his belly again before he started off.
Brother Mainoa bowed humbly at Fuasoi’s retreating back and hoped Fuasoi’s belly would kill him soon. Shithead, he thought. All from Acceptable Doctrine were shitheads. And so was Elder Jhamlees Zoe, the mad proselytizer, cast away here on Grass with nobody to convert and going slowly crazy because of it. Nothing between their ears but excrement or they’d know what was really here on Grass. Anyone with any sense could see… purr was back above, this time full of quiet amusement. “You’ll get me in big trouble,” muttered Brother Mainoa. “Then what will you have to purr about?”
The hundred-square-mile area which the aristocrats called Commoner-Town was divided into two parts by a precipitous, convoluted knob of stone which was called, half in jest, Grass’s Only Mountain, or Gom. The mountain extended east and west in an uninterrupted wall, a sheer-faced outcropping that ran down on both sides to lose itself in the depths of the swamp forest, making an effective barricade between the permanent and transient. Craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and their families lived and worked north of the barrier in an area they called Commons, centered on the town. The area south of the wall, though largely sloping pastureland, contained the port and all its appurtenances.
Appurtenances included, adjacent to the port on the east, a district containing warehouses for the storage of goods being transhipped, hay barns for winter feed of Commons’ livestock, various respectable shops and amusements run by local citizens, the Port Hotel, and the hospital. This area, including the port itself, was called the Commercial District.
Also included was an area on the west side of the port, where buildings blazoned with tawdry glitter stood along Portside Road, where the sensees stayed open around the clock and where visitors routinely stepped over bodies without worrying much about it. Not many of the bodies were dead; few of them were seriously wounded; some of them were still busily engaged. The crowded buildings led an indefinable stink made up of drugs, dirt, and various biological exudates. This disreputable area took its name from its road and was called simply Portside.
In addition to the Commercial District and Portside, the southern area contained about forty square miles of common hay meadow and grazing land, sloping on the east, south, and west from the high plateau of the port down to the swamp forest.
Connecting the port areas and Commons through a notch cut through the wall of Gom was Grass Mountain Road, a well-traveled thoroughfare which ran along the east side of the peak past the order station and the tall, solid gates occasionally used to block all traffic. It was not unknown for freighter crews to emerge from Portside establishments in the waning hours of the night determined to seek the extraordinary pleasure that comes from disrupting the sleep of ordinary people. Under such conditions, the gates were shut. Usually, however, traffic moved along Grass Mountain Road between port and Commons with no hindrance.
The port was busy, far busier than the planetary population could have warranted on its own behalf. Grass lay at a topological crossroads, an accessible destination in qua-space that coincided with a planet in real-space, and this alone made it valuable. The aristocrats, isolated on their estancias and concerned with other matters, had never considered how advantageous Grass’s location was. They would have been amazed to learn that the wealth of Grass was not, as they continued to believe, concentrated in the estancias, but was in fact held in off-planet banks by a sizable fraction of the people of the town. Few bons ever came to Commoner Town, and if they came at all, they came no farther than the merchants’ offices. The residents of Commons who went to the estancias kept their mouths shut about town business. What the bons thought of as eternally true regarding their own social and economic superiority, Commons had long since discarded in favor of a more pragmatic view. Without the aristocrats becoming more than superficially aware of it, the Commercial District had gradually become a major transshipment point offering temporary lodging to sizable numbers of travelers.
While waiting for a connecting ship, transients staying at the Port Hotel often went into Commons in pursuit of local color. Sellers of grass cloth and grass pictures and cleverly woven multihued grass baskets shaped like fantastic birds or fish did a brisk business. The purchase of some such gimcrack was as close as any of the transients would come to seeing the reality of Grass. The aristocrats had forbidden aircar tours over the prairies. At one time the Port Hotel had offered tours into the edges of the swamp forest, but after a boatload of influential persons had failed to return, the tours had been discontinued. The only sightseeing was in Commons, which meant a constant easy flow of traffic along the road. Townees were not surprised to see new faces.
Thus, when Ducky Johns stopped early one morning at the Order Station with a beautiful girl in tow, the officer thought no more of it than that some off-worlder had escaped from the Port Hotel and fallen into questionable company. Not that Ducky Johns was a bad sort. She and Saint Teresa were the madams of the two largest sensee houses in Portside, and they often traveled into Commons with their housekeepers and cooks. Ducky was usually at the top of the list of contributors to any charitable cause, if Saint Teresa didn’t have his name there first. Ducky’s machines were well maintained and seldom damaged anyone other than superficially, and none of her girls or boys or genetically altered whatsits had ever tried to kill any of the customers.
’’What’s this, Ducky?” the officer, James Jellico, asked. He was a husky and muscular man of middle years, covered with the misleading layer of plushy flesh which had earned him his nickname. “Tell good old Jelly what you’ve got there.”
“Damned if I know,” replied Ducky, sketching helplessness with both shoulders, the flounces on her tent-dress quivering in response to the mountain of shivering flesh beneath. “I found it on my back porch, under the clothesline.” Her flutelike voice made it a plaint, minor key. Her spangled eyebrows arched and the fringes of her tattooed eyelids drooped across her cheeks.
“You should’ve taken it back to the hotel,” Jelly said, giving the girl a hard look, which she returned with a wide, innocent eye.
“I tried,” Ducky said, sighing and pursing baby-lips, waving a baby-hand, the wrist braceleted with gems between tiny rolls of fat. “I’m not a fool, Jelly. I thought the same as you. Off a passenger ship, I thought, waiting around for another one. Wandered out of the Commercial District and got lost, I thought, just as you did. I asked it its name, but it didn’t have a thing to say for itself.”
“Mental, you think? Drugged up?”
“No sign of it.”
“Maybe it’s one of those, what you call ’em, de-personed things they sell on Vicious.”
“I looked and it isn’t. It’s been used some, but it hasn’t been tampered with, not the way they do there.”
“So what did the hotel say?”
“The hotel picky-pecked at its little keyboards and winky-winked at its little screens and told me to take it away. Not theirs, they said. They didn’t have any like this one, and if they did have, all theirs were accounted for.”
“I be damned.”
“Yes. Exactly what I said. Couldn’t be a Commons townee, could it?”
“You know every one of ’em as well as I do, Ducky. You know every face and every figure and if any of ’em puts on five pounds or insults his sister-in-law, you’d know and so would I.”
“Well, we both know what that leaves, Jelly That leaves the estancias, that does. Lots of unfamiliar faces out there. But that’s very puzzling indeed, isn’t it, my dear? If it had come from there, we’d have seen it.”
Aircars going between Commoner Town and the estancias were permitted to land only at the car terminal at the center of town or at the port. Any aircar landing at the port or in town would be observed. If this lovely creature with the strange eyes had turned up either place, surely somebody would have seen it.
“Off a ship?” hazarded Jellico.
“You know the silly regulations as well as I do, Jelly, dear. Passengers and crew off, fumigate at every port. How could this have lived on a ship while it was being debugged? No, it didn’t come off an empty ship. And it didn’t come from the hotel. And it doesn’t belong to me or to Saint Teresa or to any of the other bitty bit-players down in our place, no it doesn’t. I’m afraid it’s your problem, Jelly. Yours alone.” Ducky Johns giggled, the ruffles on the tent-dress quivering, a fleshquake in paroxysm.
Jellico shook his head. “Not mine, Ducky, old girl. I’ll get an image of her, then you take her back. You’ve got plenty of room in that place of yours. Put it in an empty room and feed it something. The stasis-tank is no place for that. Doesn’t need freezing. Needs tending. Better with you.”
“How trusting,” she simpered.
“Oh, you won’t sell her, Ducky. If she can’t talk, she can’t speak a consent waiver, and you know I’ll be comin’ down to look her over again next time I’m in Portside to check transience permits. And after I’ve had a chance to ask around. If this isn’t the damnedest thing…”
He went on looking at the girl as he set up the imager, she returning his gaze with her head turned sideways so that he saw only one eye, an eye in which no intelligence showed at all. And yet, when he had finished recording the creature’s image and Ducky held out her hand, the girl took it and smiled, turning the head upward and to one side again to cast a sidelong look.
Jelly shivered. There had been something strangely familiar about that look. Almost as strange as where the girl could have come from. Not through the swamp, that was certain. Not in an aircar. Not on a ship. Not from the hotel. And what did that leave?
“Damn all,” whispered Jelly to himself, watching old Ducky loading the girl back into her three-wheeled runner before turning it back toward Portside. “Damn all.”
The morning after the bon Damfels’ Hunt, Marjorie was up before light. She had slept little, and that little restlessly. When she slept she had dreamed of Hippae, and her dreams had been threatening. She had risen in the night to walk about the winter quarters, going into the children’s rooms, listening to them breathe. Anthony had been making little groaning sounds and shivering in his sleep, almost as El Dia Octavo had done that day she had seen the things on the ridge. Marjorie sat on the edge of his bed and ran her hands over his shoulders and chest, stroking him as she would have one of the horses, pulling the anxiety out of him until he lay motionless beneath her fingers. Dear Tony, little Tony, firstborn and much beloved. So like her that she could read every flicker of his expression, every line of his body. She yearned over him, wishing the disappointments away. They would come anyway. He was so like her that they must come, as day follows night.
In the neighboring room Stella slept soundly, rosy in the dim light, lips slightly parted. Each day made her resemblance to Rigo more pronounced — his passion, his pride, and a stunningly feminine version of his handsome face. Marjorie stood over her, not touching her. If Stella were touched she would come awake, full of questions, full of demands — questions Marjorie couldn’t answer, demands she couldn’t meet. Like Rigo, Marjorie thought to herself, just like Rigo. And like Rigo, Stella demanded that the world understand her even while she overwhelmed any effort to be understood.
“I tried to know Rigo,” Marjorie whispered to herself, an old litany, almost an apology, an excuse, something she said to herself again and again. Something she used to say to Father Sandoval before he had tried to mend what seemingly could not be mended by giving her penance after penance of obedience and submission until she had felt so trapped between them, she could not ask for forgiveness anymore. What she had told Father Sandoval was true, so far as it went. When she and Rigo had been newly married she had sometimes waited until Rigo was very tired or even asleep and then curled against him, pressed herself tight, wanting to feel him in his skin, feel all the muscles running there softly, getting to know the body of him as she did his face. He always responded, fiercely, passionately, hammering at her, until she was lost. There was no separate place she could stand to feel what he was like. If she stood apart from him, he accused her of being remote. If she came close, he swallowed her up.
“I tried to tell him,” she whispered, still looking at the sleeping Stella. “I tried to tell him, just the way I’ve tried to tell you.” And that, too, was true. She had tried to say, “Rigo, just hold me, gently. Let me learn the rhythm of your blood and your breath.” Or, “Stella, be still a moment. Just talk to me. Let us know one another.”
Marjorie remembered lying in the stable with her belly pressed close to a foal, quiet on the straw, the mare whickering above, soft nose pressing down on the foal and on the child-Marjorie both, until all three were same-scented, hay-scented, straw-smelling. Marjorie had felt the blood running in the foal’s veins, felt the smooth pull of the muscles over the bone. Then later, when the foal grew and they raced together, she understood what it was that moved and the spirit that moved it. She had wanted to learn Rigo like that, but he wouldn’t let her.
Stella was the same. Always passionate. Always in the depths or on the heights. Always give me, give me, give me, and never anything warm or gentle in return, never any simple affection. No hug. No little joke for the two of them to share. No peace. Not that Stella shared much with her father, either. No. If she was capable of affection at all, she had saved it all for her friend back home, the beatific Elaine.
Marjorie felt her own heart thudding away under her hand and smiled ruefully at herself. She was too old to feel this jealousy. It was not her heart that yearned toward Stella, it was her stomach, clenching now with an agony of helpless love which she could not show. Showing love to Stella was like showing meat to a half-wild dog. Stella would seize it and swallow it and gnaw its bones. Showing love to Stella was opening oneself up for attack.
“You don’t really love me. When I was little, you promised me a trip to Westriding, and I didn’t get to go!” This, the then sixteen-year-old Stella, rehearsing a grievance at least eight years old.
“You’ve been told a thousand times that Grandpa was ill. Stella. He was too sick to have company. He died not long after that.”
“You promised and then you decided all by yourself we shouldn’t go. You’re always saying we’ll do things and then we don’t. Now you’re dragging me off to this awful place, making me leave my friends without even asking me if I want to go! Why aren’t we more like a family? I wish I were Elaine’s sister. The Brouers don’t act like you do.”
“If she mentions the Brouers to me again,” Marjorie had said to Rigo, “I will strangle her.”
“They’re friends,” Rigo had replied, giving her a curious look. “They’re best friends. Why should you resent that?”
“I don’t resent that. I resent the Brouers being held up to me as a standard of perfection.”
“All kids think some other family is perfect,” he said.
“I never did.”
“Yes, but,” he had said, “you’re strange.”
“I’m strange,” she told herself now, looking down at the sleeping girl, wondering what it was about the Brouers that had evoked Stella’s admiration. What quality did the Brouer family have that attracted her? Family? What did Stella mean by family?
“I wish the Brouers were my family,” Stella had said dozens of times, stubbornly, without explaining, knowing she was hurting, wanting to hurt. “They do things together. I wish I had a family like that.”
“Well, we’ll have a chance to be a family on Grass, Stella. There won’t be anyone else around.” Not that Stella ever wanted to do what anyone else did. Not that isolation would change her.
Stella had clenched her jaw at that, threatening angrily not to come to Grass at all. For weeks before they left, Marjorie had been sure that Stella would approach her with the suggestion that she stay behind with the Brouers.
“Mother, I want to stay here in Sanctity with the Brouers. They’d like to have me stay.”
What would she have said? “Stella, that’s fine. I don’t want to go either. Neither does your father. I don’t feel right about leaving my poor people in St. Magdalen’s. Rigo doesn’t want to leave his clubs and his committees and his nights on the town with Eugenie on his arm. We’re going because we think we must, to save all of mankind. But there’s no real reason you have to go. Stay here and die of the plague, Stella. You and Elaine and her whole perfect family. I don’t care anymore.”
And she had repented her anger, confessed her anger — though not mentioning several other sins which weighed even more heavily — received absolution for it, only to feel it again. And now they were on Grass, and Marjorie still felt anger, still repented, still confessed, still wondered what she would do with Stella, who was as sulky and rebellious and unloving here as she had been at home.
“Why, Father?” she had asked. “Why is she like this? Why is Rigo like this?”
“You know why anyone… The church teaches…” His gentle old voice had begun one of its learned and inflexible perorations.
She had interrupted. “Sin. Even original sin. I know what it teaches. It teaches that a sin committed by people thousands of years ago descends to me. Through my cells. Through my DNA. Mixed in there, somehow, along with my heart and my lungs and my brain, and infected my daughter…”
He had cocked his head. “Marjorie, I’ve never thought that original sin is conveyed in the cells.”
“Where else does it come from? What else is there? The soul comes with the body, doesn’t it, Father? Sin comes with sex, doesn’t it? It isn’t just our souls in bed with each other, is it?”
Sanctity would say yes, the souls were in bed together. Sanctity said marriages lasted forever. Especially in heaven. Which wasn’t what Old Catholics believed. Thank God. When she was dead at least that would be over.
She had wept then, feeling it was all her own fault, somehow. Father Sandoval had patted her shoulder, unable to offer comfort, unable or unwilling to make her feel less guilty. Nothing had done that, not even all the work at St. Magdalen’s, which was supposed to be an expiation.
Marjorie left Stella’s room, shutting the door quietly behind her, her mind moving in old, familiar patterns. Perhaps when Stella was older, middle-aged, they could be friends. Stella would marry someone. She would separate herself from them, by distance, by time. She would have children. In time, they might be friends.
The thought made her pale, gasp, made her bend over the sick pain that struck her. There might be no time for any of that. All the sulkiness, the lack of joy — there might be no time for it to work itself out. There might not be time for Stella. There was no proof they were protected here on Grass. There was only the assumption, the hope. And the children couldn’t share even that. They couldn’t be told the real reasons for the assignment. Too dangerous. So said Sanctity, and Marjorie concurred. Tony might forget himself. Stella might rebel. Either might say something undiplomatic to one of the bons and the fate of humanity could hang upon that saying. Assuming. Assuming there was any truth to the rumor. Assuming there was really no plague here on Grass.
She sat frozen then, waiting for the morning to come, using the rote of prayer to calm herself.
As soon as light showed clearly above the grasses, Marjorie went down to the cavern where the horses were stabled. She needed to feel them, smell them, be assured of their familiar reality, their uncomplicated loyalty and affection. They did not throw her love back in her face; they repaid a little attention a thousand times over. She went from stall to stall, petting and stroking, handing out bits of sweet cookie she had saved for them, stopping at last at Quixote’s stall to peer in at him where he pawed the earth again and again, a nervous, begging gesture. She put her arms around him.
“My Quixote,” she told him. “Good horse. Wonderful horse.” She laid her face against his ebony muzzle, feeling the warm breath in her ear, for that instant forgetting Stella’s sulks and Rigo’s unfaithfulness and the Hippae and the hounds and the monsters that haunted her, the one called fox here, the one called plague elsewhere. “Let’s go out, out into the meadows.”
She did not bother to saddle him. This morning was not a time for schooling. This morning there would be only herself and Quixote, a togetherness more intimate than any other she knew. She wanted nothing between herself and his skin. She wanted to be able to reassure him with every muscle she had and take back his strength into herself. She lay along his neck as they went down from the cavern, along the curving way which led to the arena. The path went down along a winding defile, then up, topping a rise.
As they approached the rise, the horse’s skin quivered. He shook, silently, without even a whicker of protest, as though something deep within his great human-friend heart told him his only chance for continued life lay in making no sound. Only the breath came out of him like life leaving him Marjorie felt it, as she always felt the least movement he made She slid from his back in one fluid motion. Without going to the top of the rise, she knew what she would see there. Her stomach was in her throat, full of hot bile. She trembled as though half frozen. Still, one had to see. One had to know.
She pulled on the stallion’s shoulder. He had been trained to lie down, and he did it now, almost gladly, as though his legs would barely hold him. She stroked him once, for his comfort — or her own — then crawled on shivering arms and legs away, up the rise a little to one side of the path so that she could look down through the fringing grasses without being seen.
And they were there. Three of them, just as there had been three horses when she and Tony and Rigo had ridden here. Three Hippae doing dressage exercises, walking, trotting, cantering, changing feet to cross the arena on long diagonals. They did everything she had done with Octavo, did it casually, offhandedly, with a practiced ease, concluding with the three animals side by side, facing away from her, the saber tips of their neck barbs pointing at her like a glittering abatis, as threatening as drawn blades. Then they turned and looked up at the place where she was hidden, their dark eyes gleaming red in the light of dawn, soundless.
Amusement, she thought at first. A kind of mime. These Hippae had seen the humans and their horses and were amused at what these little off-world beasts had been doing with their human riders. She held the thought only fleetingly, only for a moment, trying to cling to it but unable to do so. They knew she was there. They knew she was watching. Perhaps they had timed this little exercise to coincide with her arrival…
It wasn’t amusement. Nothing in that red-eyed glare was amused. She did not stay to confront what it really was. She fled from the ridge as one in fear for her life, down to where the stallion lay as though he had been felled, urged him onto his trembling legs, and then half lay on his back as they first staggered then ran away, back to Opal Hill, back to human country, to add another horror to those she already knew.
What she had seen in those red eyes was mockery — mockery and something deeper. Something abiding and unforgiving. Malice.
James Jellico took himself home for lunch, as he often did. knowing his wife, Jandra, would be interested in the morning’s happenings. Jellico’s wife had no legs, and though she walked well enough on the elegant artificials he had obtained for her (a little bribery at the port, a little looking the other way when he was or, customs duty), she said it pained her to use the legs. There were implants one could use for the pain, but Jandra. who often said she didn’t like people fooling about with her head, preferred for the most part to wheel about the house in the half-person she had used since she was a child. About the house and the poultry yard as well. A third of the Jellys’ income came from homely Terran geese and ducks along with Semling szizz birds and fat, delicious wingless things from the planet Shame which Jandra called puggys.
He found his wife by the goose pen feeding greens to the geese, they gabbling and snatching grass fronds from one another and she humming to herself, as she did when content. “Ho, Jelly,” she greeted him “I’ve about decided to kill that one for dinner. She’s so smug it serves her right.”
The indicated goose succeeded in dragging the disputed shred of greens out of another’s beak and swallowing it, at the same time tipping her head to one side to get a good one-eyed goose-look at jelly. There was something in that cold, single-eyed stare, something in the line of beak and neck that shook him with a feeling which was at first deja vu and then horrified recognition.
“That girl,” he blurted. “She looked at me like that!” Then he had to tell her all about the girl and Ducky Johns and how strange it all was. “And it looked at me like that, tipped its head like that, as though it could see me better out of one eye than out of both. Like an animal.”
“Bird,” corrected Jandra.
“Bird or animal,” said Jelly patiently. “Any of ’em that don’t have what-you-call-it. Binocular vision. They’ll do that. Tip their heads to see you better.”
“Why do you say ‘it’ when it was a girl, Jelly. Why don’t you say ‘she’?”
“Habit, I guess. With those from Portside, he’s and she’s would be wrong as often as they’re right. They have he’s that look like she’s, and she’s that look like he’s, and it’s that look like either. I just say ‘it’ about them all.” He took the image file out of his pocket and put it in the imager, to show her.
Jandra shook her head, amazed at the ways of the world. She never tired hearing about them. Even simple things amazed her, though she was never shocked at the horrid ones. “I’ll have to go down to Ducky’s and see to this,” she announced in a tone which allowed no contradiction. She peered at the image, looking at the creature’s eyes. “It isn’t right something human and helpless should be left down there. Was there something wrong with the girl’s eyes?”
“Nothing I could see. Nothing wrong with any of it — her. Pretty, built nice, smooth hair and all. Just the face. Well, look at it.”
“What do you mean about her face, Jelly?”
“Empty,” he said after staring and thinking about it for a moment. “It looks just empty, that’s all.”