Some distance east of Opal Hill was a hidden cavern of the Hippae, one of many which could have been found on Grass if anyone had dared to look. Set deep into the hillside, its narrow openings shaded by great swaths of vermilion grasses which fell across the slender doors in gently moving curtains, the cavern was undergoing a periodic refurbishing. Arriving and departing at the northernmost slit were the creatures responsible, molelike migerers, diggers par excellence, scuttling now through the vermilion and the fuschia, out into the shorter. violet-colored grasses, their furry thigh-pockets full of loose earth recently scraped from the floor of the Hippae hall.
Inside that hall a shadowed emptiness was supported by pillars of rubbly stone, stones uncovered when the caverns were dug, each stone mortared into place with the adhesive which resulted from mixing migerer shit and earth. Marvelous creatures, the migerers — builders, almost engineers, certainly cave makers of no small talent who made similar, though smaller, caverns for themselves, each cavern linked to others by miles of winding tunnels.
In this great hall they blinked their squinty eyes, deep-pocketed in indigo fur, and chirped to one another in flute tones as they plodded across the cavern, scraping the high places into the low with urgent flat-edged claws, stamping the loose dirt down with the hard pads on their industrious hind feet.
A Hippae came into the cavern, striding on great tripartite hooves across the smoothed floor, quartering the cave again and again, nodding approval with his monstrous head, the teeth showing slightly where the lips drew back in a half snarl, the razorlike neck barbs making a dissonant clash as the beast tossed its head and bellowed at the ceiling.
The migerers affected not to notice, perhaps really did not notice. Nothing changed in their behavior. They still darted about under the very hooves of the prancing monster, scraping, packing, filling their furry pockets, and darting away into the grasses to dispose of this evidence of industry. Only when they were finished, when the floor was as smooth as their instinctive skills could make it, did they desist and fall to grooming round bellies and small tough feet, combing whiskers with curved ivory claws, blinking in the half light of the entrance slits. Then a whistle, a plaint on the wind as from some bird calling in mild distress, and they were gone, away, vanished in the grasses as though they had never been. In the cavern behind them the Hippae continued its slow parade, bellowing now and again to make the cavern ring, alone in majesty surveying and approving the work which had been done.
A second monster called in response, entering the cavern to begin a quartering of its own. Then came a third and fourth, then many, prancing in intricate patterns upon the cavern floor, interweaving and paralleling, twos and fours and sixes becoming twelves and eighteens, the files of them turning and braiding in complicated design, hooves falling as precisely as artisans’ hammers into the tracks themselves had made.
Not far off, in Opal Hill village. Dulia Mechanic turned restlessly on her bed, half wakened by the subterranean thunder. “What, what’s that?” she murmured, still mostly asleep.
“The Hippae are dancing,” said her young husband Sebastian Mechanic, wide awake, for he had been listening to the rhythmic surge for an hour or more while she had breathed quietly beside him. “Dancing,” he reasserted, not sure whether he believed it or not. Besides, he had something else on his mind.
“How do you know? Everyone says that, but how do you know?” she whined, still not awake.
“Someone saw them, I suppose,” he said, wondering for the first time how that particular someone had seen what he claimed he had seen. Sebastian himself would rather face certain death than sneak around in the tall grasses, spying on Hippae. Without identifying the source, he murmured, “Someone, a long time ago,” and went back to thinking what he had been thinking of for a long time now, about those at Opal Hill.
Out in the night, in the cavern where all the thunder came from, the Hippae moved their anfractuous quadrille along to its culmination.
Suddenly, without any sense of climax, it was over. The Hippae left the cavern as they had entered it, by ones and twos, leaving a pattern intricate and detailed as a tapestry trampled deep into the floor behind them. To them who made it, it had meaning, a meaning otherwise expressible only by a long sequence of twitches of hide and particular blinks of eye. The ancient Hippae language of gesture and quiver and almost undetectable movement was useless for this particular purpose, but the Hippae know another language as well. In the other language, learned long ago from another race, this design stamped deep into their cavern floor was their way of writing — and thereby giving notice of — a certain inexorable word.
In the stables at Opal Hill, the horses were awake, listening as they had listened many nights, most nights, since they had come to Grass. Millefiori whickered to the stallion, Don Quixote, and he in turn to Irish Lass next to him, the whispering rattle running down the length of the stalls and then back again, like a roll-taking. “Here,” each seemed to say. “Still here. Nothing yet.”
But there was something. Something they had begun to be more than remotely aware of. One of those shadows one shies at, one of those bridges one will not walk over. A thing like that, full of menace, which the riders usually do not understand. Most of them. The woman, she understood. She always understood. If there was a thing like that, she never insisted. Never. And in return, each gave her total trust. When she rode them at the high fence, the fence one could not see over, with no knowledge at all of what might be beyond, each one trusted that she would bring them safely down on the other side. They knew it as trust. She would not betray them, not one of them.
Not that they thought in words. They did not have the words. It was more an understanding of the way things were. The rewards, the threats. That thing out there on the ridge that day. This noise, moving in the night, this noise that tried to crawl into ears, into heads, to take over everything. These were threats.
But there was something else abroad in the night, and that… that was something they could not identify as either a threat or a reward. It fought against the horrid noise; it kept the insinuating thoughts away. And yet, it came no closer, it offered no hay, it stroked no necks. It was simply there, like a breathing wall, a thing they did not understand at all.
So the whicker ran, left to right, then back again. “Here. Still here. All right. Still alive. Nothing…”
“Nothing yet.”
Jandra Jellico did as she had threatened and went over to Portside in her half-person to visit with Ducky Johns. She’d met Ducky before and quite liked her, despite the business she was in, which Jandra didn’t altogether approve of. Pleasure was pleasure, had been for ages, and people would seek it out. Some of the ways they sought it, though, in Jandra’s opinion, were not quite tasteful.
Still, she made nothing of that as she sat in Ducky Johns’ private parlor, sipping tea and staring at the girl who sat on the carpet, humming to herself. Itself. Whatever. When the girl got an itch, up came the skirt and the hand scratched, wherever the itch might be. No inhibitions at all, no more than a cat, licking itself where it needed it.
“My, my,” Jandra said. “You can’t keep her here, Ducky.”
“Well, and who wanted to?” Ducky sulked, waving her tiny hands in circles to express innocent annoyance. “It was Jelly, your own Jelly, made me bring her back here. She’s useless to me, dear. Can’t sell her. Who’d want her? Needs to be trained before she’s any use at all.”
“Does she potty?” Jandra wanted to know.
“Except for eating, that’s all she does, but potty she does. Like my wallo-pup, whines when she needs to go.”
“Have you tried—”
“Haven’t tried anything at all. No time. This business keeps me at it, day on day. No time for fooling with that!” The little hands waved again, then folded themselves into an obdurate lump buried deep in Ducky’s lap. “Tell me you’ll take her away, Jandra. Do say so. Anyone else, your Jelly would argue.”
“Oh, I’ll take her,” Jandra agreed. “Or send for her, rather. But it’s, the strangest thing. The very strangest thing. Where’d she come from?”
“Wouldn’t we like to know that, my dear? Wouldn’t we all?”
Jandra sent for the girl that afternoon. Thereafter she spent a good part of several days teaching the girl to keep her skirts down and to eat with her fingers instead of burying her face in the food and to go potty by herself without whining. When she’d done that much, she called Kinny Few on the tell-me and invited her over, and the two of them sipped tea and nibbled at Kinny’s seed cakes while they watched the girl playing with a ball on the floor.
“I thought you might know who she is,” Jandra said. “Or who she was. Surely she hasn’t always been like this.”
Kinny thought hard about it. There was something in the tilt of the girl’s head that reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t say who. No one in Commons, that was certain. “She must have come in on a ship,” she offered, having already been told that this was impossible. “Must have.”
“I keep thinking so, too,” Jandra agreed. “But Jelly says no. She was just there, on Ducky Johns’ back porch, and that’s it. Like she hatched there. No more memory than an egg.”
“What are you going to do with her?” Kinny wanted to know.
Jandra shrugged. “See if I can find her a home, I guess. Pretty soon, too. Jelly’s losing patience, having her around.”
Actually, it was not Jelly’s patience he was in danger of losing. Devotedly fond of Jandra though he was (and they two with an understanding about fidelity), the proximity of the girl’s body, lovely and uninhibited as some half-tamed beast, was leading him to worrisome desires.
“A week,” he told Jandra. “I’ll give you a week.” He thought he’d probably be able to control himself at least that long.
Rigo was determined to have a diplomatic reception. He was much encouraged in this by Eugenie, who was tired of the company of Opal Hill but who had no status which would allow her to go elsewhere. She could not even go to the Hunts. After the bon Damfels’ Hunt the Yrariers had observed three other Hunts; twice as a family, once with Fathers Sandoval and James along as guests. It was quite enough, as Tony said, to know that they were all alike. They had declined to observe more, and by doing so had confirmed the bons’ prejudice about them. By that time, however, Rigo had other things to think about. Some of the furnishings for the summer quarters had arrived along with Roald Few. who promised that everything would be completed in two weeks’ time.
“Draperies, rugs, furnishings, image projectors for the walls — everything. Everything elegant and of the highest quality.”
“Rigo wants to have a reception for the bons,” Marjorie told him.
“Hmmph,” snorted Persun Pollut.
“Now, Pers,” chided Roald. “The ambassador doesn’t know. During Hunt season, Lady Westriding, he’s unlikely to get anybody but second leaders and lower. People who don’t ride. Those who ride wouldn’t even consider coming, don’t you see?”
“We’d get Eric bon Haunser but not the Obermun?”
“That’s right. You’d get nobody at all from the bon Damfels’ except Figor. Obermum won’t go anywhere Obermun doesn’t. That isn’t done. All the rest of the family rides, what’s left of it.”
Marjorie stared at him, evaluating the open countenance before her. The man seemed without guile, and thus far he had treated her fairly. “I need information,” she said at last in a very quiet voice.
Roald dropped his own voice to a confidential level. “I am at your service, Lady Westriding.”
“The bon Damfels were in mourning when we were there.”
“Yes.”
“They’d lost a daughter. In a hunting accident. Eric bon Haunser has lost his legs, also, so he said, in a hunting accident. When I looked about me after that first Hunt I saw more biotic appendages than I would have seen in a year at home. I would like to understand these accidents.”
“Ah. Well.” Roald shuffled his feet.
“There are various kinds of accidents,” offered Persun in his soft, dry lecturer’s voice. “There is falling off. There is getting oneself skewered. There is offending a hound. And there is vanishment.” He said this last almost in a whisper, and Roald nodded agreement.
“So we understand, Lady. The servants at the estancias are kinfolk of ours. They see things; they overhear things; they tell us. We put two and two together to make forty-four, when we must.”
“Falling off?” she asked. Riders fell off all the time. Rarely was it fatal.
“Followed by trampling. If a rider falls off, he or she is trampled into the grasses. Until nothing is left, you understand.”
Marjorie nodded, feeling sick.
“If you’ve seen a Hunt, you’ve seen how a rider might get skewered. It doesn’t happen often, surprisingly. The young ones ride simulators for days at a time, learning to stay out of the way of those horny blades. But still, once in a while someone faints or a mount stops too suddenly and the rider falls forward.”
Marjorie wiped her mouth, tasting bile.
“Offending a hound usually results in the hunter having an arm or leg or hand or foot or two bitten off when he dismounts at the end of the Hunt.”
“Offending…?”
“Don’t ask us, Lady,” replied Persun. “There aren’t any hounds in Commons. They can’t get into town, and nobody with any sense goes far out into the grasses where hounds’re likely to be. Close to the villages is fine, no hounds there, but farther out… those that go don’t come back. We really don’t know what would offend a hound. So far as we can tell, the bons don’t know either”
“And vanishment?”
“Just that. Somebody starts out on the Hunt and doesn’t come back. The mount disappears, too. Usually a young rider it happens to. Girls, usually. Rarely, a boy.”
“Someone at the rear of the Hunt,” she said in sudden comprehension. “So the others wouldn’t notice?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to the bon Damfels girl?”
“Same as happened to Janetta bon Maukerden last fall, her that Shevlok bon Damfels was so set on. Vanishment. The way I know is, my brother Canon is married to a woman who’s got a cousin, Salla, and she’s a maid at the bon Damfels. Practically raised Dimity from a baby. Last fall Dimity thought a hound was watching her, and she told Rowena. Next time out, same thing. Rowena and Stavenger had a set-to, and Rowena kept the girl from riding any more Hunts that season. This spring, Stavenger took a hand and made the girl go out again First spring Hunt! Poof, she was gone”
“Dimity, did you say? How old was she?”
“Diamante bon Damfels. Stavenger and Rowena’s youngest. Somewhere around seventeen in Terran terms.”
“The bon Damfels had five children?”
“They had seven, Lady. They lost two others when they were young riders. Trampled, I think. I’m sorry not to remember their names. Now it’s just Amethyste and Emeraude and Shevlok and Sylvan.”
“Sylvan,” she said, remembering him from the first Hunt. He had not been at any of the others they had witnessed. “But he wouldn’t come to a reception, because he rides.”
Roald nodded.
“There is the lapse.” murmured Persun.
“I’d forgotten the lapse,” said Roald in a tone of annoyance. “Here I am almost ten Grassian years old and I’d forgotten the lapse.”
“Lapse?”
“Every spring there’s a time when the mounts and the hounds disappear. Far’s I know, no one knows where they go. Mating time, perhaps? Or whelping time. Or something of the kind. Sometimes people hear a great lot of baying and howling going on. Lasts a week or a little more.”
“When?” she asked.
“When it happens. No exact time. Sometimes a little earlier in the year, sometimes a little later. But always in spring.”
“But doesn’t everyone on the planet know when it happens?”
“Everyone out here in the grasses, Lady. Tssf, in Commons we’d pay it no attention. Out here, though — yes. Everyone knows. If no way else, they go out to Hunt that day and no mounts or hounds show up. They know.”
“So, if we sent an invitation, saying — oh, ‘On the third night of the lapse you are invited to…’ ”
“It’s never been done,” muttered Persun.
“So, who’s to say it shouldn’t be?” Roald responded. “If your good husband is determined, my Lady, then it would be a thing to try. Otherwise, wait until summer when the hunting stops. Then you can have your reception among the summer balls.”
Rigo did not want to wait until summer. “That’s over a year and a half. Terran,” he said. “We have to start getting some information from the bons, Marjorie. There’s no time to wait. We’ll get everything ready and send the invitation as soon as the place looks decent. Undoubtedly I’ll hear from bon Haunser if we’ve overstepped some barrier of local custom ”
The invitations were dispatched by tell-me to all estancias. Surprisingly, at least to Marjorie, acceptances were prompt and fairly widespread. She got a bad case of stage fright and went up into the summer rooms to reassure herself.
The chill rooms had been transformed. Though still cool, they glowed with color. From the greenhouse in the village — which had been half ruined until Rigo had ordered it rebuilt — had come great bouquets of off-world bloom. Terran lilies and Semling semeles combined with plumes of silver grass to make huge, fragrant mounds reflected endlessly in paired mirrors. Marjorie had provided holo-records of valued artworks the Yrariers had left behind, and duplicates of the originals glowed at her from the walls and from pedestals scattered among the costly furniture.
“This is a beautiful table,” she said, running her fingers across satiny blue-shadowed wood.
“Thank you, Lady,” said Persun. “My father made it.”
“Where does he get wood, here on Grass?”
“Imports much of it. Much though they talk of tradition, now and then the bons want something imported and new. Things he makes for us, though, he cuts from the swamp forest. There are some lovely trees in there. There’s this wood, the one we call blue treasure, and there’s one that’s pale green in one light and a deep violet in another. Glume wood, that is.”
“I didn’t know anyone could get into the swamp forest.”
“Oh, we don’t go in. There’s a hundred miles of forest edge, and these are trees that grow at the edge. Even so, we don’t take many. I’m using some native woods in the panels for your room.” He had spent hours designing the panels for her study. He longed for her to praise them.
“Are you, now,” she mused. Outside, on the balustraded terrace, a slender figure passed restlessly to and fro: Eugenie. Forlorn. Childlike. Head drooping like a wilted flower. Marjorie fingered her prayer book and reminded herself of certain virtues. “Will you excuse me a moment, Persun?”
He bowed wordlessly, and she left him there while he tried to give the appearance of not staring after her.
“Eugenie,” Marjorie greeted her with self-conscious kindness. “I’ve seen very little of you since we arrived.” She had seen nothing of her at home, but this was a different world and all comparisons were odious.
The other woman flushed. Rigo had told her to stay away from the big house. “I shouldn’t be here now. I thought I might catch a ride into town with the merchant, that’s all.”
“Something you need?”
Eugenie flushed again. “No. Nothing I need. I just thought I’d spend a day looking at the shops. Maybe stay at the Port Hotel overnight and see the entertainment…”
“It must be dull for you here.”
“It is bloody dull,” the woman blurted, speaking before she thought. She flushed a deep, embarrassed red, and her eyes filled with tears.
This time Marjorie flushed. “That was tactless of me, Eugenie. Listen. I know you’re not one for horses or things like that, but why don’t you see if they have some kind of pets for sale in Commons?”
“Pets?”
“I don’t know what they might have. Dogs, maybe. Or kittens. Birds of some kind, or something exotic. Little animals are very amusing. They take up a lot of time.”
“Oh, I have so much of that,” Eugenie cried, almost angrily. “Rigo… well, Rigo’s been very busy.” Marjorie looked out across the balustrade of the terrace toward the multiple horizons of that part of the grass garden called the Fading Vista. Each ridge partly hid the one behind, each one was a paler color than the one before, until the horizon hill faded into the sky almost indistinguishably. She was amused to make a mental connection: In such fashion had her original animosity toward Eugenie faded, retreated, become merely a hazy tolerance almost indistinguishable from tentative acceptance, “We’ll be having our first official party soon. Perhaps you’ll meet some people…” her voice faded away like the horizon line before her. Who could Eugenie meet, after all? The children despised her. The servants thought her a joke. No one among the bons would associate with her. Or would they?
“There are particular people I want you to meet,” Marjorie said thoughtfully. “A man named Eric bon Haunser. And Shevlok, the eldest son of the bon Damfels.”
“Trying to get rid of me?” Eugenie said with childish spite. “Introducing me to men.”
“Trying to assure that you have some company,” Marjorie said mildly. “Trying to assure that we all do. If some of the men find you fascinating, you and Stella and maybe me — though that wouldn’t do to admit officially — perhaps they’ll frequent the place. We’re here to find something out, after all.”
“Don’t talk as though I knew anything about it. I don’t. Rigo didn’t tell me anything!”
“Oh, my dear,” said Marjorie, more shocked than she could admit even to herself. “But he must have! Why would you have come, otherwise?”
To which Eugenie merely stared at her, eyes wide and wondering. This woman married to Roderigo Yrarier, this woman, his wife, mother of his children, this woman… She didn’t know? “Because I love him,” she said at last, almost whispering “I thought you knew.”
“Well so do I,” Marjorie replied shortly, believing that she did. “But even so, I would not have come to Grass had I not known why.”
Though Eugenie had not particularly appreciated Marjorie’s advice about pets, she had heard it. Normally she would have ignored it as a matter of principle because it came from Rigo’s wife and Rigo would be unlikely to appreciate his mistress taking his wife’s advice about anything. As it was, however, Eugenie could not afford to ignore anything that would alleviate the blanketing boredom which afflicted her. At home there had been restaurants and parties and amusing places to go to. There had been shopping and clothes and hairdressers to talk with. There had been gossip and laughter. And running through all that, like a thread of gold through the floating chiffon of her life, there had been Rigo. Not that he’d been around a lot. He hadn’t been. But for a long time he had been there, in the background, providing whatever she needed, making her feel treasured and important. Men such as he, Rigo had explained, with all his important work on committees and clubs and such, needed women such as she as a necessary relief from the tiresome but urgent works they were called upon to do. This made women such as she especially important. Eugenie thought of this often. Men had told her many sweet things about herself, but never before that she was important. It was the nicest compliment she had ever received.
And so she was here, and so was Rigo, and for all they saw of one another she might as well have stayed on Terra with some other protector — which she had, quite truthfully, considered. Had there been another man immediately available, she would probably have chosen to stay. Weighing the relative inconvenience, however, of finding a new man or submitting to packing and coldsleep, she had decided that finding the new man would be more trouble. Not so much finding him but learning about him. His little ways. His favorite foods and smells and colors and little magics in bed. All men believed they had their own magics in bed.
And then, too, she did love Rigo, When she had said that to Marjorie, it hadn’t been a lie. Of all the men she had loved, she probably loved Rigo most. He had been most fun.
But Rigo was hardly fun at all in this place. When love wasn’t fun, it was just boring and dull and achy. People had to have things that were fun for them. What Marjorie had said about pets was probably the best advice anyone was going to give her, even though it had come from Rigo’s wife.
Eugenie begged a ride from Roald Few to Commoner Town, enjoying the trip because of all the sweet things he and the other men said to her. It was Roald himself who told her to look up Jandra Jellico. “If you’re looking for something little and petful and fun to have, Jandra may have it or she’ll know who has. She’s got most everything in fur and feathers and pretty skin, Jandra does.” He warned her, too, that Jandra would be in a half-person, as though Eugenie was the kind of person to make unkind remarks or stare.
And Jandra, after Eugenie had been with her for half an hour, knew everything about her just as Roald had. Knew and appreciated and felt a bit sorry for, while at the same time blessing her guardian spirits that Eugenie had come along just now to solve her dilemma. “I’ve got just the thing for you,” she said. “Something I got from Ducky Johns, down in Portside. Wasn’t right Ducky should keep it down there among the sensees and the profligates, so I had her bring it here to me. I keep it in the spare bedroom.”
She brought it out, the slender prettiness of it, the long-haired sweetness of it, the sidling, goose-eyed gaze of it, all done up in girl skin and girl smell and dressed in a pretty smock which it had learned to keep down. “I call her the Goosegirl,” said Jandra, not saying why. Eugenie wasn’t an awl-eyed one like Jandra’s own dear Jelly, to see what others hadn’t noticed, that almost mindless, birdish stare turned on each and every one as though to ask the world what there was to be afraid of out there, knowing already in its little bird mind that there was something.
“It’s a girl,” said Eugenie, uncomplaining, but definite. “Not an animal.”
“Well there’s one opinion and another about that,” said Jandra, squeezing the end of her nose between her fingers as she did sometimes while puzzling out the ethics of a situation. “It doesn’t know its name. It can’t dress itself. It is potty trained, for which I’m more than grateful, so there’s one small thing making it better than a puppy, which I haven’t one of nor nobody else I know, so no matter. It’ll sit brushing at its hair for the better part of a day, and it has a good appetite for most anything you’d eat yourself and I’ve halfway taught it to eat with a spoon. Sometimes it makes a noise as if it was about to say something. Not often, mind you, and it surprises itself when it does.”
“You should say ‘she,’ ” corrected Eugenie. The pretty thing was as female as she herself was, and very much of her own size.
“Well, there’s one opinion and another about that, too. Still, I’d be inclined to agree with you, and I call her ‘she’ to myself, don’t you know. It’s a playful bit of a thing, too. Likes to roll a ball back and forth or play with a bobble on the end of a string.”
“Like a kitten,” purred Eugenie. “Do you suppose they’ll let me keep her?”
Well, and if they wouldn’t, it would be their problem, Jandra thought, not her own, which the Goosegirl had been up until now, her or it of the pretty hair and lovely little body and sweet face without two notions to jostle one another in her head. Last evening she’d seen Jelly looking at the girl in that certain way, and no time would be too quick to get rid of her, ethics or no. Still, if Eugenie had been someone else — Marjorie Westriding, say — Jandra would have felt uncomfortable giving her the Goosegirl as a pet. Someone like the Lady Westriding — Jandra had heard all about her from Roald Few, as had every other person with normal hearing — would dig and dig, puzzle and puzzle, making the poor creature’s life a misery. And one couldn’t give it to some man to use, though one would, rather than have Jelly doing the using.
Eugenie, though. Well, she wasn’t a debauchee and she didn’t look the type to go seeking causes or laying blame. She would not abuse the creature, nor wonder where the girl had come from or what brought her to Portside to be found under Ducky Johns’ clothesline. She would see only a girl-sized walking doll, something with pretty hair to arrange, something to clothe and play with. As for Jandra Jellico, it looked the best thing she would be able to do for the Goosegirl and far better than she had recently feared.
One of Roald Few’s workmen took Eugenie and her new pet back to Opal Hill, dropping them behind the Fading Vista from which Eugenie was able to reach her own little house without being observed. Eugenie already had a dozen plans for Goosegirl. One of them had to do with teaching her to dance, but first and second on the list had to do with the sewing of astonishing gowns and the selection of a new and utterly elegant name.
Marjorie tapped at the door of Rigo’s study and entered at the sound of his voice. “Am I too early?”
“Come on in,” he said, his voice fuzzy with fatigue. “Asmir’s not here yet, but I expect him momentarily.” He stacked some papers together, thrust them into a lockbox, keyed the box to hold, and turned off his node. In the corner of the room the tell-me swam with wavering bands of color, silent. “You look as weary as I feel.”
She laughed, unconvincingly. “I’m all right. Stella is on one of her usual tears. Some time ago I asked Persun to take her down to the village, thinking she could find someone there to share her time with. She’s been there once or twice and refuses to go back. She says they’re all provincials, ignorant as cabbages.”
“Well, that’s probably true.”
“Even so—” she started to say, intending to make some comment about pride, realizing just in time that it would annoy Rigo, “Tony says not. He finds companionship there.”
“Stella may find some kindred spirit at the reception,”
Marjorie shook her head. “No one Stella’s age is coming.”
“We invited families.”
“No one Stella’s age is coming,” she repeated. “It’s almost as though they’d decided not to allow any… any fraternization.”
He flushed angrily. “Damned hidebound…” His voice became a wordless snarl to which the knock at the door was a welcome interruption.
A servant announced the arrival of Asmir Tanlig, who had spent the time since his hiring inquiring here and there about illness on Grass. Who had died, and of what? Who was suffering, and from what? Who had gone to the doctors at Commons, and for what. Now he plumped his small square body down across from Roderigo and Marjorie, his round face puzzled, his mouth pursed, his precise little hands shuffling his papers, preparing to tell them what he had found.
“I’m not finding much, sir, madam, to tell you the truth. With the bons it’s pregnancy and hunting accidents and liver renewals because of all the drinking they do” He wiped his lips on a clean handkerchief and lowered his already confidential voice as he leaned across Rigo’s desk where the lamplight pooled in the dusk. “I’ve told my family in Commons to ask around, has anyone disappeared—”
“Vanished,” murmured Marjorie. “We know they have.”
“Yes, ma’am, except if you’re talking about hunting, the vanished ones are mostly young. The ambassador told me…”
“I know.” she murmured. “I just wanted to keep it in mind.”
“As we shall,” said Rigo. “What about the non-bons, Asmir?”
“Oh, it’s everything. Accidents and allergies and in Portside there are always a few killings. Everyone accounted for, though; no disappearances except for those who’ve gone into the grass or the swamp forest.”
“Ah?” asked Rigo.
“Of course that’s always gone on,” said the man, suddenly doubtful. “For as long as I can remember. People going into the swamp forest and not coming out. People getting lost in the grass.”
“Who?” asked Marjorie. “Who, lately?”
“The last one was some big braggart of a fellow from off-planet.” Asmir referred to his notes, written neatly in a tiny, meticulous hand on various scraps of paper, which he arranged and rearranged as they spoke. “Bontigor. Hundry Bontigor. Loud mouth, people said. Swagger. Full of dares and boasts. Someone dared him to go into the swamp forest, and he went. Didn’t come out. He was only here on a weeklong permit, between ships. Nobody missed him much.”
“Has there been a case in which someone disappeared and it was… merely assumed that the person had gone into the forest?” Marjorie ran pinching fingers up the bridge of her nose and across her forehead, trying to evict the headache that had settled there.
Asmir shuffled his notes once again. “Last ones, before Bontigor, were kids. Nobody saw them go in there, if that’s what you mean. Time before that… well. Time before that was an old woman. Kind of gone, if you take my meaning. People couldn’t find her, so they thought—”
“Ah,” said Marjorie.
“Then there was that couple over at Maukerden village. And the carpenter from Smaerlok. And here’s somebody from Laupmon—”
“Lost in the grasses?”
He nodded. “But that’s always happened.”
“How many?” asked Rigo. “How many do you have listed, within the past collect? No, that would have been winter. Say last fall. How many assumed lost in the swamp forest or the grass last fall?”
“Fifly,” estimated Asmir. “Fifty or so.”
“Not many.” murmured Marjorie. “It could be what they think it is. Or it could be… illness.”
Rigo sighed. “Go on, Asmir. Keep gathering. Get everything you can about disappearances — who disappeared, how old they were. whether they seemed healthy before they went, things like that. Is Sebastian helping you?”
“Yes, sir. I gave you his information along with mine.”
“Keep at it, then, both of you.”
“If you could tell me—”
“I told you what I could when I hired you, Asmir.”
“I thought… I thought perhaps you didn’t trust me then.”
“I trusted you then and now.” Rigo smiled, one of his rare and charming smiles. “I told you I’m taking a special census for Sanctity. It has to do with human mortality. I’ve told you quite lot about Sanctity and how it tries to keep track of the human race, so you can understand why Sanctity would be concerned with what people die of. But the aristos won’t allow Sanctity to have a mission on Grass, so Marjorie and I agreed to find out what we can. However, we’re not going to offend the bons, so we’ll do it quietly. All we want to know is if there is any unexplained mortality on Grass.”
“If anybody mortals in the swamp forest, you’ll never explain it,” Asmir said firmly. “If they mortal in the grasses at night, it’s probably foxen. You’ve seen foxen?”
Marjorie nodded. She had seen foxen. Not close enough to describe, but quite as close as she cared to come.
“You’ve seen more’n me, then,” he said, lapsing into a less portentous style. “But I’ve seen pictures.”
“I take it you don’t go out into the grass?”
“Oh, sir, no! What kind of flick bird do you take me for? Oh, daytimes, yes, a little way, for a picnic or a romantic walk, say. Or to get away by yourself for a bit. But that’s what village walls are for, and estancia walls too. To keep them out.”
“Them?” queried Marjorie, gently.
He told the roll of them, words that clanged like the toll of a knell as his awestruck voice invoked incipient funerals out of each one: “Peepers. The thing that cries out in the deep night-The great grazers. Hounds. Hippae. Foxen. All them.”
“And no one really goes far into the prairie?”
“People say the Green Brothers do. Or some of them. If so, they’re the only ones that dare. And how they dare. I wouldn’t know.”
“The Green Brothers,” mused Rigo. “Oh, yes. Sanctity’s penitential monks. The ones digging up the Arbai city. Sender O’Neil mentioned the Green Brothers. How would we go about reaching them?”
Rillibee Chime, robed in unfamiliar green, his tear-streaked face unpowdered, crouched behind Brother Mainoa in a little aircar as it scuttled bouncily northward. “Can you tell me where we’re going?” he asked, wondering whether he cared-He felt hag-ridden and nauseated, unsure even of his own identity, he who had always fought so hard to keep it.
“To the Arbai city I’ve been digging,” said Brother Mainoa comfortably. “Some ways north of here. We’ll stop there for a day or two, let you get to feeling better, then I’ll take you on up to the Friary. I’m supposed to bring you directly there, but I’ll tell ’em you were sick. Soon as you get to the Friary, either Jhamlees Zoe or the climbers’ll be after you, and there’s nothing I can do about that. So, best you be feeling well when we get there.”
“Climbers?” Rillibee asked, wondering what on all this great, flat prairie there was to climb.
“You’ll learn about them soon enough. Not much I could tell you. They started their nonsense long after I was young enough to take part in it. You’ll feel better sooner if you lie down, you know. Lie down for a little bit and when we’re out of this wind, I’ll let the tell-me drive while I get you some broth.”
Rillibee let his crouch sag into a slump, the slump into a prostrate misery full of gulpings and more silent tears. Ever since they had wakened him from coldsleep he’d had these nightmares, these horrid feelings, this insatiable hunger.
“What did you do to get sent to us?” Brother Mainoa asked. “Tear one of the angels off Sanctity and sell it to the Pope?”
Rillibee sniveled, finding this funny in a sodden way. “No,” he managed. “Nothing quite that bad.”
“What, then?”
“I asked questions out loud.” He reflected. “Well, I screamed them, really. In refectory.”
“What kinds of questions?”
“What good it would do to have us all listed in the machines when we were all dead. How reading our names in empty rooms gave us immortality. Whether the plague wasn’t going to kill us all. That kind of questions.” He sobbed again, remembering the horror and confusion and his own inability to control what he was doing.
Ah.” Brother Mainoa struggled with the controls, grunting as he punched buttons that did not seem to want to stay punched. “Fouled up houndy uselessness,” he muttered. “Damned shitty mechanics.” At length the controls responded to being whacked with the palm of his hand and the car settled upon a level course. “Broth,” he said calmly and comfortingly, smiling down at Rillibee. “So you asked about plague, did you?”
Rillibee didn’t reply.
After a time the older man said, “We’ll have to come up with a name for you.”
“I’ve got a name.” Even in the depths of his present depression he bridled at the thought that he could not keep his own name.
“Not a Friary name, you don’t. Friary names have to be made up out of certain qualities.” Brother Mainoa whacked the cooker with the flat of his hand, scowling at it. “Twelve consonant sounds and five vowels, each with its own holy attribute.”
“That’s nonsense,” mumbled Rillibee, licking tears from the corner of his mouth. “You know that’s nonsense. That’s the kind of thing — That’s what I was asking in refectory. Why so much nonsense?”
“Got too much for you?”
Rillibee nodded.
“Me, too,” said Brother Mainoa. “Except I didn’t ask questions. I tried to run away. You were probably a pledged acolyte too, weren’t you? How long were you pledged for?”
“I wasn’t really pledged. They took me, is all, when… well, when I didn’t have anyplace else to go. They said twelve years and I could do what I wanted.”
“Me, I was pledged for five years, but I couldn’t get through them. Just couldn’t. My folks pledged me from my fifteenth birthday. By age seventeen I was here on Grass, digging up Arbai bones, and I’ve been here since. Penitent as all get-out. Ah, well. Maybe if I’d been a little older.” He took the steaming cup from the cooker. “Here, drink this. It really will help. Elder Brother Laeroa gave me some years ago when he fetched me from the port, though he was only young Brother Laeroa then, and I’ve given some to a dozen since then. It always seems to help. You’ll be hungry all the time for a long time, then eventually it’ll taper off. Don’t know why. Just part of bein’ on Grass. You can tell me about yourself, too. More I know about you, easier it’ll be to help you out,”
Rillibee sipped, not knowing what to say. “You want the story of my life?”
Mainoa thought about this for a time, his face adopting varying expressions of acceptance and rejection before it finally cleared. “Yes, I guess I do. Some people, I wouldn’t, you know. But you, I think so.”
“Why me?”
“Oh, one thing and another. The way you look. Your name. Now that’s an unusual name for one of the Sanctified.”
“I never was one of them. They just took me, I told you.”
“Tell me more, boy. Tell me everything there is to know.”
Rillibee sighed, wondering what there was to know, remembering, unable not to remember.
The house in Red Canyon had thick adobe walls, mud walls that stayed warm at night and cool in the day. The walls crumbled a little in the winter snow and when it rained, so that every summer Miriam and Joshua and Song and Rillibee had to spend most of a week putting more adobe on and smoothing it out and letting it dry. Inside the house the floors were tiled. One floor was red and the one in the next room was green, one was blue, the next one had patterns in the tiles. Song taught him to play hopscotch on the tiles in his bedroom, and there were dark and light ones in front of the fireplace, little ones, about two inches across, where Joshua and Miriam played checkers. The checkers were made out of clay, too, with leaves pressed into the tops so the pattern stayed after the leaves burned away. Miriam fired them in the same oven she fired the floor tile in, the funny old brick kiln out back, the one that pulled the fire in from the front.
There were three bedrooms, a little one each for Rillibee and Songbird and a big one for Joshua and Miriam. Sometimes Rillibee called them Mom and Dad and sometimes he called them by their names. Miriam said it was all right, because sometimes he meant to talk to his Mom or his Dad and other times he just meant to talk to somebody named Miriam or Joshua.
The kitchen was a big room and the common room was bigger yet, with a painting of Miriam over the fireplace and two big, squashy couches. There were old, old Indian rugs on the floors and a table where they all ate supper. Mostly they ate breakfast in the kitchen.
Joshua’s shop was off to one side, with a cellar partly under it and partly under Rillibee’s room. Joshua used the cellar to store the wood he would turn into tables and chairs and cabinets after it had seasoned. There were power tools in the shop and Miriam’s potter’s wheel and a big door along the creek side that stood open all summer long.
The low, earthen bulk of the house and shop stretched along Red Creek beside monstrous old cottonwoods that dangled their leafy branches over it, green in summer, heartbreak gold in the fall. Miriam called it that. Heartbreak gold. So beautiful it made you catch your breath when the sun came through, like the touch of the hand of God. Miriam said a lot of things like that, old-fashioned kinds of things. Even her name was old-fashioned. A really antique name, from a long, long time before.
His father, too. Joshua. That was an antique name for you. Even the things Joshua and Miriam did were old-fashioned things, things nobody else did — woodworking, pottery, gardening, making things with their hands, growing things in the soil.
In between making stuff or growing stuff they were always taking Rillibee and Songbird out to show them something or other, a flower or a crawdad or a fish. There were lots of fish in the creek. There were deer in the canyon. There were sage chickens and wild turkey on the rimrock, way up there. “This is one of the few places on earth that man hasn’t made garbage out of,” Joshua said sometimes, pointing up the canyon. “Live in it. Watch out for it. Take care of it. Every springtime move out to the front edge of it and plant something that will live longer than you do.”
Joshua and Miriam had been doing that for twenty years, ever since Joshua came back from Repentence, planting things every spring. Up the canyon along Red Creek the trees were old and big. Joshua’s grandfather had planted those. Orchards stood below the house, apple and cherry and plum, trees four times as tall as Joshua, clouds of blossoms in the spring, Joshua’s father had planted the fruit trees. Then came the groves Joshua had planted, young conifers, shorter and shorter ones as they reached the edge of the green belt Joshua and Miriam had made. Beyond the green was the gray, flat land: dry soil specked with knapweed and thistle and thorny brush, cut by the dusty knife edge of the road. Down that road was the town and the school, a Sanctity town and a Sanctity school. Rillibee’s folks weren’t Sanctified, but they sent Rillibee to school there anyhow. It was closest, and besides the things Joshua and Miriam taught him, he needed to learn the things a school could teach. School was only a mile away, easy to get to most of the year. Once in a while they’d be snowed in for a week or so, but that was rare. Sometimes Rillibee brought kids home from school with him, but that was rare, too. Mostly they thought he was strange.
Their parents all worked in comnet cubicles at their apartments, or they worked in one of the technical centers along the surface route! They went back and forth on covered walkways. If they needed to go very far, they had hovers. Joshua and Miriam had donkeys, for cries sake. Donkeys. It was enough to make Rillibee’s schoolmates chop themselves into pieces laughing about the earthfreaks who ate food they grew themselves and wouldn’t use dirty words and wore funny-looking clothes. Rillibee never heard the word earthfreak until he was in fourth category. Then he thought he’d never hear the end of it.
Rillibee minded more than Song did. She had a boyfriend who belonged to another earthfreak family over in Rattlesnake, and the two of them got along fine. Jason was his name. Another old-time name. Jason used some bad words, but never in front of Joshua. That’s one thing Joshua was death on, bad words, and when he was around, Rillibee was careful not to say any.
“Why’d you call me Rillibee?” he complained to his mother after one particularly bad day at school when everyone was busy making fun of him for his name and his clothes and his folks. “Why Rillibee?”
“It’s the sound the water makes running over stones,” she said. “I heard it the night before you were born.”
How could you yell at somebody over that? She just stood there, smiling at him, taking hot cookies out of the oven, piling them onto a plate for him, getting him a cup of the milk she’d put in the stream to cool. “Rillibee,” she said, so that he heard the water sound in it. “Rillibee.”
“The kids at school think it’s funny,” he muttered, mouth full.
“I suppose,” she agreed. “They’d think Miriam is funny, too. What are they all called now? Brom. And Bolt. And Rym. And Jolt.”
“Not Jolt.”
“Oh. Excuse me. Not Jolt.” She was laughing at him. “They all sound like laundry sonics.”
He had to agree they did. Bolt sounded like something that would shake the donkey hair out of your socks. Jolt sounded even more so.
One day Joshua brought a parrot home. It was a small gray parrot with some green feathers on it.
“What on earth?” Miriam asked. “Joshua?”
“Those cabinets I built for the Brants, you know?”
“Of course I know.”
“He really liked them. He gave me the bird as a bonus.”
Miriam shook her head, annoyed. Rillibee knew she was thinking about the mess the bird would make. “Wanted to get rid of it, most likely”
Joshua put his hands in his pockets and stood there, looking at the bird where he’d set it on its perch at one side of the fire. “He said it was valuable.”
Miriam was looking at the bird with her lips tight together as though she wanted to say something nasty.
“Shit,” said the bird clearly. “Excrement.” Then it shit on the floor.
Miriam laughed. She couldn’t help herself. She was all bent over giggling.
Joshua was red in the face, mad, not able to say a thing.
“Well, he certainly talks,” Miriam said.
“I’ll take him back! Right after supper.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Josh, leave him. We’ll teach him some better language. You know, the bird doesn’t know what he’s saying. It isn’t as though there’s a brain there, telling him to talk dirty. He’s just imitating sounds he hears.”
“He didn’t hear that!”
“Sounds he remembers.”
So they’d kept the parrot. It never learned any nicer words about anything, though it didn’t talk much; but every time Miriam got mad and acted like she’d like to say something but couldn’t, darned if that bird didn’t. Rillibee noticed it right away. Every time Miriam got really mad, here was the parrot saying “Shit” in this dreamy voice, or “Dammit” or once, “Fuckit” Joshua hadn’t heard that one, or there’d probably have been a dead parrot.
Rillibee moved into the fifth category when he was eleven, becoming a five-cat before most of his age-mates. That hadn’t made them any easier to get along with. His mentors were old lady Balman and old man Snithers. Balman taught programming and information. Snithers taught retrieval skills. The older kids in five called her Ballsy because, so they said, she had more than Sniffy did. Rillibee had no idea what that meant until he asked Joshua, and then he got about an hour’s lecture on sexuality as metaphor in dominance. The truth of it was that Snithers was an old lady, all fussy and picky, while Balman had a fine the-hell-with-it attitude that all the kids liked, which was more or less what Joshua said only in different words.
There had been one particular day. an unremarkable day, with nothing much happening at school except that Wurn March told them goodbye because he was going to Sanctity for five years as a pledged acolyte. Wurn had looked confused about it. When they asked him if he wanted to go, he’d looked like he was about to cry.
Out in the corridor. Ballsy told Sniffy that Sanctity could have him and welcome, and then they both laughed and got red when they saw that Rillibee had heard them talking. He’d been on his way back from the toilets, and they sent him back to retrieval practice in a hurry. Rillibee agreed with Ballsy that nobody would miss Wurn March. Wurn had been in five for longer than he should have. He was larger than most of the boys, and louder, and he liked to hit smaller kids, and he always borrowed stuff and didn’t give it back.
Other than that happening, it was just a day. It was the first day Rillibee had ever heard about pledged acolytes, but it was just a day.
When he got home, Miriam was in the kitchen, as usual at that time of afternoon. There were a lot of good smells in there with her, and Rillibee threw his arms around her, for once not caring what anybody else thought. She was his mom and if he wanted to hug her, so what.
So what happened was she gasped and pulled away. “Ouch,” she said, smiling so he’d know it wasn’t his fault. “I’ve got a sore place on my arm, Rilli. You kind of whacked it when you grabbed me.”
He had been sorry, insisting on examining the sore place, which looked terrible, all gray and puffy. Joshua came in behind him and looked at it, too.
“Miriam, you’d better go to the Health Office about that. It looks infected.”
“I thought it was getting better.”
“Worse, if anything. You’ve probably got a splinter of something in there. Have it seen to.” Then Joshua kissed her and the parrot said, “Oh, hell,” which set everyone off, and that was all.
The next afternoon when Rillibee got home, Songbird was there but Miriam wasn’t. Song was looking for the cake Miriam had baked the night before and hidden from them.
“Where’s Mom?” he wanted to know.
“She went to the Health,” his sister reminded him, burrowing in the cold cupboards.
He nodded, remembering. “When’ll she be home?” He wanted to tell her about Wurn March and what the teacher said and ask her about pledged acolytes.
“When she’s finished, dummo,” Song said. “You ask the dumbest questions.” She opened the side door and went outside to peer down the road.
Rillibee followed her. “You wanna hear a dumb question? When are you going to grow up? That’s a dumb question, ’cause the answer is never.”
“Brat,” she said. “Dumb little brat. Still suck your thumb.”
“Stop it,” Joshua said, coming across the yard from his workshop. “The two of you! Song, there’s no excuse for talking like that I don’t want to hear another word out of either of you. Song, go in and set the table. Rillibee, go pick up that junk you left scattered all over the common room last night. Put the rug back down, too. I’m going to start supper so your mother won’t have to do it when she comes home.”
There was quiet then, quiet for several hours. Rillibee remembered the quiet as a prelude to what happened later. Much later that quiet came to stand for tragedy, so that he would be uncomfortable with too much tranquility, too much silence. The evening sun slanting into the living room through the tall windows made pools of gold on Dad’s wide-planked floor and on the castle Rillibee had built the night before. He destroyed it and all its battlements, picked up the pieces, packed up his warriors, and put the rug back down, taking time to comb out the fringes with his fingers so they laid straight, like soldiers. Above him, on the perch, the parrot shifted. Rillibee looked up at it, and it whispered, “Oh, damn. Damn. Oh, God. Oh, no.” It sounded almost like Miriam’s voice.
Time went on until the sunlight vanished and his stomach gave an unmistakable signal. He went to the kitchen to find his father and Song waiting and Mom not home. “It’s time to eat,” he complained.
“So, we’ll eat,” his father said in a worried voice. “Your mom wouldn’t want us to wait for her. She’s been held up or something.” They were just sitting down at the table when the door-signal went. Somebody coming through the gate. Dad got up and went to the door, a smile on his face. Rillibee relaxed. She probably had stopped to buy groceries. Or sometimes she took a sample of her pottery to someone she thought might like to buy it. It was probably something like that that had kept her so long. But the voice at the front door wasn’t Mom’s voice. Somebody loud, a man, demanding to know where she was.
“Miriam hasn’t come home yet, “Joshua said firmly. “We don’t know.” Then he exclaimed in anger as the man pushed past him and came on into the house. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking,” the man said. He was a big man. Bigger than Dad.
Dressed in a white uniform with a mask thing around his neck and a green insignia on his shoulders. “Get on with your dinner, kids,” he instructed them. “I’ll only take a moment.” And he went through into the kitchen, then back into the bedrooms. Rillibee heard the closet doors opening and closing, then the man went out the front door and around into the shop. They could hear him banging around out there. Rillibee put down his fork very carefully, looking at his dad, so pale all of a sudden.
When the man came out he stood in the yard for a while, looking around, then he came back to the front door and asked Dad to come out. He talked quietly out there, but Rillibee could hear words, single words, “authority” and “penalty” and “custody.”
Rillibee fell silent.
Brother Mainoa waited awhile, then said, “They talk like that, don’t they. People who get to tell other folks what to do. Full of powerful words, they are. Sometimes I think they have words where most of us have blood.”
Rillibee didn’t say anything.
“Hard for you to talk about?”
Rillibee nodded, gulping, unable to talk at all.
“That’s all right. Wait until you feel better, then tell me.”
They flew, the car bouncing a little on the sun-warmed air. After a time, Rillibee began to tell it again.
Then the big man was gone and Dad was in the common room, sitting down at the table once more, his face like a rock, all frozen and hard.
“Dad?”
“Don’t, Rillibee. Don’t ask me anything right now. The man was looking for your mother and she’s not here. That’s all I know right now.”
“But who was he?”
“A man from Health.”
“Oh, damn. Oh, God,” the parrot said.
Joshua threw a soup spoon at the parrot. It made a splashy red place on the wall and fell on the floor. The parrot just looked at them, its black eyes swiveling back and forth as it whispered to itself.
The man didn’t come back. Mom didn’t come home. Dad paced the room, stopping every now and then to punch up people on the comnet. People Mom knew. Her sister over in Rattlesnake. Her friends. People like that.
When bedtime came, Rillibee looked out of the window of his own room to see the hover parked out on the flat. The man was watching the house. After a long time, Rillibee got into bed, dark all around him, trying to see through it to the ceiling, to the walls, only a splinter of light under the door. Tears. Trying to be quiet so Song wouldn’t hear him through the wall. Finally, sleep.
It had to have been sleep, because he woke up to a strange noise. Scratching, near his head. From under him, under his bed. Under the floor.
He thought about monsters first, not daring to move. Only after it had gone on for some time did he remember the cellar that Dad used to store wood in. A long time ago it had been a root cellar. Joshua had dug it bigger so it extended all the way to the shop. The entrance to it was out there in the shop, behind the woodstacks, but there was a hatch to it under Rillibee’s bed, from long ago. Someone was in there, scratching.
He slipped out of the bed and went to tell Joshua. Then he kept still while Joshua moved the bed, a little at a time, almost silently, and heaved the doorway up and it was Mom down there, white and pale, with her face all streaked and her hair tangled and messy and her clothes dirty as though she’d been crawling, and she was saying, “Josh, oh, God, Josh, they were going to send me away, they were going to send me away, and I went out the window. I ran and ran. I crawled down the creek and came in through the little door behind the shop. Hide me, don’t let them get me, Josh.”
“Never, darling,” he said. “Never.”
Silence again.
Mainoa said, “Your father must have loved her a lot.”
“I’ve never forgotten that,” Rillibee said, his voice liquid and bubbling in his throat. “I think about it at night sometimes, when I’m trying to sleep. I hear their voices. I remember how confused I was. Why had someone wanted to get her? Why had the people wanted to send her away? What had she done? She and Joshua didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell Song. All they had said was to pretend she hadn’t come home, just pretend they hadn’t seen her…”
Mom went to bed in her own bed, with Dad. The next morning, real early, Rillibee had wakened to some unfamiliar sound, something happening on the road. He peeked out at the corner of the shade and saw the man getting out of the white hover, out beyond the baby trees. He woke Dad and Mom just in time. She barely had time to get back down in the wood cellar and have Rillibee’s bed moved back on top of the hatch.
“Lie down there and look sleepy,” Dad commanded on his way to answer the thunder at the door.
Rillibee put his head under the pillow and told himself he was dreaming. The man from Health stamped in and pulled the pillow off, but Rillibee managed to look confused and angry as though the man had wakened him.
After that, Mom slept in the cellar. Dad moved a cot down there and a special kind of toilet he put together in the shop, one that didn’t need water. During the daytime, she came up whenever there was somebody there to watch for the man in the white hover, but if there was no one home, she had to hide.
Joshua bandaged the place on her arm. It was just a little place. About the size of a peach pit. By the end of the week, it had gotten quite a bit bigger, covering the whole elbow. It hurt her, too. Then it began to spread up and down her arm until the whole arm was raw and ugly, like meat. It hurt her to change the bandage, but if it wasn’t changed, it started to smell. They changed the bandage every night. Song held the basin with warm water in it, to wash the raw place. Rillibee handed Dad the bandages. The parrot sat on its perch saying, “Oh, damn, damn. Oh, God,” but none of them paid any attention.
The man came back. Once he brought two other men and they searched the house, but they didn’t find the place under Rillibee’s bed. By this time, Joshua had made the hatch almost invisible, fitting the wood together so you couldn’t see where it joined.
Once in a while, she’d come up in the daytime, while Song and Rillibee were at school. At night, when she came up, she’d tell them what she’d done, where she’d walked. “The leaves are turning,” she’d say. “Did you notice, Rillibee? Heartbreak gold. God, they’re so beautiful.” Then they talked about what they’d have for dinner the next night. She’d tell Joshua what to buy and how much. She’d tell Songbird how to cook it and Rillibee how to help. Then they’d talk awhile, maybe play a game, then change the bandage last thing and she’d go back down.
The bad night was when they were changing the bandage and some pieces came off. Mom made a noise, as though she was going to throw up, as though she was going to scream but couldn’t get enough air.
“Out,” Joshua said to both of them, pointing to the door, his face stretched into some horrible grin, like a pumpkin lantern, the sides of his mouth wide open and tight with all the teeth showing.
They ran into the kitchen. Song was crying and making a little grinding noise, trying to hold it in, and Rillibee was telling himself it was a dream, a bad dream, it wasn’t really happening at all. He had seen the bones in Mom’s hand, where the two fingers had come off, two round, white, slick things. The place wasn’t bleeding, just kind of oozing, slow drops of grayish liquid pushing out from the flesh and running down to make a small stained place on the clean bandages that stank like nothing he could ever have imagined. The smell had settled in the back of his throat as though it would never leave. After that, Dad wouldn’t let either of them be in the room when he changed the bandage. After a while, he wouldn’t let them be in the room with her at all. They could still hear her voice. For a while she sounded just like Mom. Once even they heard her laugh, a high, dreadful laugh. Then, after a while, there was no voice, just this high, whiny sound like a dog that’d been hit by a car, or a rabbit when a hawk takes it.
And the smell. Every night, rising at him out of the cellar below him. A terrible stink. Worse than any bathroom stink. “Oh, oh, no,” said the parrot. “Oh. God. No.” Dad changed rooms with Rillibee. Days went by and Rillibee never really saw her after that. He lay there in Dad’s bed at night, trying to remember what she had looked like. He couldn’t remember. He wanted to see the picture of her, the one over the fireplace.
In the living room, he turned on one lamp and looked up at the picture. She smiled down at him, out of the paint, her shiny hair falling over her forehead, her lips curved.
“Let me die,” whispered the parrot. “Oh, please, please, let me die.”
“Shut up,” Rillibee screamed at it silently, the words pushing out of him like huge, burning pieces of vomit. “Shut up, shut up.”
He told himself he wouldn’t go in there anymore. He wouldn’t listen to that bird anymore. He ate in the kitchen. He did his school-work. He didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t talk about Mom.
“That must have been hard,” said Brother Mainoa. “Oh, that must have been hard.”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I couldn’t. Her face would come into my mind, but then it would turn gray at the edges, starting to curl, like a picture burning, and I couldn’t see what she looked like, couldn’t remember what she looked like. I stood it as long as I could, and then went into the living room once more to look at the painting of her.
“The parrot said, ‘Kill me. Please, please, kill me.’ ”
It was the day after that, Rillibee’s twelfth birthday, that he woke up knowing it had all been a dream. The sun poured through his window, heartbreak gold. He got up and dressed and plunged out into the living room. The parrot was walking up and down its perch saying, “Thank God. Thank God. Thank God.”
Song was already there, sitting at the table. There was a package wrapped at his place. He sat down and grinned at it, turning it over and over, shaking it to guess what was inside.
“Happy birthday, Rillibee,” Dad said from the kitchen door. “I’m making pancakes.” His voice sounded funny, but the words were all right.
“Happy birthday, Rillibee,” said Song. She sounded like a recording.
Dad came in with a pitcher of juice and leaned over the table to pour it.
There was a sore on the side of Dad’s neck, toward the back. Little. The size of a peanut. Like the sore had been on Mom’s arm. When Dad went back to the kitchen, Rillibee tried to tell Song, but Song just sat there, frozen, not saying anything at all. Then he noticed the bandage on her hand and wondered how long it had been there without his seeing it.
He got up without opening the package and went out of the house, through the orchard to the groves, and down through all of them, the trees getting tinier and tiner the farther he went, until he came to the place where there was nothing growing at all…
“Did you ever see them again?” asked Brother Mainoa. There was a long silence. Rillibee was staring out the window, mouth slightly open, tears washing his face. “I went crazy in school and started yelling something. That night when I got home, there was no one there, just the man from Sanctity, who said to come along with him. I was going to be an acolyte, he said. They never said anything about Miriam or Joshua or Song. When I asked, they told me my people had died a long time ago, that I’d just forgotten. They never even asked if my family was Sanctity. We weren’t. I’m still not.” Brother Mainoa sipped at his own broth, occasionally slapping at a control button that kept threatening to disengage itself. “Brother Lourai — how does that sound?”
“How should it sound?”
“Well, the I sound is for patience, and the r sound is for perseverance. I thought you could use a little of that.”
“What does the m sound in Mainoa mean?” Rillibee asked tiredly. “And the n?”
“Resignation.” murmured the other. “And reliability.”
“Rebellion, did you say?”
“Shush, youngster. Lourai’s a good name. You should hear some of the throat-stoppers Acceptable Doctrine comes up with from time to time. Fouyaisoa Sheefua. How would you like that? Foh-oo-yah-ee-soh-ah Shee-foo-ah. Or Thoirae Yoanee. You wouldn’t want something like that hung on you. Lourai. That’s good enough.”
“What’s acceptable doctrine?”
“Acceptable Doctrine?” Brother Mainoa asked. He took the empty cups away and put them down the recycler. “Well, if you’d been a little older before they dragged you off to Sanctity, you’d have learned what the Office of Security and Acceptable Doctrine is. That’s the group of enlightened ones who tell us what we can believe and what we can’t and make sure we do it. Here on Grass they’re headed up by Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe, with Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi as his next man.”
“Like the Hierophants,” cried Rillibee. “God, I wish I could get away from that.”
“You can. Just walk off the site into the grasses, any day. Put your shovel or your soil stabilizer down and go. Nobody’ll come after you. I could’ve done that lots of times, but I always knew there’d be something interesting in the next shovelful, something intriguing behind the next bit of wall, so I don’t. All in all, I’m glad to be here rather than there. Maybe you will be, too. Just bow your head and say, ‘Yes, Elder Brother,’ in a nice obedient tone, kind of sorrowful, and they’ll let you alone.”
“How can you do that?” Rillibee asked scornfully. “It’s dishonest.”
Brother Mainoa seated himself at the controls once more, scanning the dials and buttons with a skeptical eye. “Well, now, young Brother Lourai, I’ll tell you. I’ll deny having said it if you quote me, so don’t try. The first thing you’ve got to do is tell yourself that the shitheads are wrong. Especially Jhamlees and Fuasoi. Not just a little bit wrong, but irremediably, absolutely, and endemically wrong. Nothing you can say or do will stop their being wrong. They’re damned to eternal wrongness, and that’s God’s will. You follow me?”
Rillibee nodded, doubtfully. Whatever he might have expected, it had not been this.
“Then, you acknowledge that these wrongheaded fart-asses have been placed in authority over you through some cosmic miscalculation, and you reach the only possible conclusion.”
“Which is?”
“Which is you bow your head and say ‘Yes, Elder Brother,’ in a nice humble tone, and you go right on believing what you have to believe. Anything else is like walking out into the grass when the grazers are coming by. You may be right, but you’ll be flat right and there won’t be enough left of you to scrape up.”
“And that’s what you do?”
“Umm. And you do it, too. Don’t tell Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe that your family wasn’t Sanctified. You tell him that, he’ll start working on your head, getting you to convert, get saved, get enrolled. Just nod politely and say, ‘Yes, Elder Brother.’ That way, likely, he’ll leave you alone.”
There was a long silence. Rillibee — Brother Lourai — rose from the padded floor and settled himself into the other seat. When Brother Mainoa showed no signs of breaking the quiet, he asked, “What’s Arbai?”
“An Arbai, Brother, was the inhabitant of an Arbai city, dead some long while, now. An Arbai city is the only kind of ruins mankind’s found on any world we’ve settled yet. The only intelligent race we’ve ever found.”
“What were they like? Arbai?”
“Taller than us. About seven feet tall. Two-legged and two-armed, like us, but with a skin all covered over with little plates or scales.
We’ve found bodies pretty well mummified, so we know what they looked like. They were fascinating people. Like us, some ways. Spread all over a lot of worlds, like us. Had writing, like us. not that we can read it yet. Not like us at all, other ways. Didn’t seem to have males and females like we do, at least there’s no differences we’ve found yet.”
“All gone, are they?”
“All gone. All died, everywhere, all sort of at once, like time had just up and ended for them. Except here on Grass. Here they all died from something tearing them apart.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s how we find ’em, Brother. An arm here, a leg there. A bone raggedy from teeth.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Something to tell us why they died, mostly.” Brother Mainoa looked at him curiously. “From what you say, you’ve seen plague, haven’t you, Brother. You know it exists.”
The other nodded. “They never told me so, but that’s what killed my family. And the Hierarch died of it. Lots of the people at Sanctity have it. I may have it, without knowing it.”
“Well, there’s some of us think that’s what killed the Arbai. Better tell you now, it’s not Acceptable Doctrine; so don’t go talking about it.”
“Killed them,” breathed Rillibee. “Going to kill us.”
“Ah. Well, there is that. Maybe not, though. If we could find out something…”
“Do you think we can find out anything about the plague?”
The other turned, the wrinkles around his eyes made deeper by the speculative squint with which the Brother was evaluating his new family member. “What I think,” he purred, “is something you and I may talk about someday after you’ve been out in the grass.” He pointed downward. There, spread across the short turf of the north, were the uncovered walls of the Arbai city and the complex network of ditches dug by the Brothers, some of them roofed with arched bundles of tall grasses. Mainoa pointed again, in the direction of their flight. Almost on the horizon, the ramified mass of the Friary bulked darkly against the pale sky. As they drew nearer, Rillibee/Lourai sucked in an astonished breath. Above the Friary floated a city of cobwebs, netted arches, and skeletal towers that moved in the light wind as though they were living things rooted in the soil far below. From some few of the lofty pinnacles flew the banners of Sanctity, complete with golden angels. On seeing these. Rillibee Chime gave one last, dwindling snarl.
“Home,” said Brother Mainoa. “Not a bad place, really. Though the sky climbers will probably make paste of you for a few weeks. Heights frighten you, boy?”
“Falling frightens me. Heights don’t.”
“Well then, I’d say you’ll survive it.”
“What are sky crawlers?” Rillibee’s stomach knotted at the picture this brought to mind.
“Boys no older than you. most of ’em. Most likely they won’t harm you much. You’ll get by; that is, you will if you can apply a few sensible restraints to your conduct.”
“Yes, Brother,” said Brother Lourai, his eyes cast humbly down. “I will try to restrain myself.”