Sheri Tepper - Grass

by Grass(Lit)

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

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

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

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

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

  "How long ago?" he wondered.

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

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

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

  "Sleep. Are the others coming back?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Tony, what is it?" Sylvan asked.

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

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

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

  "We'll stop for a while."

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Who is she?" someone asked.

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

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

  "Father! What happened?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "You know about that!"

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

  "We don't want Stella twisted!"

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

  "Should we ship her out?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  16

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

  Among other topics was much discussion of whether Grass's seeming immunity to plague meant anything. Foremost among those who thought it did was Dr. Bergrem She had seen one or two people arrive on ships with filthy gray lesions. After a week or two on Grass, they had departed cured. Once there had even been a man in a quarantine pod....

  Roald Few challenged the doctor to explain herself. "You mean more than that the disease isn't here, doctor. You mean it can't come here. Something here prevents it?"

  To which she nodded and said she thought so, in her experience, from what she'd seen, turning to Tony and Rillibee for their opinion.

  "No, that isn't it," Tony told them wearily. "It isn't that it can't come here. It isn't that no one gets it here. The disease started from here. Somehow. The foxen think."

  This was a statement requiring more than a little explanation. Since when had the foxen been talking to people? And where were these foxen? Tony and Rillibee told what they knew to Roald and Mayor Alverd Bee while dozens of other people came and went. They tried to describe foxen, unconvincingly, and were greeted with skepticism, if not outright disbelief.

  Ducky Johns and Saint Teresa were there with an outlandish scenario of their own: Diamante bon Damfels, sneaking around naked in the port. Diamante bon Damfels now occupying a room in the hospital next to ones already taken by her sister, Emeraude, who had been beaten, and by Amy and Rowena, who refused to return to Klive. Sylvan, hearing this, went off to see his mother and sisters. Commoners looked after him, pityingly. A bon, here in Commons. Useless as a third leg on a goose.

  "How did Diamante get here?" Tony demanded of the assembled group. "We've just come through the swamp forest, and if it's the same everywhere as the parts we saw, there is literally no way through! There are some islands near the far edge, and some near this edge, too, but in the middle it's deep water and tangles of low branches and vines everywhere you look, like an overgrown maze. If she wasn't a climber, like Rillibee here, or if the foxen didn't bring her, then how did she get here?"

  "We've been asking ourselves that, sweet boy," said Ducky Johns. "Over and over. Haven't we, Teresa? And the only answer is there has to be another way in. One we haven't known about until now." Ducky's usual girlish flirtatiousness was held in abeyance by her anxiety.

  "One we still don't know about," Teresa amended.

  "Oh, yes we do, dear," Ducky contradicted. "We know it's there. We just don't know exactly where. Unless these strange foxen creatures did bring her, which they may have done, for all we know!"

  Rillibee heard all this through a curtain of exhaustion. He said, "I don't think the foxen brought her. Brother Mainoa would have known."

  "Do I know this Brother Mainoa you keep speaking of?" asked Alverd Bee.

  Rillibee reminded him who Brother Mainoa was.

  Sylvan joined them again, his face white and drawn. Dimity was conscious, but did not know him. Emmy was unconscious, though she was getting better. Rowena was sleeping. Amy had talked with him. She had told him his father was dead, and he was wondering why he felt nothing.

  Rillibee was telling the mayor about Mainoa's attempts to translate the Arbai documents.

  "And you say they've translated something already?" Roald cried. He didn't sound astonished, merely wild with a kind of quavery excitement. His gray hair tufted around his ears like a spiky aureole; he cracked his knuckles between jabs at the tell-me link, clickety crack. The sound was like someone walking on nutshells. "I want to see that, just as soon as I can. Let me get on to Semling."

  "Are you a linguist?" Sylvan asked him curiously, wondering why there would be any such thing on Grass.

  "Oh, no, my boy," Roald said. "My living comes from the family supply business. At languages, I'm only an amateur." He said it without even looking at Sylvan, then asked Rillibee, "Who was Mainoa's contact on Semling?"

  Thus dismissed, Sylvan sat down at a table nearby, resting his head on his arms as he considered the continuing bustle around him. Things were busier in Commons than he had assumed they would be. People were more intelligent and far more affluent than he would have thought. They had things even the estancias didn't have. Foods. Machines. More comfortable living arrangements. It made him feel insecure and foolish. Despite all his fury at Stavenger and the other members of the Obermun class, still he had accepted that the bons were superior to the commoners. Now he wondered if they really were-or if the bons were even equal to the commoners? Why had he thought Marjorie would welcome his attentions? What had he to offer her?

  The thought struck him with sick embarrassment. He sought words he had read but seldom if ever used. "Parochial." "Provincial." "Narrow." True words. What was a bon among these people? None of the commoners were deferring to him. None of them were asking for his opinion. Once Rillibee and Tony had told everyone that Sylvan was deaf to the foxen, Commons had disdained him as though he were deaf-and mute-to them as well. He could have accepted their disdain more easily if they had been professionals, like the doctor, but they were only amateurs, like this old man talking translation with Rillibee. Mere hobbyists. People who had studied things that had nothing to do with their daily lives. And every one of them knew more than he did! He wanted desperately to be part of them, part of something....

  He heaved himself up and went to find something to drink. Rillibee rose from his chair beside Roald. "You know everything I do, Elder Few. I must get back to the others. I can't stay here." He yawned again, thinking briefly of asking Tony to come back with him. No. Tony would want to stay until they knew something more about Stella. As for Sylvan-better that Sylvan stayed here. Marjorie hadn't wanted him back.

  He went out of the place, still yawning, breaking into a staggering jog that carried him down the slope to the place the foxen waited. Something dragged at him. insisting upon his return. Perhaps the trees. Perhaps something more. Some need or purpose awaited him among the trees. If nothing else, then he would carry the news of the bon Damfels girl and of Rigo's injuries and of all that both those events implied.

  In the room he left behind, the doctor and the two madams were trying to figure out why a naked, mindless girl should have been trying to get into a freighter. "Why was she carrying a dried bat? What does that mean?" Dr. Bergrem demanded of the group at large.

  "Hippae," said Sylvan as he wandered by. "Hippae kick dried bats at each other. There are dried bats in Hippae caverns."

  Now they were looking at him. Now, suddenly, he wasn't mute anymore. He explained, "It's a gesture of contempt, that's all. That's how the Hippae express contempt for one another, part of the challenge. Or at the end of a bout, to reinforce defeat, they kick dead bats at each other. A way of saying, 'You're vermin.' "

  Lees Bergrem nodded. "I've heard that. Heard that the Hippae have a lot of symbolic behaviors..."

  Feeling foolishly grateful for their attention, Sylvan told them what little more he had learned about the Hippae when he was a child, wishing Mainoa were there to tell them more.

  Midmorning found Mainoa with Marjorie and Father James on the spacious open platform of the Tree City
. Brother Mainoa had been studying the material recorded in his tell-me link while Marjorie had explored and Father James had tried to talk to foxen, thanking God that he was present rather than Father Sandoval. Father Sandoval had no patience with the idea that there might be other intelligent races. Father James wondered what the Pope in Exile would think of the whole idea.

  Marjorie hadn't tried to speak to the foxen. From time to time He had reached out and said something to her. She had accepted these bits of information, trying to keep her face from showing what happened to her each time He spoke, a fire along her nerves, an ecstatic surge, taste, smell, something. Now the three humans sat face to face, trying to put bits and pieces of knowledge and hypothesis together.

  "The Arbai had machines that transported them," Marjorie said. She had finally understood that. "That thing on the dais in the center of town? That was really a transport machine. Machines like that moved the Arbai from one place to another."