Grass (16 page)

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 …