Grass

  "Yes, Elder Brother."

  "The ship will be in early, so be ready. And no more talking to yourself." Brother Fuasoi rubbed at his belly again before he started off.

  Brother Mainoa bowed humbly at Fuasoi's retreating back and hoped Fuasoi's belly would kill him soon. Shithead, he thought. All from Acceptable Doctrine were shitheads. And so was Elder Jhamlees Zoe, the mad proselytizer, cast away here on Grass with nobody to convert and going slowly crazy because of it. Nothing between their ears but excrement or they'd know what was really here on Grass. Anyone with any sense could see … purr was back above, this time full of quiet amusement. "You'll get me in big trouble," muttered Brother Mainoa. "Then what will you have to purr about?"

  The hundred-square-mile area which the aristocrats called Commoner-Town was divided into two parts by a precipitous, convoluted knob of stone which was called, half in jest, Grass's Only Mountain, or Gom. The mountain extended east and west in an uninterrupted wall, a sheer-faced outcropping that ran down on both sides to lose itself in the depths of the swamp forest, making an effective barricade between the permanent and transient. Craftsmen, farmers, merchants, and their families lived and worked north of the barrier in an area they called Commons, centered on the town. The area south of the wall, though largely sloping pastureland, contained the port and all its appurtenances.

  Appurtenances included, adjacent to the port on the east, a district containing warehouses for the storage of goods being transhipped, hay barns for winter feed of Commons' livestock, various respectable shops and amusements run by local citizens, the Port Hotel, and the hospital. This area, including the port itself, was called the Commercial District.

  Also included was an area on the west side of the port, where buildings blazoned with tawdry glitter stood along Portside Road, where the sensees stayed open around the clock and where visitors routinely stepped over bodies without worrying much about it. Not many of the bodies were dead; few of them were seriously wounded; some of them were still busily engaged. The crowded buildings led an indefinable stink made up of drugs, dirt, and various biological exudates. This disreputable area took its name from its road and was called simply Portside.

  In addition to the Commercial District and Portside, the southern area contained about forty square miles of common hay meadow and grazing land, sloping on the east, south, and west from the high plateau of the port down to the swamp forest.

  Connecting the port areas and Commons through a notch cut through the wall of Gom was Grass Mountain Road, a well-traveled thoroughfare which ran along the east side of the peak past the order station and the tall, solid gates occasionally used to block all traffic. It was not unknown for freighter crews to emerge from Portside establishments in the waning hours of the night determined to seek the extraordinary pleasure that comes from disrupting the sleep of ordinary people. Under such conditions, the gates were shut. Usually, however, traffic moved along Grass Mountain Road between port and Commons with no hindrance.

  The port was busy, far busier than the planetary population could have warranted on its own behalf. Grass lay at a topological crossroads, an accessible destination in qua-space that coincided with a planet in real-space, and this alone made it valuable. The aristocrats, isolated on their estancias and concerned with other matters, had never considered how advantageous Grass's location was. They would have been amazed to learn that the wealth of Grass was not, as they continued to believe, concentrated in the estancias, but was in fact held in off-planet banks by a sizable fraction of the people of the town. Few bons ever came to Commoner Town, and if they came at all, they came no farther than the merchants' offices. The residents of Commons who went to the estancias kept their mouths shut about town business. What the bons thought of as eternally true regarding their own social and economic superiority, Commons had long since discarded in favor of a more pragmatic view. Without the aristocrats becoming more than superficially aware of it, the Commercial District had gradually become a major transshipment point offering temporary lodging to sizable numbers of travelers.

  While waiting for a connecting ship, transients staying at the Port Hotel often went into Commons in pursuit of local color. Sellers of grass cloth and grass pictures and cleverly woven multihued grass baskets shaped like fantastic birds or fish did a brisk business. The purchase of some such gimcrack was as close as any of the transients would come to seeing the reality of Grass. The aristocrats had forbidden aircar tours over the prairies. At one time the Port Hotel had offered tours into the edges of the swamp forest, but after a boatload of influential persons had failed to return, the tours had been discontinued. The only sightseeing was in Commons, which meant a constant easy flow of traffic along the road. Townees were not surprised to see new faces.

  Thus, when Ducky Johns stopped early one morning at the Order Station with a beautiful girl in tow, the officer thought no more of it than that some off-worlder had escaped from the Port Hotel and fallen into questionable company. Not that Ducky Johns was a bad sort. She and Saint Teresa were the madams of the two largest sensee houses in Portside, and they often traveled into Commons with their housekeepers and cooks. Ducky was usually at the top of the list of contributors to any charitable cause, if Saint Teresa didn't have his name there first. Ducky's machines were well maintained and seldom damaged anyone other than superficially, and none of her girls or boys or genetically altered whatsits had ever tried to kill any of the customers.

  "What's this, Ducky?" the officer, James Jellico, asked. He was a husky and muscular man of middle years, covered with the misleading layer of plushy flesh which had earned him his nickname. "Tell good old Jelly what you've got there."

  "Damned if I know," replied Ducky, sketching helplessness with both shoulders, the flounces on her tent-dress quivering in response to the mountain of shivering flesh beneath. "I found it on my back porch, under the clothesline." Her flutelike voice made it a plaint, minor key. Her spangled eyebrows arched and the fringes of her tattooed eyelids drooped across her cheeks.

  "You should've taken it back to the hotel," Jelly said, giving the girl a hard look, which she returned with a wide, innocent eye.

  "I tried," Ducky said, sighing and pursing baby-lips, waving a baby-hand, the wrist braceleted with gems between tiny rolls of fat. "I'm not a fool, Jelly. I thought the same as you. Off a passenger ship, I thought, waiting around for another one. Wandered out of the Commercial District and got lost, I thought, just as you did. I asked it its name, but it didn't have a thing to say for itself."

  "Mental, you think? Drugged up?"

  "No sign of it."

  "Maybe it's one of those, what you call 'em, de-personed things they sell on Vicious."

  "I looked and it isn't. It's been used some, but it hasn't been tampered with, not the way they do there."

  "So what did the hotel say?"

  "The hotel picky-pecked at its little keyboards and winky-winked at its little screens and told me to take it away. Not theirs, they said. They didn't have any like this one, and if they did have, all theirs were accounted for."

  "I be damned."

  "Yes. Exactly what I said. Couldn't be a Commons townee, could it?"

  "You know every one of 'em as well as I do, Ducky. You know every face and every figure and if any of 'em puts on five pounds or insults his sister-in-law, you'd know and so would I."

  "Well, we both know what that leaves, Jelly That leaves the estancias, that does. Lots of unfamiliar faces out there. But that's very puzzling indeed, isn't it, my dear? If it had come from there, we'd have seen it."

  Aircars going between Commoner Town and the estancias were permitted to land only at the car terminal at the center of town or at the port. Any aircar landing at the port or in town would be observed. If this lovely creature with the strange eyes had turned up either place, surely somebody would have seen it.

  "Off a ship?" hazarded Jellico.

  "You know the silly regulations as well as I do, Jelly, dear. Passengers an
d crew off, fumigate at every port. How could this have lived on a ship while it was being debugged? No, it didn't come off an empty ship. And it didn't come from the hotel. And it doesn't belong to me or to Saint Teresa or to any of the other bitty bit-players down in our place, no it doesn't. I'm afraid it's your problem, Jelly. Yours alone." Ducky Johns giggled, the ruffles on the tent-dress quivering, a fleshquake in paroxysm.

  Jellico shook his head. "Not mine, Ducky, old girl. I'll get an image of her, then you take her back. You've got plenty of room in that place of yours. Put it in an empty room and feed it something. The stasis-tank is no place for that. Doesn't need freezing. Needs tending. Better with you."

  "How trusting," she simpered.

  "Oh, you won't sell her, Ducky. If she can't talk, she can't speak a consent waiver, and you know I'll be comin' down to look her over again next time I'm in Portside to check transience permits. And after I've had a chance to ask around. If this isn't the damnedest thing … "

  He went on looking at the girl as he set up the imager, she returning his gaze with her head turned sideways so that he saw only one eye, an eye in which no intelligence showed at all. And yet, when he had finished recording the creature's image and Ducky held out her hand, the girl took it and smiled, turning the head upward and to one side again to cast a sidelong look.

  Jelly shivered. There had been something strangely familiar about that look. Almost as strange as where the girl could have come from. Not through the swamp, that was certain. Not in an aircar. Not on a ship. Not from the hotel. And what did that leave?

  "Damn all," whispered Jelly to himself, watching old Ducky loading the girl back into her three-wheeled runner before turning it back toward Portside. "Damn all."

  The morning after the bon Damfels' Hunt, Marjorie was up before light. She had slept little, and that little restlessly. When she slept she had dreamed of Hippae, and her dreams had been threatening. She had risen in the night to walk about the winter quarters, going into the children's rooms, listening to them breathe. Anthony had been making little groaning sounds and shivering in his sleep, almost as El Dia Octavo had done that day she had seen the things on the ridge. Marjorie sat on the edge of his bed and ran her hands over his shoulders and chest, stroking him as she would have one of the horses, pulling the anxiety out of him until he lay motionless beneath her fingers. Dear Tony, little Tony, firstborn and much beloved. So like her that she could read every flicker of his expression, every line of his body. She yearned over him, wishing the disappointments away. They would come anyway. He was so like her that they must come, as day follows night.

  In the neighboring room Stella slept soundly, rosy in the dim light, lips slightly parted. Each day made her resemblance to Rigo more pronounced – his passion, his pride, and a stunningly feminine version of his handsome face. Marjorie stood over her, not touching her. If Stella were touched she would come awake, full of questions, full of demands – questions Marjorie couldn't answer, demands she couldn't meet. Like Rigo, Marjorie thought to herself, just like Rigo. And like Rigo, Stella demanded that the world understand her even while she overwhelmed any effort to be understood.

  "I tried to know Rigo," Marjorie whispered to herself, an old litany, almost an apology, an excuse, something she said to herself again and again. Something she used to say to Father Sandoval before he had tried to mend what seemingly could not be mended by giving her penance after penance of obedience and submission until she had felt so trapped between them, she could not ask for forgiveness anymore. What she had told Father Sandoval was true, so far as it went. When she and Rigo had been newly married she had sometimes waited until Rigo was very tired or even asleep and then curled against him, pressed herself tight, wanting to feel him in his skin, feel all the muscles running there softly, getting to know the body of him as she did his face. He always responded, fiercely, passionately, hammering at her, until she was lost. There was no separate place she could stand to feel what he was like. If she stood apart from him, he accused her of being remote. If she came close, he swallowed her up.

  "I tried to tell him," she whispered, still looking at the sleeping Stella. "I tried to tell him, just the way I've tried to tell you." And that, too, was true. She had tried to say, "Rigo, just hold me, gently. Let me learn the rhythm of your blood and your breath." Or, "Stella, be still a moment. Just talk to me. Let us know one another."

  Marjorie remembered lying in the stable with her belly pressed close to a foal, quiet on the straw, the mare whickering above, soft nose pressing down on the foal and on the child-Marjorie both, until all three were same-scented, hay-scented, straw-smelling. Marjorie had felt the blood running in the foal's veins, felt the smooth pull of the muscles over the bone. Then later, when the foal grew and they raced together, she understood what it was that moved and the spirit that moved it. She had wanted to learn Rigo like that, but he wouldn't let her.

  Stella was the same. Always passionate. Always in the depths or on the heights. Always give me, give me, give me, and never anything warm or gentle in return, never any simple affection. No hug. No little joke for the two of them to share. No peace. Not that Stella shared much with her father, either. No. If she was capable of affection at all, she had saved it all for her friend back home, the beatific Elaine.

  Marjorie felt her own heart thudding away under her hand and smiled ruefully at herself. She was too old to feel this jealousy. It was not her heart that yearned toward Stella, it was her stomach, clenching now with an agony of helpless love which she could not show. Showing love to Stella was like showing meat to a half-wild dog. Stella would seize it and swallow it and gnaw its bones. Showing love to Stella was opening oneself up for attack.

  "You don't really love me. When I was little, you promised me a trip to Westriding, and I didn't get to go!" This, the then sixteen-year-old Stella, rehearsing a grievance at least eight years old.

  "You've been told a thousand times that Grandpa was ill. Stella. He was too sick to have company. He died not long after that."

  "You promised and then you decided all by yourself we shouldn't go. You're always saying we'll do things and then we don't. Now you're dragging me off to this awful place, making me leave my friends without even asking me if I want to go! Why aren't we more like a family? I wish I were Elaine's sister. The Brouers don't act like you do."

  "If she mentions the Brouers to me again," Marjorie had said to Rigo, "I will strangle her."

  "They're friends," Rigo had replied, giving her a curious look. "They're best friends. Why should you resent that?"

  "I don't resent that. I resent the Brouers being held up to me as a standard of perfection."

  "All kids think some other family is perfect," he said.

  "I never did."

  "Yes, but," he had said, "you're strange."

  "I'm strange," she told herself now, looking down at the sleeping girl, wondering what it was about the Brouers that had evoked Stella's admiration. What quality did the Brouer family have that attracted her? Family? What did Stella mean by family?

  "I wish the Brouers were my family," Stella had said dozens of times, stubbornly, without explaining, knowing she was hurting, wanting to hurt. "They do things together. I wish I had a family like that."

  "Well, we'll have a chance to be a family on Grass, Stella. There won't be anyone else around." Not that Stella ever wanted to do what anyone else did. Not that isolation would change her.

  Stella had clenched her jaw at that, threatening angrily not to come to Grass at all. For weeks before they left, Marjorie had been sure that Stella would approach her with the suggestion that she stay behind with the Brouers.

  "Mother, I want to stay here in Sanctity with the Brouers. They'd like to have me stay."

  What would she have said? "Stella, that's fine. I don't want to go either. Neither does your father. I don't feel right about leaving my poor people in St. Magdalen's. Rigo doesn't want to leave his clubs and his committees and his nights on the town with Eugenie
on his arm. We're going because we think we must, to save all of mankind. But there's no real reason you have to go. Stay here and die of the plague, Stella. You and Elaine and her whole perfect family. I don't care anymore."

  And she had repented her anger, confessed her anger – though not mentioning several other sins which weighed even more heavily – received absolution for it, only to feel it again. And now they were on Grass, and Marjorie still felt anger, still repented, still confessed, still wondered what she would do with Stella, who was as sulky and rebellious and unloving here as she had been at home.

  "Why, Father?" she had asked. "Why is she like this? Why is Rigo like this?"

  "You know why anyone … The church teaches … " His gentle old voice had begun one of its learned and inflexible perorations.

  She had interrupted. "Sin. Even original sin. I know what it teaches. It teaches that a sin committed by people thousands of years ago descends to me. Through my cells. Through my DNA. Mixed in there, somehow, along with my heart and my lungs and my brain, and infected my daughter … "

  He had cocked his head. "Marjorie, I've never thought that original sin is conveyed in the cells."

  "Where else does it come from? What else is there? The soul comes with the body, doesn't it, Father? Sin comes with sex, doesn't it? It isn't just our souls in bed with each other, is it?"

  Sanctity would say yes, the souls were in bed together. Sanctity said marriages lasted forever. Especially in heaven. Which wasn't what Old Catholics believed. Thank God. When she was dead at least that would be over.

  She had wept then, feeling it was all her own fault, somehow. Father Sandoval had patted her shoulder, unable to offer comfort, unable or unwilling to make her feel less guilty. Nothing had done that, not even all the work at St. Magdalen's, which was supposed to be an expiation.