Grass

  Marjorie left Stella's room, shutting the door quietly behind her, her mind moving in old, familiar patterns. Perhaps when Stella was older, middle-aged, they could be friends. Stella would marry someone. She would separate herself from them, by distance, by time. She would have children. In time, they might be friends.

  The thought made her pale, gasp, made her bend over the sick pain that struck her. There might be no time for any of that. All the sulkiness, the lack of joy – there might be no time for it to work itself out. There might not be time for Stella. There was no proof they were protected here on Grass. There was only the assumption, the hope. And the children couldn't share even that. They couldn't be told the real reasons for the assignment. Too dangerous. So said Sanctity, and Marjorie concurred. Tony might forget himself. Stella might rebel. Either might say something undiplomatic to one of the bons and the fate of humanity could hang upon that saying. Assuming. Assuming there was any truth to the rumor. Assuming there was really no plague here on Grass.

  She sat frozen then, waiting for the morning to come, using the rote of prayer to calm herself.

  As soon as light showed clearly above the grasses, Marjorie went down to the cavern where the horses were stabled. She needed to feel them, smell them, be assured of their familiar reality, their uncomplicated loyalty and affection. They did not throw her love back in her face; they repaid a little attention a thousand times over. She went from stall to stall, petting and stroking, handing out bits of sweet cookie she had saved for them, stopping at last at Quixote's stall to peer in at him where he pawed the earth again and again, a nervous, begging gesture. She put her arms around him.

  "My Quixote," she told him. "Good horse. Wonderful horse." She laid her face against his ebony muzzle, feeling the warm breath in her ear, for that instant forgetting Stella's sulks and Rigo's unfaithfulness and the Hippae and the hounds and the monsters that haunted her, the one called fox here, the one called plague elsewhere. "Let's go out, out into the meadows."

  She did not bother to saddle him. This morning was not a time for schooling. This morning there would be only herself and Quixote, a togetherness more intimate than any other she knew. She wanted nothing between herself and his skin. She wanted to be able to reassure him with every muscle she had and take back his strength into herself. She lay along his neck as they went down from the cavern, along the curving way which led to the arena. The path went down along a winding defile, then up, topping a rise.

  As they approached the rise, the horse's skin quivered. He shook, silently, without even a whicker of protest, as though something deep within his great human-friend heart told him his only chance for continued life lay in making no sound. Only the breath came out of him like life leaving him Marjorie felt it, as she always felt the least movement he made She slid from his back in one fluid motion. Without going to the top of the rise, she knew what she would see there. Her stomach was in her throat, full of hot bile. She trembled as though half frozen. Still, one had to see. One had to know.

  She pulled on the stallion's shoulder. He had been trained to lie down, and he did it now, almost gladly, as though his legs would barely hold him. She stroked him once, for his comfort – or her own – then crawled on shivering arms and legs away, up the rise a little to one side of the path so that she could look down through the fringing grasses without being seen.

  And they were there. Three of them, just as there had been three horses when she and Tony and Rigo had ridden here. Three Hippae doing dressage exercises, walking, trotting, cantering, changing feet to cross the arena on long diagonals. They did everything she had done with Octavo, did it casually, offhandedly, with a practiced ease, concluding with the three animals side by side, facing away from her, the saber tips of their neck barbs pointing at her like a glittering abatis, as threatening as drawn blades. Then they turned and looked up at the place where she was hidden, their dark eyes gleaming red in the light of dawn, soundless.

  Amusement, she thought at first. A kind of mime. These Hippae had seen the humans and their horses and were amused at what these little off-world beasts had been doing with their human riders. She held the thought only fleetingly, only for a moment, trying to cling to it but unable to do so. They knew she was there. They knew she was watching. Perhaps they had timed this little exercise to coincide with her arrival …

  It wasn't amusement. Nothing in that red-eyed glare was amused. She did not stay to confront what it really was. She fled from the ridge as one in fear for her life, down to where the stallion lay as though he had been felled, urged him onto his trembling legs, and then half lay on his back as they first staggered then ran away, back to Opal Hill, back to human country, to add another horror to those she already knew.

  What she had seen in those red eyes was mockery – mockery and something deeper. Something abiding and unforgiving. Malice.

  James Jellico took himself home for lunch, as he often did. knowing his wife, Jandra, would be interested in the morning's happenings. Jellico's wife had no legs, and though she walked well enough on the elegant artificials he had obtained for her (a little bribery at the port, a little looking the other way when he was or, customs duty), she said it pained her to use the legs. There were implants one could use for the pain, but Jandra. who often said she didn't like people fooling about with her head, preferred for the most part to wheel about the house in the half-person she had used since she was a child. About the house and the poultry yard as well. A third of the Jellys' income came from homely Terran geese and ducks along with Semling szizz birds and fat, delicious wingless things from the planet Shame which Jandra called puggys.

  He found his wife by the goose pen feeding greens to the geese, they gabbling and snatching grass fronds from one another and she humming to herself, as she did when content. "Ho, Jelly," she greeted him "I've about decided to kill that one for dinner. She's so smug it serves her right."

  The indicated goose succeeded in dragging the disputed shred of greens out of another's beak and swallowing it, at the same time tipping her head to one side to get a good one-eyed goose-look at jelly. There was something in that cold, single-eyed stare, something in the line of beak and neck that shook him with a feeling which was at first deja vu and then horrified recognition.

  "That girl," he blurted. "She looked at me like that!" Then he had to tell her all about the girl and Ducky Johns and how strange it all was. "And it looked at me like that, tipped its head like that, as though it could see me better out of one eye than out of both. Like an animal."

  "Bird," corrected Jandra.

  "Bird or animal," said Jelly patiently. "Any of 'em that don't have what-you-call-it. Binocular vision. They'll do that. Tip their heads to see you better."

  "Why do you say 'it' when it was a girl, Jelly. Why don't you say 'she'?"

  "Habit, I guess. With those from Portside, he's and she's would be wrong as often as they're right. They have he's that look like she's, and she's that look like he's, and it's that look like either. I just say 'it' about them all." He took the image file out of his pocket and put it in the imager, to show her.

  Jandra shook her head, amazed at the ways of the world. She never tired hearing about them. Even simple things amazed her, though she was never shocked at the horrid ones. "I'll have to go down to Ducky's and see to this," she announced in a tone which allowed no contradiction. She peered at the image, looking at the creature's eyes. "It isn't right something human and helpless should be left down there. Was there something wrong with the girl's eyes?"

  "Nothing I could see. Nothing wrong with any of it – her. Pretty, built nice, smooth hair and all. Just the face. Well, look at it."

  "What do you mean about her face, Jelly?"

  "Empty," he said after staring and thinking about it for a moment. "It looks just empty, that's all."

  7

  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. Ther
eafter 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.