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 wo
rked 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.