Grass

  "Rigo. Yes. He feels he must," she said.

  "I warned you all!" His voice rasped in his throat – "God. I warned him."

  Marjorie nodded, fighting to maintain her mood of cool withdrawal. "Rigo does not listen to warnings. I do not know what Rigo listens to." She took a cup of steaming tea from the tray offered by one of the servants and attempted to change the subject. "Have you seen Stella?"

  Sylvan looked around the room, shaking his head. The room was crowded, and he walked away from Marjorie, searching the corners.

  "If you're looking for the girl," muttered Emeraude, "she went back out to the car."

  Sylvan conveyed this to Marjorie, who assumed that Stella had forgotten something and had gone to retrieve it. The bell rang. The servants in their hooped skirts skimmed into the house. The gate of the hounds opened. The hounds came through, two on two, gazing at the riders with their red eyes.

  Marjorie took a deep breath. Rigo was standing at the extreme left of the group. When the riders turned to follow the hounds out the Hunt Gate, he was behind them all.

  Except for one final rider, late, who came running from around the corner of the house onto the first surface, head tilted away from the observers, following Rigo out through the Hunt Gate at the tail end of the procession.

  A girl, Marjorie thought, wondering why Stella had not returned.

  A girl.

  Something in the walk, the stance. A certain familiarity about the clothing, the cut of the coat …

  Surely, oh, surely not.

  "Wasn't that your daughter?" asked Emeraude with a strange, wild look at Marjorie. "Wasn't that your daughter?"

  They heard the thunder of departing feet from outside the gate.

  When Sylvan got to the gate at a dead run, there was no one left. All the riders had mounted and gone.

  Stella had assumed that Sylvan would be among the riders. Despite what she had been told of the Hunt and had seen for herself, she had also assumed that she would find a way to bring her own mount near his. All such assumptions were forgotten the moment she vaulted onto the back of the mount that came forward for her. Before arriving at the bon Damfels', she had worried that a mount might not be available, might not, as it were, be expecting her. Everything she had been told during her observation of the Hunt, however, indicated that there were always exactly as many mounts as needed for the hunters who assembled. If someone decided at the last minute not to ride, no mount showed up outside the gate. Since it was part of her plan to come into the garden late, after the hounds had gone through, there was no opportunity for anyone to intercept her. She came to the gate as her father was mounting, and then felt, rather than saw, a mount appear before her, extending its massive leg. She went through the movements she had rehearsed so many times on the machine that they had become automatic.

  Until that moment everything had happened too quickly to think about, to consider, to change her mind. Then all at once the barbs were there, only inches from her breast, gleaming like razors. As she stared at them, half hypnotized and beginning to feel fear for the first time, the mount turned its head and drew back its lips in a kind of smile, a smile like enough to human for her to know that it held something like amusement, something like contempt, something, peculiarly, like encouragement. Then it lunged off after the others and she gasped, putting all her concentration into keeping herself braced away from the bony blades.

  They had gone some distance before she thought to look for Sylvan. From behind, all the riders looked alike. She could not tell if he was there or not. The rider directly ahead of her was her father. She knew his coat, cut unlike the coats of the other hunters.

  After a time she thought to look for Sylvan. All the riders looked alike. Except for her father. His coat was different from the others …

  After a time she looked for Sylvan. Her father was riding ahead of her …

  Her father was riding just ahead … ahead …

  It was a good day for the Hunt. Though summer was over, the pastures were still green from recent rains. The farmers had taken down some of the worst of the wire fences, and those that were left were clearly visible. Ahead, crossing the silver-beige stubble of an oat field, she could see the foxhounds, running hard, before the pack lost itself behind the slope to her left. The light wind brought the yelp and clamor of the dogs and the sound of the Huntsman's horn. Dark figures fringed the top of the hill, followers, hands shielding their eyes from the sun. One among them waved his hat and pointed the way the fox had gone. She reined her horse to the left, down along a spinney and around once more, up and over the crest of the hill, the short way around. From the top of the hill she could see the fox fleeing across the pasture below, nose low, bushy tail straight behind as it darted under a fence, then atop a long log and into Fuller's Copse. She urged her mount over the fence toward the copse, taking the jump cleanly, joining some hunters already there, hearing the thud of hooves as others arrived. The Master gestured for them to circle the copse, and she turned to one side, positioning herself near a ditch where the fox might flee.

  She could hear the hounds in the copse. The Huntsman was in there with them; his voice rose, calling individual hounds by name, urging them on. "Bounder, get out of there. Dapple, up, up girl … "

  Then there was a shout and they were away again, the horn, and the hounds giving voice …

  Sylvan.

  Someone was supposed to be riding with them today. A guest? Someone not a member of this Hunt.

  Sylvan. Here he was. Beside her, turning in the saddle to look adoringly at her. She felt her face flame and drew herself up proudly.

  Some of the riders had fallen back. They had been at it all the morning, and it was noon now, with the sun overhead and hot on her hat. The fox had taken refuge in Brent's Wood, and the Huntsman and whippers-in were among the trees. The Master, too, which was strange. Standing on his horse like some circus acrobat, standing and throwing things.

  And then … a surge of feeling. A jolt of pure pleasure that streaked up from her groin. An orgasm of sheer delight which seemed to go on and on and on.

  Sylvan felt it, too. They all felt it. Every face showed it. Every body lashed with it, heads jerking, jaws lax.

  Then at last the Huntsman was sounding the kill. There was the Huntsman with the fox's mask, and the horses turning for home. Now the sun was behind her. A long ride home. Even if they went the short way, along Magna Spinney and onto the gravel road past the Old Farm, it was still a long way home.

  She was desperately tired when they returned. Her father came over to her and took her arm, roughly, too roughly, and they walked through the gate with the others.

  "What in God's name were you doing here?" he demanded, his mouth almost at her ear. "Stella, you little fool!"

  She gaped at him. "Riding," she said, wondering why he asked. "Why, Daddy, I was riding."

  She followed her father's gaze, up to the terrace. Mother stood there, a glass in her hand, very pale, very beautiful. Sylvan was beside her. He had his arm around Marjorie, pointing down at them. How could he be there, not even in Hunt dress, when he had been riding just moments ago?

  Stella felt her face growing red. Sylvan hadn't really been on the Hunt. He couldn't have been. Her father walked away from her, up the flight of shallow stairs. Mother was clutching the balustrade with both hands, tightly, her knuckles white. Sylvan was holding her up, snapping his fingers at a nearby servant. Then Father was there, shouldering him aside.

  "Marjorie!"

  His wife looked blindly at him, as though she did not know who he was. "Stella," she said, pointing. "Her face … "

  Rigo turned to look back at his daughter where she stood at the foot of the stairs, turned just too late to see what Marjorie had seen, the same chill, senseless gaze that the Goosegirl had worn when she had appeared among them at Opal Hill.

  As for Stella, she tottered upon her feet, trembling between fury and shock with the realization that Sylvan hadn't really been th
ere to see her riding and that she could remember almost nothing about the day at all. She remembered horses and hounds and a fox, but they were real horses, real dogs from some other time, years ago. She remembered that jet of feeling which had filled her and the memory made her flush, but she did not know why she had felt it. Staring up at Sylvan's concerned face, at her father's furious one, at her mother's anxious one, she had the fleeting realization that there were things happening all around her, hideous, important things, and that she had not paid attention to what was going on.

  12

  Shoethai, assistant in the Office of Acceptable Doctrine, sat in the dining room of the port facility waiting for a ship to unload. Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi had explained that the ship carried a very important cargo, and he had sent Shoethai to receive it.

  Shoethai's automatic response had been unvoiced. "Why me?" Even now he studiously avoided looking at himself in the window, where his reflected image was superimposed over the ship in question like a hovering and misshapen ghost. The face was sufficiently grotesque to have made several staff people at the port pretend they hadn't seen him, including two of the waiters in this dining room.

  Shoethai was so accustomed to his appearance and to the way people reacted to it that he no longer showed his hurt and outrage, though the emotions seethed below the surface, more malevolently violent with every passing day. Elder Fuasoi could have sent someone else. Yavi, or Fumo. Either of them. They didn't look like much but they didn't look like monsters, either. The question was eternal. "Why me?"

  Back in Sanctity, very occasionally some well-meaning idiot had tried to comfort Shoethai by saying something like, "Still, you're glad to be alive, aren't you? You'd rather be alive than dead, wouldn't you?" Which just went to show how stupid and unfeeling they were, mouthing cliches at him that way. No, he would not rather be alive. Yes, he would rather be dead, except he was afraid of dying. Best yet would be if he'd never lived at all, if they'd let his father kill him when he tried to. Father, at least, had cared about him and wanted what was best for him. What was best was never to have been born or, if that wasn't possible, never to have lived past a few weeks when he was still too little to know anything. What would have been absolute best was never to have looked at this face, conscious that it was his own.

  Still, the Elder Brother hadn't sent Fumo or Yavi. The Elder Brother had sent Shoethai, and that meant something. It meant that Fumo or Yavi weren't supposed to know about this shipment. If Fumo and Yavi weren't supposed to know, then Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe didn't know, and Sanctity didn't know either. And that meant it was something that only Shoethai and Fuasoi knew about, only those two.

  "Do you know what Moldies are?" the Elder Brother had asked him one day, out of nothing, while Shoethai was cleaning the Elder Brother's office.

  "It's martyrs of something," Shoethai had said.

  "Martyrs of the Last Days," the Elder Brother had said. "A group of men who are dedicated to hastening the end. Have you ever read the Book of Ends?"

  Shoethai merely stood there, mouth open, shaking his head. Of course he hadn't read any Moldy books. You could get yourself terminated by Sanctity for reading Moldy books.

  The Elder Brother had read his mind. "I know. It's among the forbidden volumes. Still, I think you'd be interested in reading it, Shoethai. I'll grant a dispensation for you. Take the book with you when you leave, but don't let anyone else see it. Particularly, don't let Jhamlees Zoe see it."

  It wasn't even a reader. It was an old-style book, with pages. Elder Fuasoi laid it out on the desk and just left it there, an old brown thing with the words Book of Ends in gold across the front. Shoethai had hidden the book in the deep pocket of his robe, had read it only when he was alone – which was most of the time. By now he had it almost memorized and frequently quoted sections of it to himself.

  "Garbed in light, we will dwell in the house of light," he recited to himself now as he sucked his tea through the gaps in his teeth. After the end of mankind would come the New Creation. In the New Creation he would no longer wear this face and this body. In the New Creation he would no longer be deformed. He would dart like a spear, clothed only in radiance, beautiful as an angel. Elder Fuasoi had taken particular notice of this, reading the proper section from the book and pointing to the illustrations, but Shoethai had believed it from the moment he read it for himself. It was as though it had been written just for him. Fair was fair. If people didn't have a fair try in this life, they would in the next one.

  "Let the changes come," he whispered, inhaling another sip of tea. "Let the New Creation manifest itself." The manager of the dining room had brought the tea after a furious whispering match with his two waiters. Shoethai prayed silently that the waiters would be among the first to be cleansed away, most painfully. Of course it would be painful. Elder Fuasoi had already told him that. Elder Fuasoi had seen the plague. Elder Fuasoi had actually spent almost a year in a plague camp. Elder Fuasoi was a Moldy. He said nobody could see the plague and be anything else.

  Once Elder Fuasoi confessed that he was actually a Moldy, Shoethai had become a willing and dedicated convert even though they were the only Moldies on Grass and Jhamlees Zoe would have them both killed if he found out. Doing what the Moldies needed doing didn't need more than two. Two, Elder Fuasoi had told him, would be more than enough.

  "Bless me, O Creator," Shoethai mused silently as he stared through his own image at the scurrying figures around the ship, "for I will cleanse thy house of ugliness." Ugliness itself was a sin against Creation. The Elder Brother had even hinted that the Creator had given Shoethai this face in order to make explicit to Shoethai a certain knowledge, the knowledge of the absolute depravity and unworthiness of man, printing that message on Shoethai's flesh for everyone to see. Elder Fuasoi said that what Shoethai appeared to be on the outside, all mankind actually was on the inside. What Shoethai looked like, mankind actually was. Misshapen. Deformed. A freak of Creation. Intelligence should not exist in such stinking, fallible flesh. Flesh was all right for animals, but not for intelligent beings, and mankind was an experiment that hadn't worked out. For the few who helped clean up the mess, there would be divine rewards. And for the others there would be a final end which would leave the universe cleansed and purified and ready to start over.

  Below him, he saw ground vehicles moving from the ship toward the port building. The shipment would be in one of them. Brother Shoethai decided to stay where he was for a time. Let the crowd clear away before he went down to the cargo office. There was no hurry. Once Elder Fuasoi had the shipment and distributed it, everyone on the planet would die, but it would take some time. The virus didn't work for a long time, sometimes – There was no hurry. An hour more or less would make little difference. Shoethai giggled as he sipped at his tea. Then, seeing what the giggle did to his reflection in the window, he stopped and turned slightly away so that he would not be able to see himself anymore.

  In his office at the Friary, Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi leaned on his desk, choking down the pain from his belly. The second stomach and gut transplant hadn't worked any better than the first one, even though the office had scoured the penitents for as close a tissue match as possible. That was the best the doctors could do here on Grass, and even then they'd objected that the donor hadn't made a free gift of his body prior to getting fatally wounded in the head by (so Elder Fuasoi had informed them) an unfortunate fall from the towers. There were no facilities for cloning body systems on Grass, and while Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi of Sanctity had sufficient clout to go back to Sanctity and wait while they cloned a gut for him, Jorny Shales the Moldy hadn't wanted to take the time.

  "One would think … " he snarled to himself in a litany that was repeated every time his gut pained him, "one would think the Creator could grant surcease to those of us doing His work."

  "Pardon, Your Emminence?" said Yavi Foosh from his own desk by the window. "Pardon?"

  "Nothing," snarled the Elder. "I've got a
pain, that's all Probably something I ate."

  Though it wasn't anything he had eaten. It was flesh, that was all. Fallible flesh. Full of stinks and pains and rot. Full of weakness and foolish, ugly appetites and dirty excretions. There would be no flesh in the next creation, not for those who had cleaned up this one. Elder Fuasoi gripped the edge of the desk and sweated, thinking of other times and places as he waited for the cramp to pass.

  He had never really been aware of pain until the camp. His name had been Jorny then, a boy of fifteen dragged into the camp with his uncle Shales. One day he had been living with Uncle Shales in the fishing town, going to school, fishing off the pier, going out in the boat when the weather was right, writing love notes to Gerandra Andraws, cute little Gerry with the perky little bottom, wondering if he was old enough to really do something about her. The next day he had been there in the camp, crowded with fifteen other men and boys in one room with no school, no girls, no fishing, and no Uncle Shales.

  The people in the camp either had the disease or were close family members of people with the disease. Uncle Shales was dying, they told him. Jorny had to stay in the camp until they found out whether he was going to die, too.

  He wanted to see Uncle Shales, but they wouldn't let him. He sneaked around until he found what building Uncle was in and where his bed was, and then he got up close to the wall, around back. Uncle Shales would open the window a little bit and they'd talk, at night. Uncle Shales told Jorny not to be afraid. Everything that happened, happened for the best, he said. Jorny sat crouched under the window, tears running down his face, trying to keep Uncle from hearing him cry. Then one night Uncle didn't answer him and the window wasn't open, so Jorny waited until everyone was asleep and sneaked in. He couldn't find Uncle Shales. In the bed where Uncle had been was only this thing, this kind of monster, partly bandages, with one eye peering out and a round, raw hole where its mouth ought to be, leaking all over the place and stinking.