16

Everyone knew, the doctor said, and it seemed she told only the truth. Everyone knew there was plague. Everyone knew there might be Moldies already on Grass. Everyone knew there was a trail half a mile wide out there in the grasses, ending next to the swamp forest, which all at once seemed a fragile and penetrable curtain rather than the impassable barrier they had always relied upon. Hysteria mounted as the talk gathered both volume and speculative intensity, here and there, about the town.

Among other topics was much discussion of whether Grass’s seeming immunity to plague meant anything. Foremost among those who thought it did was Dr. Bergrem She had seen one or two people arrive on ships with filthy gray lesions. After a week or two on Grass, they had departed cured. Once there had even been a man in a quarantine pod....

Roald Few challenged the doctor to explain herself. “You mean more than that the disease isn’t here, doctor. You mean it can’tcomehere. Something here prevents it?”

To which she nodded and said she thought so, in her experience, from what she’d seen, turning to Tony and Rillibee for their opinion.

“No, that isn’t it,” Tony told them wearily. “It isn’t that it can’t come here. It isn’t that no one gets it here. The disease started from here. Somehow. The foxen think.”

This was a statement requiring more than a little explanation. Since when had the foxen been talking to people? And where were these foxen? Tony and Rillibee told what they knew to Roald and Mayor Alverd Bee while dozens of other people came and went. They tried to describe foxen, unconvincingly, and were greeted with skepticism, if not outright disbelief.

Ducky Johns and Saint Teresa were there with an outlandish scenario of their own: Diamante bon Damfels, sneaking around naked in the port. Diamante bon Damfels now occupying a room in the hospital next to ones already taken by her sister, Emeraude, who had been beaten, and by Amy and Rowena, who refused to return to Klive. Sylvan, hearing this, went off to see his mother and sisters. Commoners looked after him, pityingly. A bon, here in Commons. Useless as a third leg on a goose.

“How did Diamante get here?” Tony demanded of the assembled group. “We’ve just come through the swamp forest, and if it’s the same everywhere as the parts we saw, there is literally no way through! There are some islands near the far edge, and some near this edge, too, but in the middle it’s deep water and tangles of low branches and vines everywhere you look, like an overgrown maze. If she wasn’t a climber, like Rillibee here, or if the foxen didn’t bring her, then how did she get here?”

“We’ve been asking ourselves that, sweet boy,” said Ducky Johns. “Over and over. Haven’t we, Teresa? And the only answer is there has to be another way in. One we haven’t known about until now.” Ducky’s usual girlish flirtatiousness was held in abeyance by her anxiety.

“One we still don’t know about,” Teresa amended.

“Oh, yes we do, dear,” Ducky contradicted. “We know it’s there. We just don’t know exactly where. Unless these strange foxen creatures did bring her, which they may have done, for all we know!”

Rillibee heard all this through a curtain of exhaustion. He said, “I don’t think the foxen brought her. Brother Mainoa would have known.”

“Do I know this Brother Mainoa you keep speaking of?” asked Alverd Bee.

Rillibee reminded him who Brother Mainoa was.

Sylvan joined them again, his face white and drawn. Dimity was conscious, but did not know him. Emmy was unconscious, though she was getting better. Rowena was sleeping. Amy had talked with him. She had told him his father was dead, and he was wondering why he felt nothing.

Rillibee was telling the mayor about Mainoa’s attempts to translate the Arbai documents.

“And you say they’ve translated something already?” Roald cried. He didn’t sound astonished, merely wild with a kind of quavery excitement. His gray hair tufted around his ears like a spiky aureole; he cracked his knuckles between jabs at the tell-me link, clickety crack. The sound was like someone walking on nutshells. “I want to see that, just as soon as I can. Let me get on to Semling.”

“Are you a linguist?” Sylvan asked him curiously, wondering why there would be any such thing on Grass.

“Oh, no, my boy,” Roald said. “My living comes from the family supply business. At languages, I’m only an amateur.” He said it without even looking at Sylvan, then asked Rillibee, “Who was Mainoa’s contact on Semling?”

Thus dismissed, Sylvan sat down at a table nearby, resting his head on his arms as he considered the continuing bustle around him. Things were busier in Commons than he had assumed they would be. People were more intelligent and far more affluent than he would have thought. They had things even the estancias didn’t have. Foods. Machines. More comfortable living arrangements. It made him feel insecure and foolish. Despite all his fury at Stavenger and the other members of the Obermun class, still he had accepted that the bons were superior to the commoners. Now he wondered if they really were—or if the bons were even equal to the commoners? Why had he thought Marjorie would welcome his attentions? What had he to offer her?

The thought struck him with sick embarrassment. He sought words he had read but seldom if ever used. “Parochial.” “Provincial.” “Narrow.” True words. What was a bon among these people? None of the commoners were deferring to him. None of them were asking for his opinion. Once Rillibee and Tony had told everyone that Sylvan was deaf to the foxen, Commons had disdained him as though he were deaf—and mute—to them as well. He could have accepted their disdain more easily if they had been professionals, like the doctor, but they were only amateurs, like this old man talking translation with Rillibee. Mere hobbyists. People who had studied things that had nothing to do with their daily lives. And every one of them knew more than he did! He wanted desperately to be part of them, part of something....

He heaved himself up and went to find something to drink. Rillibee rose from his chair beside Roald. “You know everything I do, Elder Few. I must get back to the others. I can’t stay here.” He yawned again, thinking briefly of asking Tony to come back with him. No. Tony would want to stay until they knew something more about Stella. As for Sylvan—better that Sylvan stayed here. Marjorie hadn’t wanted him back.

He went out of the place, still yawning, breaking into a staggering jog that carried him down the slope to the place the foxen waited. Something dragged at him. insisting upon his return. Perhaps the trees. Perhaps something more. Some need or purpose awaited him among the trees. If nothing else, then he would carry the news of the bon Damfels girl and of Rigo’s injuries and of all that both those events implied.

In the room he left behind, the doctor and the two madams were trying to figure out why a naked, mindless girl should have been trying to get into a freighter. “Why was she carrying a dried bat? What does that mean?” Dr. Bergrem demanded of the group at large.

“Hippae,” said Sylvan as he wandered by. “Hippae kick dried bats at each other. There are dried bats in Hippae caverns.”

Now they were looking at him. Now, suddenly, he wasn’t mute anymore. He explained, “It’s a gesture of contempt, that’s all. That’s how the Hippae express contempt for one another, part of the challenge. Or at the end of a bout, to reinforce defeat, they kick dead bats at each other. A way of saying, ‘You’re vermin.’ “

Lees Bergrem nodded. “I’ve heard that. Heard that the Hippae have a lot of symbolic behaviors. ..”

Feeling foolishly grateful for their attention, Sylvan told them what little more he had learned about the Hippae when he was a child, wishing Mainoa were there to tell them more.

Midmorning found Mainoa with Marjorie and Father James on the spacious open platform of the Tree City. Brother Mainoa had been studying the material recorded in his tell-me link while Marjorie had explored and Father James had tried to talk to foxen, thanking God that he was present rather than Father Sandoval. Father Sandoval had no patience with the idea that there might be other intelligent races. Father James wondered what the Pope in Exile would think of the whole idea.

Marjorie hadn’t tried to speak to the foxen. From time to time He had reached out and said something to her. She had accepted these bits of information, trying to keep her face from showing what happened to her each time He spoke, a fire along her nerves, an ecstatic surge, taste, smell, something. Now the three humans sat face to face, trying to put bits and pieces of knowledge and hypothesis together.

“The Arbai had machines that transported them,” Marjorie said. She had finally understood that. “That thing on the dais in the center of town? That was really a transport machine. Machines like that moved the Arbai from one place to another.”

Brother Mainoa sighed and rubbed his head. “I think you’re right, Marjorie. Let’s see, what have I picked up in the last few hours? There’s been another message from Semling.” He took out the tell-me and put it at the center of their space, tapping it with one hand.

“On the theory that things written immediately before the tragedy might be of most use to us, Semling put a high priority on translating a handwritten book I found in one of the houses some time ago. They’ve translated about eighty percent of it. It seems to be a diary. It gives an account of the author trying to teach a Hippae to write. The Hippae became frustrated and furious and killed two Arbai who were nearby. When the Hippae calmed down, the author remonstrated with it. He or she explained that killing intelligent beings was wrong, that the dead Arbai were mourned by their friends, and that the Hippae must never do it again.”

Marjorie breathed. “Poor, naive, well-meaning fool.”

“Do you mean that this Arbai person, this diarist, simplytoldthe Hippae not to do it again?” Father James was incredulous. “Did he think the Hippae would care?”

Mainoa nodded sadly, rubbing at his shoulder and arm as though they hurt him.

Marjorie said, “When He ... when the foxen think of the Arbai, they always put light around them, as we might picture angels.”

Brother Mainoa wondered how the golden angels high on Sanctity’s towers would look with Arbai fangs and scales. “Not as though they were holy, though, do you think, Marjorie? More as though they were untouchable.”

Marjorie nodded. Yes. The vision had that feeling to it. Untouchable Arbai. Set upon pedestals. Unreachable.

“The Arbai could believe no evil of the Hippae?” Father James could not believe what he was hearing.

Mainoa nodded. “It wasn’t that they couldn’t believe evil of the Hippae. They couldn’t believe in it, period. They seem to have had no concept of evil. There is no word for evil in the material I’ve received from Semling. There are words for mistakes, or things done inadvertently. There are words for accidents and pain and death, but no word for evil. The Arbai word for intelligent creatures has a root curve which means, according to the computers, ‘avoiding error.’ Since the Arbai considered the Hippae to be intelligent—after all, they’d taught them to write—they thought all they had to do was point out the error and the Hippae would avoid it.”

“Of course it wasn’t an error,” Marjorie said. “The Hippae enjoyed the killing.”

Father James demurred. “I have a hard time believing in that kind of mind....”

Brother Mainoa sighed. “She’s right, Father. They’ve translated the word the Hippae trampled into the cavern. It’s an Arbai word, or rather a combination of three or more Arbai words. One of them means death, and one means outsiders or strangers, and one means joy. Semling gives a high probability to translating it asjoy-to-kill-strangers.”

“They think they have a right to kill everything but themselves?”

Father James shook his head.

Marjorie laughed bitterly. “Oh, Father, is that so unusual? Look at our own poor homeworld. Didn’t man think he had a right to kill everything but himself? Didn’t he have fun doing it? Where are the great whales? Where are the elephants? Where are the bright birds who once lived in our own swamp-forests?”

Brother Mainoa said, “Well, they couldn’t kill the ones who lived here in the tree city. The Hippae can’t swim, they can’t climb, so they couldn’t kill the Arbai who were here.”

“It must have been too late for the ones who lived here, nonetheless,” Marjorie said, looking at the shadow lovers who had just returned to the bridge and leaned there in the sun, whispering to one another. Shadow lovers, perilously intent upon one another. Not seeing what was to come. “Perhaps they died when winter came. It was too late for all the others, out there on other worlds.”

“The ones here in the city must have been immune to the disease,” Father James said. “They could have gone underground. Why didn’t they? We must be immune, too. All the people on Grass must be immune.”

“Oh, yes,” Marjorie said. “I’m sure we’re immune, so long as we stay on Grass. It stands to reason the Arbai on Grass were immune, also. That’s why the Hippae killed them as they did. But it doesn’t help to know that! Nothing we’ve found out helps! Nothing tells us how it started. Nothing tells us how to cure it once it’s started. I keep thinking of home. I have a sister back home. Rigo has a mother, a brother, we have nieces and nephews. I have friends!”

“Shhh,” he said. “We know one way to cure it, Marjorie. Anyone who comes here—“

“We don’t even know that,” she contradicted. “Even if we could bring every living human from every populated world to Grass, we don’t know whether they’d catch it again after they left. We don’t know whether we will get it if we leave. We don’t know how it is spread. The foxen know something that will help us, but they won’t tell us! It’s almost as though they’re waiting for something. But what?” She looked up to confront a shadowed mass across the railing. There were eyes, for a moment. Something brushing through her mind. She shook her head angrily. “I have this dreadful feeling of hopelessness. As though it’s already too late for all this. As though things have gone past the point of no return.” Something had changed irrevocably. Some point had been passed. She was sure of that.

A foxen touched her mind with incorporeal hands. She heard a comforting voice saying, “Hush, dear, hush.” She leaned her forehead on a vast shoulder which was nowhere near. The foxen danced in her mind, and she with them.

Abruptly the shoulder was withdrawn. She looked up. The foxen had gone.

In a moment she understood why. She heard human voices ringing over the susurrus of Arbai speech. It was too soon for Tony to be back. They were not voices she recognized.

“Listen,” she said, turning to locate the sound. Not far off in the trees someone saw her and young voices yodeled a paean of anticipation.

There was something threatening in that shout. Marjorie and the two old men retreated across the plaza, watching apprehensively as the three forms flung themselves through the trees, dropping upon the platform like apes.

“Brother Flumzee,” said Brother Mainoa in a calm, weary voice. “I hadn’t expected to see you here.”

Brother Flumzee posed on the railing, one knee up, his arms folded loosely about it. “Call me Highbones,” he chirruped. “Meet my friends. Steeplehands. Long Bridge. There were two more of us, but Little Bridge and Ropeknots got eaten by Hippae out there.” He waved, indicating somewhere else. “Along with Elder Brother Fuasoi and his little friend Shoethai. Not that we’re sure of that. We heard a lot of howling, but maybe they escaped.”

“Why were you out there at all?” Brother Mainoa asked.

“They sent me for you, Brother.” Highbones smiled. “They said you are no longer one of us. You are to be dispensed with.”

“But you said Fuasoi was with you! And Shoethai!”

“We didn’t expect them to come along. They were kind of, what would you say, last-minute additions. They were going to drop us off and then go somewhere else.”

A shadow figure moved among the three climbers. Highbones beat at it, as though it were a swarm of gnats. “What the hell are these things?”

“Only pictures,” said Marjorie. “Pictures of the people who once lived here.”

Highbones turned his head, surveying the city. “Nice,” he said. “A climber’s place. Is there enough to eat so somebody could live here?”

“In summer,” said Brother Mainoa. “Probably. Fruit. And nuts. There may be edible animals, too.”

“Not in winter, hmm? Well, in winter we could go into town, couldn’t we. Probably want to go there anyhow. Pick up some women. Bring them back here.”

“You mean stay here?” Long Bridge asked. “After we do the thing, you mean stay here?”

“Why not?” Highbones asked. “You think of any better place for climbers than this?”

“I don’t like these things.” Long Bridge batted at the shadow forms moving before him. “I don’t like these monsters all over me.”

The two men had been listening and watching, noticing the tense muscles in the climbers’ arms and legs, the strained lines of their necks and jaws. Brother Mainoa thought that all this talk meant nothing. The talk was only to make a space of time, to allow them to size up their opposition. And what was their opposition? An old man, a soft man, and a woman.

Brother Mainoa reached out toward the foxen. Nothing. No pictures. No words.

“Are you hungry?” Marjorie asked. “We have some food we can share with you.”

“Oh, yes, we’re hungry,” leered Highbones. “Not for food, though. We brought enough food of our own.” He ran his tongue along his lips, staring at her, letting his eyes dwell lasciviously on her. She shivered. “You look young and healthy,” Highbones went on. “There was talk back there at the Friary about plague. You don’t have plague, do you, pretty thing?”

“I could have,” she said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “I suppose. There was plague on Terra when we left.”

The two followers turned to Highbones, questions on their lips, but he silenced them with a gesture. “It’s naughty to tell lies. If you got it there, you’d be dead by now. That’s what everybody says.”

“Sometimes it takes years to manifest itself,” said Father James, “but the person still has it.”

“What’re you?” Highbones said with a laugh. “Dressed up like that? Some kind of servant? Mind your manners, servant. Nobody was talking to you.”

“If Fuasoi sent you after me,” Mainoa said thoughtfully, “he could have had only one reason. If he didn’t want knowledge about the cause of the plague disseminated, then he must have been a Moldy.”

Marjorie caught her breath. A Moldy here? Already? Had they been too late!

Highbones ignored the interchange. He put both feet onto the deck, stood up easily, stretching. “You boys ready?” he asked. “Each of you take one of the geezers. I get the woman first—“

“Highbones.” The voice called from above them, from the sun spangle among the high branches. “Highbones the coward. High-bones the liar. Will he climb?”

Marjorie felt the breath go out of her. Rillibee. But only Rillibee. No other voices.

Highbones had turned, neck craning as he searched the high dazzle. “Lourai!” he shouted. “Where are you, you peeper!”

“Here,” the voice called from above. “Where Highbones can’t climb. Where Highbones can’t reach.”

“Keep them quiet,” Highbones snarled, gesturing toward Marjorie and the old men. “Until I get back.” He leapt upon the railing and outward, into the trees “Wait for me, peeper. I’m coming to get you.”

Marjorie’s pack was just inside the door There was a knife in it. She turned, moving toward it. Steeplehands dashed forward, intercepted her, and knocked her away from the door. She stumbled, reaching out a hand to catch herself. The low railing caught her at the back of her knees, and she went over, falling, seeing the sun-spangled foliage spin around her and hearing her own voice soaring until she suddenly didn’t hear anything anymore.

“A very small being to see you, O God,” the angelic servitor announced. The servitor looked very much like Father Sandoval except that he had wings. Marjorie paused in the vaulted and gauzy doorway to inspect them. They were not swans wings, which she had expected, but translucent insect wings, like those of a giant dragonfly. Anatomically, they made more sense than bird wings, since they were in addition to, rather than in place of, the upper appendages. The angel glared at her.

“Yes, yes,” said God patiently. “Come in.”

God stood before a tall window draped in cloud. Outside were the gardens of Opal Hill, stretching away in vista upon vista. After a moment, Marjorie realized the garden was made of stars.

“How do you do,” Marjorie heard herself saying. He looked like someone she knew. Smaller than she had thought He would be. Very bony about the face, with huge eyes, though the person she knew, whoever he was, had never worn his hair as long as God wore His, a dark curling about his shoulders, a white mane at his temples. “Welcome, very small being,” He said, smiling. Light filled the universe. “Was something bothering you?”

“I can learn to accept that you do not know my name,” Marjorie said. “Though it came as a shock—“

“Wait,” He said. “I know the true names of everything. What do you mean I do not know your name?”

“I mean you don’t know I’m Mariorie.”

“Marjorie,” he mouthed, as though He found the sound unfamiliar. “True, I did not know you were called Marjorie.”

“It seems very harsh. Very cruel. To be a virus.”

“I would not have said virus, but you believe it’s cruel to be something that will spread?” he asked. “Even if that’s what’s needed?” She nodded, ashamed.

“You must be having a difficult time. Very small beings do have difficult times. That’s what I create them for. If there weren’t difficult concepts to pull out of nothing and build into creation. One wouldn’t need very small beings. The large parts almost make themselves.” He gestured at the universe spinning beneath them. “Elementary chemistry, a little exceptional mathematics, and there it is, working away like a furnace. It’s the details that take time to grow, to evolve, to become. The oil in the bearings, so to speak. What are you working on now?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

The angel in the doorway spoke impatiently. “The very small being is working on mercy, Sir. And justice. And guilt.”

“Mercy? And justice? Interesting concepts. Almost worthy of direct creation rather than letting them evolve. I wouldn’t waste my time on guilt. Still, I have confidence you’ll all work your way through the permutations to the proper ends....”

“I don’t have much confidence,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been taught isn’t making sense.”

“That’s the nature of teaching. Something happens, and intelligence first apprehends it, then makes up a rule about it, then tries to pass the rule along. Very small beings invariably operate in that way. However, by the time the information is passed on, new things are happening that the old rule doesn’t fit. Eventually intelligence learns to stop making rules and understand the flow.”

“I was told that the eternal verities—“

“Like what?” God laughed. “If there were any, I should know! I have created a universe based on change, and a very small being speaks to me of eternal verities!”

“I didn’t mean to offend. It’s just, if there are no verities, how do we know what’s true?”

“You don’t offend. I don’t create things that are offensive to me. As for truth, what’s true is what’s written. Every created thing bears my intention written in it. Rocks. Stars. Very small beings. Everything only runs one way naturally, the way I meant it to. The trouble is that very small beings write books that contradict the rocks, then say I wrote the books and the rocks are lies.” He laughed. The universe trembled. “They invent rules of behavior that even angels can’t obey, and they say I thought them up. Pride of authorship.” He chuckled.

“They say, ‘Oh, these words are eternal, so God must have written them.’”

“Your Awesomeness,” said the angel from the door. “Your meeting to review the Arbai failure—“

“Ah, tsk,” said God. “Now there’s an example. I failed completely with that one. Tried something new, but they were too good to do any good, you know?”

“I’ve been told that’s what you want,” she said. “For us to be good!”

He patted her on the shoulder. “Too good is good for nothing. A chisel has to have an edge, my dear. Otherwise it simply stirs things around without ever cutting through to causes and realities....”

“Your Awesomeness,” the angel said again, testily. “Very small being, you’re keeping God from his work.”

“Remember,” said God, “While it is true I did not know thatyoubelieve your name is Marjorie, I do know who youreally are....”

“Marjorie,” the angel said.

“My God, Marjorie!” The hand on her shoulder shook her even more impatiently.

“Father James,” she moaned, unsurprised. She was lying on her back, staring up at the sun-smeared foliage above her.

“I thought he’d killed you.”

“He talked to me. He told me—“

“I thought that damned climber had killed you!”

She sat up. Her head hurt. She felt a sense of wrongness, of removal.

“You must have hit your head.”

She remembered the confrontation on the platform, the railing. “Did that young man hit me?”

“He knocked you over the railing. You fell.”

“Where is he? Where are they?”

“One of the foxen has them backed into an Arbai house. He came down out of the trees just as you fell, snarling like a thunderstorm. He’s right out there in the open, but I still can’t see him. Two of the others came with him. They carried me down to you.”

She struggled to her feet, using a bulky root to pull herself up, staring in disbelief at the platform high above. “Falling all that way should have killed me.”

“You dropped onto a springy branch. Then you slipped off that onto another one, lower down, and then finally fell into that pile of grass and brush,” he said, pointing it out. “Like failing on a great mattress. Your guardian angel was watching out for you.”

“How do we get back up?” she asked, not at all believing in guardian angels.

He pointed again. Two of the foxen waited beside the tree. Vague forms without edges; corporate intentions and foci, patterns in her mind

“Did they help with the men?” she asked.

He shook his head. “The one up there didn’t need help.”

She stood looking at the two for a long moment, thinking it out. Dizziness overwhelmed her and she sagged against the tree, muttering “Rocks. Stars. Very small beings.”

“You don’t sound like yourself,” he said.

“I’m not,” she replied, managing to smile, her recent vision replaying itself in her mind. “Have you ever seen God, Father?”

The question distressed him. Her eyes were wide, staring, glassy. “I think you had a bit of concussion. You may even have a fracture, Marjorie....”

“Maybe I’ve had a religious experience. An insight. People have them.”

He could not argue with that, though he knew Father Sandoval would have. In Father Sandoval’s opinion, religious experiences were something Old Catholics should eschew in the interest of balance and moderation. Once matters of faith had been firmly decided, religious experiences just confused people. Father James was less certain. He let Marjorie lean upon him as they staggered a few steps to the waiting foxen. One of them picked her up and carried her upward along slanting branches and scarcely visible vines to the plaza high above. She could feel foxen all about her, a weight of them in her mind, a thunder of thought, a tidal susurrus, like vast dragon-breathing in darkness.

“Good Lord,” she whispered. “Where did they all come from?”

“They were already here,” said Mainoa. “Watching us from the trees. They just came closer. Marjorie, are you all right?”

“She’s not all right,” fretted Father James. “She’s talking strangely. Her eyes don’t look right....”

“I’m fine,” she said absently, trying to stare at the assembled multitude, knowing it for multitude, but unable to distinguish the parts. “Why are they here?”

Brother Mainoa looked up at her, frowning in concentration. “They’re trying to find something out. I don’t know what it is.”

A foxen bulk completely blocked the door. Marjorie received a clear picture of two human figures being dropped from a high branch. She drew a line across it. In the crowd behind her there was approval and disapproval. The picture changed to one of the two men being released. She drew a line across that as well. More approval and disapproval. Argument, obviously. The foxen did not agree on what ought to be done.

Her legs wobbled under her and she staggered. “Rillibee hasn’t come back?

Brother Mainoa shook his head. “No. His voice went off that way.” He pointed.

She approached the door of the house. The two climbers, their hands and feet tightly tied, glared back at her.

“Who sent you to kill Brother Mainoa?” she asked.

The two looked at one another. One shook his head. The other, Steeplehands, said sulkily, “Shoethai, actually. But the orders came from Elder Brother Fuasoi. He said Mainoa was a backslider.”

She rubbed at the pain in her forehead. “Why did he think so?”

“Shoethai said it was some book of Mainoa’s. Some book from the Arbai city.”

“My journal,” said Brother Mainoa. “I’m afraid I was careless. I must have left the new one where it could be found. We were in such a hurry to leave—“

“What were you writing about, Brother?” Marjorie asked.

“About the plague, and the Arbai, and the whole riddle.”

“Ah,” she said, turning back to the prisoners. “You, ah ... Long Bridge. You intended to rape me, you and the others, didn’t you?”

Long Bridge stared at his feet, one nostril lifting. “We was going to have a try, sure. Why not? We didn’t see those whatever-they-are hanging around, so why not.”

“Did you think that was a ...” she struggled to find a word he might understand, “a smart thing to do? A good thing to do? What?”

“What are you?” he sneered. “You work for Doctrine? It was something we wanted to do, that’s all.”

“Did you care how I felt about it?”

“Women like it, no matter what they say. Everybody knows that.”

She shuddered. “Were you going to kill me, then?”

“If we’d of felt like it, sure.”

“Do women like that, too?”

He looked momentarily confused, licking his lips.

“Wouldn’t it have bothered you? Killing me?”

Long Bridge did not answer. Steeplehands did. “We’d of been sorry, later, if we’d wanted you around and you was already dead,” he mumbled.

“I see,” she said. “But you wouldn’t have been sorry for me?”

“Why?” Long Bridge asked angrily. “Why should we be sorry for you? Where was you when we got packed up and sent out here? Where was you when they took us away from our folks?”

Marjorie received a new picture of the two prisoners being dropped from a high tree. She drew a line across it in her mind, though more slowly than before “What do all these foxen want, Brother Mainoa? What are they here for?”

“I think they want to see what you’ll do,” he answered.

Father James asked, “Whatareyou doing?”

“I’m trying to figure something out,” she said. “I’m trying to decide whether we can afford to be merciful. The Arbai were merciful, but when confronted with evil, mercy becomes an evil. It got the Arbai killed, and it could get us killed because these two might simply come back and murder us. The question is, are they evil? If they are, it doesn’t matter how they got that way. Evil can be made, but not unmade....”

“Forgiveness is a virtue,” Father James said, realizing as he did so that the suggestion came from habit.

“No. That’s too easy. If we forgive these two, we may actually cause another killing.” She put her head between her hands, thinking. “Do we have the right to be fools if we want to? No. Not at someone else’s expense.”

He stared at her with a good deal of interest. “You’ve never spoken this way, Marjorie. Mercy is a tenet of our faith.”

“Only because you don’t think this life really matters. Father. God says it does.”

“Marjorie!” he cried. “That’s not true.”

“All right,” she cried in return. The sullen ache in her head was now a brooding violence inside her skull. “I don’t meanyou,Father James, I mean you, what you priests usually say. I say this life matters, and that means mercy is doing the best for them I can without allowing anyone else to suffer, including me! I won’t make the Arbai mistake.”

“Marjorie,” he cried again, dismayed. He had had his own doubts and troubles, but to hear her talking wildly like this disturbed him deeply. She was almost violent, something she had never been, full of words that spilled from her mouth like grain from a ripped sack.

She turned to the imprisoned men. “I’m sorry. The only way I can see that we can be safe from you seems to be to allow the foxen to kill you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Lady,” cried Steeplehands in dismay. “Take us into Commons and turn us over to the order officers there. We can’t do nothing tied up like this.”

She held her head, knowing it was a bad idea, but not knowing why. It was a very bad idea. She was sure of it. Inside her mind was an enormous question, waiting to be answered.

Father James was shaking his head anxiously, pleading with her. “Mainoa did tie them up very tightly. And we have to go to Commons eventually anyhow. We can turn them over to the order officers. They’re probably no worse than half the port-rabble the order officers keep in check.”

Marjorie nodded, though she wasn’t convinced. This wasn’t a good idea at all. This wasn’t what a very small being should do. A very small being should scream danger and drop them from the highest tree..,.

The foxen nearest them twitched, brooding shadow, hatching visions. Light and shadow spun across their minds, stripes of evanescent color, jittering.

“He’s dissatisfied,” Brother Mainoa offered.

“So am I,” Marjorie said, her eyes wild with pain. “Listen to them. All of them. And only a few of them came forward to help us. Maybe they’re like I’ve always been. Full of intellectual guilts and doubts, letting things happen, paying no attention to how I feel.”

Her head was in agony. She received a picture of foxen traveling through the trees, going away. She drew a shiny circle around it in her mind. Yes. Why not? They might as well go away. “They’re going away. We must wait here for Rillibee,” she announced.

A cannon went off in her brain. She crawled to her bedding and lay down to let the quiet come up around her. Gradually the pain diminished. Outside in the trees, the foxen moved away. Pictures fled through her mind: their thoughts, their conversation. She let the symbols and sounds wash through her like waves, lulling her into a drowsy half-consciousness.

The sun had moved to midafternoon before they heard a “Halloo,” off in the shadows, low among the trees.

A foxen breathed among the trees, close, threatening.

“Halloo,” came the voice again, closer. The threat in the trees diminished.

Marjorie struggled to her feet and went out onto the platform. “Rillibee,” she called.

He came into sight below them, moving wearily among the vines. “You look tired out!” His bony face was pale. His eyes were circled with shadow, making them look enormous, like a night-dwelling creature.

“Long climb,” he mumbled. “Long, long climb.” He pulled himself upward, slowly upward, sliding over the railing at last in an exhausted heap. “Oh, I’m thankful for all that climbing at the Friary. All those spidery ladders, all those bridges....”

“What happened?” Brother Mainoa asked.

“Highbones tried to catch me. He couldn’t. I led him off into the forest, a long, long way. Then I hid from him, let him pass me, and came back. I’d have killed him if I could have figured out an easy way to do it. Bastard.”

Marjorie touched his cheek. “We can go now. Back to Commons.”

Rillibee shook his head. “No. Not yet. We need ... we need the foxen. I’m sorry to have wasted so much time on Highbones, but I didn’t know what else to do except get them away from here. I thought they’d all come. Highbones usually likes to outnumber his opponents. But you managed to deal with the others.”

“One of the foxen did.”

“Ah.” He sagged wearily. “I have to tell you things, Marjorie. Opal Hill has been burned by the Hippae. There’s a Hippae-hound trail half a mile wide leading toward the swamp-forest. The ambassador, your husband, is at the hospital. He’s going to be all right, but it was a close thing. Stavenger bon Damfels is dead, him and a dozen or so bons. They’ve found the bon Damfels girl in there, at the port. Dimity. The one who vanished this spring, just like they found Janetta....

“Both of them were taken by Hippae,” Marjorie said in wonderment. “And both of them ended up at the port!”

Rillibee nodded. “Naked. Mindless. Everyone at Commons is frantic over it. Janetta and Dimity got in there somehow. They couldn’t come through the trees unless the foxen carried them. If the foxen didn’t carry them, then there’s some other way in. Has to be. And if girls can get in, maybe Hippae can get in. We have to find how they got there—“

A troubled sound from the trees.

“Now they’re upset,” said Brother Mainoa, rubbing his head. “They’re angry. The foxen have never carried anyone anywhere until they carried you and your companions. Rillibee. The foxen thought the town was safe. They had encouraged men to build the port there, where the Hippae couldn’t get at it.”

“Encouraged?” asked Marjorie.

“You know.” Brother Mainoa sighed. “Encouraged. Influenced. As they do.”

She felt the foxen retreating. “Where are they going?”

“They’ve gone to look for the way Rillibee says must be there. As they went they were thinking of migerers.”

“Diggers? They suspect a tunnel, then.”

“Something like that.” Mainoa gave a weary shudder, putting his head into his hands. “Marjorie, at this moment, I’m a tired old man. I’m incapable of helping to look for tunnels.”

Rillibee put his arms around the old man. “I’m a very tired young one, Brother. If the foxen are searching, let’s let them do it. I need a little rest. Unless you think they need our help ...”

“They’ll do it,” Brother Mainoa said. Whether they would or not, he could do no more. Marjorie crept back to her bed, feeling the pain ebb once more as she fell into sleep, empty this time of all foxen dreams. Rillibee lay sprawled like a child. Mainoa huddled into himself, snoring slightly. Father James sat by the railing, wondering what had really happened to Marjorie, what she had really seen or dreamed. Long Bridge and Steeplehands sulked and muttered to one another, chafing at their bonds.

Even before First returned late in the afternoon, they knew the way into Commons had been found. When He was yet some distance off, horses and riders swam into their minds, and they knew what He intended. Mounted once more, they were led in a circuitous route as they crossed quiet pools, forded dark streams, and rode down long, splashing alleys. Without a guide, it would have been impossible to find their way. Some pools were shallow water over sucking sands. Some were full of deadly sharp root knees. They knew, because the foxen showed them.

They came out onto the grass near the pool where they had found Stella. Near where she had lain, great sheaves of grass had been torn up, turf had been ripped away to expose a gaping tunnel mouth, wide and dug deep and mortared up as the Hippae caverns were. The grass had hidden it. When they had found Stella, all of them had been within yards of it without seeing it.

“Migerer work,” said Brother Mainoa.

Somewhere a foxen cried out, a great, world-freezing cry.

“Devil’s work,” Mainoa amended. “So say our guides. This tunnel goes deep beneath the swamp. One of the foxen has been through it, all the way to the port.”

It was not necessary to ask who had used it before The tripartite hoofprints of the Hippae were everywhere inside it, everywhere except where the trickle of water had washed them away. “In,” they were urged “Through! Quickly!”

Marjorie, leading Don Quixote, went into the opening and was immediately soaked by the drip of murky water seeping through the soft stone above. The others trailed behind her, swearing softly at the dank air, the stench of droppings, the sog of the surface beneath their feet. The prisoners cursed and dragged at the ropes that held them. The tunnel top was not high enough for any of them to ride sitting up. It was barely high enough for Irish Lass to walk with her head down, her ears brushing the end of muddy roots which straggled through from above. The lights they carried lit their way, though inadequately. Horse and human feet splashed and sucked at the half-muck, half-rock beneath them.

“Foxen coming behind us,” called Rillibee from his position at the rear. “I think. I feel them there. This tunnel isn’t even tall enough for Hippae.”

“High enough if they stalk,” said Brother Mainoa. “Like great lions. One at a time. Slowly. But it was not made for them.”

Within yards of the entrance the tunnel began to slope steeply down. The trickle of water, which had been running outward, reversed itself and began to flow in the direction of their travel The horses sat back upon their haunches as the steep slope continued, whickering in protest. Something told them to go on, trilling at them, a summoning noise. The floor leveled and the water became deeper. They went on into darkness, water falling, water splashing, the darkness above them seeming to enfold them.

Marjorie flicked her light along the tunnel walls, finding numerous small holes where the walls met the water. “What are those?” she asked.

“I should think drain holes,” replied Father James. “All this water has to go somewhere.”

“Where? It can’t run uphill!”

“We’re actually in a hill,” Brother Mainoa said, coughing. “All of Commons, including the swamp forest, lies in a rocky basin higher than the surrounding prairie. It’s like a bowl on a table. If one drills holes in the bowl, the water will drain away.”

“Do you think migerers dug all this?” she asked.

grass •343

He coughed again, wrackingly. “I think so, yes. I think the Hippae told them to do it”

“Through rock?”

“Partly through rock. This looks like a fairly soft stratum. They can dig in soft stone. I’ve seen them.”

“How much farther?” she wondered aloud.

After a time Brother Mainoa responded. “There’s something just ahead.”

What was just ahead was a side chamber of the tunnel, one made tight and dry and furnished with a pile of grasses. Marjorie used her light to examine the chamber. The floor was littered with scraps of underclothing, with two left boots, with a much-tattered Hunt jacket. “She was here,” Marjorie said, “Janetta.”

“And someone else.” Brother Mainoa sighed, pointing at the boots. “Two left feet worth of someone. Janetta and Dimity bon Damfels, perhaps.”

The tunnel was full of sound, trills and snarls and demands.

“He wants us to go on,” said Brother Mainoa. “There is danger behind us.”

They resumed to their splashing journey, fear lending speed to all of them. Marjorie looked at Don Quixote and wondered if he might not understand the foxen far better than she herself did. He moved alertly, as though summoned. Al! the horses did.

Far back in the tunnel, something screamed. The echoes went by them—ee-yah, ee~yah, ee-yah—ricocheting along the walls, fading into quiet.

“Hurry,” something said in their minds. The Terran word pulsated at them, black letters on orange, large, plain capital letters, underlined, with an exclamation point. “HURRY!”

“What?” Marjorie whoofed. “What was that?”

“He does that sometimes,” Mainoa breathed. “He’s not much interested in written words, but sometimes he picks one up from me and broadcasts it.”

Another picture, this one of all of them mounted and running. It had scarcely faded before they were all on horseback, lying flat while the horses trotted rapidly through the water, blindly moving into darkness as though moving in accordance with some guidance system known only to themselves. The prisoners, hastily thrown across Irish Lass, snarled and complained.

“Shut up, or we’ll leave you for the Hippae,” Rillibee commanded. The climbers fell silent.

Then there was rosy light, slightly above them and far ahead. The way sloped upward. The horses dug in with their rear legs, pushing. A foxen was silhouetted against the light, then gone. Then they too were out in the world once more. The tunnel emerged on a tiny island. Pools of water surrounded them. Ahead, the trees stopped and the land sloped up toward a red-flushed sunset. Illusory shapes prowled out of the tunnel behind them and took to the trees. “Go,” the word said, red on white, imperative. “Go!” They went. The horses walked-swam to the edge of the trees and lunged up onto the long slope. The riders stared back, expecting horror to erupt behind them. Nothing. No sound. Perhaps the foxen had bought them time.

“I’ll take these two to the order station,” said Rillibee, tugging on the rope that bound the captives. He pointed up the hill. “That’s the hospital. Where Stella and your husband are, next to the Port Hotel.” Marjorie urged Don Quixote up the slope, covering half of it before she realized that she was actually going to a place where Rigo was. Rigo. She said the word to herself. Nothing resonated. He was someone she knew, that was all. Normally the thought of him brought feelings: guilt and anxiety and frustration. Now she felt only curiosity, perhaps a slight sorrow, wondering how it would feel to see him after all that had happened.

The Port Hotel was packed with people, anonymous groups going here and there, anonymous faces turning to stare curiously at Marjorie and the others. Someone shouted. Someone else pointed. Then Sebastian Mechanic separated himself from the mass and came running toward them.

“Lady Marjorie,” he cried. “Your son’s here, and your daughter and husband.”

She dismounted stiffly, wiping at her muddy face. “Rillibee told me,” she said. “I need to see them. I need somewhere to wash.” Then Persun Pollut was beside her, leading her in one direction while Sebastian and Asmir led the horses in another.

“Lady Westriding, I’m glad you’re here.” His heart lay in his eyes, but she did not see it there. “They’ll take the horses to the barn. How can i help you?”

“Do you known where Rigo is?”

“In there.” He pointed through a door to a crowd of people, seemingly all talking at once. “The doctor let him get up a few hours ago.

They’re talking about the plague and whether the Hippae are going to get in and eat us all!”

“The plague!” She could see Rigo’s lean form at the center of the mob. He sat in a chair, pale and haggard, but he seemed to be functioning. Still, to be talking about the plague!

“Everyone knows, ma’am. Your husband is there, trying to bring some order out of it all...”

“I’ll join them,” Brother Mainoa said from behind them. “I have to tell them about that tunnel ... something has to be done about it.”

“And Stella?” Marjorie asked Persun.

“Through there,” Persun pointed toward a hallway.

“I’ll go with you,” said Rillibee, as Brother Mainoa, leaning heavily on Father James’s arm, went in to join the crowd.

Persun guided Marjorie and Rillibee along the building, into it through a small side door and down a corridor to a corner room which was almost filled by a humming box, a Heal-all.

“In there,” Persun said.

She peered down through the transparent lid to see Stella lying below, slender wires and tubes connecting her to the box.

“Are you her mother?” The doctor had come in behind them.

Marjorie turned. “Yes. Is she? I mean, what do you....”

The doctor gestured toward a chair. “I’m Doctor Lees Bergrem. I’m not entirely sure yet what the prognosis is. She’s been here only a little more than a day. There was no ... well, no lasting physical damage.”

“They had done something to her... to her body?”

“Something. Something in the pleasure centers of the brain and nervous system, in the sexual connections to it. I’m not yet sure exactly what was done. Something perverse. Sexual pleasure seems to result from obeying commands. I think I can fix that part.”

Marjorie didn’t say anything. She waited.

“She may not remember everything. She may not be just the way she was. She may be more as she was as a child....” The doctor shook her head. “You know about Janetta bon Maukerden? Had you heard that another one has been found? Diamante bon Damfels. It’s as though they were wiped clean, except for that one circuit.” She shook her head again. “Your daughter is more fortunate. She hadn’t been disconnected yet. Even if she loses something, she’ll have time to rebuild, relearn.”

Marjorie didn’t reply. What was there to say? She felt Rillibee’s hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be all right.” he said. “I have a feeling.”

She wondered if she should cry. What she felt was anger. Anger at Rigo. Anger even at Stella herself. Rigo and Stella had done this with their foolishness. And the bons had done this. Forget the Hippae, malevolent though they were. It was human foolishness that had laid Stella in that box.

Mercy, a voice in her mind said softly. Justice. I wouldn’t waste my time on guilt.

The doctor interrupted her thoughts. “You don’t look at all well yourself. There’s a knot on your head as big as an egg. Look here.” And she began shining lights in Marjorie’s eyes and hooking her up to machines. “Concussion,” she said. “Let’s set you right while you’re here, before you try to do something about this mess and collapse. I’ll send someone in to clean you up, as well. Do you have a change of clothes?”

Attendants came and went. There were basins of water and soft towels. Someone loaned her a shirt. Then Marjorie sat beside Stella’s box, hooked-through tubes and wires to a box of her own. Gradually the vision she had had in the swamp-forest began to fade. She remembered it, but it lacked the clarity of immediate seeing. The words faded. What God had said to her faded. The doctor came back and sat beside her, talking quietly of her medical education on Semling, of her further education on Repentance, of the young people from Commons who had been recently trained as scientists and were working now on a puzzle Lees Bergrem herself was interested in. “I know,” said Marjorie. “I ordered your books.” The doctor flushed. “They really weren’t written for the layman.”

“I could tell. But I understood parts of some of them, anyhow.”

The doctor asked about the swamp-forest, the foxen, and Marjorie answered, omitting her vision but telling about the assailants, telling more than she knew...

“Oh, I would have forgiven them before,” she admitted. “Oh, yes. I’d have let them go. I’d have been afraid not to. For fear society or God would have judged me harshly. I’d have said pain in this life isn’t that important. A few more murders. A few more rapes. In heaven they won’t matter. That’s what we’ve always said, isn’t it, doctor. But God didn’t say anything about that. He just said we should get on with our work....”

The doctor gave her a strange look and peered into her eyes. Marjorie nodded. “They’re always telling us what God has said in books. All my life I’ve had God’s word in my pocket, and here He wrote it all somewhere else....”

“Shhh,” said Dr. Bergrem, patting her on the arm. Marjorie relaxed and let it go. After a time the doctor went away, and there was nothing to listen to but her own breathing and the machines’ humming. She thought of Dr. Bergrem’s book. She thought about intelligence. She thought about Stella. Faintly she remembered the face of God, and almost as though she had read it in a fairy tale long ago, how Father Sandoval looked with dragonfly wings.

In the crowded room where Rigo sat, Brother Mainoa was being wearily firm, drawing on the last of his strength to insist upon action. “The tunnel has to be closed,” he said. “At once. It’s available as a way for the Hippae to invade Commons. We heard them behind us when we came in, no great numbers because the tunnel is too small for them to come through except one at a time, but still a few of them are enough to do great damage.”

“Some of them came in behind you,” said Alverd Bee, the mayor. “The minute you arrived and told us there was a way through, I sent two men to keep watch, and they report a handful of the beasts at the tunnel entrance.”

“A dozen now could be a hundred by nightfall,” Rigo said. “Brother Mainoa is right. That tunnel has to be destroyed.”

“I wish I had some idea how to go about that,” the mayor said, turning to his father-in-law. “Roald? Do you have any ideas?”

Roald fidgeted. “Alive, what the hell can you try? Blow it up with something. Flood it somehow. Get some kind of gate across it.” He rubbed his head. “Hime Pollut is good at this kind of thing. Ask him.”

Alverd went to find Hime Pollut. In a few moments he returned “Hime thinks we ought to blow it up. He just doesn’t know what we’ve got that’ll do the job.”

Rigo said, “Don’t you have construction explosives, things you use to loosen up the rock when you have to expand the winter quarters? Or in mines? You have mines. Use that!”

“We’ve thought of that, Ambassador, but there are Hippae massed at this end of the tunnel. There’s no way we can get in there close to blow it up without getting eaten first.” Alverd chewed his lips, thinking.

“The other end—“

“The same, Ambassador. Hippae. at both ends. As soon as I heard about the ones at this end, I sent an aircar to see what was happening at the other end. The driver counted about a hundred of the beasts out in the grasses, with about a score or so guarding the tunnel entrance. Assuming they stay that way, still we’ve no way to get to the tunnel.”

grass  - 348

“Drop something from above?”

“What? We have a few explosives but no bombs. No—what do you call them—detonators. There are people here who couldbuildbombs, if we had the materials, or make the materials, possibly, if we had the time. You and your friend here say there may not be time. If we could get into the swamp forest far enough, if we could locate the tunnel from above, and if we had days or weeks to work, we could drill into it and flood it. We don’t have days or weeks. We have hours. Maybe. They’ve laid their plans. Your wife found their declaration of war trampled into that cavern. We’ve seen it. Brother Mainoa here has told us what it means. That word says they plan to come in here and slaughter us all, just as the Arbai were slaughtered. Fun and games for the Hippae, they say.”

“Where does the tunnel come to the surface?” Rigo asked.

Brother Mainoa said, “On a little island among the trees at the bottom of this slope. The forest is narrowest here, on the east side of the port. Two or three Terran miles through, perhaps. Elsewhere it’s wider, but on this side the land slopes up on either side of the swamp and narrows it to a neck. There’s where the damned migerers dug. That’s where they must have been digging for years. The tunnel has to go deep enough to have a good rock layer above or it’d be full of water. Who knows how long it’s taken them!”

“Can you reach the entrance to the tunnel? Can you physically get to it?” Rigo asked Alverd Bee.

“We could if the Hippae weren’t there, yes. But not with them there. Not with them rampaging around, coming after us,” Alverd ran his fingers through his hair, pulled his lips back to reveal his teeth, furrowed his brow. “We don’t have any armor, any kind of combat vehicle. The little runners we use around town, they’re like pea pods. We could use aircars to drive them back inside the tunnel, just inside, but then they’d come out again when any one of us tried to lay explosives.”

“If we enticed them away, you could go in close and blow up the entrance, block it.”

“Entice them away how?” Alverd turned to regard Rigo with an expression of half hope, half suspicion.

“I don’t know yet. Could you do it?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“Then get ready to do it.”

“God, it seems pretty hopeless.” Alverd shook his head.

Rigo glared up at him. “Those of us here on Grass may end up being the last of humanity, Mayor Bee. Assume that we are. How would you prefer to die? Waiting or fighting?”

Alverd showed his teeth again and went away. Rigo turned to Roald Few. “If we entice the creatures out, some of them may go around us. Can you get everyone down into the winter quarters and barricade the entrances? Can you arm people? If you have nothing else, arm them with laser knives, the kind Persun gave me.”

“People can be armed, yes. But I think we have a line of defense to use before we’re forced into winter quarters, Ambassador. We have the barrier at Gom. Let’s put weapons there, first. Weapons and some courageous people.”

“That could work. Get everyone behind that line. Evacuate the Commercial District and Portside. Get everyone into the winter quarters except those who are going to fight. Be sure the ships in port are shut up tight- !f we get out of this, we may need them later. Where’s your power station?”

“Below the town, in winter quarters. They’ll have to get us first before they can get the power station,”

And likely to do so, Rigo thought. Likely to do so. After a few moments of silence passed, Roald left him to his thoughts, which were all of death and destruction. It was easy to speak of enticement. Less easy to think of a way to do it. He went to the window and leaned in it, not seeing the bustle and confusion outside, not seeing anything but his own bloody images. “Ambassador?”

“Yes, Sebastian.”

“There’s a Green Brother here to see you. The high mucky-muck. Head of that whole bunch.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jhamlees Zoe. Says he has to talk with you.”

“I can spare him about three minutes.”

“I told him you were all busy. Told him what about, too. There’s a room over there with nobody in it. I’ll bring him there.”

The Elder Brother was peremptory. “Ambassador, I need to know what you know about the plague.” Though the room was chilly, sweat stood at the roots of his hair and ran down behind his ears.

“Indeed,” said Rigo. “On what authority?” He stared at the odd face before him.

“Sanctity’s authority. They sent you. They told me to keep in touch.”

“I wasn’t given that information. I was told no one on Grass was to know anything about my mission here “ Rigo watched a drop of sweat roll down the man’s tiny nose and hang at the tip.

“I received word from the new Hierarch, Cory Strange. His message came on the same ship that brought you.”

Rigo smiled mirthlessly. “So there’s a new Hierarch. I wish he had taken office earlier. Brother Zoe. If he had, I wouldn’t be involved in this mess. Well, your authority doesn’t matter! Even if you have none at all, it doesn’t matter. I could refuse to tell you, but you could find it out from anyone out there in the hotel in ten minutes. There is no plague on Grass. Which means, at least by implication, there is a cure here, but we don’t know where. Or what Or how. We don’t know if people coming here are cured, and if so, permanently or only for a time. The answer is probably here on Grass. That’s all we know.”

The Elder Brother pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and wiped his face with it. “I ... I ... that is, I appreciate your giving me this information, Ambassador.” He turned and left the room, almost running.

Rigo started after him, then stopped as he saw a folded piece of paper lying on the floor. It had fallen from the Brother’s pocket when he pulled out his handkerchief. Rigo picked it up, smoothed it to see if it was important enough to send after the man.

“My dear old friend Nods,” it began in a clear, quirky handwriting, narrow and clear as print.

Rigo read it all the way through in mounting disbelief, then read it again. “There is plague here, as there is everywhere else.... It is not our desire that information about the cure be widely disseminated ... wiping out the heathen to leave worlds for Sanctity alone to populate ...”

“Rigo.”

He turned to find her at his side. “Marjorie! They said you were with Stella.” She looked very pale. Very tired.

“I stopped in her room. I couldn’t really see her. She’s boxed up in a huge Heal-all. Rillibee stayed there with her.”

“How is she?”

“The doctor says she hopes for recovery. She was careful not to say full recovery. I gather some things were destroyed.” Marjorie rubbed at her eyes.

He stood stiffly away from her, aware she had not reproached him and yet feeling reproached. He did not want to talk about their daughter, not yet. The paper cracked in his hand, reminding him. “You must look at this. The head of the Friary came to see me to ask about the plague. This thing fell out of his pocket.” He thrust the letter at her.

She read, read again, turning a white face toward him at last. “Sanctity won’t spread the cure even if we find one?”

“You read what I read. The man who signed that letter is the new Hierarch. Uncle Carlos may have been an apostate, but he wouldn’t have been capable of this!”

“What are we going to do?”

“All I’ve done so far is wish I hadn’t told the man anything. I don’t know what to do next!”

She touched him gently on the shoulder. “One thing at a time, Rigo. That’s all any of us can do.”

“Very well. One thing at a time. There’s an immediate threat from the Hippae at the tunnel. We’ll probably end up having to kill all those damned Hippae....”

“No!” she folded the letter and put it carefully in a flapped pocket of her jacket. “No! We can’t kill them all. Not even most. They become other creatures. Important creatures. The foxen, Rigo. They’re an intelligent race. Even the Hippae themselves are intelligent, in a way.”

“We’re going to have to kill some,” he objected, thinking that Marjorie did not sound like herself. “No matter what they become. If we don’t, we die ourselves. We have to make Commons secure from them, or everyone here will die, just as the Arbai did.”

“Kill some,” she agreed. “Yes. It will be necessary. But the fewest possible That’s what I came to tell you. I heard what you said about enticing them away. We must use the horses.”

At first he wanted to laugh. When he had heard what she had to say, he wanted to cry. He objected, and she looked at him in firm decision, unlike herself. He could offer nothing better. Moved from mockery to despair, he stumbled out of the Port Hotel to make the preparations she had convinced him were necessary. Aircars could not get into the forest where the tunnel ended. At any threat from above, the Hippae would merely retreat into the swamp or the tunnel or both, as they had retreated from the aircar when Rigo had been wounded. If men were to destroy the tunnel, the Hippae would have to be enticed away. The Hippae hated the horses. They would use the horses.

“At least...” he said to himself, trying to laugh, “at least I’ll never have to wear those damned bon boots or those fat-bottomed pants again!”

Not long after dawn they assembled in the great hay barn where the horses were stalled. They met without many words. What words had been necessary had already been carried from each to each, and they were all tired of words. Tired of words, afraid of action, yet determined nonetheless.

Rigo, pale but resolute, was saddling El Dia Octavo. Marjorie had chosen Don Quixote. Tony took Blue Star, and Sylvan, Her Majesty. Irish Lass, they had regretfully decided, was not quick enough. That left only Millefiori.

“I wish we had someone,” Sylvan said, looking at the mare.

“We do,” said Marjorie. She was very calm. Father Sandoval had suggested he hear her confession and give her absolution. She had told him there wasn’t time. She wasn’t sure she wanted to confess anything. She wasn’t sure anything needed confession. Even if it did, she didn’t think she would, or could, share it, because she hadn’t figured it out yet. “Tony, we do have someone.”

“Who?” he asked in surprise.

“Me,” said a voice from the door. She stood there in the light from outside, very pale, dressed in her bon riding coat and a hastily remodeled set of trousers. Rowena.

Sylvan gasped. “Mother!”

“I’m glad I have a child left to call me mother,” she said coldly. “Have you seen Dimity, Sylvan?”

He bowed his head, for a moment unable to reply. “I’ve seen her, yes. I know what condition she’s in. But it won’t help her for you to do this,” he murmured. “You’re not well, not healed....”

“I promised Marjorie my help if ever she should need it. She needs it. And who else will do it? A few hours ago Marjorie took me out and taught me how. It’s nothing. Nothing compared to what I did all my girlhood, most of my Obermum life, even after you were born, Sylvan. Oh, I’ve enough experience riding to get through this, I think. Have you seen Emmy, Sylvan? She looks almost like Dimity. Though the doctors say she will heal, in time.”

“Father did that,” he said expressionlessly.

“I don’t blame Stavenger,” she said. “Why blame a dead man? I blame the Hippae. I blame who’s responsible, and that has always been the Hippae.”

“The bons and the foxen both deserve a share of blame,” Marjorie said hotly. “The foxen let it happen. They allowed themselves a comfortable retirement. They let happen what would. Then, when it all went wrong, they chose to discuss it philosophically. When men came here, they learned new ideas of guilt and redemption and talked about that. They engaged in great theological arguments. They sent Brother Mainoa to find out if they could be forgiven. They talked of original sin, collective guilt. They’re still doing it. They haven’t learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all.” She pulled on a girth so furiously that Don Quixote whuffed in complaint.

“Mother,” Tony said. “Don’t.”

“Damn it, Tony, they could help. They’re great, powerful beasts, evolved to be so to protect themselves from something even more terrible that was long ago extinct. But they no longer do anything. They think. They discuss. They don’t decide.”

“I thought when they helped you, they had decided,” Rigo said. She had told him about the climbers.

“Aaah,” she growled, “Aaah. One of them helped me. By himself. I don’t think even he would be much help against a dozen of the Hippae. Not alone. The rest of them are all sitting up there in the trees, thinking about it. Wondering what they might do if they ever decide to do anything. I made a mistake back there in the Tree City when I didn’t kill those two climbers. I set a good example. They’re all too ready to take a good example if it means they won’t have to do anything and then take responsibility for it.”

For the tenth time she checked her lance, a strong spear of light metal alloy with a trigger mounted on it which would turn on a big laser knife, one of the kind they had given their workmen for harvesting grasses. The knife was mounted at the tip of the lance and was counterbalanced by a weight in the butt end. Roalds’ workmen had built the lances as well as the bucklers each of them wore, a kind of light breastplate with a hook under the left arm to hold the end of the lance down. The breasts and flanks of the horses were armored in similar fashion, with light plates strung on tough fabric, to keep the weight down. Rigo had remembered the breastplates from armor he had seen, armor dating from a time when lances had been monstrously heavy and had had to be carried dead level.

It didn’t matter how level these were carried. Actually they would do more damage if they wobbled and swung. If they moved about a good deal, it would do maximum damage at the greatest distance. Still, the hook would help to control them and keep the tips from dipping or catching on the ground—for at least one charge. Marjorie hadn’t really intended a charge. She had suggested a quick sally to bring the Hippae away from the tunnel mouth in pursuit, and then a long flight which would keep the Hippae away long enough for Alverd’s men to blow up the tunnel. Rigo, having seen what knives would do to Hippae flesh, had suggested improving their chances with weapons. So each of them had a lance plus a knife in a pocket. Armed or not, after one charge horses and riders would probably be fleeing for their lives. If they survived that long.

There had been time for only a brief mounted practice with the lances. “Remember, horses are faster on the flat,” Rigo had reminded them. “The Hippae will be faster running uphill. It’s the way they’re made. More like big cats than like horses. Their legs can give more thrusting power going up than going forward. We’ll run on the flat, along the hill, slightly upward, not straight up. If we can make it to the gate at the order station, they’ll let us through.”

The gate seemed an impossible goal as they left the great hay barn and rode across the paved area that separated it from the Port Hotel, around the empty hotel and hospital, to the slope leading down to the marsh. Each of them studied it, finding the route they would take when the Hippae came after them. If they went north they would shortly be trapped against the implacable ridge of Com. Besides, that’s where Alverd’s men were, waiting to move down to the tunnel as soon as the Hippae were decoyed away. So they would go south where they could run for miles in a wide arc, all the way around the grazing land to the ruts south of Portside Road and along Portside Road to Grass Mountain Road and the gate. The ground was the same wherever they would run. A grassy, weedy slope, uncultivated, scattered with rock and the break-leg holes of small migerish creatures. The sun was in their eyes. The marsh lay in shadow at the bottom of the slope, just outside the first fringe of trees. The Hippae were hidden. From time to time, the sound of their howling came up the hill. No one knew what they were waiting for.

“Ready?” asked Rigo.

Silence. He looked to either side to see them nodding, ready, unwilling to break the quiet with words. He kneed El Dia Octavo into a steady walk down the slope.

17

Marjorie thought: It always comes down to something like this, doesn’t it. No matter what our consciences say, no matter how much doctrine we’ve been taught, no matter how many ethical considerations we’ve chewed and swallowed and tried to digest, it always comes down to us arming ourselves with weapons as deadly as we can manage and going out into combat...

I should be frightened but it doesn’t feel much different from competition, really, A high wall. Always the possibility of a fall, even a bad fall, even getting killed. Not the safest sport in the world. Still, it’s only time and energy and staying on and trusting the horse. Thinking with the horse, not for him...

I really don’t have to think about anything except killing as many of them as I can. Killing them, and not worrying about the ethics until later. Forget that every Hippae at the bottom of the hill has the potential of becoming a foxen. A being more intelligent than I am. Every Hippae I kill or maim means one less like Him. Don’t think about Him. Unthink Him. The whole thing was delirium, that’s all. Imagination.

Where’s the justice in this? If man had never come to Grass, nothing like this would have happened. If man and Arbai had never come. If no one ever went anywhere, nothing like this would happen....

Except that it would. Some wild, malevolent virus would have found its way to us stay-at-homes. Something like the Hippae would come screaming through our windows, breaking down our doors, killing and raping and mutilating us.

Oh, Lord, I have been such a good girl! I have always attended mass, always gone to confession, always done my penance. I’ve done charity work. I’ve loved and cared for my children, no matter how hard they made it. I’ve tried my damnedest to love my husband. I thought about killing myself, but I repented that. I’ve lived a very acceptable, proper life at home, there.... Piss on it.

I’d rather be here. Even if I die, I’d rather be here. If there’s anything important for a very small being to do, it’s fighting the plague. That’s first. We’ve got to buy time to find the answer. The only thing that matters now is the plague. We’ve got to find the cure and make sure that Sanctity doesn’t get it before someone else does. And if we do that then ... then there’s something else. Oh, God, let Him talk to me. I want Him to talk to me.

Rigo thought: This damned lance doesn’t balance right. It needs to be heavier at the butt so it’ll swing with less strength. Maybe it’s just that I feel lousy. Sick, weak. I should still be back there in a chair letting somebody put a blanket over my legs. Instead, I’m here. Where is here? How the hell did I get here? Well, no one forced me. I’m the only one of us who’s ever fought a Hippae. I’m the only one who knows where to hit them. Legs first, jaws second. Cut their legs out, their jaws off, let the damned, stinking things die.

I’m not healed yet. My legs don’t feel right. My thighs feel soggy, like wet sponges As though there were no muscle there. Someone may die out here today. Maybe me. Better me than Marjorie or Tony. They haven’t played the fool, the way I have.

But if it’s me, she’ll be free. Free to do whatever she likes, go to whomever she likes. Sylvan. Look at him. Never ridden a horse before, but he looks like he was born riding. Well, it’s not that different. The strengths are the same; legs, back.

If I get killed, will she go to him?

If she does, is it any worse than my having Eugenie? Poor Eugenie. Damn. I wish they’d saved her Lovely Eugenie. Nothing in her head but how to make things pretty and taste good and smell good and feel good. No high aspirations. No high-minded innocence to offend against. No modesty to invade. No expectations to fall short of. No serious thoughts at all. Still, she deserved better than to die like that.

If she died. God. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe the hounds took her, the Hippae took her, the way they took Stella...

Don’t think of that! The only thing that matters now is the plague. We’ve got to save Commons from being overrun, just for a while, until someone can come up with the answer. We will, will come up with an answer. Mankind will come up with an answer! Something always saves, us, just in the nick of time. God will intervene. There’ll be time. Marjorie will turn back to me. She always has. Always, no matter what happens....

Sylvan thought: You have to give him credit. Not a day out of bed, half killed by the mounts, and here he is. He keeps looking at me, letting his eyes slide across me. I know what he’s thinking. If he gets killed, I get Marjorie. Fool. If he gets killed, Marjorie does what she pleases, and that doesn’t include me. I don’t know why. I’ve never had trouble with any woman I’ve ever wanted, but I’m no good with her. I’m the real fool. I thought she was like one of us. What’s the Terran word? Pleasure-seeking. Hedonistic. Well, what else have we had to think of but pleasure? The damned Hippae haven’t let us think of anything else. They’ve tapped into us and enslaved us and kept us right where they wanted us....

Look at Marjorie! Like a queen! Regal and tall and rides that thing as though she were part of it. That thing! Ha-ha. Horse. Horse. They make soft noises when you pat them and they look at you kindly when you get on. This one, Her Majesty, she does what I ask her to. It’s almost like loving a woman. Horse. Not Hippae.

Tony’s watching me, too. He doesn’t like me. I thought at first it was because of Marjorie, but that’s not it. I offend him somehow. My manner. My bon manner. Maybe it was because I didn’t take their plague seriously. I didn’t know. Did I even think it mattered whether there was anything left of humanity, elsewhere? That’s what the Hippae thought. They didn’t care. If they thought it, we thought it How long have they been doing our thinking for us? They don’t want there to be another intelligent race. And they won’t believe that they themselves become another intelligent race. Foxen. What was it Brother Mainoa said? We never believe we’ll get old. The Hippae don’t know what they have in them to be. They’ve stopped themselves, half grown. They’ve stopped themselves at adolescence. Brutal time, that. Hateful time. Not a child. Not grown. Full of strength and fury and no place to put it....

Well, they stopped us there, too. Marjorie looks at me the way she looks at Tony. As though I’m a boy. And when have I ever had the chance to be anything else....

Mother. Mother. You shouldn’t be out here at all. Oh, Mother, do you really think this pays back for Dimity....

Tony thought: Let’s get this over with and go home. If I die, I die, but if I don’t die, let me go home. Let’s leave these people, these crazy bons, let’s go! Let me go through this hour, two hours, whatever it takes, then we’ll go, I’ll go, somehow. Let’s get it over with. If I die ...

Rowena thought: Dimity. For Dimity. For Emmy. For Stavenger. For my other children, dead so long ago I’ve almost forgotten their names. For all of you. For all of us.

Sylvan. Oh, Sylvan. Whatever happens, remember that I love you, I love you all....

Don Quixote thought:  She is riding. Trust her. Trust what she does. And listen, all of you. Listen for the voices.

At the foot of the hill they were separated from the Hippae at the tunnel entrance only by a few deep pools and a screen of foliage. Only Rigo rode all the way down, measuring the distance at a mental gallop. Then he turned back, summoning the others to a line that seemed an appropriate distance from the bottom. They wanted the slope of the hill to aid them, but there had to be space to turn along the hillside without being forced into the sucking pools at its foot. Silently Rigo checked his lance while the others did likewise, then began rattling the butt of his lance on his buckler, screaming insults at the same time. “Hippae fools. Mock horses. Stupid beasts.” Not that they understood what he was saying, but they could pick the intent up from his mind.

“Genocides,” shrieked Marjorie at the top of her lungs. “Ingrates! Malicious beasts! Curs!”

“Oh, wah. wah, wah, wah,” screamed Tony, making as much noise as he could but incapable of thinking words.

“For Dimity,” cried Rowena. “For Dimity, Dimity, Dimity.”

“Cowards,” trumpeted Sylvan. “Cowards. Animals. Peepers. Mig-erers. Muddy migerers with no more honor than a mole.”

The Hippae came out of the screening brush in a rush, then stopped while those on the hill fell silent. The humans had expected Hippae. They had not expected them to have riders. Foremost among them was a great gray mount bearing someone they all knew on its back. “Shevlok,” breathed Rowena. “Oh, for the love of God, my son.”

“It’s not Shevlok,” Sylvan spat at her. “Look at his face.” The face was a mask, empty as a broken bottle. There was nothing there. “You’re fighting the beasts, not the riders,” trumpeted Rigo. “Remember that. The mounts, not the riders!” He kneed El Dia Octavo into a trot. Behind him the others did likewise, falling into a diagonal line so that each would have room to charge and turn without endangering the ones behind.

Rigo counted as he rode. There were ten of the Hippae. The one bearing Shevlok’s body was to the fore with three others beyond to Rigo’s right. Well and good. The one in front would take the brunt, and better Rigo to attack that one than to expect the bon Damfels to do it. The other Hippae riders—who were they? He risked a quick glance. Lancel bon Laupmon. Three of the bon Maukerdens: Dimoth, Vince, and one whose name he had forgotten. He didn’t know any of the others, or he didn’t recognize them. The faces didn’t look like faces at all. They had been transfigured into something merely symbolic. Something wholly possessed

He was only a few feet from them when he felt them pushing at his mind, erasing his intent. He howled, the howl driving them out, away. He flicked the trigger to turn on the knife and signaled Octavo for a slow, collected canter. The gray Hippae reared high, and Octavo ran toward it, then turned to the right without hesitation as Rigo clipped off its front feet with the fiery lance. It hadn’t expected that! One. One, screaming, but down!

Octavo stretched his stride and galloped along the hillside, running swiftly as three of the Hippae came up from the swamp and tried to intercept him from the left. Cursing, Rigo lifted the tip of the lance from under his left arm, brought it across and anchored it in his right armpit, then stretched out his left arm to hold the lance perpendicular to the line of Octavo’s movement. The humming flame caught the first interceptor low across its shoulders. Leg muscles severed; it fell as the other two screamed and turned away. Two.

Sylvan was behind him, Her Majesty flying in the face of the Hippae, swift as a bird. He saw Rigo shift the lance and shifted his own almost simultaneously. The object was to get the creatures moving in pursuit, he reminded himself. Not necessarily to kill them yet. Now, if possible; eventually, yes, but not necessarily now. He jabbed the lance toward a green-mottled Hippae and heard it bellow in angry pain. Then he was past. He cast a quick glance across his shoulder and saw the green monster coming after him. Good. Well and good. He pointing the lance in the direction he was moving and leaned forward to whisper soft words in Her Majesty’s ear. They were words he had whispered to lovers in time past. He saw nothing incongruous in urging Her Majesty on with them now.

Rowena was behind Sylvan, copying his tactics a little too late to make the wide turn he had made. It was only when her lance had chopped into the throat of a shrieking mud-colored creature that she remembered they had to flee. Millefiori had already decided it was time. Wheeling on her hind legs, she set out in pursuit of the other two while the mud-colored monster staggered behind them, screaming, being rapidly outdistanced by two other, uninjured Hippae.

Three, Marjorie thought to herself. Three down. Four in pursuit of the three horses, two of them at least slightly wounded. Three waiting for her, and for Tony. Little Tony. White-faced. The way he always got when he rode. Fearful. Not thinking about it.

“Anthony!” she screamed in his ear, “Follow me!”

She thumbed the lance on, sighted a line of travel that would take her in front of two of the remaining Hippae, The third one was hanging back, as though for an ambush. “Watch that one,” she cried, pointing to the mottled wine-colored beast half screened by the trees.

Tony cried something in answer, she couldn’t tell what. Then Quixote was crossing the path of the two, both charging at her, necks twisted to one side to bring the barbs to bear. She flipped the lance to her left as the others had done and raked them with the blade. Screams. Bellows. She turned Quixote up the hill and around.

Tony. He was facing the final Hippae, his lance dipping and swirling, the beast staying well back, out of range. Tony was too close. If he turned to flee, the other would have him!

She looked behind her. The two she had touched were not badly hurt. Surprised into inaction for the moment, but not badly hurt. She had touched their necks, not their legs. She pulled Quixote up and back, wheeling on his hind legs. “Come on,” she cried to Quixote, riding directly at the monster confronting Tony. Beyond the beast was a patch of level ground.

Her heart was hammering so loudly that she could hear only it, nothing else, a pulse in her ears that drowned out the fall of hooves. She took the lance in her left hand, held it loosely. They came closer. “We’re going to jump,” she told Quixote. “We’re going to jump over him, boy. Over him.” Then there was no time to say anything. Quixote’s haunches gathered under him; they were high, high over the monster’s back and the lance was pointed down, down and back, then they had landed on the other side.

They were on a tiny island, only large enough for Quixote to stop on, stop and wheel and jump once more, back over the pool to the solid hillside. Tony was there, looking stupidly downward at the recumbent, slavering Hippae with the severed spine while two wounded ones stalked toward him.

Four.

“Anthony!” she cried as she went past. “Come, Blue Star!”

Horse heard her if rider did not. Quixote lunged up the hill, faster than the wounded Hippae, with Blue Star close behind. When they had gained a little distance, Marjorie turned to the south. Blue Star was even with her. She risked a look at Tony. He looked almost like Shevlok, his face white and expressionless. She drove Quixote at Blue Star’s side so that they raced only inches apart, then leaned out and slapped Tony with her glove, and again.

He came to himself with a start, tears filling his eyes. “I couldn’t think,” he cried. “It got into me and didn’t let me think.”

“Don’t let it!” she demanded. “Yell. Scream. Call it dirty names, but don’t let it!”

Perhaps a half mile ahead of them on the hillside, Octavo and the two mares raced side by side with four of the Hippae in pursuit.

“Now,” Marjorie cried, pointing ahead and to the right. “We’re going to intercept them.”

She leaned forward. Rigo, Sylvan, and Rowena were riding on the level line of the hill, around it. not up it. The full circuit of the sloping ground, back to the gate, would take two or three hours, riding at top speed the whole way. If she and Tony went slightly uphill and to the west, they should intercept the others a bit past the southernmost point of their arc. Quixote and Blue Star stretched out, galloping side by side like twins joined at the heart. Behind them came the two wounded Hippae, still screaming, still with their blank-faced riders aboard. They were not fast enough to be an immediate threat, but the laser knife had cauterized as it cut, so they were not being greatly weakened by blood loss, either.

‘They’re still trying to get into my head,” Tony called. “So I’m thinking about going home.”

She smiled at him, nodded encouragingly. Whatever worked. She herself could not feel them at all. She felt something, but not Hippae. Something else. Someone else.

“You didn’t kill your bad individuals,” Someone commented, quietly curious. “Why are you killing ours?”

“Because I could tie mine up and keep them from hurting anyone,” she replied. “I can’t do that with these creatures.”

“You could figure something out,” the voice suggested. “No!” she said, angrily. “Everyone always says that. It isn’t true. If you can figure something out, you do. If you don’t, it’s because you can’t. Can’t because you don’t have the time, or the money, or the material. Can’t because there isn’t any way or any time or you’re not smart enough.”

A thought very like a sigh. A touch, like a caress. “Damn it,” she cried aloud. “Can’t you see that theoretical answers are no answers at all! It has to be something you cando!”

Shocked silence. Tony was staring at her. “What was that?” he cried.

“Nothing,” she muttered, concentrating on riding. “Nothing at all.” The ground fled by beneath them. The leather of their saddles creaked.

Occasional bunches of tall grass whipped at them Brush materialized before the horses’ feet. Rocks and holes and hollows were there, were jumped, were gone. Behind them the wounded pair came on, howling. Time went by, swift but interminable. Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief. Tony’s eyes were glazed with his effort to keep the Hippae from commanding him. Marjorie sat quietly, helping Quixote by her quiet. He would do all he could do for her without her bothering him. The arc of the hill against the sky seemed no closer, no matter how long they rode.

And then at last it was there. They came upon the height to see Rigo and the others to the south below them, coming around toward them to make the arc which would bring them back along the west side of the long hill on which Commons was built. The four Hippae still pursued Rigo and-the other two riders, more closely than before. “Come on, Quixote,” she cried, urging him down, wanting to let Rigo know she was there but judging the distance too great for him to hear her yet.

She looked at the point where the two lines of travel would intersect, laid her body along Quixote’s neck, and urged him on. When they had halved the distance, she yodeled, seeing three heads come up. Rigo looked over his shoulder, apprehending what Marjorie intended. She could come in behind the four Hippae pursuing Rigo, Rowena, and Sylvan. Rigo and the others could then turn and take them from the front while Marjorie and Tony attacked from behind. Which would have been an acceptable tactic except for the two other Hippae, just now coming over the hill behind Marjorie and Tony. Their presence would put her between two groups of them. He waved, pointing behind her.

She turned, saw what was coming, and cursed. She had thought the horses could outdistance the wounded beasts, but the Hippae had kept pace. That made the odds six Hippae to five humans. Even though four of the Hippae were slightly wounded, it wasn’t good. Not good enough.

From the east came a great crumping sound, a concussion of air, like thunder. The ground shivered. The two Hippae on the hill screamed in rage, realizing before Marjorie did what had happened. Alverd Bee’s men had blown up the tunnel.Thetunnel. For the first time, Marjorie realized that the tunnel had been too narrow and low to allow a sudden, full-scale invasion. If the Hippae had been planning their attack for long, there were probably other tunnels. There was that great trail out there in the grass. There had to be other tunnels ... “We’re looking,” said Someone. “We haven’t found any others yet.” Which didn’t mean there weren’t any.

“Are you going to help?” she demanded. “Are you going to let us get killed doing this all by ourselves?” There was no answer.

Rigo had heard the explosion. Now he leaned over Octavo’s neck and urged him forward. Her Majesty and Millefiori fled along behind him, moving like the wind, opening the distance between them and the Hippae.

Marjorie turned more to the north. It would do no good to come up behind the other riders. Now they had simply to outrun their pursuers. Get to the stony ridges of Com, get to the gate. “If it were your people, I’d try to help,” said Marjorie. “Humans have been helping the Hippae kill foxen,” came the answer, snappishly, not at all allusively, in clear words. Not the familiar voice, another one. “All along.”

“You know damned well that’s not so,” she cried. “Humans have beenusedby Hippae to kill foxen. That’s entirely different.” At least partly a lie, too. Humans had been all too willing to lend themselves to that Hunt. No answer.

They ran. Quixote was lathered, breathing harshly. It had been a long hill and the armor was heavy. Marjorie held the reins in her teeth, took her knife from her pocket, and cut the straps that held the armor, one around Quixote’s breast, two on each side. The plates dropped off and the horse made a noise that sounded like a prayer. Tony saw what she was doing and did likewise.

Rigo had been watching. He nodded and called to the other two. Sylvan followed suit, as did Rigo himself. Rowena cried out in dismay. She had no knife. She had come last, and no one had thought to give her one.

As though distracted by this cry, Millefiori stumbled and fell. Rowena went rolling away, coming up wild-eyed. Then she was up, running toward the horse, mounting all in one fluid motion as Millefiori struggled to her feet, limping. Then the mare was running again, though awkwardly, slowly, with a wide space opening between Rowena and the others.

Sylvan saw. He turned Her Majesty and made a tight circle which brought him to his mother’s side. He reached out, pulled her onto the saddle before him. Now Her Majesty was carrying double. She slowed Millefiori slowed. Sylvan edged back to give his mother room. One of the Hippae leapt forward with stunning speed and gaping jaws, snatching him from Her Majesty’s back. Another ran even with Millefiori, ready to leap. Rowena, face like death and mouth wide with an unheard howl, rode on.

Sylvan had vanished. Where he had been was nothing, no movement. Marjorie screamed in anger and pain, tears streaking her face. “I’ll begin by burning the swamp forest. It won’t burn easily, but we’ll do it somehow. Then the grasses, all of them. That will take care of the plague and the Hippae. There’ll be no more Hippae.”

“What about us?” voices cried.

“What about you?” she snarled. “If you’re no help, you’re no help. You don’t care about us. Why should we care about you?”

A whine. A snarl. A slap, as from one being to another being. Then, suddenly, there was something behind Millefiori, rising to confront the approaching. Hippae Mauve and plum and purple, a lash of tail and ripple of shoulders, a moving mirage of trembling air.

“If He has to do it alone,” Marjorie cried, “I’ll still burn the forest, even if I have to do it by myself.”

“The ones behind us are gaining,” Tony called. “Blue Star’s exhausted.”

“We’re all exhausted,” she cried, tears running down her face. Where Sylvan had been was a tumult of beasts. “Turn more toward the road.” She looked behind her, then up at the sun. They’d been running for well over an hour. Perhaps two. Thirty miles, more or less, all of it over rough ground and a lot of it uphill. With another twelve or fifteen miles to cover before they got back to the gate. “If I die out here,” she threatened, “my family will burn the forest, I swear to God they will.”

“What’s going on down there?” cried Tony. “The Hippae have stopped.”

They had stopped. Stopped, turned, were running away. Not back the way they had come, unfortunately. Uphill. Toward Marjorie. “Foxen,” Marjorie cried. “Not quite where I would have wanted them, but better than nothing, I suppose.”

She was trying to feel philosphical about dying, not managing it, trying not be frightened, and not managing that, either. “Tony, we have to take out the two behind us before those others reach us.”

He turned a stricken face upon her.

“We have to! If the other four reach us first, we’ll have them all around us.”

He nodded, biting his lip. She saw blood there, the only color in his face.

“Turn on your lance.”

He’d forgotten about it. He thumbed it on. looking at the humming blade almost as though hypnotized.

“Tony! Pay attention.” She motioned, showing him how she wanted him to circle—the two of them wide, in opposite directions, coming back to hit the wounded Hippae from both sides.

They broke from one another, circled tightly, and were running back toward the pursuing monsters before the Hippae understood what was happening. Then they, too, broke, one headed for each of the horses. Marjorie tried to forget about her son, concentrate on what she was doing. Lance well out in front, the blaze of its blade apparent even in the light of day.

There was a roar above her. She looked up to see Asmir Tanlig and Roald Few beckoning from an aircar, screaming at her. She lip-read. “We’ll pick you up, pick you up.”

Leave Quixote and Blue Star to face these beasts alone! She shook her head, waved them off. no. Only when the car rose did she realize what she had done. Oh, God, how silly. How silly. And yet ...

The Hippae was before her, circling just out of reach, darting forward, then back. He could maneuver more quickly than Quixote could. Quixote kept his head toward the beast, dancing, as though he wore ballet shoes, as though he stood on tiptoe. Behind her she heard Tony yell. She didn’t dare look. Again dance, dance. Then Quixote charged. She hadn’t signaled him to do it. He simply did it. There was an opening, the lance found it, and they were dancing away again while the Hippae sagged before them, yammering at the sky, its neck half cut through.

Five, her mind exulted as she tried to find Tony.Five.Six was standing over her son while Blue Star fled toward the distant gate as though she knew where it was, as though she had been told it meant safety. Great jaws wide, the crouching Hippae howled at the boy, ready to take off his face in one huge bite. Quixote raced forward, screaming....

There was a furry blur on the Hippae’s back. Another between the jaws and the boy. Another at its haunches, clawing at it. Three foxen. The screaming battle tumbled to one side and rolled toward the hill. Tony lay still.

She dismounted and struggled to get him onto Quixote’s back. The horse knelt to receive him, again without a signal to do so. Then Marjorie was up once more, holding her son before her, and they were running the way Blue Star had gone. Not really running. Moving, at least.

Down the hill, other foxen had taken on the other Hippae. Rowena was just behind Rigo. Millefiori came behind, limping badly.

“Now,” thought Marjorie. “Now bring out your damned aircar or airtruck or what-have-you. Now.”

And it was there, only a short distance from them all, with Persun Pollut driving it and Sebastian Mechanic dropping out a ramp for the horses.

“I knew you wouldn’t leave the horses,” Persun called as they came aboard. “I told Asmir you wouldn’t, but Roald said you wouldn’t be that silly.”

Silly, she said to herself. Silly. As though that were the answer to a problem that had bothered her for a very long time. In her mind she sensed an enormous, unqualified approval.

Headquarters had been set up in the order station under James Jellico’s watchful eye. A dozen eager volunteers offered to rub down the horses. Aside from Millefiori’s bad leg they seemed to be all right. In one corner Dr. Bergrem was looking at Rowena with an expression of concern. Rowena had broken something in that fall. Her shoulder, maybe. Something inside her had broken as well. She sat still and white-faced, unresponsive. When Marjorie went to her, she was whispering Sylvan’s name, over and over.

“We found him,” Marjorie said. “We went out and found him, Rowena.”

“What?” she asked. “How?”

“He’s dead, Rowena. The fall broke his neck. They didn’t touch him.”

“He’s not ... oh, he’s not—“

“No, Rowena,” she cried. “He’s not. We brought his body back to be buried.”

She returned to Tony, who was sitting white-faced in a corner, slowly coming to himself. Beyond him she saw Brother Mainoa seated at the tell-me. Marjorie fumbled awkwardly at her pocket flap with hands that seemed frozen from their long grip upon lance and reins.

Her fingers were made of wood. Eventually she got the pocket open and the letter out.

She laid it before Brother Mainoa. “I think this should be sent to Semling,” she said.

He read it, his face turning gray as the sense of it reached him. “Ah ... ah,” he murmured. “Ah, yes ... but—“

“But?”

He rubbed his forehead, started to speak, stopped to think again. “If you spread this around now, there will be panic, rebellions, riots. Then, if we find a cure, the authorities will be so occupied with maintaining order, they won’t be able to disseminate the cure. This letter shouldn’t be made public until there’s a cure, Marjorie.”

“All right,” she agreed. “But I’m concerned that it might not get out at all if we wait. Who knows what those—“

“Devils,” he offered. “Sanctified devils. The Hierarch and his retinue.”

“It’s your faith. I didn’t want to....”

“It’s what I was born to,” he admitted. “What I was given to. That’s not the same thing. No. This was written by someone unworthy of any faith, Marjorie.”

She threw up her hands. “You know what I’m saying, Brother. What’s-his-name, Zoe, may miss this letter at any time. May come looking for it. May take steps to stop its getting out.”

“We’ll make copies,” Brother Mainoa offered. “Merely sending the text off-planet wouldn’t do. The Hierarch could disclaim any such. Copies in his own hand, that’s what’s needed. And since this says the Hierarch is on his way here, we should get someone to take copies off-planet. There’s a Semling freighter in port, ready to leave. TheStar-Lily.”

“How long to the nearest ... how long to Semling?”

“Two weeks, Grassian time.”

“Thirty days,” she murmured. “How wonderful if we could have a cure by then.”

“We who?”

“The doctor here. She’s remarkable, Brother Mainoa. She studied on Semling. She studied on Repentance. She’s got some young helpers just back from school. She got interested in immunology, because of something she found here on Grass when she was a girl.”

“Something?”

“A— I’m no scientist. She wrote a book about the stuff. It has a long name I’ve forgotten. It’s a nutrient. Something our cells have to have in order to grow and reproduce. And here on Grass it exists in two forms, the usual one and one that’s inverted. Nowhere else. Only here.”

“When did she tell you this?”

“When I was visiting Stella. She was only talking to distract me, but she sounded so competent it gave me hope, some hope.” She took the letter from him, stared at it, still finding it hard to believe. “I suppose you’re right about this. If we don’t find a cure, what difference does it make whether people know? But if we do? Then people need to know about this letter. People are entitled to know what Sanctity intended to do!”

“All right, Marjorie. We’ll send copies off-planet, just in case. The Star-Lily still plans to leave tomorrow. Now that the tunnel is blown up, we’ll ask Alverd Bee to get the crew and the warehousemen back over to the port to get it ready to lift.”

“Tony,” she said. “We’ll send Tony.” It would be a good idea to send Tony. He was too vulnerable to the Hippae. She had to get him away before he was tainted by them, as Stella was. Except ... there might be plague on Semling. Which risk was greater? All risks were equal. All were life or death. “Tell the crew to be careful. There must be another tunnel. Why else that great Hippae trail leading here!”

He nodded, patting her hand. “If the men keep someone on watch and an aircar or two standing by, they should be safe enough. And, just in case the Hierarch starts looking for me—which he may do, if Zoe tells him about me—I’ll hide myself away somewhere. I’ll go back to the forest, that’s what. Rillibee will come along to take care of me. If they come looking for me, tell them I went back into the forest. If they come looking for the letter, you never saw it. Rigo never saw it. When a cure is found, Tony will see that the letter is widely disseminated, just as the cure is.”

Rillibee was beside them. “I’ll go,” he said. “I’ll get Brother Mainoa up in a tree somewhere, and we’ll wait until one of the foxen comes to get us.”

She found herself trying to think of an excuse why she should go herself. She wanted to go herself. She wanted to be there, among the trees, not here with all these people. She looked around, seeking some reason, and turned back to find Rillibee already gone.

Damn. She felt unutterably sad but forbade herself to cry. “Does everyone accept that there’s probably another tunnel?” she asked Roald Few, trying to distract herself.

“Oh, yes,” Roald said. “Probably more than one. Probably not finished yet, or they’d be all over us/’

“A tunnel could just as easily come in on this side of the wall,” she whispered, looking around to be sure that no one else heard her. “It could come out below the town. Have you thought of that?”

Roald nodded wearily. “Lady Westriding, we’ve thought of that and of three or four other things that would be equally dreadful. People are beginning to talk about the winter quarters, how long they could hold them against a Hippae assault.”

“So, if the tunnel isn’t finished, what will the Hippae do next?”

“Burn the estancias,” he replied, “just as they did Opal Hill. That’s one of the things we figured out while you were out there enticin’ the Hippae. We all agreed. Given their nature, if they can’t get in here yet, they’ll start fires.”

“Has anyone warned the estancias?”

He buried his head in his hands. “Nobody’s had time! And who are they going to listen to? Obermum bon Damfels? They might believe her. They certainly won’t believe me.”

Marjorie went away to make copies of the letter, to get Tony onto the Star-Lily, and to find Rowena.

No one answered the tell-me at Klive. At the bon Laupmons’, someone answered but declined to respond either to the information that Taronce had survived or that the estancia should be evacuated. At Stane, however, after learning that both Dimoth and Vince were dead, Geraldria bon Maukerden begged Rowena to send whatever help would come from Commoner Town to evacuate the house and village. Mayor Bee already had all available aircars and trucks going to all the villages, the bon Damfels village included.

“The damned bons can char on their own griddle if they want to,” he snarled. “But we’ll get our village people out.”

It was too late to get them out of Klive. Even before the tunnel had been blown up, Hippae had attacked Klive. There were no people left alive there, not in the estancia, not in the village, except one man, Figor, found wandering among the charred houses, a laser knife in his hands.

When she heard the news, Rowena wept, wiping the tears away with her left hand. The right arm and shoulder were in a Heal-all, mending. “Emmy’s here,” she said. “Amy’s here. Shevlok’s here, alive in a way. Figor will be all right. But oh, I grieve for Sylvan. And my cousins. And old Aunt Jem.”

No one had time to grieve with her. There had been a trail leading from Klive to the swamp forest. All the Hippae on Grass seemed to be congregating there.

The evacuation fleet shuttled back and forth across the prairies, continuing even after fires sprung up at Stane and at Jorum, the estancia of the bon Bindersen’s. Obermun Kahrl and Obermum Lisian refused to leave the bon Bindersen estancia, but their children, Traven and Maude, left willingly enough with the people of the village and many others from the big house.

At the bon Haunser place, Eric joined the evacuees along with Jason, the Obermun’s son. Felitia had died outside the bon Laupmon walls, during what Rigo had come to remember as “The Joust.”

The bon Laupmon place was totally destroyed before the cars arrived, though the commoners had cut a fire break around the village and, armed with harvesting knives, were standing fast with their livestock. At the bon Smaerloks’, the drivers were told that the bons had gone hunting with the bon Tanligs. All of them, even the old folks. A vast crowd of hounds and mounts had showed up early on Hunt morning, and every occupant of the estancias had gone a-hunting. The only people left in the estancias were children. The children and the villagers were evacuated; a wide Hippae trail led from the estancias toward Commons.

The order station became the nerve center for Commons. From there one could see what went on at the port and receive messages from approaching ships. From there one could direct the defenses if Hippae came in through some other tunnel-In the winter quarters below the order station a makeshift hospital was set up to house Rowena, Stella, Emmy, Shevlok, Figor, and a dozen others who had been badly injured before or during the evacuation. People with only superficial injuries were treated and dismissed. When the last of them had been attended to, Lees Bergrem insisted upon going back through the gates to the hospital with several of her assistants.

“Whether there’s another tunnel or not. the equipment I need is at the hospital,” she told Marjorie. “I may be in a position to do more about this plague thing than anyone else, but I have to get to my equipment. I can’t let those Hippae keep me away.”

“Do you have any ideas? Any line of attack?” Marjorie asked. “Nothing. Not yet. I have a few ideas, but I’m not really onto a line of inquiry at this point!” She shook off Jelly’s remonstrances and went, her helpers with her. all of them laden with food and drink and various esoteric supplies they had carried in when the Commercial District had been evacuated.

There was nothing else Marjorie could do. Tony was sleeping in the order station dormitory, ready to leave when the Star-Lily left— a matter of hours. Mainoa and Rillibee were in the forest- Persun and Sebastian were helping Mayor Bee get the evacuees settled and fortify the winter quarters.

There was nothing more that Marjorie could do “Roald’s offered us a room at his place in town,” she told Rigo. “His wife, Kinny, is fixing us some supper. We can walk down....”

He tottered to his feet with an apologetic grimace. “I’m not sure I can walk.”

Persun overheard this and came forward. “I’ve got a little runner outside, sir. Room enough for you and Lady Westriding, if you don’t mind being crowded. I have to go down to town anyhow.”

Rigo smiled his thanks, and they rode in exhausted quiet to the Few summer quarters.

Kinny, with tears in her eyes, led them to a suite of comfortable rooms below. “We only lost one village,” she said, weeping. “Only one out of seven. But everybody in town was related to someone there. Everyone’s mourning Klive-“

Marjorie herself could mourn Klive, mourn the waste of it.

Kinny went on, shaking her head in amazed, pained annoyance. “Those bons, already trying to take over, did you know?”

“No,” said Rigo. “How do you mean, take over?”

“Oh, Ambassador, you wouldn’t believe— Well now, let’s see. It’s Eric, brother to the dead Obermun Jerril bon Haunser, and Jason, Jerril’s son. And it’s Taronce bon Laupmon, nephew to Obermun Lancel that died, and Traven, that’s the dead Obermun bon Bindersen’s brother. The four of them. They’ve decided to take over Commons, for the time being.” She laughed, angry and amused, both at once. “They told Roald they had elected themselves a council of four to run things. Roald and Alverd are tryin’ to explain things to ‘em. Not easy. Not with them.”

“Did they think you would all take orders from them?” Rigo asked, amazed.

“They really did. Yes. Well, we always pretended to, when we went out to the estancias. you know. It pleased the bons, and it didn’t do us any harm. But there’s too much at stake here in Commons to let them meddle with it. They’re so ignorant.” She made a face and asked them if they were ready to eat something.

“I think so.” Marjorie said with a sigh. “I can’t remember when the last meal I had was. In the Tree City, I think.”

“Oh, I want to hear about that! You folks take your time washing up, and supper’ll be ready when you come up.”

Kinny served them in the kitchen while she chattered about the Tree City and a dozen other things, interrupting herself to cry occasionally, then interrupting her tears to laugh about something she remembered. It was only when they had eaten and were sitting over cups of tea that she remembered. “Oh, Roald called while you were down below. He told me to tell you. There’s a big ship coming in tomorrow. From Sanctity. Roald says the big high mucky-muck himself is on it. The what-do-you-call-him. The Hierarch.”

“Is he going to let it orbit?” Rigo asked, his stomach clenching as he thought what such an arrival might mean.

Kinny shook her head. “Roald said tell you he doesn’t want to, nor Mayor Bee. Question is, how would you keep it from sittin’ up there if it wants to?”

Marjorie’s imagination had leapt ahead, far ahead. “Rigo, we have to get Dr. Bergrem away from the hospital. It’s right by the port. If that ship comes down. If Sanctity finds out what she’s working on ..

He groaned as he got to his feet. “Let’s go talk to Alverd Bee once more.”

“What is ‘Galaxy class’?” Mayor Bee wanted to know.

“It’s a Sanctity ship,” one of the port controllers said. “Called theIsrafel.I’ve never seen one like it.”

They were in the winter quarters of the order station. From the adjacent rooms came the moans of someone wounded and the wail of frightened babies. Someone bustled down the hall and the moans ceased. The babies went on crying.

The man at the tell-me paid no attention. “Warship,” he said, staring at a diagram on the screen. “Sanctity navy. Big son-of-a-hound.”

“It’s a troop carrier,” said Rigo, staring narrow-eyed across the operator’s shoulder at the diagram. “And a battleship. Old. All their vessels are old.”

“No matter how old, it carries a thousand men,” the port controller agreed. “With real combat weapons.”

“Dr. Bergrem has to go,” Marjorie said. “On the Star-Lily. She can’t stay here”

“Dr. Bergrem doesn’t intend to go anywhere,” said the woman’s voice from behind them. “What is all this?”

The doctor divested herself of her cloak and sat down as though to stay awhile. “I was on my way into town to pick up some book I need, and I hear my name being taken in vain.”

“Sanctity’s new Hierarch is about to arrive,” Marjorie told her. “Cory Strange. You don’t want to be here when he gets here.”

“Why in hell not?” The woman settled herself firmly into her chair.

“Do you have a cure?”

“Not yet, no. But I think I’ve happened on a line of inquiry. If I just knew—“

“Then you must go,” Rigo snapped.

The doctor flushed angrily.

“Shh,” said Marjorie. “Dr. Bergrem, no one is trying to push you around. Read this.” She took a copy of the note to Jhamlees Zoe from her pocket and handed it to the woman.

Lees Bergrem read it, then again. “I don’t believe this!”

Rigo started to retort. Marjorie covered his lips with her fingers. “What don’t you believe?”

“That anyone could— This must be faked....” She looked into their faces, finding nothing there but apprehension. “But why would— Damn!” She handed the note to Alverd Bee.

“You have to go,” Marjorie repeated. “You may be close to finding a cure, or something that will lead to a cure. You said so yourself. If you find the answer here, with that ship in port you’ll never get a chance to tell anyone. A thousand troops can put us all under house arrest. We were going to send our son to Semling with copies of this letter. But you could disseminate it even better. You’re known at the University there “

“You send me off-planet, I can’t do any good at all,” Lees Bergrem said. “I need tissue samples and soil samples. I need things that don’t exist on Semling. Forget it.”

Alverd Bee looked up from the note, his face strained and angry. “If you won’t go off-planet, then we’ll have to hide you somewhere, Lees. That means moving your equipment. Tell us fast what you need. We have about six hours to get you hidden and Star-Lily away. After that, it’ll be too late.”

“The new Hierarch won’t know anything yet,” Rigo said. “Jhamlees Zoe can’t tell him anything until he lands on Grass.”

“Jhamlees Zoe can’t tell him anything, period,” said Persun Pollut as he entered the room. “Sebastian and I’ve been out to the Friary to see if they’d changed their mind about being evacuated. The Hippae have hit the place. We saw the flames all the way from Klive. Half this piece of Grass is burning.

“So this Hierarch won’t know,” the doctor announced, turning around as though to renew the argument. “I’ve moved out of the hospital once already. We just got set up again. I can stay there. The Hierarch won’t know what I’m doing.”

“He won’t care what you’re doing,” Marjorie pleaded. “Once he’s here on Grass, you’ll do what he says, or else. Dr. Bergrem, you haven’t dealt with Sanctity. Rigo and I have. Believe me! Even their own people have few rights against Sanctity; unbelievers have none at all except what they can enforce for themselves. If the Hierarch chooses to deploy a thousand troopers, we couldn’t enforce the coming of summer!”

“Oh, all right, all right. I’ll hide! Tissue samples, Alverd. I need snips from whatever bons have survived. I’ll send one of my people to get those. Samples from the children, too. I need soil samples. From in here and out there. Persun, come with me and I’ll describe what I need. I’ll pack up my stuff. It’s heavy. Send some men over to load it.”

And she was away.

“What about you two?” asked Alverd.

Rigo drew himself wearily to his feet. “There’s nothing we can do just now. Tony’s asleep down below, and there’s no point in waking him until he needs to board the Star-Lily. I think we’ll try to get some sleep. When the ship from Sanctity arrives, we need to be alert. At that time, some misdirection may be in order.”

TheIsrafelbloomed like a star, and like a star remained in the heavens. One small shuttle came down to unload a small detachment of men commanded by a Seraph with six-winged angels on his shoulders. He was met by Mayor Bee.

“The Hierarch wishes to speak to Administrator Jhamlees Zoe at the Friary of the Green Brothers. We have been unsuccessful in reaching the administrator through your communications system.”

Mayor Bee nodded sadly. “The Friary was wiped out by prairie fires,” he said. “We’re searching now for survivors.”

There was a thoughtful silence. “The Hierarch may want to come down and verify this for himself”

“We evacuated the Port Hotel for the Hierarch’s use,” the Mayor agreed. “The fires have burned great stretches of grassland and seven villages. The town is full of refugees.”

“The Hierarch may choose the town, nonetheless,” said the Seraph. “Well, certainly, if he wishes,” said Mayor Bee, nodding. “Though there is sickness in the town which we assumed the Hierarch would wish to avoid.”

The Seraph’s expression did not change, though something wary came into his voice. “The office of the Hierarch will advise you. Any particular kind of sickness?”

“We’re not sure what it is,” said Mayor Bee. “People breaking out in sores.. .” Rillibee had told him what it looked like. Rillibee had told them a good deal more than any of the commoners had wanted to know. The small detachment made room for themselves at the empty hotel, but the Hierarch did not come down to Grass. Instead, he sent for Rigo. Marjorie insisted upon going along.

“For verisimilitude,” she said. “We came here together. Let us support one another.”

“I need you. Marjorie.”

She gave him a thoughtful look “You have never said that to me before, Rigo. Did you often say it to Eugenie?” He flushed. “I may have.”

She said wonderingly, “It’s a different thing, being needed, from being wanted, which you often said to me, though that was long ago. I think the Seraph is waiting for us.”

“Seraph,” he snorted. “Why can’t they call him a colonel or a general? Seraph!”

“We mustn’t betray our biases! This Hierarch is not your uncle. and he may already be suspicious of us simply because we’re outsiders.”

The Hierarch betrayed no suspicion, though it would have been difficult to detect, since he greeted them from behind a transparent partition, calling their attention to it as though they could not see it for themselves. “My advisors,” he said in an annoyingly satisfied though self-deprecating tone. “They won’t allow me to expose myself to possible risk.”

“Very wise,” said Rigo.

“Is there risk here, Ambassador?” The Hierarch was clad in white robes with golden angels embroidered at the hem and in a wide border up the front. Their metallic wings threw a coruscant flicker around him, like an aureole. His face was ordinary. It had no feature more distinguished than the others. It was a face one could instantly forget. One would not forget the robes, however. The Hierarch repeated his question. “Are there deaths? Unexplained ones? Or deaths from plague?

“We don’t know,” said Rigo, remembering it was probable that the Hierarch had an analyzer on them. The least risk lay in disclaiming absolute knowledge. One could almost always do that truthfully.

“People do disappear on Grass,” Marjorie offered honestly. “We’ve been trying to find out how, and why. It might help if we knew precisely what drew Sanctity’s attention to Grass initially. The information we were given was not very specific.”

The Hierarch gave her a long looking over, head to toe, as though assessing how well she would dress out for meat. It was not a look Marjorie had met before, and it chilled her. The Hierarch was not interested in her as woman or person, so much was clear.

“I will tell you precisely what we heard. A minor official at Sanctity was visiting his family. One of his visiting kinfolk worked as a port controller on Shame. Sometimes this kinsman stopped in at a port tavern after work. On some unspecified occasion, he talked over his ale with a crewman from an unnamed freighter, The crewman said his friend, unnamed, had come down with some sores on his legs and arms just before the ship landed on Grass. The sick man was in a quarantine pod. The ship was on Grass an unspecified length of time. When it arrived at some farther destination, the man was cured.”

“That’s all?”

“Our official repeated this story to us when he returned from his visit to his family. Our computers say the likelihood is great that the unnamed crewman had plague, but we’ve been unable to verify the story. The man who told it to our official died of plague shortly after leaving Terra. We don’t know where the alleged ship went from Grass. We have been unable to identify the ship or the crewman.”

Rigo threw up his hands, indicating frustration. “Assuming the story is true, the cure could have come about here or elsewhere. Or he might not have had plague at all. Plague isn’t the only thing that causes sores!” He let his voice and manner indicate frustration and fear. That was normal, and it would cover his agitation.

The Hierarch stared at them expressionlessly. “Have any survivors from the Friary been found?”

Rigo nodded. “A few, yes. Some are beginning to wander back to the site as they realize we’ll be searching for them there.”

“My old friend Nod—that is, Jhamlees Zoe?”

Rigo shook his head, unwilling to trust his voice. No. Jhamlees Zoe hadn’t turned up. If Rigo said that aloud it wouldn’t take a machine to detect that he rejoiced in the fact.

The Hierarch nodded, as though someone had asked him a question. “I think we’ll remain here for the time being. Zoe may yet turn up. Or you may find some more definite information.”

In the shuttle, Marjorie asked, “Rigo, the crewman in the quarantine pod, assuming there was one, would have been given Grassian food and water and air, would he not?”

“Certainly.” He nodded, indicating the men seated in front of them. “Quarantine pods allow nothing out, but materials do go in.”

She chased an idea, worrying at it, but she asked no other questions.

They were escorted back to the order station by a handful of troopers. “There are definitely enough armed men on that ship to control the planet.” Marjorie said to Roald Few.

“If they decide to do so,” Rigo agreed.

“What do you think?” Roald asked, throwing a side long glance at his son-in-law, the Mayor.

“I think the Hierarch is doubtful,” Rigo replied. “If I were the Hierarch, my next step would be to send the scientists down.”

“Wouldn’t he have told you that?” the mayor wanted to know.

Marjorie laughed, an unamused sound. “We aren’t among the Sanctified, Mayor Bee. He doesn’t like us, doesn’t trust us. Probably he doesn’t like or trust much of anyone. He’ll get what he can from us, but he won’t give us anything in return.”

“Smart man,” remarked Alverd. “Not to trust us Commons. We’ve no love for Sanctity. He’s one should die of plague.”

“When that letter of his becomes public, he may wish he had,” Marjorie said. “Until then, we simply hang on and get in his way as much as possible.”

They were given no further opportunity to impede the Hierarch. Sanctity scientists came down and occupied the hospital, setting up their own mysterious equipment.

“It doesn’t matter what they find out,” Marjorie reminded Rigo. “So long as Dr. Bergrem finds it, too.”

“It would be better if she found it first,” Rigo objected, taking Marjorie by the arm and leading her to a quiet corner. “You and I need to agree on what we will say if the Hierarch asks more questions. All of Commons needs to agree on what they will say.” They discussed their strategy, at first alone, then with Roald and Alverd. When they had worn the subject thin, they returned to their rooms in the winter quarters, to more sleep and more of Kinny’s cooking.

Late in the evening Rillibee came in from the swamp forest, waking the Yrariers. Marjorie came out of her room yawning, wrapped in a light robe, to find Rigo sitting up in his bed with Rillibee perched on the foot of it.

“I’ve come to get Father James,” he said. “And the other Father, if he’ll come back.”

“What’s going on, Rillibee?”

“I wish I knew exactly. The foxen are trying to figure something out. It’s because of something you did, Marjorie. You talked to the foxen, didn’t you?”

“During the ... the episode out there. Yes.”

“You didn’t tell me that,” Rigo said, almost angrily.

“It wasn’t anything very real to me at the time,” she said calmly. “I would have a hard time quoting the conversation. Mostly I was thinking words, but the foxen seemed to understand the threat I intended.”

“It wasn’t anything to do with a threat, I don’t think. No. It was something else. Brother Mainoa is tearing what little hair he has left trying to figure it out. Whatever you did, it was the key to some change in their attitude. There are hundreds and hundreds of foxen in the forest, you know. All talking at one another, growling, yowling, thinking, sitting and looking at each other with their claws tap-tapping. It’s like having shadow beasts projected all over you. You can’t see them. You walk around them without knowing why. You hear them, and your mind tries to make wind noises out of it. After a while, you lie down and put your hands over your head, wishing they’d all go away....

“Anyhow, they’re having some major discussion. Something’s going to happen. A foxen wants you, Marjorie, but I told him I didn’t know if you could come. He’ll settle for Father James.”

Marjorie shook her head, longingly. “I mustn’t leave here. If I were to vanish, the Hierarch could get very suspicious. He’s got a thousand armed men, and he might not hesitate to destroy the swamp forest or the town or anything else he felt like. Father James will probably go with you, if he feels up to the trip.”

“I’d like to take Stella, too,” Rillibee said, looking at his feet. Marjorie sighed and turned away. Stella was still at the temporary hospital, though no longer encased in a Heal-all. “Have you seen her, Rillibee?”

“I stopped there first.”

“She’s not ... she’s not like herself.”

“She’s like a child,” Rillibee agreed. “A nice child.”

“What use do you have for a nice child?” Rigo asked, his mouth in a grim line.

Rillibee drew himself up, a slight, wiry figure, somehow dignified in this circumstance by his very lack of stature and bulk. “I’m not interested in molesting her, if that’s what you’re imagining. She’s in danger here. You all are. But you can choose what you’ll do and she can’t. I’d like to take Dimity, too. And Janetta. For the same reason. If the Hippae ruined them, maybe the foxen can help to heal them.”

“Why not?” Marjorie said. “If Rowena and Geraldria are willing to have you take their daughters, why not? You’ll have to ask them, but as far as I’m concerned, yes, take Stella.”

“Marjorie!” Rigo was outraged.

“Oh, stop roaring at me, Rigo,” she snapped in a voice he had never heard. “Think! You’re doing it again, all these automatic responses of pride and masculinity.”

“She’s my daughter!”

“She’s mine, too, and there’s nothing in her head at all. She doesn’t know me. She plays with a ball, bouncing it off a wall. What are you going to do with her? Take her back to Terra and hire a keeper for her?”

‘This ... this ...” he pointed at Rillibee.

“What?”

“This young man,” she said, “who has been ill used by Sanctity, as we all have. This young man, who has certain talents and skills. What about him?”

“You trust him not to—“

“I trust him not to do anything to her nearly as bad as the Hippae have already done,” she cried, “because you let them. I trust him to care for her better than we did, Rigo! Better than her father or her mother. I trust him to look after her.”

Rillibee, who had tried to make himself inconspicuous during most of this, now asserted, “I will do for her what is best for her. From the moment I first saw her, I wanted only what was best for her. Right now there is only one good place left on Grass, and the Tree City is it. If there is trouble on Grass, it has not touched the trees.”

Rigo did not reply. Marjorie could not see his face. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see it, and she did not wish to argue it further with him. At the tell-me she reached Geraldria and Rowena, telling them of Rillibee’s offer and advising them to accept it. When she turned, Rigo was there, and she said impatiently, “Yes?”

“Yes,” he responded, as though granting a favor. “I’ll accept this for now. It may be the best place for her for a time.”

She tried to smile, not quite successfully. “I hope I am right about this, Rigo. I’d like to be right, a few times.”

He didn’t reply. Instead, he turned and left her, going back to his own room. Though she tried to get back to sleep, she could not. It was only hours later, near dawn, when the Seraph and his armed escort came for them, that she learned he had been as sleepless as herself.

They were given little time to dress. Perhaps it was only imagination, but it seemed they were treated with less courtesy than previously. When they were escorted into the Hierarch’s presence, two other persons were already there. Rigo’s hand tightened on Marjorie’s arm as he saw the first. Her face grew momentarily rigid as she saw the second.

“Admit!” she cried in what she hoped was a glad-sounding voice. “Rigo, it’s Admit Maukerden. I’m so glad you escaped the fires at Opal Hill. Sebastian and Persun went back time after time, but you weren’t among the people they brought in.”

“My name is AdmitbonMaukerden,” he said.

“A bon? Jerril bon Haunser told me he would provide a lateral,” she exclaimed.

“I was assigned to find out what you were doing on Grass,” he said. “The bons wanted to know what you were up to. As this one does, now.” He gestured through the glass at the Hierarch. “He wants to know what you were up to.”

“Well for heaven’s sake,” Marjorie cried, “tell him, Admit. Tell the Hierarch anything he wants to know.”

“I am more interested in what this other one tells me,” the Hierarch said silkily from behind his transparent partition.

The other one lounged on his chair like a lizard on a rock, his relaxed manner belied by his scratched and bruised face and arms. Highbones.

“Brother Flumzee?” Marjorie asked the Hierarch. her voice calm. “He and his friends intended to kill me in the swamp forest. What else does he tell you?” She looked at Highbones gravely.

He saw the look and remembered what it was he had forgotten about women. They pitied you sometimes. When you didn’t even know why.

The Hierarch said in a silky voice, “He tells me that you were well acquainted with one of the Brothers, Brother Mainoa. He says that Brother Mainoa was thought to be a backslider. And that he knew something about plague.”

“Did he really? What did he know, Brother Flumzee? Or do you still prefer to be called Highbones?”

“He knew something,” Highbones shouted, hating what he saw in her face. “Fuasoi wanted him killed.”

“What did he know?” asked the Hierarch. “It would be in your best interest, Lady Westriding, and you, Ambassador, to tell me everything the Brother knew, or thought he knew.”

“We’ll be glad to,” Rigo said. “Though he himself would be able to tell you much more than we can—“

“He’s alive?” The Heirarch snapped.

Marjorie replied calmly, “Well, of course. Highbones left his two friends to kill Mainoa and Brother Lourai, but they didn’t succeed. I think Highbones hated Brother Lourai. and that was the reason for it.”

“Fuasoi ordered Mainoa killed!” Highbones shouted.

“Well, I suppose that’s possible,” Marjorie continued, keeping her voice calm, though she was in a frenzy of concentration. “Since Brother Mainoa thought Fuasoi was a Moldy.” She turned her face toward Rigo, nodding. She had never mentioned Brother Mainoa’s speculation to him. She prayed Rigo would understand what she was trying to do.

The Hierarch, who had started the inquiry with a furious intensity, now looked stricken. “A Moldy?”

“Brother Mainoa thought so,” Rigo said, following Marjorie’s lead. “Because—“

“Because Fuasoi wouldn’t have ordered Mainoa killed, otherwise,” Marjorie concluded. “If he thought Mainoaknewsomething about the plague, the only reason to kill him would be if Fuasoi was a Moldy. Anyone who was nota Moldy would want Brother Mainoa alive, talking about what he knew.” She looked at the Hierarch helpfully, feeling hysteria pushing at the back of her tongue.

“Moldies here, on Grass?” the Hierarch whispered, very pale, his mouth drawn into a rictus of horror. “Here?”

Rigo saw the man’s terror and was thankful for it “Well, Your Eminence,” Rigo offered in a placating tone, “it was only a matter of time until they came here. Everyone knew that. Even Sender O’Neil told me that!”

The audience ended abruptly. They were outside the chamber, being escorted to the shuttle once more. Highbones wasn’t with them. AdmitbonMaukerden wasn’t with them. Those two were taken away in some other direction.

“Where are they going?” Marjorie asked.

“Down to the port,” the escort leader responded. “We’ll hold them there in case the Hierarch wants them again.”

Marjorie felt a surge of hope. If they had been believed, perhaps the Hierarch would depart. Perhaps this is all it would take! When Marjorie and Rigo reached the port, however, they were not allowed to return to the town. Instead they were taken to the empty Port Hotel and given a suite with a guard outside the door

“Are we to stay here without food?” Marjorie demanded.

“Somebody’ll bring it from the officer’s mess,” the guard said. “Hierarch wants you here where he can lay hands on you if he needs you.”

When the door was shut behind them, Marjorie put her lips almost against Rigo’s ear. “Anything we say here can probably be overheard.”

He nodded. “I think Mainoa was right,” he said loudly. “I think Brother what’s-his-name was a Moldy. He probably had virus shipped in weeks ago. That’s probably what the people in town have. I think we ought to get off this planet, Marjorie. As soon as possible.” He shook his head at her tiredly. What more could they say or do than this mixture of half truth and part lies? If the Hierarch was frightened enough, perhaps his own fear would drive him away.

Rigo sat down, leaning back, eyes closed. Marjorie sat near him. The room was full of unsaid things and of the teasing memory of said ones. She looked at his exhausted face and felt an almost impersonal sorrow, like the feelings she had often had for the people of Breedertown. And she could help him no more than she had ever helped them.

Behind his slitted eyelids, Rigo wondered if it was too late. If too much had happened. Eugenie. Stella. His accusations against Marjorie. Stupid of him. He knew better. If he knew anything about her, he knew she had no appetites of that kind. Why had he accused her?

Because he had had to accuse her of something.

And now? Was it too late to forgive her for what she had never done?

18

In the Tree City of the Arbai two religious gentlemen sat in the mild breezes of evening, eating fruit which had been brought from the surrounding trees by foxen, one of whom had remained to join the feast.

“Like plums,” said Father James. He had arrived at the city by foxen back in midmorning. Father Sandoval had refused to come. Brother Mainoa had come to the city earlier, an exhausting trip from which he had not yet recovered. Now the Brother reclined against the breast of a foxen, like a child in a shadowy chair, while Father James tried to convince himself yet again that the foxen were real—not dreams, not amorphous visions, not abstractions or delusions. Conviction was difficult when he couldn’t really see them. He caught a glimpse of paw, or hand, a glimpse of eye, a shadowed fragment of leg or back. Trying to see the being entire was giving him eye strain and a headache. He turned aside, resolving not to bother. Soon everything would resolve itself, one way or another.

“Chameleons,” Brother Mainoa whispered. “Psychic chameleons. The Hippae can do it too, though not as well.”

Father James’ lips trembled. “Don’t you think the fruit is like plums?” he repeated, longing for something familiar. “Though perhaps the texture is more like a pear. Small, though.”

“Ripening this early, they’d likely be small,” Brother Mainoa offered in a breathy whisper. “The fruits of summer and fall are larger, even from these same trees.” He sounded contented, though very weak.

“They fruit more than once during the season, then?”

“Oh, yes,” Mainoa murmured. ‘They fruit continually until late fall.”

Along a bridge leading from the plaza Janetta bon Maukerden was dancing, humming to herself. Dimity bon Damfels watched from the plaza, mouth open around a thumb, eyes remotely curious. Stella was with Rillibee in a room facing the plaza. The older men could hear his voice.

“Take the fruit in your hand, Stella. That’s it. Now, have a bite. Good girl. Wipe your chin.Goodgirl. Have another bite....”

“He’s very patient,” whispered Brother Mainoa.

“He would have to be,” murmured Father James. “Three of them!”

“Poor unfortunates,” Father James said. “We’ll help him with them while we’re here. It’s the least we can do.” He thought a moment, then added, “If we’re here long enough.”

A group of shadow Arbai came toward them, checkered them with arms and legs and shoulders, battered them with sibilant conversation, then moved on past. A swoop of scarlet and brilliant blue swept below them, from one tree to another, a colorful almost-bird, quite different from the Terran species, yet enough resembling them that one would think “parrot” on seeing them. Out on the bridge where Janetta danced, one of the shadow figures grasped a railing with shadow hands and squatted over the edge. The Arbai had been casual about elimination.

“It will be your choice,” Brother Mainoa said in a weak whisper. “Your choice, Father. Whether to stay or go.”

The priest protested “We’re not even sure we can live here! Food, for example. We’re not sure these fruits will sustain our lives.”

Brother Mainoa assured him, “The fruit plus grass seeds will be more than enough. Brother Laeroa has spent years determining the nutrient value of various grass seed combinations. After all, Father, on Terra many men lived on little else than wheat or rice or corn. They, too, are seeds of grass.”

“Harvesting grass seed would mean going out into the prairies,” Father James objected. “The Hippae wouldn’t allow that.”

“You could do it,” said the Brother. “You’d have protection....” He shut his eyes and seemed to drift off as he had been doing ever since they arrived.

“Though, come to think of it,” said Father James, suddenly remembering farms he had visited as a child, “here in the swamp one could have ducks, and geese.” He tried to summon a hearty chuckle, but what came out instead was a tremulous half sigh. The young priest had just remembered that the few humans on Grass might be all the humans there were. Whether one could have ducks or not, there might be nowhere else to go.

“Wipe your chin again,” said Rillibee Chime. “Oh, Stella, that’s such a good smart girl.”

Janetta spun and hummed, then stopped momentarily and said, quite clearly, “Potty!” She hitched up her smock, grasped the railing, and squatted where she was on the bridge, her bottom over the edge in the same pose the shadow Arbai had adopted moments before.

“She can talk,” said Father James unnecessarily, his face pink as he turned it away from Janetta’s bare buttocks,

“She can learn,” Brother Mainoa agreed, suddenly awake once more.

Father James sighed, his face turned resolutely away. “Let’s hope she can learn to be a bit more modest.”

Brother Mainoa smiled. “Or that we can learn to be—as, evidently, the Arbai were—less concerned with the flesh.”

Father James felt a wave of sadness, a wash of emotion so intensely painful that it seemed physical. He suddenly saw Brother Mainoa through some other being’s senses: a fragile friend, an evanescent kinsman who would not be concerned with the flesh at all for very much longer.

Someone was watching him. He looked up to see a pair of glowing, inhuman eyes, clearly fixed on his own. They were brimming with enormous, very human tears.

Shortly following the detention of the Yrariers, the Seraph in command of the Hierarch’s troops took a few of his “saints” in battle dress—more to impress the populace than for any tactical reason—and made a sweep through the town and surrounding farms, searching, so the Seraph said, for someone named Brother Mainoa. Everyone had seen him at one unhelpful time or another. Several people knew where he slept. Others knew where he had been having supper hours before. No one knew where he was at that moment.

“He was depressed,” an informer by the name of Persun Pollut told them with transparent honesty. “About all the Brothers getting burned up out at the Friary. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d gone down into the swamp forest. There’ve been several people done that recently.” All of which was true. Though he pulled a mournful face and sighed at the Seraph, Persun couldn’t wait to see the Tree City for himself.

The troop made a cursory search along the edge of the trees, sending a patrol some little way into the forest. Troopers returned soaked to the thighs saying they couldn’t quite remember seeing anything. Spy eyes sent into the dim aisles of cloaking vines saw nothing either. Or, those who followed the spy eyes on helmet screens were sure they saw nothing, which amounted to the same thing. It was conceded among those who had inspected the swamp forest close up that if this Brother what’s-his-name had gone in there, he was probably drowned and long gone.

Meantime, the troopers remaining in town were offered cakes and roast goose and flagons of beer and were treated to a good deal of garrulity which had nothing to do with what they were looking for. The search continued with increasing laxness and joviality while the day wandered inconclusively toward evening.

The Seraph was an old hand at appearing Sanctified, one who could and did spew catechetical references at every opportunity. In Commoner Town he found his views listened to with such flattering attention that he actually began to enjoy himself, though—as he told anyone who would listen—he would have felt more secure with a few hundred saints deployed, rather than a scant two score. According to these good people, there were hostiles on the planet, hostiles that had already built themselves one route under the forest.

“Haven’t you any devices to detect digging?” he asked. “Any mechanisms that listen for tremors? That kind of thing?”

“Grass doesn’t have tremors, not like that.” Roald Few told him. “About the worst shaking we get is when the Hippae go dancing.”

The Seraph shook his head, feeling expansive “I’ll bring some detectors down from the ship. Standard issue. We use them to locate sappers coming in under fortifications. They’ll do the job for you here.’

“Where do we put them?” Mayor Bee asked. “Here in the town?”

The Seraph drew a map on the tablecloth with his fingertip, thinking. “Out there, north of town, I’d say two-thirds of the way to the forest. About a dozen, in a semicircle. You can set the receiver up anywhere here in town. The order station’d be a good place. Then if anything starts to dig in, you’ll know it!” He smiled beatifically, proud of himself for being helpful.

Alverd looked at Roald, receiving a look in return. So, they would know. Well and good. What in the hell would they do about it once they knew?

In theIsrafel,high above all this confusion, the aged Hierarch fretted himself into a passion. The first time he had questioned the Yrariers he had been convinced the ambassador was misleading him, though the analyzers had said only maybe. The second time, however, the machines had declared Rigo and Marjorie to be truthful. Compared to Highbones and the Maukerden man—both liars (said the machines} from the moment of conception—the Yrariers had been certified honest and doing their best to be helpful. However, they weren’t Sanctity people, and in the Hierarch’s opinion they weren’t terribly bright. This business about the Moldies. That couldn’t be true. Sanctity had been too careful for it to be true. They had kept the plague so very quiet, so very hidden. The Yrariers must have misunderstood whatever this Brother Mainoa had said about Moldies.

The Hierarch considered this. The pair had been chosen by the former Hierarch because they were kin, because they were athletes. Not known for brains, athletes. That’s where old Carlos had gone wrong. He should have sent someone cleverer. Someone slyer. And he should have done it long before instead of waiting until the last possible moment. There was no point in keeping the Yrariers locked up. And he, the Hierarch, would be safe enough in the specially modified isolation shuttle his people had built for him. Once he himself was on the ground, things would happen! Discoveries would occur! He knew it!

As he was about to depart, however, a bulletin arrived from the surface. Danger, the Seraph said. Not only the possibility of plague, but the presence of large, fierce beasts would make it dangerous for the Hierarch to descend. Hostile creatures might be planning to overrun the port.

The additional frustration was enough to send the Hierarch into one of his infrequent fits of screaming temper. Servitors who had barely survived previous such fits were moved to panicky action. After emergency ministrations by the Hierarch’s personal physician, the Hierarch slept and everyone sighed in relief. He went on sleeping for days, and no one noticed or cared that no orders had been given for the Yrariers’ release.

Persun Pollut, Sebastian Mechanic, and Roald Few took the Seraph’s listening devices out into the meadows north of town to set them up. They were simple enough to install: slender tubes to be driven into the ground with a mechanical driver, long, whiskery devices to be dropped into the tubes, and transmitters to be screwed onto the tops.

“Foolproof,” the Seraph had told them “As they must be if inexperienced troopers are to use them. A-B-C. Pound it in, drop it in, screw it on.”

Foolproof they might be. In the aggregate, heavy they also were. The men used an aircar to transport the dozen sets and the bulky driver that went with them. They started at the western end of the proposed arc, setting each device and then moving northward, parallel to the curve of the forest. Most of the day had passed by the time seven of the gadgets were in place, and they were bending the arc toward the east when Persun shaded his eyes with his arm and said, “Somebody in trouble up there.”

When they stopped working, they could all hear it: the stutter of an engine, start and stop, the pauses like those in the breath of someone dying—so long between sounds one was sure no other sound would come—only to catch again into life.

Then they saw it, an aircar coming toward them, scarcely above the forest. It jerked and wobbled, approaching by fits and starts. When it had barely cleared the trees it fell, caught itself, then dropped, coming down hard midway between them and the swamp, not a hundred yards away.

Persun set out toward it at a run, with Sebastian close behind. Roald followed them more slowly. At first there was no sign of life in the fallen car, but then the door opened with a scream of tortured metal and a Green Brother emerged dazedly, holding his head. Others followed: six, eight, a dozen of them. They sank to the ground by the car, obviously exhausted.

Persun was the first to reach them. “My name’s Pollut,” he said. “We can get some cars out here to pick you up, since yours seems to be disabled.”

The oldest among them struggled to his feet and held out an age-spotted hand. “I’m Elder Brother Laeroa. We stayed out near the Friary thinking we could pick up survivors. Obviously, we stayed too long. Our fuel was barely enough.”

“I’m surprised to see any of you,” Sebastian said. “The place was pretty well wiped out.”

Laeroa wiped his face with trembling fingers. “When we heard of the attack on Opal Hill and the estancias, we suggested to Elder Brother Jhamlees Zoe that he evacuate the Friary. He said the Hippae had no quarrel with the Brothers. I tried to tell him the Hippae needed no excuse to kill.” He tottered on his feet, and one of his fellows came forward to offer an arm. After a moment he went on in his precise voice, as though he spoke from a pulpit. “Zoe was always impatient with argument and impervious to reason. So these Brothers and I started sleeping in the aircar.”

“You were in the car when the Hippae struck?”

“We were in the car when the fires started,” said one of the younger Brothers. “We took off and went out into the grass a ways, thinking we’d pick up survivors later. I don’t know how many days we’ve been out there, but we only found one man.”

“We picked up a couple dozen of your people,” Sebastian Mechanic said to them. “Young fellahs, most of ‘em. They were wandering around pretty far out in the grass. There may be more. We been going out there every day to look. The Hippae aren’t around there anymore. They’re all around the swamp forest now.”

“They can’t get through, can they?” asked one of the men, obviously the one man the Brothers had rescued. His face was very pale and he carried what was left of one arm in a sling.

“Not so far as we know,” said Sebastian, wanting to be comforting. “And if they did, we’ve got heavy doors down in the winter quarters and people down there already making weapons for us to use.”

“Weapons,” breathed one of the Brothers. “I had hoped—“

“You’d hoped we could talk to them?” asked Elder Brother Laeroa bitterly. “Forget it Brother. I know you worked for the office of Doctrine, but forget it. I’m sure Jhamlees Zoe still retained his hope of converting the Hippae up to the moment they killed him He’s hoped for that ever since he came to Grass, no matter how many times we told him it would be like trying to convert tigers to vegetarianism.” Sebastian nodded agreement as he said, “lust be thankful the Hippae don’t have claws like Terran tigers do. Otherwise, they’d be able to climb and we couldn’t get away from ‘em. Now, you start on up the slope there. I’ll get on the tell-me and have somebody come pick you up.”

The Brothers got wearily to their feet and started up the long meadow in a shuffling line. When Sebastian and Persun had seen that all of them could walk, they went to listen outside the car while Roald messaged for help.

“On their way,” Roald said at last.

“Good,” Sebastian murmured. “Some of ‘em look like they couldn’t walk more than a hundred yards or so.”

“Thirty some-odd brothers left out of a thousand,” Persun commented, as he went to install the next device.

“One thing we can be grateful for,” the other replied. “There’s nothin’ left of the other nine hundred and some-odd to bury.” He paused beside the mechanical driver. “Have you noticed how quiet it is?”

The two men stood looking around them. “The noise of the tube driver,” Persun said. “It’s frightened everything.”

“The driver isn’t that noisy. And we haven’t been using it for the past little while.”

“The noise of that aircar, then.”

The silence persisted. The swamp forest, usually full of small croak-ings and rattles, the call of flick birds, the cry of leaf dwellers, was silent.

“Eerie,” whispered Persun. “Something wrong. I can feel it.” He started back toward the aircar, feeling in his pocket for his knife. Behind him Sebastian moaned.

A head peered sightlessly at them from the edge of the trees. Blank eyes glared in their direction. Above the eyes, flesh was torn to expose the bone, which gleamed moistly white. The head wobbled on its neck, rising into view, shoulders, arms, then the hideous Hippae maw below. A rider on a mount! A rider dead or so nearly dead as made no difference. The corpselike mouth opened to emit a screaming rattle, and with that sound the edge of the forest erupted into life. They burst into the open across a wide front, both riders and mounts screaming hate, defiance, death, and dismemberment. Persun turned back to grab Sebastian, who stood as one hypnotized.

Sebastian’s only thought, before his body was ripped apart, was that their morning’s labor had been too late.

Persun backed toward the aircar and swung the knife, a scream choked back, there had been another tunnel to the north. Teeth like razors raked his knife arm. His weapon clattered onto a rock. He clenched his jaw, readying himself for the final pain, his eyes staring into the blind dead eyes of the rider above him.

Something forced its way between him and the Hippae teeth. The aircar was hovering low beside him; Roald was shrieking at him. Hippae teeth darted toward him, then away. He threw himself backward into the open car, seeing, as he did so, that other cars hovered beside the pathetic line of green-robed Brothers, some staggering as they fled, some cut down and dead, some making it to the refuge of the cars, while all around them the Hippae howled and rampaged, their riders jerking and twitching as though they had been tied in position.

Persun tried not to look at what was left of Sebastian as they rose higher. Blood was dripping from his motionless fingers. His head was half out the aircar door. Packs of Hippae and hounds were already moving toward the town. Roald was screaming into the tell-me. Persun saw a Brother snapped in half. Others were shouting. All he could think of was that his fingers did not move. His carving fingers did not move. Beside him Roald cried out at something he saw, but Persun did not turn. His fingers did not move, and he thought it might have been better to have died.

While the Hippae in their hundreds overran the town from the north, battalions of migerers cut through the final few yards of a second tunnel on the south, one both taller and wider than the previous hole, an access route large enough to allow hosts of Hippae to move through it at a run. They came in waves, as they had come over the Arbai city long before; up from the forest toward the port, howling, ready to kill. There was no substantial opposition south of the wall. The handful of troopers at the port were inexperienced. They were taken by surprise and immediately overrun.

Even so, three or four of the quicker among them had time to arm themselves and get to upper levels of a ship maintenance gantry where the Hippae could not follow. Hippae died by the dozens in screaming disbelief, learning thereby to avoid the guns.

North of the wall the horn had been set off in response to Roald’s alarm, and all Commons had fled to the winter quarters, sheltering behind doors already reinforced against attack, though not, most people feared, sufficiently so to stand against repeated battering by Hippae. At the sound of the alarm, James Jellico locked the tall gates. He also had the presence of mind to send runners to find the troopers who had been dallying among the friendly kitchens of town. Though Jelly didn’t yet know where the threat was coming from, the dozen men with the Seraph at least had proper weapons. Possibly the Seraph could bring additional men and weapons from that ship above.

The hastily summoned Seraph chose the order station as his base and sensibly set about keeping danger at bay.

“Two men at every opening,” he ordered, sweating at the sight of Hippae rampaging among the motionless bodies at the port. “Ninety-five degrees auto-fire coverage. Helmet lights on full fan. Night goggles. Auto on anything that moves.”

“There’s a dozen saints at the port,” one of the troopers objected from a dry mouth. “They may try for the gate.”

“There’s fire from the upper levels of that structure, Cherub,” the Seraph replied bleakly, pointing it out as though the trooper were blind. “If the men there have any intelligence at all, they’ll stay where they are. They’re safer there than we are here. If you see anything moving toward the gate, kill it. Communication silence except to report those things breaking in here. I’ve got to get reinforcements down.” He knew it would take hours, even days. TheIsrafelhad not been equipped with assault craft. Who could have thought they would be needed? They had only small shuttles, which would have to come down bringing ten men at a time, setting up a fire perimeter as they did so.

“Sir,” said the Cherub again, “what about those people out in that hotel?”

“What people?” demanded James Jellico in surprise.

“The scientists that the Hierarch sent down,” the Cherub replied. “And that ambassador. Him and his wife.”

In the suite at the Port Hotel. Marjorie wakened at the first howls of the invading Hippae. Her windows faced the wrong way. She went through the room where Rigo lay in exhausted slumber to the window in the outside room. There were darting, wildly moving lights at the port. She saw Hippae lunging in and out of shadow. Without waking Rigo, she went to the door of the suite and opened it. The daytime guard had been replaced by another man.

“Trooper,” she said. “Take a quick look out the window. Some very dangerous creatures are rampaging around out there.”

He gestured her back, as though she were the dangerous one, she standing there in her crumpled clothing with no weapon at all, her hair falling untidily around her face. When he had seen, however, he looked confused, as though teetering among several desires.

“If we’re going to stay here,” she said, “we need to make ourselves as safe from those beasts as we can. We have to assume they’ll come here eventually.”

“How?” he asked. “What do you mean?”

“They can’t climb ladders,” she said. “But they aren’t stupid. They may know or be able to figure out what lifts are. We need to turn off the power to the chutes. We’re on the fourth level here. Without lifts, they probably can’t get up here.”

“Power controls are probably all the way down,” he said.

“Then we’ll have to go all the way down.”

He hesitated, starting toward the lift, then back,

“Come on, boy,” she snapped. “I’m old enough to be your mother, so I can yell at you. Decide what you’re going to do!”

He started to put his weapon down.

“Take it,” she commanded. ‘They could get into the hotel while we’re down below.”

They fell into the down chute together, Marjorie complaining bitterly under her breath at the slowness of the thing. Luxury seemed to be equated with slow chutes. The Port Hotel held itself out as luxurious. They floated past the doors like dust motes, ending up five levels below the ground with a further five levels still beneath them indicated upon the board.

“Winter quarters down there,” said Marjorie. “I’d forgotten there would be winter quarters.

“It must get really cold here, huh?” the guardsman wanted to know as he looked vaguely around himself.

“I have a feeling cold is only part of it,” Marjorie answered. “Now where?”

He pointed. The power room was opposite the chute, a heavy metal door opening into a room full of consoles and bubble meters.

“We should probably shut it all down,” said Marjorie. “All? You won’t have any water up there or anything. Besides, how’ll we get back?”

“Climb the chute,” she said succinctly. She moved down the console, reading labels. Main power control Main pump. The main pump seemed to be on a separate circuit from the power control. It might be possible to leave them with water. She folded back the barrier and thrust the power control sharply across. The room went black. “Damn,” she snarled.

A blazing light came on in her eyes. “I should’ve had it on already,” the trooper confessed, adjusting his helmet lamps. “Where do we climb back?”

“Up the chute,” she said. “Up the emergency ladder.” They went back to the chute, leaning out over a well of chill dark to seize a cold metal rung. They climbed, Marjorie first, their ascent lighted by the trooper’s lamp.

“That’s a handy gadget,” she commented between puffs as they neared the fourth level once more. “Your helmet, I mean. Does it see in the infrared?”

“Infrared,” he agreed. “Plus about six other filter combinations. It can tell living stuff from dead stuff. And it’s got a motion detector. And if you tie it to the armor arm controls, it’s got automatic fire potential.” He sounded proud of it, and Marjorie approved of his pride and confidence. He might need it. Their safety could depend on it.

“Now,” she said when they had reached the fourth level, “you might as well come inside the suite. We’ll close and lock the door behind us just in case something—anything—gets up here.” Rigo still slept. He looked drawn and worn. “He’ll be hungry when he wakes,” she said. “We don’t have any food here.”

“Emergency rations,” the boy said from behind her, tapping a long compartment down one armored thigh. “Enough for one man, ten days. Enough for the three of us for a while, at least. They don’t taste like much, but the Cherubim tell us they’re sustaining.” He gestured at the sleeping man. “Has he been sick?”

She nodded. Yes. Rigo had been sick. All the riders had been sick. “What’s your name?” she asked him. “Are you Sanctified?” He grinned proudly. “Favel Cobham, ma’am. And yes, I’m Sanctified, ma’am. The whole family. I got registered when I was born. I’m saved for eternity.”

“Lucky you,” she said, turning again to Rigo’s bed. Here in the Port Hotel she and Rigo weren’t saved for even this life if the Hippae got in. Tony was, maybe, if someone found a cure soon. And Stella. Remembering how Rillibee had looked at her, perhaps Stella was saved. If not for eternity, at least for a very small being’s lifetime, which was all one could expect.

She went back to the window, looking across the battle to the huge barns against the wall. The horses! She could see the barn where they were stabled. It was stout, true, but not impenetrable. It was connected to the building they were in by the tunnel network. Everything was connected to everything else. Could she find her way there? She fumbled in her jacket pocket, finding the trip recorder that Brother Mainoa had returned to her.

“The Seraph, he had a few men in town,” the trooper said.

“What will they do?” she wondered.

He shook his head. “The Seraph, he’s what you’d call conservative, ma’am, I’ve heard the Cherubim say that, a few times. He’ll wait until morning, then he’ll prob’ly make a sweep from the wall with all the men moving on automatic fire. By that time, he’ll have more men down from the ship.”

“There’s at least one tunnel where the Hippae came in,” Marjorie said. “It’ll have to be blown up, or flooded, or something.”

“Do the people in the town know that?” he asked. When she nodded, he said, “Then they’ll tell the Seraph and he’ll take care of it. Maybe even tonight if he can get an assault hopper down. Seraph has an assault group moves with him, wherever he goes. Assault group’s got all kinds of demolition stuff.”

“Would he have taken a group like that into town?” she asked incredulously.

“Everywhere,” he said soberly. “Everywhere he goes, even to the toilet. In case something happens while he’s gone and he has trouble getting back to his command. Like a mutiny or something.”

She shook her head, amazed. How insecure a Hierarch must feel to make a routine provision for mutiny.

“Mutiny?” asked an angry voice from the door. Rigo, stripped to his trousers, feet bare. “What’s going on?”

Marjorie stood aside from the window to let him see.

“They’ve come through,” she said. “This young man and I have turned off the power to the hotel,” she said. “They won’t be able to get up here unless there are some stairs I’m unaware of. By the same token, however, I’m afraid we’re trapped. For the time being.” She believed they might not outlive their entrapment, though she did not say so.

Rigo looked expressionlessly out the window. “Hippae,” he said unnecessarily. “How many?”

“Enough to do a great deal of damage,” Marjorie replied. “I quit counting at eighty some-odd, and there were still more arriving.”

“If you’ll wait outside,” Rigo said to the trooper, “I’d like to talk to my wife.”

“No.” she said. “He can wait here. I don’t want him out in the hall, where they might smell him or hear him. There might be another way up, and I don’t want to attract them. If you want to talk, we’ll talk in your room.” She went before him, rumpled, uncombed, and yet stately. In the room where Rigo had slept, she sat in a chair and waited while he stalked about, three paces, three paces back.

“While you were away,” he said, “I had an opportunity to discuss our situation with Father Sandoval. I think we need to talk about our future.”

She felt sorrow mixed with a faint annoyance. It was so like him to pick a time when there might not be any future to discuss their future together. He had always picked times when there was no love to talk about love; times when there was no trust to talk about trust. As though love and trust were not feelings but only symbols or tools which could be manipulated to achieve a desired result. As though the words themselves were keys to open some mechanical lock. Twist love, love happens. Twist trust, trust occurs. Twist future ...

“What about our future?” she asked expressionlessly.

“Father Sandoval agrees with me that there will be a cure,” he announced in his laying-down-the-law voice, as though his saying it made it fact. Well, Rigo’s use of that voice had almost always produced the desired result. So he had spoken to his mother, his sisters, to Eugenie and the children, to Marjorie herself. If his voice hadn’t worked, Father Sandoval’s had, setting penances, invoking the power of the church. Now Rigo was going on, telling her what would happen.

“Someone will find it. Now that we know the answer lies here, someone will find it, and it won’t take long. The cure will be disseminated. We will stay here only until then. Then we must get back to our real lives, all four of us.”

“We must what?” she asked, thinking of the monsters in the town, in the port. How could he simply ignore them? But then, how could he have ignored the fact that they were monsters before? “What must we do?”

“All four of us.” he repeated. “Including Stella.” His eyes were angry. Evidently Stella’s going to the forest had rankled. “She’ll take a lot of attention, but you needn’t give up your charities or your riding. We can hire people to care for her.”

“To care for her.”

He made a grim line with his lips. “I know she’ll require a lot of attention, Marjorie. The point I wanted to make is that it needn’t be a burden on you. I know how much your work means to you, how important you think it is. Father Sandoval has pointed out that I shouldn’t have argued with you about that in the past. It was wrong of me. You’re entitled to have your own interests ...”

She shook her head at him, slowly, disbelievingly. What was he saying? Did he think they could go back as they were before, as though nothing had happened? Would he find someone to replace Eugenie and then go on, as they had before? Would she go down to Breedertown, taking food, arranging transport? As it had been?

“Have you and Father Sandoval discussed how you will introduce Stella to your friends?” she asked. “Will you say, This is Stella, my idiot daughter. I allowed her to be mentally and sexually crippled on Grass in order to show off my manliness to people who meant nothing to me.’ Something like that?”

His face turned dark with fury. “You have no right—“

She put up a hand, forbidingly. “I have every right, Rigo. I’m her parent too. She’s not yours alone to dispose of. She belongs to me, as well, and to herself. If you want to take Stella back to Terra, I suppose you can try. Somehow, I don’t think you will easily remove her from where she is now. You would have great difficulty removing me. If you want to go back to the way things were, I can’t stop you. I won’t try. But you must not expect Stella or me to come along like dogs at your heels!”

“You’re not thinking of staying here! What would you do here? Your work is at home. Our lives are at home.”

“I would have agreed with you once. It’s not true now.”

“All those arguments you used to give me about your work at Breedertown? You’re saying that was so much fluff? Lies?”

“I thought it was important then.” Or made myself think so, she said to herself.

“And now you don’t?”

“What difference does it make what I think? I’m not even sure what I think! And despite your assumption that the plague will be ended, we may die of it yet! Or the Hippae may kill us. This is no time to discuss what we will doif,what we will do when.We have no choices right now except to try to stay alive as best we can.” She got up and went past him, laying a hand on his shoulder as she went, wanting to comfort him or herself. Now was not the time to have argued with him. If their lives were to end here, she would rather not have them end in rancor. What did it matter what he said now?

He went after her, finding her at the window with the trooper. Rigo, looking over her shoulder at scenes of fire and destruction, wondered why anyone would consider staying on Grass. The Hippae had found the scientists in the attached hospital and had dragged them out onto the weedy slope. Even when they were all dead, the Hippae rampaged among the bodies like bulls, trampling and bellowing.

Marjorie cursed in a quiet voice, tears running down her face. She had not known or remembered that there were other people in the port building. When she and the trooper had shut off the power, they could have-brought the others up to safety. The sight of the rampaging creatures made her think again of the horses. She would not leave them to face this horror alone.

The two men were frozen at the window. She turned quietly and went out without their noticing. It would be a long climb down to the winter quarters and the tunnels which connected everything, as Persun Pollut had said, like the holes in a sponge.

Most of Commons managed to get behind the stout doors of winter quarters before the Hippae arrived. Most, not all. Those who were left above ground fought their way to such safety as they could find. Though most buildings in town were low, there were upper floors for refuge, stairways that could be held at least for a time. They had no weapons to oppose the Hippae and the hounds. While a knife could cut a leg or a jaw, a hound could come up from behind and take the arm that held the knife before the man knew the beast was there. Hounds could come up stairs like great cats. Bodies and parts of bodies began to accumulate in Commons streets. In the order station the Seraph sweated and swore, wishing he had ways of communicating with the defenders of the town.

“An aircar,” James Jellico suggested. “You can fly overhead. Aircars have speakers.”

“You do it,” snapped the Seraph. “Tell them to get out of the streets onto roofs where we can pick them up. Tell them to stop dying uselessly until I can get my men down!”

So Jelly flew, and Asmir, and Alverd, and even old Roald, skimming the tops of the buildings as they bellowed at those below to get onto the rooftops.

“Climb,” they shouted. “We’ll pick you up.”

Those who heard them swore and screamed and tried to get onto roofs while beasts darted at them from every doorway, lunged up at them from seemingly empty streets, materialized out of nothing in corners of walls. Always before, the Hippae had chosen to be seen. Now, in battle, they chose not to be seen until their teeth were fastened in their prey. Like chameleons, they faded against their backgrounds, their skins mottled the colors of brick or cobbles or plaster, only their teeth and the gleam of eyes betraying them, too often too late.

Those with the arrogance to be ridden could not disguise their eldritch riders, however. The sight of a shuddering corpselike figure coming head high along a wall was enough to warn that there was a beast beneath it. Roald, peering down from the aircar at this display, wondered what arcane motives led the Hippae to this horrid mockery of a Hunt? Why did they burden themselves with these useless excrescences? When the Hippae died, their riders rolled off, some of them alive, some barely alive, some already truly dead. Roald had picked up a few that looked like they might make it. Even the most alive among them did not know why they were there. Why were they there?

“I see more dead ones,” Roald muttered to Alverd as they flew from rooftop to rooftop. “More dead Hippae.”

“I know,” Alverd marveled. “Who’s killing them? Not the troopers. They’re all tied up over at the order station.”

“Us, I guess.”

Alverd snorted. “Not likely, father-in-law. There’s another dead one, at the corner down there. All torn apart.”

“What’s killing them, if we’re not?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something. Something we can’t see. Something with teeth.”

From the lowest floor of the Port Hotel winter quarters, Marjorie worked her way through the network of tunnels toward the barn, which stood almost at the wall of Com. The trip recorder could not guide her but it would keep her from becoming irretrievably lost. The barn was not far from the place where Hippae rampaged and killed. It would be difficult to get the horses out without being seen. However, if they could reach the swamp forest they might be safe. If they were seen, she would undoubtedly be slaughtered. She felt the anger of the Hippae, against her, personally. She was the one they hated. She had spied on them, gone into their cavern, ridden against them. They would not miss the chance to bring her down.

Even so, if she could get the horses out onto the slope, some of them would make it. She could get them moving in the right direction, at least. Once they reached the forest, First would take them, protect them. Gallant horses. They deserved better than this fangy death. They deserved meadows and foals and long days of grazing under the sun.

Her feet echoed on the stone. Dim lights picked out the junctures of one tunnel with another. When the trip recorder said she had come far enough in the proper direction, she began looking for a way up. The horses would be above her somewhere. Pray the barn had not yet attracted Hippae attention. Pray the horses were not injured, or dead.

No,said someone.The horses are safe.

She stopped, stunned into frozen immobility. That voice belonged to the wilderness, to the trees, not to these dry, dark corridors. When the shock passed, she turned toward the voice as a compass needle turns toward the north, quivering.

Here,it said. Here.

She crept toward the summons, upward along slanting corridors, up twisting flights of stairs, pulled like a fish on a line.

He was in the barn with the horses, lying across the door. She saw the troubled air, the miragelike wavering, the glint of tooth or eye. The horses chewed quietly, undisturbed. When she came in, Quixote whickered at her and she leaned against the wall, trembling. So. Was He the only one to get involved, or were there other foxen as well?

Whyare you here?she asked.

I knew you would come here,He replied, in words, human words, clear as air.

She shook with the implications of that.I could not abandon my friends.she said.

I know,He said. I knew before, but my people didn’t believe in you.

She asked,Have they changed their minds’?

Yes. Because of these,He said. Because of the horses.

She saw herself on Quixote’s back, menaced from front and rear, the aircar above her offering escape, saw herself refusing to go. The picture in her mind was larger than life, freighted with enormous import. She would not leave the horses. Silly, she thought. Ithought so at the time.

Silly,He agreed, using words again.Important Important to know one would risk herself for another not like herself. Important to know humans feel loyalty. Important to know friendship can extend from race to race.

Were the Arbai your friends?

A negation. She saw Arbai involved with Hippae, working with Hippae while foxen prowled nearby and the Arbai studiously avoided seeing them. To the foxen, it seemed the Arbai preferred to teach at arm’s length rather than communicate as the foxen did; she felt the fastidious withdrawal of the Arbai, their punctilious modesty of mind, similar to her own feelings, but carried so much further! They could not see evil, but they could perceive an invasion of privacy, and they rejected it. How familiar! How horrible!

He agreed. Nonetheless, He felt pity and guilt that they had died.

They died,she said ,Now we are dying. TheHippae are up there. They’ll get into Commons and kill us.

Already in Commons. But not many are dying. Not this time.

You’re protecting us?

This time we know what is happening.

You didn’t know what was happening before?she asked. You didn’t know what was happening to the Arbai?It seemed impossible, and yet, would the foxen necessarily have known? The slaughter had been out on the prairie, away from the forest…

He said,Some hated humans because you hunted us- Some felt it was not our affair, not our concern, because you would not be our friends, no more than the Arbai. I told them Mainoa was friend. ‘They said he was only one, a freak, unlike any other. I said no, there would be others. Then there was you. They say you, too, are freak, and I say there will be others yet.We have argued over it. Finally, we have compromised.Humor Almost laughter, yet with something sad and tentative in it. We agree if you are truly my friend, I can tell you.

Me?

If you will give your word. To be friend as Mainoa was friend. To be where I am.

She heard only the condition and assented to it at once. She had already decided to stay here She would not take Stella away from here. At least the people here understood what had happened to her.

I will give my word,she said.

To be where I am?

Yes.

Even if that is not here?

Not here? Where would He be, if not here? She waited for explanation and got none. Something told her she would receive none. If she could only see His face. See His expression ...We see one another,He told her. We foxen.

She flushed. Of course they saw one another, in their intimacy. As she could have seen them if she had let go of herself and joined them. As humans stripped away their day-to-day habiliments to come to their lovers naked, so foxen stripped away concealing illusion to perceive the reality...

But she could not see Him now. If she accepted this condition, it would have to be blindly, like a ritual, like a marriage ceremony, swearing to forsake all others for this one, this enigma, with no more certainty than there had been before. Swearing to give up her central self for something else. She shivered. Oh, perilous. Take it or leave it.

How could she? This is what Rigo had wanted, too, and she had tried, over and over, but could not. Because she had not known him, had not trusted him ... Did she trust this one?

He had known where to find her. He had committed Himself and His people to saving her and her people. What else could He have done to be trustworthy? What else would she have him do?

She sighed, choking on the words, committing herself forever. “Yes. I promise.”

He showed her then why and how the Arbai had died. Why men were dying.

When she understood, she leaned against Him, her mind whirling in a disorderly ferment of ideas, things she had heard, connections she had made. He did not interrupt her. At last things began to fall into place. She only partially understood, and yet the answer was there, close, like a treasure sparkling in a flowing stream, disclosing itself.

There is something you must get for me,she said. Then I must go through these tunnels into town....

Marjorie came into the cavern where Lees Bergrem was huddled over a desk. For a time she stood in the corner, unseen, putting her thoughts together. Lees looked up, aware of being observed.

“Marjorie?” she asked. “I thought you were at the Port Hotel! I thought the Hippae had you trapped!”

“There’s at least one tunnel under the wall. I came back through it,” she said. “I had to talk to you “

“No time,” the other said, turning back to her work. “No time to talk about anything.”

“A cure,” she said. “I think I know.”

The doctor turned burning eyes. “Know? Just like that, you know?”

“Know something important,” she said. “Two important things, really. Yes. Just like that.”

“Tell me.”

“First important thing: The Hippae killed the Arbai by kicking dead bats through their transporters. We don’t have transporters, so the Hippae have been killing us by putting dead bats on our ships.”

“Dead bats!” She pursed her lips, concentrating. “The bon Damfels man said that was symbolic behavior!”

“Oh, yes. It is symbolic. The problem is that we thought of it as purely symbolic. We should have remembered that symbols are often distillations of reality—that flags were once banners flown during battle. That a crucifix was once a real device for execution. Both are symbols of something that is or was once real.”

“Real what?” Lees sat down, glaring at Marjorie. “Bats are real what?”

Marjorie rubbed her head, ruefully. “Real pains in the neck, originally. Real vermin. The Hippae kick dead ones at one another. I’ve seen them do it.”

“We know that! Sylvan bon Damfels said it meant ‘You’re nothing but vermin.’”

“Yes. Originally, it would have meant ‘You’re nothing but vermin.’ That’s what it meant when the Hippae kicked dead bats at the Arbai, too. On Terra there were once animals that threw feces at strangers. The Hippae despise strangers. They think of all other creatures either as useful tools, like the migerers or the Huntsmen, or as things to be despised and, if possible, killed. The Arbai fell into that category, so the Hippae kicked dead bats at them, and at their houses, and at their transporter. It was pure chance that a bat happened to go through the transporter to somewhere else. At this end, it was only symbolic. At the other end, it meant plague. Death.”

“The vector of infection....”

“Yes. It happened. Somewhere, wherever the transporter was set for, Arbai died. And then the foolish Arbai here on Grass told the Hippae what had happened. From that moment on, the gesture no longer meant ‘You’re vermin’ It meant ‘You’re dead.’ Once the Hippae knew they could kill by putting bats through the transporter, they kept on repeating the act. It was not symbolic, it was real.”

“Kept on—“

“Kicking dead bats through the transporter until all the Arbai were infected. It may not have taken long. Maybe only a day or a week. Whenever they weren’t observed. The Arbai were so ... so set in their thinking that they never thought to set a guard. I’m assuming the transporter must have worked like a voice-activated corn-link. Whenever the network was in use, certain sets of terminals must have come on so that a bat kicked in at one terminal would have ended up far away. On Repentance? On Shame? There are Arbai ruins both places. On a hundred worlds we’ve never seen? Wherever, however many, it worked. The Arbai died, everywhere. Hippae memorialized the event in their dances. A great victory. ‘Fun to kill strangers.’ They remembered it.

“When humans came to Grass, the Hippae would have repeated the act again, but we didn’t have transporters, we had ships. Dead bats had worked with the Arbai, so the Hippae decided to put dead bats on our ships. Our ships, however, were inside the forest where the foxen had influenced us to put our port. The foxen had believed that if the port was inside the swamp forest, it would be safe. The foxen had enjoyed having the Arbai around. Though they would have liked direct contact, being telepathic they hadn’t needed to have it. They had sought a kind of intellectual intimacy with the Arbai and been rebuffed, so they didn’t try it with us. Instead, they regarded us as we might regard some intelligent, interesting, but unaffectionate pet, and they thought we would be safe enough....

“They underestimated the Hippae. Perhaps they thought the Hippae wouldn’t remember after all those centuries, but they did remember. They had codified their memory into dancing, into patterns. When men first arrived, the Hippae set the migerers to digging a tunnel, at first only a small one, one large enough to admit one human messenger at a time. Human messengers the Hippae had wiped clean except for a certainimpetus,a certain programmed activity—“

“That’s unbelievable!”

“It’s quite believable because it was only a slight variation of their natural habit. Peepers have no such ability. Hounds have almost none. The Hippae have enough to affect the minds of those around them and bend those minds to their purposes. Think of what they do to the migerers and to the Huntsmen! When the Hippae change into foxen, the ability is multiplied a hundredfold. Hippae may not be truly intelligent- Evil and sly. yes, able to learn but incapable of true subtlety. They learned to kill by accident, but once having learned, they went on, and on. Everything they have done was merely a repetition of a pattern they already knew....”

The doctor was very still, thinking. “You said you knew two important things.”

“The other thing was about your books. I tried to read them. I’m not scientific. All I can remember is that one of them was about this nutrient, this protein building block. You said it was something we all needed. Most living cells. And you said it existed in two forms here on Grass, and only here. I got to wondering why. Why two forms here? And then I wondered, what if something here turned it around? What if something here on Grass turned around an essential nutrient? Something all our cells need and use. Something we couldn’t use in a reversed form....”

There was a long silence.

“I need a dead bat,” said Lees Bergrem.

“I brought one,” Marjorie said, reaching into her deep pocket. First had left the barn, had gone out onto the sloping lands to get it for her. She put the dried crumbling thing on Lees Bergrem’s table. Then she sat down and put her head between her trembling knees and tried to think of nothing at all.

The two women stayed in the makeshift laboratory for two days. Above them in the town, battles were fought street by street, building by building. People died, though not so many as had at first been feared. There were allies no one could see. There were fighters no one could look at. Hippae were found dead, and no one remembered killing them. Then, too, since the Hierarch was not awake to countermand the Seraph’s orders, troopers came down on the shuttle, a few at a time, to take over segments of Commons and man a slowly expanding perimeter. Demolition teams found the tunnels beneath the swamp forest and collapsed them into sodden ruin. No more Hippae came through. Those already inside hid, chameleonlike, to come screaming out of alleys, shrieking along walls. Sharing this much of the foxen invisibility, they found their way into houses and shops. Death came to Commons, death and blood and pain, but slow victory came also.

Roald Few missed death by inches, saved by something he could not describe. One of his sons died. Many of his friends were dead, or missing. A morgue was set up in the winter quarters. The first body there was Sylvan bon Damfels’ His was joined by a hundred others. In death he became what he could not manage in life, one with the Commons.

One by one the remaining Hippae were found and killed. Many were still hiding in the edges of the forest. Troopers ringed that perimeter, their heat-seeking weapons set on automatic fire. Within the trees, other beings found the Hippae, and none came out onto Commons ground again.

Toward the end of the battle, Favel Cobham climbed back down the chutes and restored power to the Port Hotel before going out to join his fellows. He had not been ordered to stop guarding the Yrariers, but neither had he been told to continue,

Rigo came out of the hotel later, when he saw the last of the troopers straggling back toward the port, and made his way toward the gate. In the port area, the men were already burying their dead and readying for departure.

“Going already?” Rigo asked a gray-haired Cherub with a wrinkled, cynical face.

“Lord and Master woke up and found out what happened to his tame scientists,” the Cherub replied. “Found out what happened to the town, too. I guess he figures he might get gobbled up by something if we stay.”

Rigo went on into Commons to ask if anyone had seen his wife. He was told to look where everyone was looking for missing kinsmen, in the morgue. He found her there, standing by Sylvan’s body.

“Rowena asked me to come and arrange burial,” she said. “She wants him to be buried out there, where Klive used to be.”

“Wouldn’t you have come anyhow?” he asked. “Didn’t you care for him? Weren’t you in love with him?” It was not what he had planned to say. He and Father Sandoval had agreed that recriminations were not appropriate. He had expected to find Marjorie’s body and grieve over it. Thwarted of grief, thwarted of good intentions, this other emotion had happened.

She chose not to answer his question. Instead, she said. “Sebastian is dead too, Rigo. Kinny lost one of her children. Persun Pollut was almost killed. His arm is terribly hurt. He may never carve again.” He was shamed into silence, and angered for being shamed. She walked toward the door, he following. “I’ve been working with Lees Bergrem,” she said, looking around to be sure she was not overheard “She thinks we’ve found a cure. She already had some of the pieces. It can’t be tested here on Grass. She’s sent word to Semling. They can manufacture the cure, get some victims together, and test it.”

“Manufacture?” he asked her, disbelieving. “Some kind of vaccine?” She nodded, coming close to him, actually hugging him, an awkward, one-armed embrace, tears on her face. “Not a vaccine at all. Oh, Rigo, I really think we’ve found the answer”

He reached for her, but she had already turned away. She would not say anything more until the people in Semling had received everything Lees Bergrem could send them. “Wait,” she said to Rigo and Roald and Kinny. “Don’t say anything to anyone until the word comes back. Don’t get people’s hopes up until we know for sure.”

Marjorie and Lees Bergrem spent the third day since their discovery fretting together, stalking back and forth through the echoing room where they had worked. On this day the Semling victims would either improve or go on dying. At noon on the fourth day the word came from Semling. Within hours of being treated, all the victims had started to mend.

“Now.” Marjorie was crying, tears flowing into the corners of her joyously curved mouth. “Now we can let everyone know.” She went to the tell-me to call Brother Mainoa. Only then did she learn he had died in the lap of a foxen, days before. Only then did she understand a part of what First had tried to tell her.

19

“Our job is over,” Marjorie said. “What we were sent to do is done.” She and Rigo and Father Sandoval were sitting at a table at Mayor Bee’s restaurant, drinking genuine Terran coffee. Around them the work of renewal went on. Renewal and burial. At the foot of the street, litter carriers went past, and Marjorie averted her eyes. She did not want to think any more about death.

“So you have said,” Father Sandoval said in the aloof voice he had used to her recently. “I’ve seen no proof of it.”

“I think I can explain it,” she offered. They had scarcely spoken during the past few days. Father Sandoval had not forgiven her for going off like that, though, since a cure had seemingly resulted, he had not said much about it. He had not forgiven Father James, either. He and Rigo had been discussing the recalcitrants, Rigo’s nephew, Rigo’s wife. Their emotions were at war with their sense of what was fitting, and she wanted to help them both. She said, “I can at least tell you what Lees Bergrem told me, what she’s telling everyone.”

Father Sandoval set his cup down and twisted it on the tabletop, leaving a wet circle there when he picked it up again. He touched the circle with a fingertip, stretching it, breaking it.

“Perhaps that would be useful,” he admitted.

She folded her hands in her lap, the way she had used to do as a child when called on to recite.

“Lees says that everything we’ve found in our universe has proven to share pretty much the same assortment of left-right molecules. She says there’s no particular reason that we know of why some molecules are twisted one way and some are twisted the other, but they are, everywhere we’ve been. Some of these substances are essential to different forms of life, and one of these is a nutrient, L-alanine. L-alanine exists everywhere we’ve ever been. Human cells, most cells, can’t get along without it.

“Here on Grass, however, a virus evolved which, as part of its process of reproduction, creates an enzyme, anisomerase,which converts L-alanine to D-alanine. L-alanine is the usual form. D-alanine is the mirror image, the isomer, and it is virtually nonexistent anywhere we know of. I’m quoting Lees exactly. She’s said it a hundred times, so I know I’ve got it right.” She stopped for a moment to drink, to watch Rigo watching her. He gestured vaguely, telling her to go on.

“After hundreds of thousands of years, the virus became widely dispersed here, in the living cells of all plants. As the plants died, the D form was released into the environment. Over time, here on Grass, the D form became as common as the L form. That’s the important fact, Rigo. Here on Grass, both D-alanine and L-alanine are floating around, ubiquitous. We can’t breathe or drink this coffee or eat anything grown here without taking in some of both—along with the virus.

“The minute we stepped off the ship from home, we were infected. The virus is in the air, in the dust, in the water. Lees says we probably had viruses in almost every cell of our bodies within minutes. The virus needs a co-factor in order to reproduce, however. A kind of activator. D-alanine is the co-factor. The viral protein binds to this co-factor, and then it converts L to D, very rapidly. However, the virus works both ways. It can also bind to L-alanine, and when it does, the viral protein converts D to L.

“Binding to D-alanine takes almost no time here on Grass because there’s so much D-alanine around. Someplace like Terra, where there are maybe only a few accidental molecules, it could take a long, long time. That’s why the plague was so slow to start elsewhere. It’s also why there isn’t any plague here on Grass. As soon as we started breathing on Grass, all our cells got supplied with D and L both.

“So, here on Grass, the virus inverts L, which we need in order to live, to D, which our bodies can’t use. However, since both D and L are plentiful, it turns both forms around simultaneously, and each of our cells finds enough L-alanine to go on living. On other planets there was little or no D-alanine to start with. When L was reversed, only D was left, and the cells couldn’t use it. When human cells died, the viruses escaped into neighboring cells in their immediately infective stage, and the process was repeated. People got sores that spread. Bandages, wash water, anything that touched the body served as a source of infection, and the dead cells provided the co-factor for newly infected cells.”

“But not here,” Rigo said stiffly.

“Not here. On Grass, both D-alanine and L-alanine are plentiful; our cells survive. The virus’s life cycle is interrupted, the cells die naturally. People come here and get infected and go away, never knowing it....”

“And it was spread by bats?” Father Sandoval asked.

“Lees says the bats don’t use alanine. It’s only one of a number of amino acids, and the bats just don’t use it. However, the blood of other animals has alanine in it. The bat doesn’t need it, so the viruses and the co-factors exist in the bat’s blood bladder. When bats die and dry, their insides are powdery with virus-rich material, as packed with viruses and with co-factors as a puffball is with spores. Dead blood-sucking bats are about as good a carrier as you could get.”

“You haven’t said what the cure is,” Father Sandoval said, finding on Rigo’s face an expression which reinforced his own mood, one of frustrated anger. One could not be angry that a cure had been found; one was, however, annoyed at the way it had been found.

“The cure?” She looked up, puzzled. “Well, of course, Father. I thought that was self-evident. All that’s needed is to spread massive quantities of D-alanine around. Small doses are no good. If somebody gets small doses of D, it will bind to the enzyme and they’ll die. But

grass •413

if they get massive amounts, more than is needed to bind, then there will be equal mixtures of L to D and D to L conversion And, of course, Semling found that it was extremely easy to make. They just used the virus to manufacture it out of L-alanine.”

Father Sandoval shook his head. “It sounds so simple the way you describe it. But the Arbai couldn’t cure it, as wise as they were?” He would not believe in their wisdom, no matter what Father James had said. Furthermore, he felt the church would disbelieve in their wisdom as well. Doctrine, as he knew it, had no room for other children of God.

“Perhaps they died faster than we did. My informant doesn’t know.

“Your informant?” Rigo said, his voice ugly. “A foxen! Horses weren’t enough for you, Marjorie?”

She frowned at him warningly, repressing her sudden anger. “Don’t, Rigo. If you are ambassador to Grass, you are ambassador to them, as well. They aren’t animals.”

“That is not for you to decide,” the priest said, echoing her anger with a sullen fury of his own. “That is a question for the church, Marjorie. Not for you. They may be intelligent and still be animals. Your relationship with them may be a serious error. I caution you!”

“You what?” she asked, incredulous. “You what?”

“I caution you. On pain of excommunication, Marjorie. Do not continue in this mindless adulation of these creatures.”

She looked at the priest, betraying nothing. His face was red, then white. His hand, resting upon the table, was clenched. Rigo looked much the same. They had been discussing her again. Talking over how she was to be controlled, no doubt. Her mind scuttered in its usual pattern of evasion, of compromise, then stopped as though it had run into a wall.

She had made a commitment.

She laughed.

“Does he speak for you, as well?” she asked Rigo.

He did not reply. His face was reply enough. He, too, flushed, livid with rage.

She rose from her chair, leaned forward. “You two ...” she said calmly, “you two can go to hell.” She turned and walked away, leaving them staring after her, their faces leaking anger until nothing was left except pallid amazement.

All Rigo could think of as he watched her back as she walked away was to wonder who she was thinking of now that Sylvan was dead.

“Father?”

They looked up to see Father James standing at their sides. Father Sandoval nodded curtly.

“I’ve come to say goodbye.” said the younger priest, with only a slight tremor.

“You recollect what I told you,” Father Sandoval said through gritted teeth.

“Yes, Father. I deeply regret you cannot see my point of view. However, I feel you’re wrong and my conscience will not allow—“

“Obedience would allow!”

The younger man shook his head and went on. “My conscience will not allow me to be swayed. I came in today to hear about the cure. Before Brother Mainoa died, he said he knew we would find it. The foxen, he said. They would help us. Mainoa was almost a hundred Terran years old, did you know? Well, why would you? A wonderful old man. He would have wanted to be here himself ...”

“You’re going back to the forest? Despite what I’ve told you?”

“I am, yes. I believe I must stay here, Father. I agree with Marjorie that it may be the most important work we have to do.”

Rigo’s nostril lifted. “What work is that? More charities? Resettling the homeless Grassians? More widows and orphans?”

Father James shook his head, giving Rigo a perceptive, tilt-headed look. “No widows or orphans, Uncle Rigo. No. The foxen are the only other intelligent race man has ever found. I’ve already sent an inquiry to Shame, to the Church in Exile. Despite what Father Sandoval says, I’m confident the Secretariat will think it important for us to find bonds of friendship with the foxen. Kinship, as it were. To find a way to share ourselves. Marjorie says that even small beings may be friends.” He laughed, shrugging. “But then you know—“

“I don’t know,” he replied angrily. “She talks very little to me.”

“Well,” theyoung man reflected, “that’s probably natural. You always talked very little to her, Uncle Rigo. She says she used to suffer from the Arbai disease.”

“Arbai disease?”

“Terminal conscientiousness,” he replied, his brow furrowed. “Scrupulousness of the kind that creates conditions making poverty and illness inevitable, then congratulates itself over feeding the poor and caring for the sick. Those are my words, not hers, and I may have it wrong....”

He nodded, then walked away as Marjorie had done, leaving the two to discuss threats and confrontations, knowing as they did so that anything they might propose was as useless as what they had already done. Neither Marjorie nor Father James would change minds in the time before the ship for Terra left, even though both of them were to know by then that what they were doing was a good deal more complicated than they had assumed.

20

In the Tree City of the Arbai, spring gave way to an endless summer, and summer to an endless fall. The season moved slowly toward winter, day succeeding day in a kind of tranquil haze. The inhabitants of the city knew they must go down to winter quarters soon, but they delayed. Two, or perhaps more, were waiting for a certain occasion; others waited for no occasion at all. Sun still spangled the tops of the trees. The wind was only occasionally chill. On most days, it was warm enough to sit beside an open window with a book, or with a letter....

“My dear Rigo,” Marjorie wrote.

You have written once more to ask that Tony and I return to Terra. Tony must answer for himself. I’ve written several times since you left, attempting to explain why I can’t return. It seems silly to use these same words over and over again when they meant nothing before. It is autumn here on Grass. That means years have gone by where you are. After all this time, I wonder why you even care.

She looked out the window of her house to see Rillibee Chime drop down onto the plaza, returning from a climb among the treetops. Other young Green Brothers were still up there. She could hear them yodeling to one another. The older Brothers, including Elder Brother Laeroa, were in their Chapter House, away among the trees. There were still Green Brothers upon Grass, and would be. Who would make grass gardens if the Brothers went away?

“All the leaves are curling or falling or withdrawing into the twigs,” Rillibee called to her. “All the little things that live up there are going down.” He stopped beside Stella, who was reading on the plaza. “Froggy things and all, burrowing down into the mud.”

Stella looked up from her book. Her face was open and childlike, yet it was not a child’s. She was a young woman once more, though a different woman than she had been. “Even the furry ones?”

“Those, too,” he replied, leaning over to kiss her while she kissed him back. From a window across the bridge two faces appeared, two mouths making kissy noises, teasing, with a kind of feral abandon. Like young dogs, tearing at something.

“You,” Rillibee called. “Get back to your lessons.”

Obediently, the two heads withdrew. “They’re doing better,” remarked Stella. “Janetta can read ten whole words, and Dimity almost never takes her clothes off anymore.”

“Your brother’s a good teacher.”

“Foxen are good teachers,” she replied. “They don’t make you learn to read or talk human or anything. Dimity and Janetta can talk foxen a little. I wish I could just talk foxen.”

“Don’t you want to be able to talk to your mother?”

Stella wrinkled her nose.

Marjorie stared at the mostly blank page on her lap-desk and sighed silently. No. Even now, Stella did not particularly want to talk to her mother, though she was much nicer about it than she had once been. Soon there would be no mother to talk to, so there was no profit in regret.

“How about talk to me?” Rillibee asked

“Yes,” Stella caroled. “Yes, I want to talk to you.”

“What do you want to do this afternoon?”

“Go say hello to Brother Mainoa. Pretty soon he’ll be all by himself, so we’d better say hello now.”

“That’s true.” Rillibee nodded, taking her hand as they set slowly off toward the bridge, stopping every step or two to exclaim at a creature or a leaf or a flower.

Marjorie returned to her letter.

Thank you for bringing us current on what has happened at Sanctity. We had already heard that the Hierarch had been overthrown in absentia and that Sanctity itself has been invaded and largely destroyed. The last time Rillibee went to Commons, he was told that Sanctity is only a shell, that the angels upon the towers raise their trumpets to an empty sky. He also learned that all those in the Israfel perished of the plague on an unsettled planet where they’d fled for refuge. They must have carried the plague with them from Grass. I remember Favel Cobham and weep for him. He was a goodhearted boy.

“Stop.” She heard Stella’s voice.

Marjorie looked out. Rillibee had stopped obediently, just short of the bridge. “Why are we stopping?” he asked her.

“I want to see the Arbai lovers. They’re coming along the bridge now.”

The two humans on the bridge and the one in the house watched the inhuman lovers bending across the rail, curling into one another; arms, entwined. “What’re their names?” Stella said in a stage whisper

“You know their names as well as I do,” Rillibee replied.

“Tell me!”

“The probably-a-boy’s name is Ssanther. The probably-a-girl’s name is Usswees.”

“Arbai names.”

“Yes. Arbai names.”

Marjorie mouthed the well-known names to herself. Experts ha> come from Semling and Shame to record the language spoken in this city and connect it to written words. According to them, the tiny projectors hidden among the trees would go on working for another century or more, throwing Arbai images into the city they had built and died in. Similar projectors had been found in the other city, buried in the ruined walls, lost under the soil, the source for the mysterious visions which had filled the ruins. Now that the specialists understood the language, Arbai artifacts were no longer so enigmatic. Scientists had even succeeded in restoring the Arbai transporters, at least from this end, though they had not been tested yet. She turned back to her writing.

Here on Grass, the foxen have determined to take charge of their lives. Several new villages have been built with solar-powered fences to keep peepers in and Hippae out. Those foxen who are still capable of doing so have begun laying eggs in these areas. The peepers that hatch from foxen eggs will be kept separately. Foxen will eat only those hatched from Hippae eggs. In time, through this purposeful predation, the malice of the Hippae may be abated.

The Green Brothers have begun gardens around these villages. Where the gardens of Opal Hill once flourished, I have stood upon a newly sprouted first surface which may one day astonish the great Snipopean. The foxen agree that beauty must not be allowed to perish, that whatever else is done, beauty must be conserved lest we impoverish our destinies. Even Klive will be reborn.

Marjorie put down her stylus and rubbed at her cramped fingers as she continued to stare out the window, remembering Klive. Remembering Opal Hill. Such glory in the grass. Even Snipopean could not have told that glory, for he had not danced with the foxen....

She came to herself with a start. She was merely filling pages, giving herself something to occupy the last few hours. Everything was done that she had to do. Her pack lay beside the door, its contents carefully selected. Who could have thought a promise would carry her so far.

Outside on the plaza, Stella tugged at Rillibee. “Come on.” she said. The two of them went along the bridge toward its island end. In the flat green meadow at its base, at the foot of a tall fruit-bearing tree, Mainoa’s grave lay, the herbage above it constantly littered with fruit and seeds and scraps of rind.

Marjorie rose, confronting one of the wall panels carved by Persun Pollut. The first one he had done with his left hand was crude, though full of harsh vitality. The later ones had gained in subtlety and ease of line. He was a great artist, Persun. Too great to stay here on Grass. Elsewhere, he could have a new right hand cloned for him. Well, soon the unwilling tether that held him on Grass would be untied. Then, perhaps he would go ...

Marjorie closed the lid of her writing desk, took it by its handle, and went after Stella and Rillibee. Around her the shadow Arbai moved and spoke. Their words had been translated. Their motives were understood. Confronted with evil, these had chosen to die, Marjorie mourned them, but could not regret them. They had been too good to do good. Someone had said that once. Rillibee, she thought. Rillibee, who loved Stella.

The two of them were sitting by Mainoa’s grave mound when she came down the hill. “And how is Brother Mainoa today?” she asked. Stella leaned forward to neaten the fragrant herbs, brushing away the litter. “He’s going to be lonesome out here by himself.”

“I don’t think so,” Marjorie said, turning slowly to take in all of the meadow: behind its protective fence, the twisted arch of the Arbai transporter, glowing with opalescent light; the blossoming reeds at the edge of the mire; the shaggy trees, towering into heights of heartbreak gold. She turned back to the young ones with a smile. “Not Brother Mainoa. He’ll be very interested in everything that happens, all winter long. And the foxen will come talk to him. They come out above ground in the winter.”

“What are you doing?” Rillibee asked her, indicating the desk she was carrying. “Writing a book?”

She shook her head ruefully, “Rigo has asked for explanations. Yet again.”

“Father James says he may be trying to accumulate evidence in order to have your marriage set aside.”

She looked thoughtful for a moment, then laughed. “I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s probable! Father Sandoval undoubtedly put him up to it. Perhaps the laws on Terra have changed and he would be allowed to father a new family. Well, in any case, this may be my last opportunity to try telling him about his former one.” She shrugged, confronting Rillibee’s look with a calm face.

“You’re still determined to—“

“It isn’t determination, Rillibee. I made a promise. I’ve always tried to keep my promises, when I could.”

“Tell Daddy Rillibee and I are going to have a baby.” said Stella. “Tell him that we’re going to name it Joshua. Or Miriam.”

Two of Rillibee’s magic names. Names he would hold sacred if all hell came against him. Now he would give the baby one of them, sending it out like a firefly into darkness. In time there would be others, lighting up nothingness with bright names, like the burning names of stars. Marjorie smiled, thinking that she would not tell Rigo that. He would not understand.

From above came a trill, a purr. Foxen. Marjorie trilled in answer. From the neighboring meadow, a horse whickered in reply.

“Did you see the new colt?” Stella asked suddenly.

Marjorie nodded. “This morning. Mother and baby doing well. All sixteen of the horses doing well, as a matter of fact. The foxen have been talking to the foals again. I keep getting these very percipient looks! Blue Star’s new baby looks exactly like Don Quixote. Mayor Bee’s terribly excited.”

“The mayor gets the colt, does he?” Rillibee asked.

“Well, I promised. A few Hippae showed up at the interdict village near Klive, and the mayor wants to lead the expedition.”

“In accordance with the plan,” he said.

“In accordance with the plan,” echoed Stella.

In accordance with the plan, thought Marjorie. She sat down and put the desk on her lap, looking at it with resignation. Father James was probably right. Rigo wanted written evidence of her dereliction, her apostacy.

“We’ll let you get back to it,” said Rillibee. “I’ll go relieve Tony. He’s been working with Dimity and Janetta. They’ll never be right, Marjorie. Everyone knows that now. I don’t know why Tony goes on....”

“He’s stubborn,” Marjorie said. “Like me. Has he said anything?” she asked, a little anxiously. “About after... ?”

Rillibee nodded, frowning. “He’s going back to Terra. He thought his father’s request over carefully, and he’s decided to return, at least for a while. Since he and Stella were the only children Rigo was allowed to have, Tony thinks going back, for a while at least, is only fair.” He took her hand and pressed it, sharing her disappointment. Then he and Stella went away from her, up the green hill.

Marjorie sighed. She had hoped Tony would stay. In the winter, he would have lived closely in Commons, acquiring age, acquiring friends. In the spring Amy bon Damfels would be coming to the Tree City with Emmy and her mother. Marjorie had envisioned Amy and Tony— Still, if he wanted to go back ... He was still very young. Perhaps he felt he needed at least one parent.

She opened the desk and started a new paragraph. If Rigo wanted proof she was crazy or ungodly or whatever, why not give it to him?

You needn’t refer to my religious duties, Rigo. I have not forgotten them....

We came to Grass together, out of duty. On Terra I had become much accustomed to duty, much concerned with propriety. Even when I knew I was doing very little good with my visitations, I persisted, out of duty. It has recently occurred to me that I was not too different from the bons. As they rode the Hippae and were enslaved, so I rode custom and was enslaved. I was a very good child and woman. I was scrupulous in my behavior. I confessed regularly and followed my confessor’s advice. I did good deeds, even feeling guilty because I sometimes broke men’s laws of discipline to do what I thought of as God’s laws of mercy. I was faithful to you because it was my duty, and I did what duty required because I thought God would be offended if I didn’t.

Here on Grass there was more duty. I found myself looking ahead to the time I could die and wouldn’t have duty anymore. Here I was, barely forty, Terran, wanting to die so I could quit going through all these motions! So, I went out into the grasses one day, courting death, but what offered itself was not really death and the horror of that made me realize what I was doing.

Duty simply was not enough. There had to be more than that!

Father James suggested that perhaps we were viruses. I know now that he meant to be funny. He thinks I lack humor. I do. Everyone says so, even Tony. Because I do, I took his words seriously. Later I came to think we might be like other things, like white cells or neurotransmitters. Warriors or message carriers. Such cells have a purpose, or at least a function in the body they inhabit. They have evolved to have that function. So we, in the body which we inhabit, may have evolved or be evolving to have similar purpose or function, though we are, I believe, only very small beings...

Up among the leaves she heard Father James’ voice raised in disputation with the foxen. Now that he was head of an official mission to the foxen, he did a lot of disputation and he always raised his voice when his logic was weak. Lately they had been discussing sins of the flesh and he had been raising his voice a lot. The foxen were not believers in sins of the flesh, and they offended the priest by quoting back at him the scripture he had once quoted to them.

Across the meadow one of Rillibee’s red and blue pet parrots called over and over to itself, “Songbird Chime. Joshua Chime. Miriam Chime. Stella . . .”

Marjorie turned back to the pages once more.

When mankind thought that his was the only intelligence and earth was his only place, it was perhaps fitting to believe that each man had individual importance. We were all there was. Like frogs, each thinking its own puddle was the center of the universe, we believed that God worried over us each of us. Strange that we should realize Pride is a sin yet still be willing prey to such arrogance.

We had only to look around us to know how foolish the idea was. Where was the farmer who knew each of his seeds by name? Where was the beekeeper who labled his bees? Where was the herdsman who distinguished among individual blades of grass? Compared to the size of creation, what were we but very small beings, as bees are small, as seeds of corn are small, as blades of grass are small?

And yet corn becomes bread; bees make honey; grass is turned into flesh, or into gardens. Very small beings are important, not individually but for what they become, if they become....

The Arbai failed because they did not become. Mankind almost failed. We squatted on Terra almost too long. We left only because we had ruined our planet and had to leave or die. Then, once we had swarmed far enough to find new homes, we let Sanctity stop us from going on. ‘Fill up the worlds,’ it said. ‘Go no farther. Take no risks.’ And we went no farther. We took no risks. We grew. We multiplied. We did not become...

A trill came from behind her. She did not need to turn to know who was there. He touched her neck as delicately as a leaf fall, a claw barely extended, the tiniest prick.

“Now?” she breathed.

He dropped her pack on the ground beside her.

She wavered. “I haven’t said goodbye to Tony, to Stella!”

Silence.

She had said goodbye. Every hour of the past season had been goodbye. Father James had given her his blessing only this morning. There was nothing left to say. He touched her once more.

“I must finish this,” she said, bending above her letter.

… We did not become. We did not change.

But change must come. Risk must come. God knows there are enough of us that we can afford some losses! Why else are we so many? And though the grass be numberless as stars, there must still be a first shoot set out to make a garden…

She had not said goodbye to Persun, Perhaps better that she not say goodbye. Considering everything....

One of the foxen and I are going on a journey. No one knows whether we will arrive anywhere or be able to return. If we do not, someone else will, eventually. There are enough of us that we may go on trying, as long as it takes.

His claw touched her again, teasingly.

She sorted through the pages, setting them in order, knowing they wouldn’t tell Rigo what he wanted to hear or even what she wanted to say. There was no time to write another letter, and what could she express otherwise? Perhaps, if things had been different along the way, Rigo would have been with her today. He had chosen to go back. She had chosen to go on. There was no blame in either choice.

She looked up at the city, seeing the wind-thrown shadows move among sun-dappled trees. The letter could be left here in the desk. Tony or Rillibee would find it and see that it was sent. She had never intended her departure to be ceremonial.

Now,He said like a trumpet. Now. There were others with Him, a great many others. Whether Marjorie had intended ceremony or not, the foxen had come to say farewell.

She wrote the last few words and signed her name, as she knew it, wondering whether Rigo would be relieved that she had gone or annoyed that she was past pursuit. What use would he make of these pages? She set the desk on Mainoa’s grave. Duty was done, but there were still promises to keep.

They were all around her. She mounted the familiar mirage and arranged herself. A hundred yards away, the Arbai transporter glowed with bubble light, nacreous glimmers, a veil of mystery within the loop. There was only one way to test it: by going through. Decorum, she told herself as they approached. One should go toward one’s destiny with decorum.

“Marjorie,” she said aloud, voicing the last words she had written so she could hear how they sounded.Hedid not know her as Marjorie. This might be the last time she heard her name.

Marjorie,

by the grace of God, grass.

Amen.