Father James had been thinking of that, too. His mind dwelt all too frequently on certain monstrousnesses he had heard of in the confessional, on certain perversions and horrors he had read of that he could never have imagined for himself. Why these memories were associated in his mind with the Hippae he did not know, but they were. He set the evil thoughts aside. “We will find her, Marjorie. Trust Brother Mainoa.”
She desisted, willing herself to trust Brother Mainoa, since there was no one else to trust.
They ate cold rations. They washed themselves in a placid pond, one of those which encircled the island. Marjorie and Tony examined the horses, looking closely at their hooves, their legs. Despite the wild run of yesterday, the animals seemed to be uninjured. Though she did her best to remain calm, Marjorie felt herself ready to explode from impatience before they heard the call from above.
Rillibee swarmed down a great vine-draped tree like an ape. “I got turned around,” he said. “The trees look different in the light, and it took me a while to find my way back.”
“Did you find them?” she asked. “The voices?”
“I found their city,” Rillibee answered. “You have to come see it.”
“We have to go the other way' — she pointed — “to find the trail…”
“Up,” he insisted. “I think we should.”
“Up,” agreed Brother Mainoa. “If we can.”
“One of the things that took me so long was finding a trail the horses can follow,” Rillibee said. “That way.” He pointed deeper into the swamp. “Then we’ll climb.”
“Why?” Marjorie cried. “Stella isn’t in there…”
“The trail is out there among the grasses, Marjorie,” Brother Mainoa said. “But that’s not necessarily the way. While you were still asleep, Tony and I went to the edge of the forest. The Hippae are still there. There is no way we can go out that way just now.”
“But why?” she gestured upward, fighting tears. “I don’t want to go sightseeing, for the love of God.”
“Perhaps it is for the love of God we should go,” Father James said. “Do you know what’s up there, Brother Mainoa?”
“I suspect.” he replied. “I suspect what is up there. I have suspected since the report came from Semling.”
“What is it?”
“I think it is the last Arbai city,” he said. “The very last.”
He would tell them nothing more. He said he didn’t know. When they asked Rillibee, he said only that they would see for themselves. He led them as they rode across shallow pools, down aisles of trees. Sometimes he stopped and simply looked at the trees while they waited. Once he dismounted and put his hands on a tree, leaning against it as though it had been a friend. Sylvan started to say something during one of these pauses, but Brother Mainoa laid a hand on his shoulder to silence him. They crossed small islands, coming at last to a very large one with a hill at its center.
On a flat pedestal of stone stood a twisted monument much like that in the plaza of the Arbai city.
“Arbai?” Marjorie whispered, staring at it, unbelieving. Despite what Brother Mainoa had said, she had not let herself believe him.
Rillibee pointed upward along a flank of the hill where a trail wound toward a precipitous cliff edge.
“That’s how I came down,” he said. “Leave the horses. They’ll be all right here.”
They dismounted, trying to do it quietly so they would not interrupt the voices above them. People were talking. Singing. Telling stories to the accompaniment of muted laughter. Rillibee led them up the trail. At the cliff edge a bridge led between fantastically carved posts across a gulf of air into the trees — a bridge made of grass and vines and splits of wood, intricate and closely woven as an ornamental basket. The railings were laced into designs of leaves and fruit. The floor was plaited in swirls of color, solid as pavement. Two hundred feet in the air they walked behind Rillibee into the shadow of the trees.
There were dwellings — gazebos and cupolas, tented roofs and conical spires, woven walls and latticed windows — hung like fruit in the branches of the trees, opening upon wicker-work alleys and suspended lattice streets. Aloft were sun-dappled pergolas, shaded kiosks, intricate cages, all joined to those below by spider stairs. Lacework houses hung in the high branches like oriole’s nests.
There were inhabitants calling from windows, talking from rooms above and below, conversing as they moved along the roadways, their voices growing louder as they came near, dwindling away as they passed Shadowy forms met along the railings. A group leapt from a doorway into the play of light from the applauding leaves. They were graceful, only slightly reptilian. Their eyes lit with laughter, their hands extended to one another as though to say, “Welcome.”
But there was no one there. No one at all.
A pair of lovers leaned on the railing of the bridge, arms entwined. Rillibee walked through them, his face spattered with their faces, his body with their bodies, and they reassembled behind him, still staring into one another’s glowing eyes.
“Ghosts,” breathed Tony. “Mother…”
“No,” she said, tears on her cheeks at the sight of the lovers. “Holos, Tony. They left them here. The projectors must be somewhere in the trees.”
“They gave them to one another,” Mainoa said. “Toward the end. When there were fewer and fewer of them. To keep the last survivors company.”
“How do you know?”
“I was told,” he said, “just now. And it fits in with other things I have learned since we had lunch together that day at Opal Hill.”
“The language…” Marjorie turned to him, eyes wide.
“The language, yes.”
“I was so eager to get away, to find Stella, I never thought to ask—”
“The great machines at Semling have chewed on the problem, chewed and swallowed and spat it out again. The machines can translate the books of the Arbai. Some. Oh, half, let us say. Half they can read. The other half they can guess at. The clue was there in the vines on the doors. Where we had never thought to look.”
“And the carved doors themselves?”
“They can read those as well.”
“What do they say?”
Brother Mainoa shook his head, trying to laugh, the laugh becoming a cough which bent him double. ‘They say the Arbai died as they lived, true to their philosophy.”
“Here?”
“There on the plain they died quickly. Here in the trees they died slowly. Their philosophy prevented their killing any intelligent thing. In their city on the plain, the Hippae had slaughtered their kinfolk. Those who lived in this summer city among the trees could not go back to live there safely. They did not wish to die. So they lived out one last summer here, and when winter came they slowly died here, knowing that in all the universe they were the last of their people.”
“How long ago?”
“Centuries. Grassian centuries.”
She looked around her at the woven buildings and shook her head.
“Not possible. These structures would not last. The trees would grow; eventually they would die and fall. These woven roadways would rot away.”
“Not if they were renewed, hour by hour, day by day. Not if they were mended.”
“By whom?”
“Yes, Marjorie, by whom? We all wonder, don’t we. Yes. I think we will meet them very soon.”
Rillibee led them along the woven streets. Before them the way widened, expanding into a broad platform with rococo railings and spiraled pillars supporting a wide witch’s hat of a roof.
The town square, Marjorie thought. The village green. The meeting hall, open to the air, to the wind and the sound of birds. All around it shadowy figures walked and danced and saluted one another, shadows so thickly cast that for a moment the humans thought the mighty figure padding toward them from across the platform was another shadow. When they saw that it was not, they drew together, Tony reaching for the knife he carried.
“No,” said Brother Mainoa, putting his hand on the boy’s arm. “No.” He walked forward to see what he had so
