Grass

face, hot with embarrassment as she realized He did not need to see her face. She fumbled with her clothes, thinking she needed to dress herself, realizing only then that she was dressed, that the nakedness lay within. Her mind. Changed. Something that had covered it stripped away.

After a few moments, He came back, offering His shoulders again. She mounted and He carried her, discreetly, neatly, an egg in a basket, while the dance faded into memory. Something marvelous and awful. Something not quite completed.

Maenads, she thought. Dancing with the god.

He was talking to her. Explaining. He said names, but she saw only a few females, obviously not as many as the males. Only a few of them capable of reproduction. Many of them deciding not to bother. Grieving over that. Now only melancholy. Dark brown-gray distress.

Hopelessness. The future opening like a sterile flower, its center empty. No seed.

How did the foxen know flowers? There were no flowers here on Grass. Yours, He said. Your mind. Everything there. I took it all… A time of wonder. So he knew her. Really knew her. We are guilty, He said. All should die, perhaps, He suggested. Expiation. Sin. Not original sin, maybe, but sin, nonetheless. The sound of the word in her ears. The sound of the word wickedness. Collective guilt. (A picture came into her mind of Father Sandoval, talking. Evidently Father Sandoval had thought of that diagnosis.) The foxen had let it happen. Not they, but others like them, long ago. She saw the pictures, foxen elsewhere while Hippae slaughtered the Arbai. Screams, blood; then, elsewhere, disbelief. Clearly. As though it had been yesterday. They were guilty, all the foxen.

Postcoital depression? Part of her mind giggled hysterically and was admonished by some other part. No. Real sadness.

It wasn’t your fault, she said. Not your fault.

She felt cold from the images. So much death. So much pain. Why would she say that?

Because it’s true, she thought. Damned sure. Not your fault.

But suppose some of us did it. When we were Hippae. Some of us.

Not your fault, she insisted. When you were Hippae, you didn’t know. Hippae have no morals. Hippae have no sense of sin. Like a child, playing with matches, burning down the house.

More pictures. Time past. Hippae were better behaved long ago. Past memory. Before the mutation. Didn’t kill things then. Not when foxen laid the eggs. A picture of a foxen bowed down with grief, head bent between the front paws, back arched in woe. Penitence.

Her fingers were busy with her hair, trying to braid it up. She thought, Then you must go back. Make things the way they used to be. Some of you can still reproduce.

So few. So very few.

Never mind how few. Don’t waste your time on penitence or guilt. Solving the problem is better! It was true. She knew it was true. She should have known it was true years ago, back in Breedertown. Lack of understanding.

She thought the kneeling figure, the foxen crouched in woe while Hippae pranced and bellowed. She crossed it out, negated it. She thought a standing figure, claws like sabers, a foxen rampant, laying eggs. Better. Much better.

This militancy fell as though into an umplumbable well, a vacancy. They had gone beyond that. They had decided they should no longer care about things of the world. They felt responsible without wanting to be responsive.

She cried, not knowing whether He had not heard her or whether she had merely been ignored as of no consequence. Changed as she was, she knew she should make Him hear, but there were others around and His thoughts were diluted and disarranged.

The night had gone on without their notice. Ahead and above hung glowing globes of Arbai light which they climbed toward. She heard the contented whicker of horses, grazing on their island below. She was very tired, so tired she could scarcely hold on. He knelt and rolled her off and went away.

“Marjorie?” She was looking up at Father James’ concerned face. “Is Stella—”

“Alive,” she said, licking her lips. Saying words felt strange, as though she were using certain organs for inappropriate ends. “She knows her name. I think she recognized us. I sent the others to take her to Commons.”

“The foxen took them?”

She nodded. “Some of them. Then the others went away, all but… all but Him.”

“First?”

She couldn’t call Him that. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I have committed adultery. Bestiality? No. Not a man, not a beast. What? I am in love with — Am I in love with… ?

He said, “You’ve been a very long time. The night’s half gone.”

She blurted desperately, trying not to talk about what most concerned her, “I thought all that business about sin was just Brother Mainoa being a little contentious. It wasn’t. The foxen are obsessed with it. They either have considered or are considering racial suicide out of penitence.” Though it was not suicide merely to stand still, doing nothing. Or was it?

He nodded, helping her up and guiding her into the house she had selected, where she half sat, half fell onto her bedding. “You’ve picked that up, have you? Mainoa says so, too. There’s no doubt the Hippae killed the Arbai. There’s little doubt the Hippae are killing mankind. I don’t know how. The foxen don’t tell us how. It’s something they’re withholding. As though they’re not sure whether we’re worthy…

“It’s like playing charades. Or decoding a rebus. They show us pictures. They feel emotions. Once in a while, they actually show us a word. And difficult though it is with us, seemingly they communicate with us better than they do with the Hippae. They and the Hippae transmit or receive on different wavelengths or something “

It was no longer charades or rebuses to Marjorie. It was almost language. It could have been language if only she had gone on, entered in, if she had not drawn back there, at the final instant. How could she tell Father that? She could tell Mainoa, maybe. No one else. Tomorrow, maybe. “I think you’re right, Father. Since the mutation they have not communicated with the Hippae, though I get a sense that in former ages, when the foxen laid the eggs, they exercised a lot of guidance toward their young.”

“How long ago?” he wondered.

“Long. Before the Arbai. How long was that? Centuries. Millennia?”

“Too long for them to be able to remember, and yet they do.”

“What would you call it, Father? Empathetic memory? Racial memory? Telepathic memory?” She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling the braid into looseness. “God, I’m so tired.”

“Sleep. Are the others coming back?”

“When they can. Tomorrow, perhaps. There are answers here, if only we can lay our hands upon them. Tomorrow — tomorrow we have to make sense of all this.”

He nodded, as weary as she. “Tomorrow we will, Marjorie. We will.”

He had no idea what she had to make sense of. He had no conception of what she had almost done. Or actually had done. How much was enough to have done whatever it was? Was she still chaste? Or was she something else that she had no word for?

She could not tell anyone tomorrow, she knew. Maybe not ever.

Very early in the morning, while the sun hung barely below the horizon, Tony and his fellow travelers were deposited just below the port at the edge of the swamp forest. The foxen vanished into the trees, leaving their riders trying to remember what they had looked like, felt like. “Will you wait for us?” Tony called, trying to make a picture of the foxen waiting, high in a tree, dozing perhaps.

He bent in sudden pain. The picture was of foxen standing where they stood now while the sun moved slowly overhead. Rillibee was holding his head with one hand, eyes tight shut, as he clung to Stella with the other arm.

“You’ll wait here for us,” Tony gasped toward the forest, receiving a mental nod in reply.

“Tony, what is it?” Sylvan asked.