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.”
“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 could build bombs, 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
