“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 hapen.
“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 do if, 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
