She ignored what he had said to Marjorie about riding, ignored his advice to the Yrariers. It did not fit her picture of him, so she struck it from his image as she built him anew, according to her own needs—the gospel of St. Sylvan, according to Stella, his creator.
The machine galloped on, its springs and levers walloping and sliding, the sound of hooves thundering softly from its speakers, the pictured stems of grass fleeing everlastingly on either side, the blades lashing at her with softly sounded strokes.
In some remote part of her mind she told Elaine Brouer all about Sylvan, about their meeting, the way their eyes had met. “He loved me in that moment. In that very moment, he loved me as he had never loved anyone before.”
Sylvan was saying much the same thing to himself as he walked a winding path deep in the famed grass gardens of Klive. “I loved her in that moment. I loved her the moment I saw her. The moment I took her into my arms. As I have never loved before.”
He was not speaking of Stella. He was speaking of Marjorie.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” Marjorie was kneeling in the confessional at the side of the chapel, the evening light falling upon her face. The chapel was dusk dim, the light near the altar making a watchful eye in the shadow. “I have resented my daughter. And my husband….”
She was alone in the chapel except for Father James. Rigo was closeted in the winter quarters with Hector Paine. Stella and Tony and Father Sandoval had ridden the mares down to the village to visit Sebastian Mechanic and his wife, Dulia, who was, said Sebastian, the best cook on any six planets. Since the reception, Eugenie had scarcely put her nose outside her house and was there now. As Marjorie had come through the gardens to the chapel she had heard Eugenie singing, a slightly drunken lament with no particular burden of woe. The blues, Marjorie recalled having read somewhere, needed no proximate motivation. Any common grief would do. The ancient song, though not particularly melodic, had entered Marjorie’s ear and now turned there, playing itself over persistently, hating to see the evening sun go down.
“I have lost patience with Stella,” she said. Father James needed no explanation for this. He knew them all far too well to need explanation. “I have had angry words with Rigo….” Words about the Hunt, words about his risking his neck and more than his neck. “I have doubted God….”
Father James woke up at this. “How have you doubted?”
If God were good, Rigo and I would be in love, and Rigo would not treat me as he does, she thought. If God were good, Father Sandoval would not treat me as a mere adjunct to my husband, sentencing me to obedience every time I am unhappy. I haven’t done anything wrong, but I’m the one who is being punished and it isn’t fair. She longed for justice. She bit her lip and said none of this, but instead dragged false scent across the trail. “If God is truly powerful, he would not let this plague go on.”
There was silence in the confessional, silence lasting long enough for Marjorie to wonder whether Father James might not really have fallen asleep. Not that she blamed him. Their sins were all boring enough, repetitive enough. They had enough capital sins roiling around to condemn them all. Pride, that was Rigo’s bent. Sloth, Eugenie’s trademark. Envy, that was for Stella. And she, Marjorie, boiling with uncharitable anger toward them all. Herself, who had always tried so hard not to be guilty of anything!
“Marjorie.” Father James recalled her to herself. “I cut my hand upon a grass blade a few days ago, a bad cut. It hurt a great deal. Grass cuts do not seem to heal easily, either.”
“That’s true,” she murmured, familiar with the experience but wondering what he was getting at.
“It came to me suddenly as I was standing there bleeding all over the ground that I could see the cut there between my fingers but I could not heal it. I could observe it, but I couldn’t do anything about it even though I greatly desired to do so. I could not command the cells at the edges of the wound to close. I was not, am not privy to their operations. I am too gross to enter my own cells and observe their function. Nor can you do so, nor any of us.
“But suppose, just suppose, that you could create … oh, a virus that sees and reproduces and thinks! Suppose you could send it into your body, commanding it to multiply and find whatever disease or evil there may be and destroy it. Suppose you could send these creatures to the site of the wound with an order to stitch it up and repair it. You would not be able to see them with your naked eye. You would be unable to know how many of them there were in the fight. You would not know where each one of them was or what it was doing, what agonies of effort each was expending or whether some gave up the battle out of fatigue or despair. All you would know is that you had created a tribe of warriors and sent it into battle. Until you healed or died, you would not know whether that battle was won.”
“I don’t understand, Father.”
“I wonder sometimes if this is what God has done with us.”
Marjorie groped for his meaning. “Wouldn’t that limit God’s omnipotence?”
“Perhaps not. It might be an expression of that omnipotence. In the microcosm, perhaps
