Sheri Tepper - Grass

Thus, when Ducky Johns stopped early one morning at the Order Station with a beautiful girl in tow, the officer thought no more of it than that some off-worlder had escaped from the Port Hotel and fallen into questionable company. Not that Ducky Johns was a bad sort. She and Saint Teresa were the madams of the two largest sensee houses in Portside, and they often traveled into Commons with their housekeepers and cooks. Ducky was usually at the top of the list of contributors to any charitable cause, if Saint Teresa didn’t have his name there first. Ducky’s machines were well maintained and seldom damaged anyone other than superficially, and none of her girls or boys or genetically altered whatsits had ever tried to kill any of the customers.

“What’s this, Ducky?” the officer, James Jellico, asked. He was a husky and muscular man of middle years, covered with the misleading layer of plushy flesh which had earned him his nickname. “Tell good old Jelly what you’ve got there.”

“Damned if I know,” replied Ducky, sketching helplessness with both shoulders, the flounces on her tent-dress quivering in response to the mountain of shivering flesh beneath. “I found it on my back porch, under the clothesline.” Her flutelike voice made it a plaint, minor key. Her spangled eyebrows arched and the fringes of her tattooed eyelids drooped across her cheeks.

“You should’ve taken it back to the hotel,” Jelly said, giving the girl a hard look, which she returned with a wide, innocent eye.

“I tried,” Ducky said, sighing and pursing baby-lips, waving a baby-hand, the wrist braceleted with gems between tiny rolls of fat. “I’m not a fool, Jelly. I thought the same as you. Off a passenger ship, I thought, waiting around for another one. Wandered out of the Commercial District and got lost, I thought, just as you did. I asked it its name, but it didn’t have a thing to say for itself.”

“Mental, you think? Drugged up?”

“No sign of it.”

“Maybe it’s one of those, what you call ’em, de-personed things they sell on Vicious.”

“I looked and it isn’t. It’s been used some, but it hasn’t been tampered with, not the way they do there.”

“So what did the hotel say?”

“The hotel picky-pecked at its little keyboards and winky-winked at its little screens and told me to take it away. Not theirs, they said. They didn’t have any like this one, and if they did have, all theirs were accounted for.”

“I be damned.”

“Yes. Exactly what I said. Couldn’t be a Commons townee, could it?”

“You know every one of ’em as well as I do, Ducky. You know every face and every figure and if any of ’em puts on five pounds or insults his sister-in-law, you’d know and so would I.”

“Well, we both know what that leaves, Jelly That leaves the estancias, that does. Lots of unfamiliar faces out there. But that’s very puzzling indeed, isn’t it, my dear? If it had come from there, we’d have seen it.”

Aircars going between Commoner Town and the estancias were permitted to land only at the car terminal at the center of town or at the port. Any aircar landing at the port or in town would be observed. If this lovely creature with the strange eyes had turned up either place, surely somebody would have seen it.

“Off a ship?” hazarded Jellico.

“You know the silly regulations as well as I do, Jelly, dear. Passengers and crew off, fumigate at every port. How could this have lived on a ship while it was being debugged? No, it didn’t come off an empty ship. And it didn’t come from the hotel. And it doesn’t belong to me or to Saint Teresa or to any of the other bitty bit-players down in our place, no it doesn’t. I’m afraid it’s your problem, Jelly. Yours alone.” Ducky Johns giggled, the ruffles on the tent-dress quivering, a fleshquake in paroxysm.

Jellico shook his head. “Not mine, Ducky, old girl. I’ll get an image of her, then you take her back. You’ve got plenty of room in that place of yours. Put it in an empty room and feed it something. The stasis-tank is no place for that. Doesn’t need freezing. Needs tending. Better with you.”

“How trusting,” she simpered.

“Oh, you won’t sell her, Ducky. If she can’t talk, she can’t speak a consent waiver, and you know I’ll be comin’ down to look her over again next time I’m in Portside to check transience permits. And after I’ve had a chance to ask around. If this isn’t the damnedest thing…”

He went on looking at the girl as he set up the imager, she returning his gaze with her head turned sideways so that he saw only one eye, an eye in which no intelligence showed at all. And yet, when he had finished recording the creature’s image and Ducky held out her hand, the girl took it and smiled, turning the head upward and to one side again to cast a sidelong look.

Jelly shivered. There had been something strangely familiar about that look. Almost as strange as where the girl could have come from. Not through the swamp, that was certain. Not in an aircar. Not on a ship. Not from the hotel. And what did that leave?

“Damn all,” whispered Jelly to himself, watching old Ducky loading the girl back into her three-wheeled runner before turning it back toward Portside. “Damn all.”

The morning after the bon Damfels’ Hunt, Marjorie was up before light. She had slept little, and that little restlessly. When she slept she had dreamed of Hippae, and her dreams had been threatening. She had risen in the night to walk about the winter quarters, going into the children’s rooms, listening to them breathe. Anthony had been making little groaning sounds and shivering in his sleep, almost as El Dia Octavo had done that day she had seen the things on the ridge. Marjorie sat on the edge of his bed and ran her hands over his shoulders and chest, stroking him as she would have one of the horses, pulling the anxiety out of him until he lay motionless beneath her fingers. Dear Tony, little Tony, firstborn and much beloved. So like her that she could read every flicker of his expression, every line of his body. She yearned over him, wishing the disappointments away. They would come anyway. He was so like her that they must come, as day follows night.

In the neighboring room Stella slept soundly, rosy in the dim light, lips slightly parted. Each day made her resemblance to Rigo more pronounced — his passion, his pride, and a stunningly feminine version of his handsome face. Marjorie stood over her, not touching her. If Stella were touched she would come awake, full of questions, full of demands — questions Marjorie couldn’t answer, demands she couldn’t meet. Like Rigo, Marjorie thought to herself, just like Rigo. And like Rigo, Stella demanded that the world understand her even while she overwhelmed any effort to be understood.

“I tried to know Rigo,” Marjorie whispered to herself, an old litany, almost an apology, an excuse, something she said to herself again and again. Something she used to say to Father Sandoval before he had tried to mend what seemingly could not be mended by giving her penance after penance of obedience and submission until she had felt so trapped between them, she could not ask for forgiveness anymore. What she had told Father Sandoval was true, so far as it went. When she and Rigo had been newly married she had sometimes waited until Rigo was very tired or even asleep and then curled against him, pressed herself tight, wanting to feel him in his skin, feel all the muscles running there softly, getting to know the body of him as she did his face. He always responded, fiercely, passionately, hammering at her, until she was lost. There was no separate place she could stand to feel what he was like. If she stood apart from him, he accused her of being remote. If she came close, he swallowed her up.