Sheri Tepper - Grass

“No, Tony. It didn’t.”

“Eugenie hasn’t the brains of a root peeper.” He said it hopelessly, waving his fingers, as though to wave Eugenie away. Neither he nor Stella could understand their father’s fondness for Eugenie. “No brains at all.”

“Unfortunately, that’s probably close to the truth.” She caught Father James’ eyes upon her and flushed. Rigo’s nephew probably had family loyalties to Rigo. She should not have criticized Rigo before him. She should not do it before Tony, either, except that Tony already knew… so much.

“I wondered what could be important enough to get you to come.”

Tony said, shaking his head. “Leaving your work at Breedertown that way. But surely they can’t be depending only on us. What is Sanctity doing?”

“According to Rigo, everything they can. They can’t get any animal, including man, to create an antibody to the virus. They can kill the virus, but not in a living creature. Eventually, if we find there is no plague here, we will ship some tissue samples from here back to Sanctity.”

“Tissue samples? Will the bons let you do that?”

“They have no physicians among themselves, Tony. If they are injured, they must call upon doctors from Commons. I think we can buy whatever samples will be needed.”

“But so far, Sanctity has found nothing.”

“Nothing. No tissue they have tested makes antibodies to the virus.”

The four of them were huddled together like conspirators. “Tony, you mustn’t—”

“Mustn’t tell Stella. I know. She would blurt it out, just to prove we can’t tell her what to do.”

Father Sandoval nodded in agreement. “I think that’s probably true.” He had known Stella since she was a child. She confessed a fair number of sins — usually, with maximum drama, not the ones she was most guilty of. Anger, mostly. Anger at Marjorie for not having provided that indefinable something Stella had always wanted. After long thought and meditation, Father Sandoval had decided it was perhaps the same thing Rigo wanted — the thing called intimacy. Though neither of them would set themselves aside long enough to work for it. They wanted family, but they wanted it on command, like water from a spout, ready when they turned it on, absent otherwise. “Help me now, give me now, comfort me now. Then, when you’ve done it, get out of my way!”

Father Sandoval sighed again, wishing his years had given him better insight into Stella, and into her father, Stella, of course, would eventually marry and could then be instructed to be obedient to her husband as she was now instructed to be obedient to her parents. But what could one do with Rigo? Both he and Stella were too impatient to woo. They would storm or nothing. Overwhelm, or nothing. They would not beg. They would take by right. Even things they should not take at all.

Unaware of Father Sandoval’s concern, Stella, meantime, was upon the simulacrum in the sixth hour of her current ride: eyes glazed, back braced, beyond hunger or thirst in a trance of her own evoking.

Her father had finished his own session on the machine hours ago. Hector Paine was gone. No one else would come into the winter quarters. She had set the timing mechanism for seven hours, two hours longer than she had ever ridden before, and had vaulted aboard. There was no way to stop the machine once she had started, no way to get off the mount save by falling.

On the screens around her the grasses whipped past. Devices at her side mimicked the blows of the blades, striking her hat, her coat. The machine rocked and twisted, always slightly off rhythm so that she could not relax. The body stayed alert, but the brain eventually gave up thinking and retreated into some never-never land beyond exhaustion. Stella was there now, dreaming of Sylvan bon Damfels. During the reception at Opal Hill, she had watched him as he danced with Marjorie, watched, devoured, swallowed him whole. When she had danced with him, she had absorbed him through her skin, taken his image into herself so that he dwelt there, a paradigm of the real and genuine man. And since that time she had undressed him and possessed him and done with him all those things she had not yet done with others, not through any sense of morality but because she had not yet found one she thought worthy of herself. Now she had. Sylvan was worthy. Sylvan was noble. Sylvan was one to whom she might be mated. No! The one to whom she would be mated. In just a little time. In the time it would take for her to ride, as he rode, so that she might ride by his side.

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 trial. “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!