Sheri Tepper - Grass

“You’ve got him sedated,” Tony commented.

“Machine sleep. He’s too nervous a type to leave conscious for long. He frets.”

That was one way of saying it, Tony thought with an ironic twist to his lips. Roderigo Yrarier frets. Or fumes. Or roars.

The doctor went on, “Your sister, now, that’s something else. Mind reconstruction, I wouldn’t doubt the Hippae have been at her.”

“You know about that!”

“Seen a bit of it when the bons come in with broken bones or bitten-off appendages. They don’t respond normally, so I tell them I’m testing their reflexes when I’m actually looking at their heads. Strangeness there, usually, though I’m not allowed to do anything about it. Not with the bons. They choose to keep their warps and twists, however strange it makes them.”

“We don’t want Stella twisted!”

“Didn’t think you did. Didn’t think so for a moment. May not be able to straighten her totally, though. There’s limits to what we can do.”

“Should we ship her out?”

“Well, young man, at the moment I’d say she’s safer here, warped or not, than she may be out there. You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?” He stared, unwilling to understand.

“Plague,” she said. “We’re getting a pretty good idea of what’s going on out there.”

“Do you know anything about it? What causes it? Do you know if there’s any here?”

“None here. That I can be almost sure of. Why didn’t you ask us medical people? Didn’t you think we’d be capable of doing anything? Me, for instance. I’ve got degrees in molecu-bio and virology from the University at Semling Prime. I studied immunology on Repentance. I could have been working on this.” She turned an open, curious face toward him. “The word is you’ve been trying to find out in secret.”

“It was secret,” he whispered. “To keep the Moldies from knowing. If they knew…”

She considered this, her face turning slowly white as she realized what he meant. “They’d bring it here? Purposely?”

“If they found out, yes. If they once knew.”

“My God, boy!” She laughed bitterly. “Everybody knows.”

Everyone knew, the doctor said, and it seemed she told only the truth. Everyone knew there was plague. Everyone knew there might be Moldies already on Grass. Everyone knew there was a trail half a mile wide out there in the grasses, ending next to the swamp forest, which all at once seemed a fragile and penetrable curtain rather than the impassable barrier they had always relied upon. Hysteria mounted as the talk gathered both volume and speculative intensity, here and there, about the town.

Among other topics was much discussion of whether Grass’s seeming immunity to plague meant anything. Foremost among those who thought it did was Dr. Bergrem She had seen one or two people arrive on ships with filthy gray lesions. After a week or two on Grass, they had departed cured. Once there had even been a man in a quarantine pod…

Roald Few challenged the doctor to explain herself. “You mean more than that the disease isn’t here, doctor. You mean it can’t come here. Something here prevents it?”

To which she nodded and said she thought so, in her experience, from what she’d seen, turning to Tony and Rillibee for their opinion.

“No, that isn’t it,” Tony told them wearily. “It isn’t that it can’t come here. It isn’t that no one gets it here. The disease started from here. Somehow. The foxen think.”

This was a statement requiring more than a little explanation. Since when had the foxen been talking to people? And where were these foxen? Tony and Rillibee told what they knew to Roald and Mayor Alverd Bee while dozens of other people came and went. They tried to describe foxen, unconvincingly, and were greeted with skepticism, if not outright disbelief.

Ducky Johns and Saint Teresa were there with an outlandish scenario of their own: Diamante bon Damfels, sneaking around naked in the port. Diamante bon Damfels now occupying a room in the hospital next to ones already taken by her sister, Emeraude, who had been beaten, and by Amy and Rowena, who refused to return to Klive. Sylvan, hearing this, went off to see his mother and sisters. Commoners looked after him, pityingly. A bon, here in Commons. Useless as a third leg on a goose.

“How did Diamante get here?” Tony demanded of the assembled group. “We’ve just come through the swamp forest, and if it’s the same everywhere as the parts we saw, there is literally no way through! There are some islands near the far edge, and some near this edge, too, but in the middle it’s deep water and tangles of low branches and vines everywhere you look, like an overgrown maze. If she wasn’t a climber, like Rillibee here, or if the foxen didn’t bring her, then how did she get here?”

“We’ve been asking ourselves that, sweet boy,” said Ducky Johns. “Over and over. Haven’t we, Teresa? And the only answer is there has to be another way in. One we haven’t known about until now.” Ducky’s usual girlish flirtatiousness was held in abeyance by her anxiety.

“One we still don’t know about,” Teresa amended.

“Oh, yes we do, dear,” Ducky contradicted. “We know it’s there. We just don’t know exactly where. Unless these strange foxen creatures did bring her, which they may have done, for all we know!”

Rillibee heard all this through a curtain of exhaustion. He said, “I don’t think the foxen brought her. Brother Mainoa would have known.”

“Do I know this Brother Mainoa you keep speaking of?” asked Alverd Bee.

Rillibee reminded him who Brother Mainoa was.

Sylvan joined them again, his face white and drawn. Dimity was conscious, but did not know him. Emmy was unconscious, though she was getting better. Rowena was sleeping. Amy had talked with him. She had told him his father was dead, and he was wondering why he felt nothing.

Rillibee was telling the mayor about Mainoa’s attempts to translate the Arbai documents.

“And you say they’ve translated something already?” Roald cried. He didn’t sound astonished, merely wild with a kind of quavery excitement. His gray hair tufted around his ears like a spiky aureole; he cracked his knuckles between jabs at the tell-me link, clickety crack. The sound was like someone walking on nutshells. “I want to see that, just as soon as I can. Let me get on to Semling.”

“Are you a linguist?” Sylvan asked him curiously, wondering why there would be any such thing on Grass.

“Oh, no, my boy,” Roald said. “My living comes from the family supply business. At languages, I’m only an amateur.” He said it without even looking at Sylvan, then asked Rillibee, “Who was Mainoa’s contact on Semling?”

Thus dismissed, Sylvan sat down at a table nearby, resting his head on his arms as he considered the continuing bustle around him. Things were busier in Commons than he had assumed they would be. People were more intelligent and far more affluent than he would have thought. They had things even the estancias didn’t have. Foods. Machines. More comfortable living arrangements. It made him feel insecure and foolish. Despite all his fury at Stavenger and the other members of the Obermun class, still he had accepted that the bons were superior to the commoners. Now he wondered if they really were — or if the bons were even equal to the commoners? Why had he thought Marjorie would welcome his attentions? What had he to offer her?

The thought struck him with sick embarrassment. He sought words he had read but seldom if ever used. “Parochial.” “Provincial.” “Narrow.” True words. What was a bon among these people? None of the commoners were deferring to him. None of them were asking for his opinion. Once Rillibee and Tony had told everyone that Sylvan was deaf to the foxen, Commons had disdained him as though he were deaf — and mute — to them as well. He could have accepted their disdain more easily if they had been professionals, like the doctor, but they were only amateurs, like this old man talking translation with Rillibee. Mere hobbyists. People who had studied things that had nothing to do with their daily lives. And every one of them knew more than he did! He wanted desperately to be part of them, part of something…