Grass (5 page)

Still it would be an odd thing to imagine. The hounds had killed, so they should have been in a good mood. There was no reason for one of them to have watched Dimity. There was no reason for Dimity even to have imagined it. Surely no one had ever said anything to her, about Janetta … about that side of things.

She would speak to Sylvan about it. As soon as she could. As soon as this silly matter of the scientific mission was decided and everyone could think about something else.

Grass.

Millions of square miles of prairie, with villages and estancias, with hunters and the hunted, where the wind walks and the stars shine on stalk and seed plume and where the sluglike peepers cry from the roots all day and all night, except when certain things call deep in the star-specked dark to make a stunning, eerie silence fall.

North, almost at the place where the shortgrass country begins, are the ruins of a city of the Arbai, not unlike the many other cities of the Arbai found among the settled worlds, except that here on Grass the inhabitants died of violence. Among the ruins the Green Brothers are intermittently occupied, digging trenches, listing artifacts, making copies of the volumes in the Arbai library. The Brothers are penitents, it is said, though no one else on Grass knows or cares what they are penitent about.

A little north of the dig, in the sprawling, vaulted Friary, other Green Brothers keep busy in their gardens, busy with their pigs and chickens, busy sky-crawling, busy walking out into grasses to preach to the Hippae perhaps, or to the foxen, who knows? All of them, too, are penitents, cast out of Sanctity to this far, lonely place. They were here, unwillingly, when the aristocrats arrived. Some of them lament that they will still be here, as unwillingly, when the aristocrats have gone.

And finally there is the port, and Commoner Town, both of them set down in the one place on Grass where little grass grows, a high, stone-based ridge surrounded by swamp forest – a long, slender ellipse, a hundred square miles or so given over to shipping and warehouses and hydroponic farms, to quarries and meadows and mines and all the other clutter and cacophony of human life and human business. Commoner Town, where strangers can come and go without bothering anyone, where foreigners can do their incomprehensible and, as the bon Damfels do say, contemptible business.

And there is the port, where fat ships fall, squatting on their fiery tails as they arrive from Shame and Semling and the planet most call Sanctity until they are reminded that it is really named Terra, the first home of man. Men and women are on Grass in many guises: transients and merchants and craftsmen and ships' crews and preachers needing hotels and warehouses, shops and brothels and churches. Children, too, with their playing fields, and teachers with their schools. Occasionally a small group of adventurous children or bored transients will leave the port or town behind them and walk the mile or two down the long slope to the place where the ground flattens out in marshy meadow. There is a kind of springiness in the mossy growth there, a resilient dampness at first, which, if they go on, rapidly turns to the kind of sogginess one might expect after days of rain. Walkers can get a bit farther on that ground, feeling their feet squelch deeply into it, though most draw back in fear that it will quake and give way, as indeed it does in a little space, becoming so boggy that stubborn explorers have to leap from tussock to tussock over braided streams gleaming in oily lights. There are huge blue-leafed clume trees in this bog, and flowers blooming like pale candles, and powder-winged moths the size and color of parrots and smelling of incense, and there are huge homely frogs whose forebears came with the first settlers long ago.

So much one can see on a casual walk from Commoner Town – so much, but no more, because just beyond the clume trees the bog deepens and the tussocks become jungly islets separated by twined rivers of dark water full of twisted roots and things that go squirming into the slime with ominous plopping sounds. There the trees have bluer leaves, and they grow taller the farther one goes, shutting out the light. To go on into the forest one would need a boat, a shallow skiff or punt with a long pole to push against the murky depths below, or maybe a paddle to dip silently into that smooth dark water, propelling one along the labyrinthine leafy halls.

Not that it hasn't been done. Some few heedless men have built themselves vessels of greater or lesser water-worthiness to carry them exploring; some few foolhardy commoner boys and maybe a girl or two have made themselves boats to slip between the great buttressed trunks of the trees and the reaching tentacles of vine and take themselves farther into the glimmering shadows of the swamp forest. Not many. There might have been more, except that of those who went in, a good many never came out. Grown men from off-planet have tried it, too, doughty men and strong, but they have been lost just as the boys and girls were lost.

And those who did come out again? What could they say about it except that it was wet and dark and full of things slithering and that it got wetter and darker and more slithery yet the farther one went? In fact, they have said very little. It is almost as though they could not remember what they might have seen, there in the dank depths of the swamp forest. As though they had gone in and come out again by accident, while sleeping, having seen or heard nothing at all.

And, after all, who cares? Who has any need to go in there? Nothing comes out of the mire and the viny trees to do anyone harm, and nothing has been seen in the swamp that anyone wants. From above, the great trees look like the restless billows of a miles-wide gray-green sea. From afar, they are a wall shutting Commoner Town inside and keeping the restless energies of its tradesmen and craftsmen from erupting. From inside, they are a wall against the inexorable grasses, keeping them at bay. North, south, east, and west, all sides of the town are closed off by the swamp forest. No road in, no road out, and the depths of the forest inviolable, the depths of its trees and waters unknown and unseen, though so wide and ramified that – even though no one has ever seen anything of the kind – everyone in Commoner Town believes there is a something there that will emerge, someday, to the astonishment of them all.

The streets of St. Magdalen's were, as usual, deep in mud. Marjorie Westriding Yrarier had to leave her hover at the hamlet gate, next to the population post, and go slogging through mire which came almost to her ankles as she went past the chapel and the soup kitchen to the hovel that had been assigned to Bellalou Benice and her children. One child now: Lily Anne. The two legal children had publicly repudiated their mother a month ago, so they were well out of it. The phrase set up an ugly resonance, and Marjorie flushed, angry at herself for being angry at the two almost adult Benices. "Well out of it" was accurate, and Bellalou herself had probably encouraged her offspring to execute the demeaning ceremony as soon as both were old enough. On Terra, both the planetary and most of the provincial governments claimed a Judeo-Christian heritage, but "honor thy father and thy mother" had no meaning for illegals or for their parents.

At the hovel Marjorie set her pack on the stoop while she scraped her boots on the step edge, kicking the gluey clods off into the morass. There was no excuse for this. It would take less money to pave the streets than it took to lay temporary sidewalks during the quarterly visitations by the board, but Marjorie was a minority voice on the Board of Governors, which had a "no frills" policy vis-a-vis its charitable endeavor. Most of the board members made their decisions about Breedertown without ever seeing the place or any of the people in it. Not that they didn't coo and flutter around Marjorie for being so "dedicated," so "brave." She had taken considerable satisfaction in that, once. Some time ago. Before she knew as much as she knew now.

The hovel door opened a crack, disclosing Bellalou's swollen face. Someone had hit her again. Not her putative husband. He'd been shot last year for illegal procreation.

"Ma'am," said Bellalou.

"Good morning. Bellalou." Marjorie smiled her visitation smile, carefully not patronizing. "How's Lily?"

"Fine," the woman said. "She's fine."

Lily Anne was not fine, of course. When Marjorie came into the slovenly room, the illegal glared at her out of a sullen face as bruised as her mother's. "You checkin' up on me agin."

"Trying to keep you alive until the ship goes, Lily."

"Maybe I'd rather be dead, you ever think of that?"

Marjorie nodded soberly. Oh, indeed. She had thought of that. Maybe Lily would rather be dead. Maybe most illegal people would rather be dead than shipped away to Repentance, where two thirds of them would die before they were thirty anyhow. Though Marjorie had undertaken this work out of the religious conviction that life at any price was worth living, that was before she had seen certain documentaries, read certain exposes. Even she was no longer sure Repentance was preferable to simple death.

"You don' mean that, Lily," Bellalou remonstrated.

"Fuck I don't."

Marjorie intervened, trying to convince herself as much as the girl. "Look at it this way, Lily. You can have all the babies you want on Repentance." That, at least, was true. Population was as much needed on Repentance as it was now rigidly controlled here on Terra. Babies born on Repentance would be citizens of that planet.

"Don't want babies there. Want my baby you took." It was the most recent plaint, since the abortion Marjorie had arranged, risking her own freedom and possibly her marriage in the process. Neither Rigo nor the local law would have looked kindly on that particular act of charity. Marjorie's confessor, Father Sandoval, wouldn't have been precisely cheery about it, either, had he known. Taking another step down a path she had prayed was not irreversible, Marjorie hadn't told him.

"Lady Wesriding din take your baby, Lily. If you din have that abortion you'duh been shot by the pop'lation as soon as you showed, you know that." Bellalou looked pleadingly at her daughter. "Illegals can't do that." Only third and subsequent living children were actually illegal. Though Bellalou herself was not an illegal, her status made little difference. As the parent of one she had been stripped of her civil rights. She went on, as though to claim a future joy for her daughter, "It'll be better on Repentance."

"Don't want Repentance. Rather be shot," the girl cried.

Neither Marjorie nor Bellalou contradicted her. Marjorie found herself wondering why she simply hadn't let it happen. Poor little beast. Ignorant as a chicken. Half her teeth were falling out already and she couldn't read or write. No one was allowed to teach illegals anything or give them medical care. On her sixteenth birthday, Lily would be taken to the port to join a mob of other young illegals destined to live and die on the colony planet, and if it hadn't been for the recent abortion and the implant of a very illicit five-year contraceptive device, the poor little cow wouldn't have lasted until deportation. Planetary law said any illegal who came up pregnant got shot, along with whatever male illegal or de-righted person she claimed was responsible – if she cared to claim, which a surprising number of them did. Such claims made against certain respectable men, however, had caused some changes in the law. Now, only women served as guards in Breedertown. Only women were on the visitation committee.

"You get to have kids," Lily whined. "You rich people!"

"Two children," Marjorie said. "Only two, Lily. If I had a third child, it would be illegal, just like you. They'd take away my rights, just like they did your mother's. They'd make my older children repudiate me, just like your brother and sister did to Bellalou." She said it all wearily, not believing it. Rich people didn't get in that kind of mess. They never had. Only the poor got trapped: by ignorance, by religion, by self-righteous laws passed by people who broke them with impunity. Marjorie herself had an implant, imported from the Humanist Enclave on the coast. Another thing she hadn't told Father Sandoval. She hadn't told Rigo, either, but surely he suspected. Probably his mistress had one as well.

She brushed the wrinkles out of her trousers as she rose. "I brought some clothes for you to wear on the ship," she told the girl. "And some things you'll need on Repentance." She handed the package to Bellalou. "Lily will need these things, Bellalou. Don't let her trade them for euphies, please." Despite all efforts to keep them out, dealers in euphoriacs managed to do a good business in St. Magdalen's.

"Gimme," whined Lily, snatching at the package.

"Later," said her mother. "Later on, honey. I'll give it to you later on."

Her business with Bellalou finished, Marjorie returned to the clammy air and the mud, glad that one visit was over, not eager to go on to the half dozen other hovels she had scheduled for today. There was so little she could do. Food for hungry children. A few antiseptics and painkillers that weren't considered really "medical." The local province was populated largely by the Sanctified, which meant there were provincial laws against both contraception and abortion. Stack that up against the planetary population laws against more than two living children per mother and what did you get? St. Magdalen's Town. Breedertown. A charitable foundation set up by rich Old Catholics to shelter the unfortunate and unwise who followed either their inclination or their religion. As head of the Visitation Committee, Marjorie saw more of the place than most. Hands smoothing her disordered hair, she corrected herself: She saw more of it than any of them. They had been quick to admire her for her dedication but damned slow to emulate it.

All of which merely increased her doubts The chairmen before her had been chairmen in name only, or they had been women no wealthier than Marjorie who hired others to do the visitations for them. Why did she insist on doing this herself?

"You've got visions of yourself as a saint," Rigo had sneered. "Being an Olympic gold medalist wasn't enough for you? Being my wife isn't enough? You also have to be Saint Marjorie, sacrificing herself for the poor?"