He nodded, helping her up and guiding her into the house she had selected, where she half sat, half fell onto her bedding. “You’ve picked that up, have you? Mainoa says so, too. There’s no doubt the Hippae killed the Arbai. There’s little doubt the Hippae are killing mankind. I don’t know how. The foxen don’t tell us how. It’s something they’re withholding. As though they’re not sure whether we’re worthy.…
“It’s like playing charades. Or decoding a rebus. They show us pictures. They feel emotions. Once in a while, they actually show us a word. And difficult though it is with us, seemingly they communicate with us better than they do with the Hippae. They and the Hippae transmit or receive on different wavelengths or something ”
It was no longer charades or rebuses to Marjorie. It was almost language. It could have been language if only she had gone on, entered in, if she had not drawn back there, at the final instant. How could she tell Father that? She could tell Mainoa, maybe. No one else. Tomorrow, maybe. “I think you’re right, Father. Since the mutation they have not communicated with the Hippae, though I get a sense that in former ages, when the foxen laid the eggs, they exercised a lot of guidance toward their young,”
“How long ago?” he wondered.
“Long. Before the Arbai. How long was that? Centuries. Millennia?”
“Too long for them to be able to remember, and yet they do.”
“What would you call it, Father? Empathetic memory? Racial memory? Telepathic memory?” She ran her fingers over her hair, pulling the braid into looseness. “God, I’m so tired.”
“Sleep. Are the others coming back?”
“When they can. Tomorrow, perhaps. There are answers here, if only we can lay our hands upon them. Tomorrow — tomorrow we have to make sense of all this.”
He nodded, as weary as she. “Tomorrow we will, Marjorie. We will.”
He had no idea what she had to make sense of. He had no conception of what she had almost done. Or actually had done. How much was enough to have done whatever it was? Was she still chaste? Or was she something else that she had no word for?
She could not tell anyone tomorrow, she knew. Maybe not ever.
Very early in the morning, while the sun hung barely below the horizon, Tony and his fellow travelers were deposited just below the port at the edge of the swamp forest. The foxen vanished into the trees, leaving their riders trying to remember what they had looked like, felt like. “Will you wait for us?” Tony called, trying to make a picture of the foxen waiting, high in a tree, dozing perhaps.
He bent in sudden pain. The picture was of foxen standing where they stood now while the sun moved slowly overhead. Rillibee was holding his head with one hand, eyes tight shut, as he clung to Stella with the other arm.
“You’ll wait here for us,” Tony gasped toward the forest, receiving a mental nod in reply.
“Tony, what is it?” Sylvan asked.
“If you could hear them, you wouldn’t ask,” said Rillibee. “They think we’re deaf. They shout.”
“I wish they could shout loud enough for me to hear them,” Sylvan said.
“Then the rest of us would have our brains fried,” Tony said irritably. While he had immediately warmed up to Rillibee, Tony wasn’t at all sure he liked Sylvan, who had a habit of commanding courses of action. “We’ll go over there.”
“We’ll stop for a while.”
Now Sylvan said, “Someone in the port will give us transport to Grass Mountain Road. We’ll speak to the order officer there.” He moved toward the port.
Though Tony felt arguing wasn’t worth the energy it would take, he wanted to get Stella to a physician quickly. “The doctors are at the other end of town?” he asked.
Sylvan stopped, then flushed. “No. No, as a matter of fact, the hospital is just up this slope, near the Port Hotel.”
Rillibee said, “Then we’ll go there,” admitting no argument. He picked Stella up and staggered up the slope toward the hospital. “Can I help you carry her?” Tony asked.
Stella had slipped into a deep sleep, and Rillibee wondered if she would even know who held her. Still, he shook his head. He was unwilling to give up the burden to anyone else, though he had become exhausted by carrying it. Though he thought of her as a child, she was not a small girl. He had been holding her on the foxen for hours. She was his heart’s desire, so he thought, without trying to figure out why.
“I’ll manage,” he said. “It’s not much farther.” It was at the top of a considerable slope, a long climb for men already weary. They came at the place from the back, where blank walls confronted them on either side of a wide door. A white-jacketed person stuck his head out, saw them, and withdrew. Others came out, with a power-litter. Rillibee handed over his burden with the last of his strength, then leaned on one of the attendants to get himself inside.
“Who is she?” someone asked.
“Stella Yrarier,” Tony said. “My sister.”
“Ah!” Surprise. “Your father’s here as well.”
“Father! What happened?”
“Speak to the doctor. Doctor Bergrem. In that office. She’s there now.”
Minutes later Tony was staring down at his father’s sleeping face.
“What’s wrong with him?” He asked the doctor.
“Nothing too serious, luckily. We wouldn’t be able to do systems cloning and replacement here the way they do elsewhere. We have no SCR equipment.”
Cloning! Systems replacement! The mortality rate for systems replacement was high. Besides, Old Catholics were prohibited from using cloned systems, though there were always backsliders who had a system cloned and confessed it later.
The doctor frowned at him. “Don’t get into a state, boy. I said not too serious. Some cuts and a bit of bruising on the brain. All that’s taken care of. Some nerve injury, his legs. That’s healing. All he needs to do is stay here and simmer quietly for a day or two more.” The slight, snub-nosed woman hovered over dials, twitching at them. Her plentiful dark hair was drawn back in a tight bun and her body appeared almost sexless in the flapping coat.
“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.”