“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.”
16
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…
He heaved himself up and went to find something to drink. Rillibee rose from his chair beside Roald. “You know everything I do, Elder Few. I must get back to the others. I can’t stay here.” He yawned again, thinking briefly of asking Tony to come back with him. No. Tony would want to stay until they knew something more about Stella. As for Sylvan — better that Sylvan stayed here. Marjorie hadn’t wanted him back.
He went out of the place, still yawning, breaking into a staggering jog that carried him down the slope to the place the foxen waited. Something dragged at him. insisting upon his return. Perhaps the trees. Perhaps something more. Some need or purpose awaited him among the trees. If nothing else, then he would carry the news of the bon Damfels girl and of Rigo’s injuries and of all that both those events implied.
In the room he left behind, the doctor and the two madams were trying to figure out why a naked, mindless girl should have been trying to get into a freighter. “Why was she carrying a dried bat? What does that mean?” Dr. Bergrem demanded of the group at large.
“Hippae,” said Sylvan as he wandered by. “Hippae kick dried bats at each other. There are dried bats in Hippae caverns.”
Now they were looking at him. Now, suddenly, he wasn’t mute anymore. He explained, “It’s a gesture of contempt, that’s all. That’s how the Hippae express contempt for one another, part of the challenge. Or at the end of a bout, to reinforce defeat, they kick dead bats at each other. A way of saying, ‘You’re vermin.’ ”