“Yes. Because we bons hunt them. Because we help the Hippae hunt them.”
“I don’t think they blame you,” Brother Mainoa said. “They blame themselves.” He thought about this for a moment, then amended it. “At least, that’s how the one I’ve been talking to feels. The others may feel differently.”
“What do you call him?” Marjorie asked. “I can’t come up with a label for him. Them.”
“First,” Brother Mainoa replied. “I call him First. Or Him, capitalized, as though He were God.” He laughed weakly.
“It was they you were talking about when we had lunch together at Opal Hill,” Father James said. “The foxen! It is they who were concerned with original sin.”
Brother Mainoa sighed. “Yes. Though the reason I gave for their concern was not the real one. They have no pangs of conscience over eating the peepers. They have always done so. There are far more peepers than the world could hold if they all matured, and the foxen know that. They eat them as big fish eat little fish, with no concern for the relationship. No, what weighed upon them was the genocide of the Arbai. Some of them have acquired ideas of sin and guilt from our minds, and they do not know what to do with these concepts. It distresses them. Those that think about it. Not all of them do. Like us, they are variable. Like us, they argue, sometimes bitterly.”
Father James turned toward him, curious. “They feel guilty because of the slaughter in the Arbai city?”
“No. Not merelythatslaughter. I mean the genocide of the Arbai,” Mainoa repeated. “All the Arbai. Everywhere. I don’t know how it was done, but the Hippae killed them all.”
“Everywhere?” Marjorie was incredulous. “On other worlds? Everywhere?”
“As the plague is killing us everywhere now,” said Father James in sudden comprehension. “I think that’s why Brother Mainoa brought us here.”
“That’s why,” Brother Mainoa sighed again. “Because the foxen, at least some of the foxen, did not want it to happen again. They thought they had prevented its happening again. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know. Somehow, they were not careful enough, not attentive enough, and though there are things they have not or will not tell me, they have said it may already be too late.”
“No,” Marjorie said. “No. It cannot be too late. I will not accept that.”
Brother Mainoa shrugged, his tired face crumpling. Father James reached out a hand.
“No,” she said again with absolute certainty, thinking of Stella, out there somewhere, of Tony, of all those she had known and cared about all her life. Very small being or not, nameless or not. she would not tolerate this. “Whatever else we may believe, we may not believe it is too late.”
15
At the Friary, while an aircar was readied and certain accoutrements were assembled (assassins, for the use of, Elder Brother Fuasoi thought to himself, grimacing at his own private joke) Fuasoi stewed and steamed in his lonely office, thinking of a thousand ways the plans of the Moldies might already have been forestalled. Or, if not already, then imminently. Perhaps Sanctity had found out about him and had sent people. Perhaps the Health Authority on Semling had become aware of Moldy plots. Perhaps Mainoa had talked to others; perhaps the ambassador knew. He opened his desk drawer for the tenth time, searching for the book that wasn’t there, Mainoa’s book. Who had taken it? Had Jhamlees taken it? That totally Sanctified idiot? Had he? If he had, Jhamlees would be messaging Sanctity about it. Messaging, getting messages back. Like a message from the Hierarch saying, open the secret armory and take the planet for Sanctity. A message like that.
Not that he knew there was a secret armory here in the Friary. Everyone said so; but then, everyone could be wrong. Suppose the Green Brothers did take the planet, wipe out the bons and the mounts and the hounds; so then what would they do with it?
They’d find a cure, that’s what they’d do with it. Mainoa had seemed to think there was a cure here. They’d find it. Give them a little time…