Grass by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online

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