What she had seen in those red eyes was mockery — mockery and something deeper. Something abiding and unforgiving. Malice.

James Jellico took himself home for lunch, as he often did. knowing his wife, Jandra, would be interested in the morning’s happenings. Jellico’s wife had no legs, and though she walked well enough on the elegant artificials he had obtained for her (a little bribery at the port, a little looking the other way when he was or, customs duty), she said it pained her to use the legs. There were implants one could use for the pain, but Jandra. who often said she didn’t like people fooling about with her head, preferred for the most part to wheel about the house in the half-person she had used since she was a child. About the house and the poultry yard as well. A third of the Jellys’ income came from homely Terran geese and ducks along with Semling szizz birds and fat, delicious wingless things from the planet Shame which Jandra called puggys.

He found his wife by the goose pen feeding greens to the geese, they gabbling and snatching grass fronds from one another and she humming to herself, as she did when content. “Ho, Jelly,” she greeted him “I’ve about decided to kill that one for dinner. She’s so smug it serves her right.”

The indicated goose succeeded in dragging the disputed shred of greens out of another’s beak and swallowing it, at the same time tipping her head to one side to get a good one-eyed goose-look at jelly. There was something in that cold, single-eyed stare, something in the line of beak and neck that shook him with a feeling which was at first deja vu and then horrified recognition.

“That girl,” he blurted. “She looked at me like that!” Then he had to tell her all about the girl and Ducky Johns and how strange it all was. “And it looked at me like that, tipped its head like that, as though it could see me better out of one eye than out of both. Like an animal.”

“Bird,” corrected Jandra.

“Bird or animal,” said Jelly patiently. “Any of ’em that don’t have what-you-call-it. Binocular vision. They’ll do that. Tip their heads to see you better.”

“Why do you say ‘it’ when it was a girl, Jelly. Why don’t you say ‘she’?”

“Habit, I guess. With those from Portside, he’s and she’s would be wrong as often as they’re right. They have he’s that look like she’s, and she’s that look like he’s, and it’s that look like either. I just say ‘it’ about them all.” He took the image file out of his pocket and put it in the imager, to show her.

Jandra shook her head, amazed at the ways of the world. She never tired hearing about them. Even simple things amazed her, though she was never shocked at the horrid ones. “I’ll have to go down to Ducky’s and see to this,” she announced in a tone which allowed no contradiction. She peered at the image, looking at the creature’s eyes. “It isn’t right something human and helpless should be left down there. Was there something wrong with the girl’s eyes?”

“Nothing I could see. Nothing wrong with any of it — her. Pretty, built nice, smooth hair and all. Just the face. Well, look at it.”

“What do you mean about her face, Jelly?”

“Empty,” he said after staring and thinking about it for a moment. “It looks just empty, that’s all.”

Some distance east of Opal Hill was a hidden cavern of the Hippae, one of many which could have been found on Grass if anyone had dared to look. Set deep into the hillside, its narrow openings shaded by great swaths of vermilion grasses which fell across the slender doors in gently moving curtains, the cavern was undergoing a periodic refurbishing. Arriving and departing at the northernmost slit were the creatures responsible, molelike migerers, diggers par excellence, scuttling now through the vermilion and the fuschia, out into the shorter. violet-colored grasses, their furry thigh-pockets full of loose earth recently scraped from the floor of the Hippae hall.

Inside that hall a shadowed emptiness was supported by pillars of rubbly stone, stones uncovered when the caverns were dug, each stone mortared into place with the adhesive which resulted from mixing migerer shit and earth. Marvelous creatures, the migerers — builders, almost engineers, certainly cave makers of no small talent who made similar, though smaller, caverns for themselves, each cavern linked to others by miles of winding tunnels.

In this great hall they blinked their squinty eyes, deep-pocketed in indigo fur, and chirped to one another in flute tones as they plodded across the cavern, scraping the high places into the low with urgent flat-edged claws, stamping the loose dirt down with the hard pads on their industrious hind feet.

A Hippae came into the cavern, striding on great tripartite hooves across the smoothed floor, quartering the cave again and again, nodding approval with his monstrous head, the teeth showing slightly where the lips drew back in a half snarl, the razorlike neck barbs making a dissonant clash as the beast tossed its head and bellowed at the ceiling.

The migerers affected not to notice, perhaps really did not notice. Nothing changed in their behavior. They still darted about under the very hooves of the prancing monster, scraping, packing, filling their furry pockets, and darting away into the grasses to dispose of this evidence of industry. Only when they were finished, when the floor was as smooth as their instinctive skills could make it, did they desist and fall to grooming round bellies and small tough feet, combing whiskers with curved ivory claws, blinking in the half light of the entrance slits. Then a whistle, a plaint on the wind as from some bird calling in mild distress, and they were gone, away, vanished in the grasses as though they had never been. In the cavern behind them the Hippae continued its slow parade, bellowing now and again to make the cavern ring, alone in majesty surveying and approving the work which had been done.

A second monster called in response, entering the cavern to begin a quartering of its own. Then came a third and fourth, then many, prancing in intricate patterns upon the cavern floor, interweaving and paralleling, twos and fours and sixes becoming twelves and eighteens, the files of them turning and braiding in complicated design, hooves falling as precisely as artisans’ hammers into the tracks themselves had made.

Not far off, in Opal Hill village. Dulia Mechanic turned restlessly on her bed, half wakened by the subterranean thunder. “What, what’s that?” she murmured, still mostly asleep.

“The Hippae are dancing,” said her young husband Sebastian Mechanic, wide awake, for he had been listening to the rhythmic surge for an hour or more while she had breathed quietly beside him. “Dancing,” he reasserted, not sure whether he believed it or not. Besides, he had something else on his mind.

“How do you know? Everyone says that, but how do you know?” she whined, still not awake.

“Someone saw them, I suppose,” he said, wondering for the first time how that particular someone had seen what he claimed he had seen. Sebastian himself would rather face certain death than sneak around in the tall grasses, spying on Hippae. Without identifying the source, he murmured, “Someone, a long time ago,” and went back to thinking what he had been thinking of for a long time now, about those at Opal Hill.

Out in the night, in the cavern where all the thunder came from, the Hippae moved their anfractuous quadrille along to its culmination.

Suddenly, without any sense of climax, it was over. The Hippae left the cavern as they had entered it, by ones and twos, leaving a pattern intricate and detailed as a tapestry trampled deep into the floor behind them. To them who made it, it had meaning, a meaning otherwise expressible only by a long sequence of twitches of hide and particular blinks of eye. The ancient Hippae language of gesture and quiver and almost undetectable movement was useless for this particular purpose, but the Hippae know another language as well. In the other language, learned long ago from another race, this design stamped deep into their cavern floor was their way of writing — and thereby giving notice of — a certain inexorable word.