The Margarets (17 page)

“What they’re like doesn’t matter,” I told myself sternly. “It’s just like building rock wall. You don’t complain about what you have to work with, you just make it work!”

I set out to learn everything I could about each of the five, so we could knit together to stand strong and indivisible. It turned out, the best way to do this was by involving the whole group in solving problems. It let us see everything from as many points of view as possible. Even though Jaker didn’t usually solve problems on her own, she always saw something in them the others had not seen, and the same was true of each of them. I began to see things differently myself. Here was the problem, and there was the way it went, and it swerved around Caspor and fled toward Ferni, then Flek, then went on, touching each of them, sometimes circling back, until suddenly, one of us saw it! There it was, the route laid out as if in
flashing lights, an avenue so well marked that we could not possibly mistake it. A high road, paved and guttered. We had only to point it out to the others, lead them down it, and at the end, there was the solution, right where it should be.

“The talk road,” Ferni called it. “Let’s help old Naumi find the talk road.” And help they did, to their own benefit no less than mine. It was a new experience, this having friends and working together. I hadn’t realized until then how lonely my life had been before.

Neither Sergeant Orson nor Captain Orley seemed to take any notice of this. Several dormitory mates did take notice of this to their dismay, for we had become so tight that bullying any one of us brought a quick and unpleasant retaliation.

A plump, gray-haired woman who worked in the kitchen had taken a bit of liking to me. She thought I looked like her son, long since grown and gone away, so she sneaked me extra cookies that I shared with the others, and she kept me up-to-date on the local news, like who was dropping out and who wasn’t. So, one evening I went to see if she had anything for us. She told me to go through into the kitchen next to the officers’ dining room and wait for her while she finished putting tomorrow’s loaves in the oven.

I went where she told me, quietly, as was my habit, though not with any idea of sneakiness. I heard people talking in the dining room. One of my professors said, “Cadet Poul. You know the boy, Captain Orley.”

“Of course I know the boy, the son of…”

“Very much the son of the largest import-export firm on Thairy, right! I didn’t think he’d last out the year.”

“You mean he will?” asked the captain in amazement.

“He will. It seems a trio of his dormitory mates plus a couple from the women’s dorm have a study group led by young what’s-his-name, the foundling boy from Bright? Ah, Naumi.”

“A study group?” in a tone of slight dismay.

“It’s not unheard of, Captain. We even suggest it.”

“I wasn’t saying it’s a bad idea. I was just surprised. Poul’s actually learning something? He’ll pass?”

“Better than merely pass, by a good bit. So will the others. It seems Caspor is in charge of things mathematical. Ferni is in charge
of things biological. Flek, it turns out, has a family interest in armaments…”

“I didn’t know that!”

Well, neither had I known it, and I found it very interesting indeed, so I went nearer the hatch between kitchen and dining room and sat down quietly on the floor.

“Surely you know of Flexen Armor. Flexen Magma Canon, FMC? Her grandfather is Gorlan Flekkson Bray. Originally from Chottem.”

“She’s that family? I had no idea.”

“Cadet’s the offspring of one of the daughters, her surname isn’t the same, and the mother didn’t make anything out of it when her daughter was registered. She’s been wandering around the factories with her maternal grandfather since she was old enough to walk. She chose to come here, and her grandfather recommended her to the academy. She’s packed to the gills with engineering information she has no idea she knows, or knows the usefulness of.”

“I suppose the rest of them have hidden qualities as well?”

“Not that we know of. Jaker is a quiet, self-contained young woman from another extremely wealthy import-export family. The Jakers and the Pouls are linked, matrimonially, with cousins in common. She has no outstanding abilities, but she, too, is learning. And Naumi…well, he doesn’t shine in any particular class. He doesn’t attract attention. That pack that follows Grangel—all of whom will be dropping out any day now, one fondly hopes—harassed him a bit when he first arrived, but that’s dwindled off to nothing…”

“But he leads this group?”

“Oh yes, sir. He wouldn’t say that, of course, but he does. That’s his outstanding quality, I guess. That and something else…”

“Which is?”

“You know we give the cadets problems to solve. Tactical problems. You know. We’re looking for optimum, seventieth, eightieth percentile answers. Most cadets are lucky to rate over fifty percent with a solution. Naumi and his group come up with the optimum answer nine times out of ten. The tenth time, they come up with an answer we’ve never received before, and when we give it to the battle simulator, it comes back as an even more highly rated response, one that the simulator hadn’t thought of. He always says it’s a group ef
fort, what he calls a talk-road effort, and from what we can learn, it is, but he’s always the one that pulls the group together.”

This was news. I knew we’d been doing well, but not that well.

“It seemed to us,” said a professor, “that is…we all thought he should be recommended to the war college, at once. Why wait four or five years with ability like that?”

There was a long pause, then Captain Orley said, “I objected to the boy being admitted, nobody that he was, late in the year as it was. I thought it would be a handicap both for the boy and for his house. However, I’m a man who can eat my earlier opinions for breakfast without choking on them, which is a good thing. This boy got in because he was recommended.”

Mr. Weathereye. I knew it!

Someone said “Every cadet who comes to Point Zibit is recommended by somebody!”

The captain said ruefully. “Oh, he had that sort of recommendation from his schoolmaster and friends back in Bright. That’s not what I’m talking about. Naumi was recommended by the Third Order of the Siblinghood.”

Someone, I think it was Professor Hilbert, the mathematics man, said something in a harsh voice. “The Order. I find a great deal wrong with that, Captain Orley. First, though I know the Siblinghood is real enough, I find some difficulty in believing the Third Order actually exists. Secondly, if it exists, why is this supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing group interested in a schoolboy? And finally, assuming such an organization does exist, how does one verify that any information comes from that organization and not merely some clever-cock who wants to pull strings?”

Captain Orley murmured a reply while I was wishing I could have seen his face, to know how he felt about it. “It’s a bit like discussing God, isn’t it? Is there one? If there is one, how do we know it is speaking? How do we know what it wants?”

“Exactly,” snapped Hilbert.

“The eternal questions,” the captain went on. “Which always come down to the same answer. One has to trust the interface between oneself and it. The prophet. The sacred writing. The beatific visions. Then the second prophet who clarifies the issues. Then the new writing, and
the new visions. Then a declaration of heresy and a reformation. Then a schism. Then a sect. Except that with the Third Order there is no writing, no visions, no prophet that we know of…”

“Then how in the name of all good sense…?” yelled Hilbert, while two or three other people said, “Shhh, shhh.”

Captain Orley raised his voice. “…how does the lowliest member of the selection committee, myself, wake up one morning to find the message pinned to my shirt, which was in my locker, which was locked, which was inside my room, which was locked, which was in the officers’ quarters, which are guarded. A real message, which I read half a dozen times before it disintegrated into shiny dust.”

Hilbert huffed. “Ascribe it to whatever you ate and drank the night before, Captain. You were seeing things.”

“I could tell myself that. There are five of us on the committee, however, and we had not dined together for a long time. Nonetheless, it happened to all five of us. Same message, same location, more or less, all in places protected against intrusion, all signed, ‘The Third Order.’ I’ll be glad to give you the names of the other four if you’d like to hear it directly from them.”

I noticed I could see them reflected in the side of one of the big pots hanging on the wall. I saw them glancing at one another. I wondered if they were reviewing everything they had said, wondering if maybe this Third Order might be listening.

“Tread carefully, gentlemen. If what you tell me is true, if what I have told you is believable, it is likely Naumi will come to us, or someone will come on his behalf, if and when he, or they, consider the war college is a good idea. If Naumi chooses not to stand out, then I would suggest you let him…stand in, just where he is, where the Third Order recommended he be.”

I told Ferni about it, back at the dorm. He asked what the Third Order was.

“I never heard of it,” I said. “Honest, I never. But I was called for life-duty, so maybe…maybe it’s just something they want me for.”

“That makes you out to be pretty important,” Ferni said with a lofty look. I swear, sometimes the way he drew himself up that way you’d swear he thought he was king of the world.

I said, “Not necessarily, Ferni! A squirt of axle grease can be im
portant if that’s what you need. That’s probably all I’m supposed to be. Something to help turn a wheel.”

We left it at that. I think Ferni forgot all about it. I put it away among my mental memorabilia and tried not to think about it, though sometimes I did, wondering what it all meant.

Except for the rumors and whispers that followed the disappearance of our three classmates, college life was undisturbed for a time. I was fully focused on the final section of my “lateral studies,” those intended to broaden understanding of linguistic development. Everything known about the Pthas and their linguistic survivors had been reviewed; the aeon-long changes in the Quaatar language likewise; along with the accepted works on dialect development among Mercan and Omniont planets. The last thing on the list was to consider a speaking race that had lost its use of language, as recorded by a Gentheran exploration ship. My friend Sybil, Bryan’s sister, had made a vomit face when mentioning it, so I’d been putting it off.

Still, it was a required thing, so I settled my earpieces, keyed my didactibot, and faced a barren planet dotted with tall, irregular lumps. With a hiccup and purr, the lecture began in the same sweet, high voice I had heard at the meeting, Sister Lorpa’s voice. Or one of her kin.

“While on a routine journey of exploration, the Gentheran ship
Pendaris Kuo
happened upon an uncharted system with one live planet. Since the planet was occupied by a previously unknown race, a monitoring shuttle was implanted into a rocky area to provide a longitudinal recording of the inhabitants.

“The earthen towers you see are the homes of the only
land animal living on this world. These clay mounds are analogous to the termite mounds found on Earth during the multispecies ages. Since there is no evidence of a precursor race on the planet, Gentheran historians researched the archives to determine how these creatures may have arrived there. An ancient Quaatar logbook entry may have described the ancestors of this population stowing away on a Quaatar ship, then fleeing the ship on this planet, ‘Into the thick vegetation that covered the world.’”

The point of view receded. “Assuming that one tower was built initially, and extrapolating from the growth rate observed by the buried ship, we see here how the towers spread, resulting in the complete deforestation of the planet. There is evidence of several natural disasters that virtually eliminated these creatures on this world, but each time forest growth returned, they also returned to destroy it.

“Gentheran researchers picked a tower at random and fed audio-optical leads and chemical sensors into it, using the ordinary microburrowers used by xenoarchaeologists. These fibers provide sufficient light to permit a pictorial record of life inside. Only the various types are distinguishable from one another. Members of each caste or type are identical.

“The first recording begins at dawn. The creatures you see before you are curled against a tunnel wall, sleeping. To give human students some sense of scale, each creature could easily be held in your cupped hands.”

I could see why Sybil had been disgusted by the creatures. So was I. They were naked and gray. They had large ears that were folded against the head, each head pillowed on one skinny arm. The legs were short and almost as thin as the arms. They had no noticeable sexual organs. The faces had a common bilateral pattern, one shared by many races: sight and scent organs grouped at the upper end above the ingestion aperture. These mouths were toothless, the creatures had no chins and no appreciable necks.

A second type of individual appeared, slightly larger, with a larger mouth. As it passed along the line, it uttered a sound,
wakwak wakwak,
as it kicked the feet of each sleeper. Those kicked stood up, each in sequence, as room was made by the previous riser. Uttering this continuous
wakwak wakwak,
the kicker went up the tunnel, while be
hind it the wakened creatures made a half turn to face the direction it had gone, moving their two legs in a steady rhythm while making a continuous sound:
railev railev railev.
The line began to move, slowly at first, then more quickly as space opened up between the awakened ones.

I yawned. Bryan and I had been together the night before, and I was sleepy. Covertly, with a guilty glance at the monitor, I keyed the lecture to fast-forward, stopping shortly before the end. “…the protolanguage these creatures may once have spoken has not been identified. The Gentheran expedition did not take genetic samples, since sampling of speaking races is forbidden by IGC rulings without the consent of the individuals. The Gentheran research team was unsure whether this population was or was not a speaking race, though their opinion was that language had once existed but had been lost, and the current sounds made by the creatures were mere flock-murmur, the sort of recognition noises made by birds. The researchers chose not to presume what the IG might rule on the matter, and as yet, no researcher has been sufficiently interested in this oddity to return to the world in question. The buried Gentheran survey shuttle is still there, however, recording the passing of the race and the probable reforestation of the planet, which has been labeled in Gentheran, ‘Drdpls,’ or, in Earthian, ‘Hell.’

“For students, the importance of this report lies less in what it tells us about this race than in what it tells us about language. We believe that at one time, this creature had language formed and ramified by experience. Brought to a world with no inimical organisms and plentiful food, it expanded endlessly until it occupied the entire land surface of the planet. As food became scarce, the creatures became progressively smaller, eventually reaching the stage we see now.

“Along the way, all meaning was lost except for verbal signals, the kind of signals any animal species develops in order to stay in touch with its own kind, call others to a feeding spot, or alert others to danger. Every linguist should know that language must be used to be retained, and the compilers of this report have warned that human language on Earth is also being reduced. As humans become more crowded, they become less tolerant of variety. To fit into a crowd, people must be similar, and Earth’s population today is a vat
of homogeneity with only a pretense of choice remaining. One may pick model x with one curlicue or model y with three, the tasteless brown cracker or the tasteless yellow cracker, the actual difference in either case being nil. Any real choice among things of unlike value might lead to disparity, which leads to conflict. Ideas also contribute to disparity, and therefore in crowded populations, ideas must be restricted to the least controversial, the least interesting. Children all receive the same grades in school. Workers all receive the same pay. Clothing is similar; foods are identical; and with the passage of all distinctions, the words for them also pass. Who now knows of oranges, whale blubber, corsets, chopsticks, panty hose, nutmeg? What is a cable knit? Where might one find a T-bone?…”

I pushed the stop and reversed, listening to this last bit again. What was a cable knit? Or a T-bone? I had known for years that people didn’t say anything, but I had never considered that they might actually be losing language! Suddenly interested in this, avid to learn more, I keyed the machine to play it over. My intention was interrupted by a crash as the rear door of the classroom was banged open.

Around me the whispers fell into silence. The man in the door was a black-clad proctor. During the last ten years, proctors had become both ubiquitous and universally dreaded. He spent only a moment scanning the room before striding directly toward me. He leaned down, spoke quietly, waited while I stood and started to gather up my study materials.

“Leave them,” he said. “You won’t need them.”

I saw a dozen pairs of eyes on me, some of them curious. I shrugged, hands out, obviously as ignorant as they were, trying desperately to look nonchalant. What had I done? Or more likely, what did they think I had done? Did this have anything to do with that meeting? Did they think I was involved in what my fellow students had said…

The monitor spoke from the front of the room. “Settle down. Get on with your lessons, please.”

Outside in the hall, I asked, “Where are we going.”

“To the Provost’s office,” the proctor replied, not breaking his lengthy stride. “Stupid woman insists on seeing you.” I trotted to keep up with him, readying myself for a considerable walk, only to be
surprised that a car driven by one of the security staff awaited us at the main corridor.

Cars were silent and fast. The driver, an expressionless woman with her clearance code tattooed on her forehead, left us at the Provost’s office, where I stood just inside the anteroom door, watching the car dwindle down the hallway, trying not to huddle under the watchful eyes of the proctor.

“Do you know what she wants me for?” I asked.

“I don’t answer questions,” said the proctor.

It was a threat. There was just time to realize that before the Provost’s aide came for me and took me to into her office.

The Provost looked up. “Margaret.”

“Yes, Provost.”

She rose. “Margaret, I’m sorry about this. If you were not a party to this deception, you will be shocked at this news.” She walked around the desk.

“A party to what? I have no idea…”

“You are seemingly a student here under false pretenses.” She shut the door between us and the proctor.

My mouth dropped open momentarily, before shame and anger snapped it shut. “I am a four, Provost. I am my mother’s first and my father’s third child.”

The Provost nodded, saying more softly, “That was thought to be true ten years ago when you received citizen’s approval at age twelve. Two years ago, however, as you are no doubt aware, it became apparent the planned population cuts had not been deep enough, and the selection criterion was moved back another generation. Only twos to fours from two to four parents are now approved.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course I know that.”

“All over-fours were instructed to report to the local emigration office?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Interesting, because it appears that your mother’s older brother was born as a twin. Your mother is, therefore, at least the third child of both her mother and her father, a six.”

“I don’t understand! My mother didn’t have an older brother. She had an uncle almost as young as she was, but…”

“The medical records establish that your mother had two older brothers. Twin boys were born to your maternal grandparents.”

“Uncle Hy?” I murmured, completely lost. “He’s Mother’s uncle, and he lives on Luna!”

She shook her head. “He may well live on the moon, if he chooses, but he and his brother were born on Earth, and they were your mother’s siblings, not her uncles.” With a sorrowful expression she reached across the desk and took my hand. “I have seen the records, and this is true, Margaret! You must accept that it is true.”

“But…but, Provost, that would have been recorded! It would have been in the…in the files…I would have known…Mother would have known…”

She shook her head, patted my hand, and said compassionately, “You really didn’t know. I’m so sorry.”

“Mother thought Hy was her uncle!”

“She may have been told he was. The record of your family’s enrollment session is in the permanent files. This year, when the emigration rule was moved back a generation, all the modules were instructed to fact-check and recompute. The module noticed an anomaly, a person named Hyram living on Luna. Original records established that Hyram was a twin of George, who died at birth. Your mother was a six, therefore neither you nor your mother may be registered among two-fours any longer.”

“But…I’m still a four.”

“Though it makes no difference, you really aren’t. You were also a twin, whose sister died at birth. It is very rare to have twins in successive generations on both sides of the family, and your father begot twins, which means you’re a three on your father’s side, a two on your mother’s, so you yourself are a five, the child of a two and a six.” She looked at the papers in front of her. “Strange. If you hadn’t mentioned the name of Hyram during your registration session, no one might have caught that part of it.”

I had mentioned it? I sagged, catching myself on the edge of her desk. She rose, put her hand on my shoulder, whispered, “There’s nothing I can do, Margaret. There is no appeal. But I insisted they bring you here because I want you to know something. I said you were selected to be at that meeting, and you were, by the Third Order
of the Siblinghood. I doubt you’ve heard of it, and I know nothing more than the name, but that very fact may be important to you in the future. Say it?”

I gaped. “The Third Order of…the Siblinghood?”

She opened the door, saying brusquely, “Proctor? Take this woman to the Resources Office for outprocessing.”

I was driven home in a Resources floater, black, with the gold symbol on the doors: a stream running down a hill, a tree on the hill, above that a cloud, a sun, the words
ENOUGH FOR ALL
. That symbol always reminded me of that historic educational effort called “No child left behind,” which actually meant “No child gets ahead,” for compliance meant dumbing everything down so no one would learn more than the least capable. “Enough for all” really meant “Too little for everybody.” As we went, the false windows displayed pictures of tree-lined streets, the vents emitted the smells and sounds of summer: flowers and cut grass, birds singing, children playing. All false. All mere pretense. There was no water for trees, grass, flowers, and solar radiation would kill any child who played outside.

Halfway home, I suddenly thought of Bryan. Bryan! What could I say to Bryan! Sybil was in the class the proctor had just taken me from, and she would tell him! Bryan was a third generation two, a first child of first children, so he might feel that I was too shameful to…He might even think it best not to tell me good-bye…

In that, I misjudged him, for he arrived at my home almost immediately after I did.

“Margaret, I just heard. Sybil told me. Where’s your mother? Did you have any idea about this?”

“No,” I had said, tears streaming down my face. “I hadn’t. Mother is already gone. She left me a note.”

“What did they tell you?”

“Seventy-two hours to prepare for shipment out.”