The Margarets (7 page)

Before I could make up my mind to do anything, someone put a hand on my shoulder, a tall, robed woman. Her face looked familiar, as though I had seen it somewhere before. Not on Phobos. Not here on Earth. Where?

The woman smiled. “Are you hearing contentious voices, child? It’s the place, don’t you think? Or the situation? Almost guaranteed to make one question every move. Well, don’t let voices bother you. This is where you belong.” She took my hand and led me into the boarding tube. “Before leaving Earth, you had begun the study of nonterrestrial languages, isn’t that so?”

Perhaps I answered, perhaps not, I don’t remember. I do remember turning at the ship’s door and looking across the huge lobby. If I was over there, I was lost in the crowd.

In the lock of the ship, the woman turned. “You’re extremely young to leave home like this. All I can promise you is that you will not be unhappy where you are going.”

“I was told it would be a colony planet.”

“Oh, yes. The planet you’re going to is called Chottem. It is a colony planet and my home. I know it very well.”

“I’ve heard your voice before,” I said, suddenly recalling. “The day the proctor came. Was that you? Telling me it would be all right.”

“Did someone tell you that?” the woman asked. “Perhaps it was a friend of mine. We’re all inescapable busybodies.”

“May I ask your name, ma’am?”

The woman smiled briefly, somewhat ruefully. “Why don’t you
call me what everyone else calls me. I’m just the Gardener. And since you need a new name to go with your new life, let us call you Gretamara.”

New Margarets/Who Are We?

“Bain, Margaret,” said the checker, rubbing his eyes. “Number seven-seven-zero-five-nine-eight-two. That way, to your right.”

The hallway to the right was crowded, traffic in it made more difficult by the baggage everyone carried. As I moved forward, I heard loud and emphatic voices ahead: “Enter your number, take your chances.” “That way.” “That way, move it. Wait, you dropped this.” “Enter your number.” “That way.” “Another that way.” “Okay, go with your friend there.” “Now, you can go this way.”

The boarding-tube ports were at a lower level. As those ahead of me moved down the slope, I could see over their heads to the tube ports. Two uniformed men operated a device and called out the results. As I approached, I saw it, some kind of number pad and a lever. Numbers were entered, and arrows lit up, right or left. The line ahead of me shortened, and soon there were only half a dozen left.

“You two together? Okay. Enter one number. Either one.” “That way.” “You two together?”

“No,” a woman cried passionately. “We are absolutely not together.”

“Okay,” said the bored official from somewhere ahead of me. “Enter your number, sweetheart. Go that way.” “Watch it, Bondy! She says you’re not together, let her alone. Besides, your number comes up the other way.”

I was next. The lever snapped. The arrow pointed right.

“That way, colony girl. Down to your right.”

“Where is the ship going,” I asked, without any real hope of receiving an answer.

“The colonists end up on Thairy, love. Run on now.”

As I turned to my right, I looked back. Another me was standing there, looking at the arrow that had lit.

“That way, bondy girly. Down to your left.”

I saw myself turn left, heard myself ask, “Where is the ship going?”

“It’s off to Cantardene. Get moving.”

Cantardene. What had someone told me about Cantardene? The K’Famir. The dreadful, evil K’Famir…somehow, she’d been mixed up. It wasn’t a colony planet at all…

Margaret/on Earth

So, I, Margaret, dreamed I had been sent away from Earth, split off from myself, not once, but three times! When I woke, it was perfectly clear in my mind, and I wrote it down in my journal, just to remember it. Gradually, as the day passed, the dream faded. I forgot all about it until a long time later, a day when I felt terrible and lay in my bed full of fever and aching. To comfort myself, I did what I had not done for a year or more: I went among my people. The little shy one, the healer, she was gone. The one who had been my spy was gone. My warrior was gone. I took out my journal and read what I had written about the dream. Which one had gone to Chottem? Which one to Cantardene? Which one to Thairy? And where was Wilvia now?

The Gardener called me Gretamara. She took me to Chottem, a blue-and-green planet. We flew across enormous, rolling grasslands into high, splintered mountains near the western sea. We dropped down a valley into a little village, a hamlet called Swylet. We alit near her house and walked to it through her garden, surrounded by a fence with a gate in it. A bell hung by the gate, and she said that people rang it when they needed her help. She was a physician, or perhaps something more than a physician, and she told me my task was to learn from her, to be a healer.

She told me about herself. Everyone in Swylet who had ever ailed knew the Gardener, and even the indomitably healthy had seen her moving about in the shade of the moss-draped trees beyond the fence. Gardener told me about the people, about generations of them, for she seemed to know everything they had ever thought, or wanted, or dreamed of. Gardener said there was always a Grandmother Sage, a Grandmother or Grandfather Vinegar, an Uncle Salt, an Aunt Pepper. The current Grandmother Sage, who was young when she had first sought help from the Gardener, was fond of saying that the Gardener’s appearance had not changed over the years, that she was still as young-looking as in Grandmother’s youth. Grandfather Vinegar—the current one—claimed that Grandmother Sage had probably dealt with three
generations of Gardeners, the current one being the granddaughter of the one Grandma had known in her youth.

“But she’s the same, the very same!”

“Ah, no, Granny,” said the vinegary one. “It’s just the appearance of this latest one has rubbed up against the memories of those others, wearing against one another like coins in a pocket until all the little differences are worn away.”

Since the Gardener never left the garden by a route any of them could see, not so much as to step outside the gate, even Grandfather Vinegar could not venture a guess as to how she might have come by a child or a grandchild. Only women and children were invited inside her gate, and they only rarely, and a dreadful penalty was exacted from trespassers. Some of the grandmothers claimed to remember David Highnose opening the gate and walking two steps inside, two steps back out, and falling dead on the path, shriveled as an old leaf.

Aunty Pepper gave it as her opinion that the Gardener was married to the moon, though Uncle Salt said it had to be the sun, for what garden burgeoned by moonlight? Grandma Sage said if she was married to anything natural, likely she was married to the rain, for it was true that sweet rain came to the Gardener’s place, even in droughtful times when the rest of Swylet got only the shout and splatter of a thunderstorm traveling through, much noise and little help. Those near the Gardener’s fence sometimes heard rain falling, and if a person put a hand on the top rail, that hand would be wet with rain, though not a single drop fell on the dusty road outside.

All Swylet knew how she looked as well as I did: lithe and strongly built, with hard brown hands and a face that seemed to be all bones and eyes until one looked carefully and saw the curve of the lips, the flare of the nostrils, the way color came and went in her cheeks. I thought her very beautiful, though in a quiet way, the way a great tree is beautiful or a mountain. Between the straps of her summer sandals, her feet were brown as her hands. She wore a leather apron with many pockets over ankle-length dresses that were green in spring, gold in summer, red in fall, and blue in winter. Her hair was usually covered by a fine linen wimple topped by a wide-brimmed and battered leather hat. I never saw her wash herself, but she was always clean, and she smelled of flowers.

The people of Swylet also knew the Gardener’s cats, very large, round-headed ones who came to the gate whenever a supplicant rang the bell. They were mostly tabby cats, a few black ones, and always at least one with slanting blue eyes in a narrow, speculative face. Each had a name, and the Gardener spoke to them in baby talk as she walked: “There, Bounce, beneath that borage a burrow. See to it tonight. Lightfoot, linger by the lilies. Someone starlit has left them in tangles. Tell me what creature is dancing there, do…” Then she would laugh, and so would the cats, in strange high voices, as though they were playing a game. The villagers stated as absolute fact that the cats sometimes danced on their hind legs and spoke among themselves.

I could not tell whether the villagers believed this was truth or had merely invented it for amusement, though Grandpa Vinegar and his ilk never allowed themselves to be amused. Grandpa Vinegar had grown old and sour from loneliness, for his marriage had ended long ago when his wife hanged herself by her neck from the barn loft, despairing over his having brought calamity home to taint her blood and kill the babe in her womb. This calamity came from his chasing after women in the sea cities before he came back to his betrothed in Swylet, barely in time for the marriage feast. So said the Gardener when the woman brought the stillborn to her, begging to know why. The Gardener took the baby to lie among her lilacs. She always took dead babies to lie in her gardens, and certain mothers claimed they could hear their children laughing as they danced upon the Gardener’s meadows in the moonlight.

So, they talked about the Gardener, and when they first met me, they talked about me, but no more than they talked about the weather or the crops or the latest scrape the children were into. Generation after generation, the Gardener came down the path among her cats, talking to them as she came, and no matter what the supplicant asked for, the Gardener always gave something that would help. Babies were born and named and taken in their mother’s arms to the Gardener’s gate to receive her traditional gift of honeycomb on their lips. “That his life may be sweet,” the Gardener always said, her voice humming softly among the droning of the bees. “That her life may be sweet.”

And there I lived, and I worked hard learning what she taught me. I learned to plant and gather what I had planted and make elixirs from it and to mix them with others to treat specific conditions. I slept well at night because I was tired, and my hands grew callused and hard, like hers. Still, my life was sweet, and she took me on many journeys, including one that was unusual but very important for mankind.

You will need to imagine this:

A volume of amorphous, immeasurable space scattered with stars, singly or in clusters; some bright, some dull; each surrounded by a halo of luminescent mist that swims and wavers, sometimes penetrating the cloud that surrounds another star, sometimes separating from it; everything shifting, neither spiraling nor whirling as a whole but separately erratic, as though each point of light has a different destination.

Or this:

A forest. Here a tree immense past reckoning, its saplings gathered at its feet; there a huge, moss-hung hulk looming lonely at the edge of things; here a copse of fluttering leaves or a brushy labyrinth of old trees, branches intertwined. Imagine the whole underlain with shrubs and ferns over liverworts and fungi, while in the soil below little worms and bacteria writhe and multiply; everything moving slowly, undetectably, chaotically, one part going there, another coming here, all without apparent direction.

Or this:

An ocean inhabited by a thousand life-forms, some solitary, some in schools, some reef dwellers living by twos and threes, here a fanged eel, there a sinuous serpent, here a cloud of clown fishes, striped like a carnival, and over them all the colossal bulks of great basking sharks or whales, they, too, surrounded by clouds of diatoms and krill and bits of floating weed, all moving in separate routes toward indiscernible ends.

Imagine watching any of these for a million years or so as new stars come and old ones die, as old trees rot away and saplings grow tall, as whale bones litter the abyss and young fry hatch, as all the parts within each scene shift in relationship to one another, some touching, some separate, sometimes so remote that the individual
seems undetectable by any perception save its own. Imagine that they speak, that space hums and bellows with their voices:

Star calls to star: “Here I am, who is like me?” Tree calls to tree: “I am I, who knows me?” Submarine dweller calls to other dwellers, innumerable calls: some subsonic, some deep, rhythmic pulses, some shrill eeps and squeals. When a response is detected, the thing that uttered moves separately but implacably toward its responder, as by gravity. So equivalence is drawn to equivalence until they are within touching distance.

Gardener took me to this place. She called it the “Gathering,” and those assembled there were “Members of the Gathering.” She said the place could as well be called Heaven, Valhalla, Olympus, or Glaspfifel, and those assembled could be called gods, spirits, essences. Regardless of title or size, she said each one of them, arose from a mortal source: Human, Gentheran, Quaatar, K’Famir, or any of a thousand others. Large gods arose from numerous sources, and small gods arose from few, size having nothing to do with potency. Any race of mortal beings may give rise to one god or many, and if, by chance or intention, an entire world is struck by a giant comet wiping out an entire living race, the Members associated with that race wink out like blown candles, at once both absent and unremembered.

Each Member, the Gardener said, can think only what its mortal source thinks, and each source visualizes its Member(s) differently. Earthians speaking of their gods: “Him” or “Her” or “Them,” visualize very large persons, perhaps of great age, to denote wisdom, or strength, or power. Gentherans visualize kindly uncles and keen-minded aunts. K’Famir and Frossians and Quaatar visualize huge, fanged creatures with curved knives in each of their several manipulators, squatting above bloody altars. Though many mortals speak with authority concerning what their Members want—“Our Father wants us to sacrifice a bullock,” “Kali demands we garrote a passerby”—the desires and demands of the gods are always determined by the desires and demands of the people. Whatever the prophet or priesthood comes up with, the gods parrot. The Members of the Gathering think only what their source thinks: bloody, painful, happy, kindly, arbitrary, logical, sadistic, nurturing—every god is always what the people suppose it to be.

Gardener says few mortals have ever seen the Gathering, and those who have seen any of it have seen only a tiny fraction of the whole. Even if mortals could gain access to the place and observe its continuous and eternally erratic movements as it sorts and re-sorts itself, they would be no wiser, for the Gathering is a spiritual mirror of the whole universe in which all mortal races are reflected through their deities.

Whenever a previously planet-bound race achieves space travel, they carry some or all of their gods with them into space. As soon as those deities emerge through the gravitic barrier around their home planet they are drawn inexorably to the Gathering. So when the Gentherans left their original home world, Gentheran Members appeared in the Gathering. So when the Earthians left their world to set up their little colonies, Earthian Members appeared. The Gentheran Members were few, very strong, and mostly cheerful, so said Gardener. The Earthian Members, on the other hand, covered the entire spectrum from horrid to happy, from bloodthirsty to benevolent, from sadistic to solicitous, and were, counting all the little saints of this and that, so very numerous that some of the oldest Members of the Gathering considered the arrival to be more an invasion than an advent.

The Gardener told me that a Quaatar Member, known to his inventors and worshippers as Dweller in Pain, was one of the most annoyed. DIP took an instant dislike to each and every Earthian Member, though it could give no reason for doing so. Members know only what their sources know, and no mortal Quaatarian knew why it disliked humans. It was a received aversion, passed down from generation to generation. Even if no prior reason had existed, the dislike might have arisen anew from the fact that many of the Earthian Members were rather jolly, and the Quaatar, being sadomasochists of the most elemental sort, did not approve of jolly. Pain, honor, blood, and death were the components of their ethos. Agony was their meat and drink, beginning in infancy when baby Quaatar, moving swiftly to avoid being eaten by their elders, often lost body parts in the process; continuing in youth through an endless series of rite-of-passage battles and on to the precedence trials of adulthood, events of ever-increasing excruciation until death intervened. In Quaatar male soci
ety, abhorrence of strangers and infliction of pain was the norm. Loathing the foreign or inferior and torturing the loathed was considered the usual thing. So Gardener told me, pointing out, as she did so, a few little Earthian gods with similar tendencies. “That is the god of jihad,” she said. “That is the god of crusades. They are identical except for their names.”

She explained that the Gathering is a sloshing sea of fluctuating factions, each wavelet betraying an ephemeral or lasting association. By the time mortal races leave their home planets, many of their gods have already amalgamated with one another. Small tribal godlets are often thrust together through shared execrations. All Death-Honor-and-War gods, for example, are identical. The people may fly different flags, but their gods are happy to drink blood from both sides of the battle. All Sun, Harvest, or Forest divinities are analogous. Even when similar mortal races arise on planets remote from one another, similar gods find one another easily.

The oldest deities of the Gathering, those originated by the Pthas, a source billions of years old and wise past belief, had set boundaries for the Gathering: Whatever the mortal races might do among themselves, their gods might not interfere with the sources of other Members. When detected, the penalty for such an attempt was instant eradication.

That “when detected” was a narrow but advantageous loophole, for, as the Gardener said, the right-hand tentacles, palps, or scravelators of the Members of the Gathering were only rarely aware of what the countersegmental organs were up to. Further, no part of the Gathering, including the oldest and wisest, was diligent in finding such things out. Even though the gods of the Pthas had instructed that neutrality or beneficence should govern the Gathering, there was no routine enforcement of that dictum. The Gardener says that mortals often pass laws they cannot enforce in order to be seen as “strong,” or “determined,” even though they know the laws will not solve the problem.