The Margarets

  “The person saying it can’t be human,” insisted Falija.

  “How about someone like a K’Vasti?” asked Mr. Weathereye, with a peculiar smile. “Who heard it from a Hrass? Thank you, Falija. That is completely doable.”

  They told me later the place they picked was Gilfras Station, the same nonplanet They told me later the place they pickedary transshipment point that Ferni and I had used as a rendezvous not long before. K’Famir and Frossians were numerous there, as were a dozen other races, including the inevitable Hrass, huddled in small groups in corners, trying to be inconspicuous. One of them, however, was accompanied at his table by a loud, drunken K’Vasti, who shouted, “What do you mean, all the Gentherans were talking Quaatar. Nobody talks Quaatar.”

  The Hrass murmured unintelligibly.

  The K’Vasti bellowed, “Called the Quaatar umfa! I don’t understand that.”

  The Hrass murmured, gesturing.

  The K’Vasti brayed with laughter. “Oh, that’s a good one. Gentherans and Earthians, having a contest on B’yurngrad to see who can write the most insulting poems about the Quaatar in Quaatarian!”

  The Hrassian leaned forward, saying something urgent.

  “Not only the Quaatar? Insults in Frossian and K’Famir as well. Ha. Where’s this contest being held?”

  The Hrass murmured, swinging its nose in what might be presumed to be laughter.

  “At a tribal camp northwest of Black Mountain? Out in the wilderness. Guess they figured nobody would hear them out there…Whoops…” Abruptly the K’vasti rose to his feet and staggered off toward the toilets. While all eyes followed him, the Hrass, as was customary in his race, quietly slipped away. Seemingly the K’vasti had had far too much to drink, for he, too, did not return. •••

  M’urgi and I sat wearily at the foot of a tree, looking off across the campgrounds when Mr. Weathereye returned in the company of a Hrass, who promptly took off her nose and emerged as Ongamar. “It’s done,” he said. “We put on the performance. I played the K’vasti. Ongamar played the Hrass. We were both totally believable in the roles.”

  “I’ve recruited bellowers to shout insults, just in case the insulted need convincing,” said M’urgi in a weary voice. “What do we do now?”

  “We wait,” I said. I glared at Weathereye, who from my point of view had a lot to answer for. “You did say the word would travel rapidly?”

  “You may rely on it, my boy,” said Mr. Weathereye. “It’s taken us almost a day to get back, so we did our little playlet that long ago. In half a day, the word was widespread among K’Famir and Frossians, and the first of them to hear of it would have been in touch with at least one Quaatar, if for no other reason than to enjoy Quaatar agitation. The moment even one Quaatar knew, all the Quaatar would know.” Weathereye shifted a bit uncomfortably. “I do hope we’re ready?”

  “The machine’s in the center of the camp, and we’ve checked the new calibrations,” said M’urgi. “One of us is always beside it, an hour at a time so we don’t risk falling asleep.”

  “I sent word to the Siblinghood,” I said. “Told them we knew the origin of the ghyrm. The K’Famir have been ordering a lot of big weapons from Omniont space, and the Siblings intend to substitute our machines, remotely controlled, for several of theirs.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Some time. The machine isn’t even finished yet,” I replied, searching the skies above them. “What do you think they’re doing right now?”

  “The K’Famir, the Frossians, and the Quaatar? I think they’re working themselves up into a killing rage,” said Weathereye. “I think they have an interesting synergy going between themselves and their gods. They planned originally to test their ghyrm-drop quietly, without fanfare, hoping nobody much would notice until B’yurngrad was uninhabited, but if they’re sufficiently insulted, they won’t care who notices.”

  “It’s a pity we have to have all this destruction,” said M’urgi.

  Weathereye nodded. “Oh, my dear lady, I do agree. From my own personal point of view, however, I’d prefer that humans not go extinct, and I know of no peaceful way to prevent it. That possibility is really a question for races like the Gentherans, who love complex ethical issues. When is it justified to kill or destroy? In self-defense, or never? I, of course, can only think what humans think, and I think we’re justified in getting rid of ghyrm along with certain bacteria and viruses.”

  “Look there,” said Naumi, pointing toward the sky. “There, a little east of south, fairly low. That’s a ship.”

  “Go warn Mar-agern,” said Mr. Weathereye. “And the tribes.”

  “There are lookouts,” M’urgi said, not moving.

  A mournful horn sounded from a nearby rise, a sound echoed almost immediately by dozens of others, from all directions. M’urgi sat up straight and closed her eyes. I knew she was sending herself to the place Mar-agern sat next to the machine, finger on the start button.

  M’urgi sighed, relaxed, came back to herself. “Everyone’s alert,” she reported. “Mar-agern’s ready.”

  M’urgi and I rose. The ship came toward us, four others descending into view behind, followed in turn by four more.

  “They’re huge,” I breathed. “I’ve never seen anything that size! If they’re full of cargo…full of ghyrm…no way we’re going to be able to…”

  “Nine of their biggest ones,” said Mr. Weathereye in a faraway voice. “The ones they use for cargo shipments.”

  “Our people will need our help,” I said, starting away down the hill, M’urgi trailing behind me, only to stop as we saw a red-robed women approaching.

  “Naumi,” she said. “M’urgi. What have you set up here? A trap?”

  I had the very strong impression I had seen her somewhere before. “The dragonfly I dreamed about,” I said abruptly to M’urgi. “The dragonfly. She was the pilot!”

  “So I was,” said the Gardener. “I bring you greetings from Gretamara, and Wilvia. They await you in Tercis. I ask again, what have you here? A trap?”

  “We calculated it would be a trap,” I confessed, suddenly convinced that I ought to tell her everything that was going on, without reservation. “We have a machine to kill ghyrm, and we thought if we could get them all dumped on top of us, we could wipe them out here. But look at those ships? If they’re stuffed full of ghyrm, it will take too long…and the power source is limited. If they pour those things out, hour after hour, there won’t be time. There’s not even time to get word to the Siblinghood.”

  She looked up at the huge ships, her eyes veiled. “One never foresees everything,” she said. “One can only do the best one can, with what one has to work with.” She spoke over my shoulder, to Weathereye. “I came to tell you that the Gentherans have found the place on Chottem where a man named d’Lornschilde has been keeping the human children from which the ghyrm are made. They are being transshipped to colony planets as we speak. Also, they have found the ships he used to bring them to Chottem, and those are being destroyed.”

  M’urgi said, “Yesterday, I would have considered that to be good news! Before I saw that armada overhead…”

  “Your plan must proceed,” Gardener said to me. “I am told you did well as a tactician. I have faith in your plan.”

  “M’urgi, Naumi,” said Mr. Weathereye. “You haven’t met the Gardener. She is the one who has kept Wilvia safe, and she is a friend of Earthians and Gentherans. She has been in this business from the beginning.”

  “Then you know about the seven roads,” I said.

  “I do,” she replied. “Which we’ll soon be walking.”

  “Provided all goes well.” M’urgi grimaced.

  “Well or ill, still we must walk,” said the Gardener. “It took us over a thousand years to find a sevenfold road that would exist for a little while in the now, the here! It took two hundred years to arrange the emergence of the walkers and another lifetime to prepare them. We have only hours to accomplish what it has take
n over a millennium to arrange. Even if this world ends, we must walk.”

  The horns moaned again, more loudly. “Where did they get those horns?” I cried. “They sound like the end of the world.”

  “They’re from old umoxen,” M’urgi said. “The tribes find the bones and horns on the prairies, where an umox has died. The older the animal was when it died, the longer the horn and the more mournful the sounds are. Look! They’re dropping cargo.”

  The ships were sowing seeds into the sky, dark specks that drifted downward. At the center of the encampment, something hummed briefly, faded to a drone, then to a hissing sound, like waves on a shore. Out on the prairie, tribesmen danced, waving their spears and insulting the Quaatar at the top of their lungs.

  Thousands of the specks were drifting toward them, becoming visible as circles of pale tissue supported by radiating arms, the whole almost transparent, floating downward like tiny parachutes. Looking straight up, we could see the ghyrm dwindling into the distance. As the falling creatures passed an invisible line, the tissue darkened, the arms curled. When they were close enough to be seen in detail, the arms were shriveled, the disks of pale tissue were darkening. The last few dozen feet, the things crumpled and fell, littering the ground around us, unmistakably dead.

  Out on the prairie, the tribesmen went on shouting, and I cursed my own stupidity!

  “Tell some of them to pretend to die,” I shouted. “I didn’t think of it until just now. The Quaatar will stop dropping the ghyrm unless they can see some of us dying!”

  M’urgi ran down the hill, spoke urgently to one of her messengers, who sped off. I, watching from the hill behind her, saw the message relayed to others who fled away in their turn, a spiderweb of messengers, radiating off into the chaos of the camps. A few men near the hill began to stagger, clutching first their throats, then their bellies, falling and writhing with arched backs and histrionic faces. A few more, not too many, then others, while some of the first played dead.

  The ships turned in a wide swoop that brought them lower, and lower still. The sun faded behind the rain of ghyrm. I looked down to find I cast no shadow. Well, if I could not see the sun, likely the creatures in those ships couldn’t see what was happening on the ground! I tried to estimate how many ghyrm were being dropped. Millions. Millions. “How many could they have had?” I cried to Mr. Weathereye. “Each of those, a human life?”

  “Shipload after shipload of Earthian children, year after year,” said the Gardener from behind me. “Plus we understand they’ve learned to clone them. We can’t stay to see the end of this, however. It’s time for you and the others to go. Round them up quickly. We go to Cantardene, then to Chottem, swiftly through a gate on Hell, and so to Tercis, where the others are waiting. It will take us less than an hour.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Who’s going?”

  “Everyone who came with you from Thairy, plus M’urgi,” said Weathereye. “It’s time. What we do, we must do now, while the road is open and the enemy fully occupied here.”

  We were fetched variously: M’urgi, reluctantly, from her station amid the battle, where she had been whispering orders to tribesmen; Mar-agern from her post outside the tent, weapon at the ready; Margaret from her seat by the fire in the tent where Bamber Joy, Falija, and Gloriana lay asleep. I found Ferni in the thick of the shouting, and dragged him away as he protested. Meantime Mr. Weathereye found Ella May and gave her certain instructions.

  “No time for you to pack anything,” the Gardener told M’urgi, who was reaching for her kit. “Bring weapons only.” We joined the others, who were moving quietly through the clearing. One by one, we squeezed between the two big trees and lined up outside the shining gate, all of us keyed up, nervous, frightened, each of us trying desperately not to show it.

  “The first stop is Cantardene,” said the Gardener. “We may find no one at the Cantardene gate. Their ruling class is in those ships above. In case they’ve left a guard, Naumi, Ferni, and M’urgi should go first, armed and ready, the rest to follow.”

  We came out in the mausoleum on Cantardene, empty of any living thing. I heard voices from outside and went to look out over the slanting bulk of the huge door that rested on one corner and one hinge. Outside in the plaza, a few soldiers knelt at a gambling game beside the stone of sacrifice.

  The Gardener came up beside me, pointed to the tall stone, and said, “That is empty, too. Whirling Cloud of Darkness-Eater of the Dead is elsewhere. Now the next gate. Cover your faces and walk slowly, for the floor is covered with charbic root.”

  We waded through the layer of powder, lifting our feet high and holding kerchiefs over our faces. We emerged into darkness. The Gardener said we were in the cellars of Bray, and only the light from the farther gate illuminated our way. Iron grilles were fastened, but the weapon Mar-agern carried broke the locks. The next way-gate took us to a steel room. We walked on a steel floor that rumbled to our footsteps, through the opposite gate and out behind a tangle of vines opening into a forest. Down the slope was a snug little house with smoke coming from its chimney.

  “Home,” said Margaret, her voice breaking. “Gloriana, Bamber Joy, it’s home.”

  We Margarets Walk

  I, Margaret, led the way down the hill, the others in a straggling line behind me. As we approached the house, I saw shattered fragments of my door piled to one side of the porch and a blanket hung where my door should have been. I shivered. The apple tree at the corner of the house was bare. Winter had come while I was away.

  Gloriana pushed the blanket aside and called into the house. “It’s me, Gloriana.”

  A glad outcry from inside startled us all. “Gloriana, is Bamber Joy with you?”

  Bamber Joy cried, “Mother!” and thrust past Gloriana.

  When Gloriana and I entered, we found the boy on his knees beside the couch, his head pressed to the woman’s breast. Gloriana shifted from foot to foot nearby as the woman reached a hand toward her.

  “Gloriana,” she cried. “Oh, sweet, dear girl-child! Oh, poor thing, you haven’t any idea who I am, do you? And you both look so much like Joziré, and so tall!” She turned to me, tears covering her face. “Are you the one of us who cared for them?”

  “I’m Margaret,” I faltered, momentarily witless with surprise. “I…I thought Gloriana was my granddaughter…adopted, that is…Bamber Joy, well, he was left with Abe Johnson…” My voice trailed off, and I simply stared. So Wilvia was Gloriana’s mother. Which meant that I myself was Gloriana’s mother?

  “I had to leave them both,” she said, tears still flowing down her face. “The Gentherans thought the children would be safer if separated, from one another and from me. The Thongal were paid by the Quaatar to wipe out the royal house, so they had to be hidden…”

  “Then you’re Wilvia,” said Gloriana. “And you’re my real mother? Which means Bamber Joy is my brother, and my grandmother was my real mother, sort of. And her daughter was my foster mother, sort of…” She turned to me. “Grandma, I thought it couldn’t get any more confusing!” She stopped, seeing Gretamara for the first time. “Another Margaret?” she croaked. “That’s all seven of you, isn’t it?”

  The new one introduced herself, and I saw Gloriana put on the concentrated expression she wore when she was determined to get something right. She was memorizing them, us. I did as she did, looking at each of us in turn. Gretamara was twentyish, very gentle-looking; Mar-agern and M’urgi looked to be in their early or mid thirties, both brown from the sun and very muscular.

  Wilvia couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else, not with that diadem, a little older yet. Naumi was about that same age, with wide shoulders and a strong jaw, and a deeply curved mouth. Then Ongamar, smaller and thinner than the others, appearing only slightly younger than I was myself. Some forty years’ apparent difference between oldest and youngest (though one really shouldn’t count Gretamara), and one of us male…

  A shadow on the glass caught my eye. Through the window I saw Ferni s
tanding in deep shadow on the porch, unseen by the others and wearing an expression I could not read. His eyes kept going from Wilvia to M’urgi and back again, like an avid cat watching two birds, unable to decide between them.

  I turned to the Gardener, and demanded, “How did you do it? You are the one who did it, aren’t you?”

  She patted me on the shoulder. “The Gentherans did it, Margaret. As to how? Well, I can hypothesize: Say they picked a woman who had twins in the family. Twins in both families, as a matter of fact, father and mother. Suppose they encouraged the original fertilized egg to split, making two, and then again making four, and then again, making eight…”

  “But there are only seven of her!” Gloriana said.

  “One died,” I said. “My mother had twins, on Mars. I was one. The other died. What, was she supposed to be a spare?”

  The Gardener shook her head at me, and I flushed. “And, I suppose you’re saying the other six were taken away, somewhere.”

  Falija said, “Where they could have grown up just as you did, Grandma, in mirror worlds that reflected everything in your world, each of them thinking she was Margaret, until one was nine, until three more were twelve, until the last three were twenty-two.”

  “How?” demanded Gloriana.

  Gretamara answered. “It may have been in the same way I grew up, Gloriana. In a place that exists but is not real. In a world that may be observed and interacted with, but is not actual. A virtual world, as Earthians would call it, that ended for each of us when we entered a real one. In the end, there were seven real worlds: I was on Chottem; Naumi was on Thairy; Ongamar was on Cantardene; Mar-agern was on Fajnard; M’urgi was on B’yurngrad; and Margaret was on Tercis.”

  “And Wilvia?” Gloriana asked.

  “Here and there,” Wilvia herself said. “B’yurngrad first, then Fajnard, then other places, and finally, I was in Hell.”