The Margarets (32 page)

Glory said, “I never fed Falija cat food any more than the barn cats get cat food. They eat what they catch. Falija eats what I eat. There’s no cat-food trail anybody can follow, and Falija doesn’t even associate with other cats. She won’t go into the barn at all. Whenever she sees a barn cat, she gets all strange.”

“How do you mean, strange.”

“All sad, upset, silent. So I don’t take her in there.”

“What about the money bag?” I asked her. “The one the people gave to you to pay for Falija’s needs.” Glory had given me the money so Sue Elaine couldn’t borrow it without asking, which was one of Sue Elaine’s many unattractive habits.

“It’s in my boot,” Glory said. “With some dirty socks shoved down on top of it.”

I mused, “It has to have a power source. People use detectors to find metal and things like radioactivity.”

We went down the hill together and up the back stairs to her room. She shook the bag out of her boot, and something else fell out with it: the little book Falija’s mother had given Glory, which Glory had told me about. We had both forgotten what the person had told Glory to do with it. Glory stared at it with her face all knotted up. I felt absolutely idiotic. Here between the two of us we’d forgotten the one thing we were supposed to do for Falija, even though I hadn’t really believed it until tonight!

We talked about a safe place for the little bag, and we eventually decided to bury it next to metal, not as easy as you’d think on Tercis, where metal was rare and expensive. We finally thought of the cemetery fence. Glory got a trowel out of Maybelle’s gardening basket, and we hiked over to the cemetery to bury the bag next to a fence post. If anyone used a metal detector, they’d think it was reacting to the post, though I thought it likely that the bag was of a technology far, far
beyond metal detectors. Chances were, whoever might look for it would be equally sophisticated. Nonetheless, we scattered the place with rocks, weathered side up, then we went up to the thimble-apple rock to be sure we hadn’t left any sign of being there.

When we looked down the meadow, there they were, all Lou Ellen’s friends with Lou Ellen among them, moving out into the moonlight on the meadow, dancing like leaves dance on the wind, almost weightless, floating up and down, free and glorious, as though they had forever to dance in. They sang, too, with Lou Ellen’s voice among them, joyful and blithe.

I looked down at Glory. She was gazing down the hill with such longing that it almost broke my heart. She wanted to go down there with Lou Ellen. I started to say something, then stopped. Some things couldn’t be fixed with words. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, then stared, way across the meadow. I followed her gaze. There was the woman in red, looking straight at us from the edge of the trees. I could feel the woman’s eyes on me, almost stroking. I lifted my hand; the woman smiled and waved and disappeared into the forest.

“Who is she?” Glory asked.

“A dream from my past,” I said. “A woman who flies a dragonfly ship. Everything down there in the valley is a dream.”

Falija wasn’t around when we got back, but the next morning, Glory came up to apologize for forgetting about the book.

“I forgot what your mama told me to do, Falija. I was supposed to read it to you when you began to talk.”

“I’ve been talking for a long time,” Falija said, with a little frown between her eyes.

Glory flushed. “I know, Falija. It’s my fault. I’d forgotten it until last night. Now listen.” She opened the book. On each page there were only a few words. The first page started out: ‘Our word for insight is ghoss.’ Ghoss was spelled out as guh-HOSS, so the reader would know how to pronounce it. The next page had another few words, and so on, a few hundred of them altogether.

Then I took the book to look at it, and Falija stared at me in a funny way and said, “Please, read it to me again, Grandma.” I did. When I’d finished, Falija went off in a corner by herself after putting the book on one of my bookshelves, hidden behind some other books.

That night, Falija came into my bedroom and climbed up onto my bed, digging her claws into my shoulder. I woke to see her frightened face inches from my own, eyes as big as moons. I held her while she curled up on my chest, shivering as though she’d been frightened half to death.

“What is it?” I whispered. “Falija, what is it? Tell me.”

“In my head,” she said. “There’s a whole world in my head, and I can’t shut the door in between…” Then she said something in another language that went on and on, and she shut her eyes and just lay there, shivering like an abused animal. At first I didn’t realize what she’d said, but then it came to me. She was speaking Gentheran. I wrapped my arms around the little person, to comfort her, and we stayed that way for a long, long time. Falija would shiver, then she’d calm down, then she’d make this pitiful little noise and shiver all over again.

“My home,” she whispered. “My home is the land of Perepume on the world of Chottem. I can see the cliffs of Perepume, where the spray from the green ocean smells like spicebush and pine. I see the forests, where the wind sings in the boughs. I hear the tongues of Perepume, lilting and laughing through the long nights. They were there, inside my head, in my mother-memory. The words you read to me opened the door to the mother-memory all at once, and it scared me. I didn’t know where I was!”

I held her tight. “That must be how your people pass on information,” I said, trying to sound very calm, as though it wasn’t anything unusual or strange. “I wish our people could do it that easily. I’ll bet you know all the history and geography now, without even having to read a book or study about it.”

Falija looked confused for a moment, but then her ears came forward, and she did her cat smile. “I think I do. I really do.”

“That would be wonderful,” I said enthusiastically. “Gloriana will be so jealous! Just think, no homework.”

“What’s homework?” Falija asked.

I explained about school. It seemed to soothe her to hear me talk, so I went on about being in school myself, when I was younger, and how difficult some classes were. “But your way, you just have one sort
of scary night—and that’s our fault for forgetting the book until now. But, you have it! It’s all right in there. Oh, Falija, I really envy you.” And it was true, I did.

Falija curled a little tighter against my chest and seemed to doze off for a while. Then she woke up, and said, “Grandma, they have human people in my world.”

I half opened one eye and said sleepily, “Do you suppose that’s why your family left you with Gloriana? Because they already knew about human beings?”

Falija looked puzzled. “Maybe. They’re in my world…no, a special few of them live among us. And there are bad creatures, Thongals. They were on Fajnard, too. They tried to capture the king and queen of the Ghoss, who barely escaped…” Her eyes got big, and she didn’t say anything more for a long while. I slept.

“It’s part of a story,” said Falija loudly enough that my eyes snapped open. “It starts at the beginning, and it goes on to the end. Shall I tell it to you?”

“You can’t just pick out the important parts?” I suggested sleepily.

“No. One tells it all, or one doesn’t tell it. I think Glory should hear it, too. It’s a long story…” She stood up. “I’ll go get her. We’ll come back here.”

And she was out the door, silent as a shadow.

They came back up the hill together, Falija draped over Glory’s shoulder. I turned on the light as they came near, the light scoring deep shadows into the ledge before the house and throwing an amber glow on the bottoms of the branches.

Glory opened the door and yawned. “Falija says you have something important going on here.”

I was at the stove, putting on the kettle. Falija jumped up on the sofa while Glory came to set out the cups and get the sugar and tea out.

“What kind of tea, Grandma?” she asked.

“Oh, that strong one I use to wake up with,” I said. “I’ll never get back to sleep, after, but never mind.”

Glory measured the tea. The kettle boiled, the tea was steeped, and we moved over to the sofa, where I put my nose in the steaming cup and felt better immediately.

“All right,” I said to Falija. “What is it?”

Falija said, “I now have the memory I got from my mother before I was born. It just didn’t open up until tonight.”

“How did this mother-memory get into your head?” I asked.

Falija got wrinkles between her eyes, looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “In early pregnancy, our females duplicate a certain part of their brain, and the duplicate moves down what’s called an epispinal duct to the womb, and this mother-brain part connects to the baby’s mind before the skull grows around it. Then, after the baby is born, that mother-mind gradually makes connections with the baby’s brain, and, when the child learns to speak our language, the words link up and open the way to all that information.”

I chewed on this for a while. “Not until the child learns to speak?”

Falija said, “That’s why the book was so important. Ideas are expressed in words, and even the ones that are thought of in pictures or feelings need words to decode them, so babies have to have words in our language to tie them to the mother-brain. If I’d grown up among my own people, I wouldn’t have needed the book, because I’d have heard the words from the first. It’s very interesting, isn’t it? There’s so much of it, it will take a long time to absorb it all.”

I said, “You already know some things, though. You know where you’re from.”

“From Perepume, yes. I know there are humans on my world, and the humans call the planet Chottem. Perepume is a separate part, a…continent. I have memory of a world called Thairy and one called Fajnard. My people live on both of those as well, and so do humans. I know the names of a lot of other worlds, all of them occupied by different people, all spread out and joined together by…channels, ropes…”

“Wormholes?” I offered.

“Spcc’ci in my language,” she crowed. “Yes, wormholes. The whole network is huge. Almost none of the people in it know about all the other people in it, but my people know secret ways to get from place to place very quickly. And I know the story, the one I said both you and your grandmother should hear.”

“The one you woke me up about,” I said.

“That one. Yes.”

“Well, nighttime is a good time for storytelling. Let me turn out some of these lights. Open the stove door and bring the teapot over here, Glory. We’ll sit in firelight.”

And then, to Falija, “Tell the story.”

“In the long, long ago, the Gentherans came to Earth the very first time…”

“Not that long,” I said. “It was only a century or so.”

“No.” Falija’s eyes glowed in the light of the stove. “You mustn’t interrupt the story. The first time Gentherans decided to visit Earth thousands and thousands of years ago, they discovered your people living in caves and making crafty things with their hands and thinking crafty thoughts. Your people fought with each other quite a lot. The Gentherans are a curious people, very interested in other beings, and they thought your people were intriguing, so they took some of them to Fajnard, near where a lot of my people, the Gibbekot, live. They gave the humans a place with caves to live in, near good soil where they could plant crops. After that it seemed like no time at all, they were overcrowded and began to fight with one another.

“So, the Gentherans decided to change the humans a little, not so much as would make them unhuman, but enough to make them less likely to overcrowd and fight. Sometimes a Gibbekot baby dies before the mother-mind leaves the mother’s head, and when that happens, our doctors can take the partial mind and give it to other creatures. So the Gentherans obtained an unfinished mother-mind from my people, one that had our language in it and some of our other talents, and the Gentherans cloned enough of these mother-minds to give them to all the humans.

“In the humans, it had an unforeseen side effect. Some Gibbekot are almost telepathic, and the partial mind that they cloned for humans had that quality, and in the humans it was stronger! Suddenly, the humans understood one another better, they stopped lying and cheating and fighting each other, their lives became much more contented, and remarkably, they passed the mother-mind on to their children! They named themselves the vabil ghoss, which is to say
those having insight,
in my language. ‘Enlightened ones,’ I guess you’d say.

“Both the Gibbekot and the vabil ghoss still share the highlands of
Fajnard very happily. In time, they dropped the vabil part of their name and were known just as the Ghoss. Ghoss do some things better than we do, and we do some things better than they do, and Ghoss went with my people when colonies were established on Thairy and Chottem.”

I frowned in concentration. “Your people must have liked us a good deal!”

“The Gentherans had a special reason to be interested in humans. That’s why they’re so set on helping you. Gloriana, you know your cousin Trish? You’ve told me about her, and I’ve seen her because I was curious. She’s not quite complete, and I’ve even heard you, Grandma, feeling sorry for her.”

“So?” said Gloriana.

“In time long past, an armada of Gentheran ships was traveling near a variable star, and the radiation caused a mutation in all the unborn babies. They were born physically deformed and mentally limited. Their fingers never developed, they couldn’t stand erect or learn to speak, and because of that they couldn’t access their mother-minds and were forever trapped in babyhood. Even though they couldn’t mature into true Gentherans, they did mature sexually and were able to have children. Because they were mute and crippled, our people called them, ‘the afflicted.’ Our people grieved over them just as you do over Trish, Grandma.

“When the Gentherans found your race, oh, many thousands of years ago, they had some of the afflicted ones with them. Your people were…silly about them. They just loved them. Your people, especially your children, were just delighted with these poor, handicapped Gentherans, and the poor, handicapped Gentherans liked them just as much.