The Margarets (45 page)

The two of us walked toward the group, I called out, “Naumi! Is that your name?”

The person I was hailing turned with a polite smile and froze, as though he were seeing a ghost. “My name is Naumi Rastarong.” He paused, swallowed. “And yours and your sister’s, ma’am?”

“Margaret,” I said. “This is Mar-agern.”

“Are we related in some way?” Naumi asked.

One of his friends came up beside him, and Naumi said, “Caspor, they look like family, don’t they?”

Caspor said, “I could work up the odds on their not being, but the resemblance is astonishing. That dip in the upper lip, and the slant of the eyebrows!”

“And their noses,” said another friend. “Even the same color eyes!”

Naumi said, “Jaker, let’s introduce you four. Flek, Jaker, Caspor, Poul.”

We all nodded somewhat distractedly at the two men and two women, and I asked, “Do you remember coming from Earth?”

Naumi cocked his head, obviously wondering at this. “No. As a matter of fact, my earliest memories start at about age twelve, when I survived some kind of accident and was put in the care of my foster father, here on Thairy.”

“Age twelve,” said Mar-agern. “When the proctor came.”

“And nothing happened,” I replied, “but I…that is, we always felt something had.”

“Maybe something did happen,” Falija offered, “and you just didn’t know about it.” She looked up to find five pairs of eyes staring at her as though she had grown another head. “Did I say something odd?” she asked.

Flek stammered, “It’s just…we’ve never seen…we thought you were…I mean…”

“They thought you were somebody’s pet,” said Gloriana indignantly. “This is Falija, our guide. Her people are called the Gibbekot. A great many of them live up there, on the heights, or so she tells me.”

“We thought that’s where the Gentherans live,” said Jaker. “And we’ve never seen any of them. We have no idea what they look like.”

“Rather like me,” said Falija. “Only larger.” She turned toward Naumi. “Excuse me if I am impolite in not using your correct title, but you must be one of the people we’re looking for.”

“What people are those?” Naumi asked.

“The people who began life as Margaret Bain, who were split off from her in some way, at some time in her life, and who seem to be scattered across a sizable chunk of the galaxy. Margaret and Mar-agern were split at age twenty-two. You, Naumi, were evidently split off at twelve.”

“But he’s male!” Mar-agern snapped.

Falija said soothingly, “My mother-mind tells me that in all gendered races, one sex always shares some of the traits of the opposite sex. Perhaps he, Naumi, was split off from among the most male traits Margaret Bain possessed. Or maybe it really doesn’t matter very much.”

“This all seems very unlikely,” I growled peevishly. “Just when I get used to something, the ground shifts.”

A noise from above attracted our attention to the flier, which was approaching a landing pad not far from us. Naumi beckoned everyone to follow him, and we arrived just as a lean, dark-haired person came from the flier, threw his arms around Naumi, smiled across his shoulder at the others, and froze at the sight of Mar-agern, just as Naumi had done.

“Margy?” I thought he said.

“Mar-agern,” she corrected him.

“But you…she…Naumi! Except for the hair, she looks exactly like M’urgi! They could be twins! What’s going on?”

Naumi held up his hand, hushing him. “Ears are quivering over there at the guard post. Let’s find somewhere less public. May I suggest the dorm common room? Plenty of room for the…ah…peo
ple who have joined us. The reunion doesn’t start for two more days, so there’ll be no one there but us.”

Chatting over his shoulder about the weather, the beauty of the sunset, how wonderful it was to see everyone, Naumi led our group past the guards at the gate. We went down a central road and turned right to enter one of the large buildings facing the side street. Inside, Naumi took us straight back through the building to a large room opening onto a central courtyard.

“All right,” Naumi said. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”

We looked at one another. Gloriana took a deep breath, and said, “This all started when Falija’s parents left her with me…” She went on to describe briefly how that had happened. Falija, dutiful as ever, picked up the story from that point: her fostering on Tercis, her acquisition of the mother-mind, the threat on Tercis, our travels to Fajnard, where we had picked up Mar-agern, and our trip to Thairy. She said we had learned that the way-gates go one way in pairs, one coming in, one going out, and had verified that in the cave we had come in through.

“You came through that thing up on the cliff,” Naumi said. “So that pool of light is a way-gate! I found it the first year I was here, but I’d never heard of way-gates, and it seemed a bit dangerous to try on my own. I’d almost forgotten about it!” He turned to Margaret. “But you called me by name. Both of you.”

I said, “When I…that is, when we were a child, I, we invented imaginary people, roles to play, fantasies to act out.
Now me
was a warrior. I said to myself, ‘I will be a queen,’ and ‘will be a’ turned into ‘Wilvia,’ and there really is a Queen Wilvia, but we don’t know where she is. Margy was our shaman…”

“That’s M’urgi,” cried Ferni. “The woman I’m in love with, the reason I came to Thairy! She’s a shaman! She’s been captured by tribesmen. They won’t hurt her, at least not for a while, but…”

“Shhh,” Naumi said. “Just a moment.” He turned to me, I suppose because I was the eldest of the group. “I’ve found it isn’t smart to believe or disbelieve too early in any situation, but one thing we need to know immediately: Are any of you in immediate danger? Are you being pursued? Is there an emergency of some kind?”

I turned to the others, who looked quite blank. Even Falija shook her head, no, not right now.

Naumi turned back to Ferni, took him by the upper arm, and sat him down. “Now. Everyone sit. Flek, will you and Poul get us something to drink? How about our visitors? Are you hungry? Well then, just something to drink while Ferni tells us whatever he has to tell us, because that does sound like an emergency.”

Ferni, openly staring at me-Margaret and other-me-Mar-agern, began his story with the arrival of another Margaret on B’yurngrad. “Her name was Margaret,” he said. “She was twenty-two. She was from Earth.”

“So were we,” Mar-agern and I said simultaneously.

Ferni went on with M’urgi’s name change and education by the shaman. “I wasn’t with her again, not for years,” he said. He told of his search for her, of their ghyrm-hunting in the northlands. “I love her,” he declared almost defiantly. “We love each other, and they took her! The tribes are being eaten by ghyrm, and they want her to kill them all, which she can’t do by herself!”

“The Siblinghood won’t help?” Naumi asked.

“I can’t reach anyone above midmanagerial-not-allowed-to-decide-anything-unless-it’s-in-the-book!” cried Ferni, pounding the table with one clenched fist. “Which makes me think there must be some great crisis going on somewhere. Someone may be available when I get back, two days from now, but I knew our old talk road was assembled here, and I thought we might come up with some answers.”

“Talk road?” asked Falija.

Caspor laughed. “We used to call it that. When we had a problem, we’d talk about it, sometimes forever, and eventually we could almost always figure it out. Ghyrm infestations of tribesmen on another planet are a little outside our expertise, I’m afraid.”

“Possibly not,” said Flek. “The company has been working on a weapon.”

“May I ask, what company?” I asked.

“My grandfather was Gorlan Flekkson Bray, originally from the city of Bray on Chottem. He didn’t like some of the family ways, as I
understand it, so he moved here, to Thairy, to start a company he later called Flexxon Armor. In Bray, he’d traded with the Omniont races for technological information. Here on Thairy, he recruited some very bright young people who developed their own refinements, and he began by manufacturing high-quality armor for the colonies…”

“Are the colonies under attack?” I demanded.

Flek shook her head. “Not yet. Everyone knows what the Mercans are like, though, and we’re right in the middle of Mercan space! So, while we publicly supply armaments for the colony police and the frontier scouts, we’re also developing and stockpiling very-high-tech arms and armament to help the colonies resist invasion. Gorlanstown, up the coast a way, is the only city large enough to furnish our work force. We have twenty different buildings there, under twenty different names, so that almost no one knows the full extent of what we do.”

“Are you sure you should be telling us?” I asked.

Flek smiled, a surprisingly wicked smile. “I would tell Naumi anything. You either are or are not Naumi. If you betray us, you’re not Naumi, and you’re stupid, besides.”

Glory choked back a giggle, but Mar-agern laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re being tested, Margaret! What about the others who obviously aren’t Naumi. Glory? Bamber Joy? Falija?”

Caspor said, “We’ve been told the Gentherans are completely honorable. If this young…Gibbekot is related to them, we may trust her honor. If these are your grandchildren, reared by you, then they, too, should be completely honorable.”

I thought of explaining that neither of them was actually my grandchild, but let it go. It didn’t matter. I trusted the boy at least as much as I trusted Gloriana. “You imply you have something to kill ghyrm.”

Flek nodded. “We developed a metal that kills them, and we’ve been providing the Siblinghood with knives made from it. Recently, we’ve developed a machine that kills ghyrm in confined areas. The Siblinghood sent you one, Ferni, not long ago. Did it work well?”

“So I understand,” he replied.

“That’s good, because the first few models killed humans and a lot
of other creatures as well. The problem was that the genetic code of the damned things is very similar to the genome that ninety-odd percent of all Earth mammals share, including humans.”

“As though humans were the intended target?” Naumi asked.

“We’ve considered that possibility. The rest of the genome is a weird amalgam that no one has been able to identify! We’ve improved greatly on that model, however. What we have now is a small prototype of a weapon that, when we enlarge it, can wipe ghyrm off whole worlds without killing people or umoxen or whatever. The prototype only covers fifty square jorub.”

“Jorub?” I asked.

“Thairy measurement,” said Caspor. “A jorub is ten taga, which is roughly three miles, old Earthian. Say four hundred fifty square miles. But how high?” he demanded of Flek.

Flek said, “The dimensions of the field, length, width, height are variable. Since ghyrm don’t fly, the fifty-jorub figure has a low ceiling, to cover more ground. It would have to be set higher for mountainous terrain, of course. At this point we’re sure it doesn’t kill Earth animals or any creatures native to any of our colony worlds, but there’s always the possibility it will kill some essential something that we aren’t aware of. Eventually, if we can locate the place where the ghyrm are coming from, we plan to drop some really big machines on that location and wipe them out at the source. Anyhow, it seems relevant to our discussion.”

Ferni said earnestly, “For my situation, it would be helpful if we could give the tribes a lot of those knives you mentioned. M’urgi and I both used them when we went ghyrm-hunting. We have to give the tribe something to make them let M’urgi go.”

Caspor had been staring at the ceiling, his lips moving silently, and suddenly he demanded, “Where’s the star map we used to have in here?”

Naumi looked up, puzzled. “Behind the screen, over there. It’s a new one. The old one’s display circuits were so worn, no one could read it. Why do you want a star map?”

“This way-gate business interests me. I’m wondering what the underlying logic of all this business may be. Margaret—if you’ll excuse the familiarity, ma’am—came from Tercis to Fajnard. Then the group
came from Fajnard to Thairy. They tell us the gates are one way, that each place has one gate coming in and one gate going out. It would be interesting to know where all the gates are…” He went to the screen, moved it aside, and stood before the map pedestal, mumbling to himself and switching it back and forth among view planes.

All of us newcomers were staring at Caspor wonderingly. Ferni said, “He’ll do that for quite a while. Caspor has to figure everything out. If it doesn’t have a logical, mathematical solution, he drives himself crazy.”

“If he wants to know where the way-gate is that leads away from here,” said Gloriana, “it’s up in that same cave, just around another corner.”

“There are two of them?” Naumi was astonished. “When I discovered it, I thought there was only one.”

“You saw the outgoing one. The incoming ones are black,” said Falija. “Don’t try entering them from that direction.”

“But I stepped inside the light…”

Falija said, “Yes. And then what?”

“I stepped back out.”

“Then you never went all the way through. You were just inside the gate. If you’d gone on through, you couldn’t have come back. Not the way you went.”

Naumi furrowed his brow, staring at the ceiling as he tried to remember. “There was a dark recess to the left when I went in. The way in must have been in there…”

“We were discussing weapons,” reminded Falija.

Flek nodded. “We have the next model of the machine in the final stages of assembly.”

“Is it something you could do in a hurry?” asked Ferni. “I’m not worried about M’urgi, not really, but—”

“Well, I’m worried about her,” I interrupted. “If she’s one of us. It seems that seven of us may be necessary in order to do something important, and if M’urgi is one of the seven, she’s probably irreplaceable.” I thought about this for a moment, saying with surprise, “Any of us are!”

“Why seven?” demanded Caspor, from his position before the
star map.

“It’s a story,” Falija responded. “About a fish and an angry man.”

“Can you tell it briefly?” Caspor asked, turning toward her.