The Margarets (53 page)

We walked for what seemed a very long time. We could see one another, but the distance stayed the same. The floor seemed to roll away beneath us like a treadmill that welled up from some point in the center of their circle and flowed out continuously, keeping us in the same place.

M’urgi called, “Stand still a minute.”

We did so, watching her. She stood very straight, concentrating, and a trail of light shot upward from her forehead, high above us all. I thought of her leaning upon the substance that fills the universe, which separates matter and transmits light and knows and remembers everything.

“Shut your eyes,” M’urgi called. “Hold out your hands. We’re right next to one another.”

I reached out my hands, grasping at others I felt on either side, the three of us tugging and sidling as we connected with the rest.

“Now,” cried M’urgi. “Open your eyes but hold on tight.”

We stood in a circle only a few steps across. In the center, suspended in space, I saw a little creature, legs crossed, a book on its lap. Across the pages words ran endlessly from right to left, left to right, top to bottom, bottom to top, interweaving with one another.

At the same time I saw this, I saw what the others saw, just as I had used to sense as they did when they were part of me. M’urgi saw a pillar of fire, words of smoke pouring up through it. Naumi saw a tree, its roots extending into the depths beneath us, its higher branches beyond his sight above, and every leaf a journal. Wilvia saw a dragon with jeweled scales, each one engraved with a history. Ongamar saw a stone pillar reaching from the beginning to the end of the universe, with little beings swarming all over it, carving words. Mar-agern saw herds of creatures in a meadow, each of them reciting the story of a people. Gretamara saw an anthill, each ant carrying a grain of sand on which was engraved the chronicle of a living race.

I was the eldest. I swallowed deeply, and asked, “Are you the Keeper?”

It looked up from its book, out of the flame, out of the leaves, the dragon’s eyes, the words on the stone, the meadow creatures,
the anthill. “Think of it!” it said wonderingly. “One road is seven roads, walked simultaneously by one creature. How did you manage that?”

Wilvia smiled at the dragon charmingly. “Only through great sacrifice, Keeper.”

“Patience,” said M’urgi.

“Labor,” said Mar-agern.

“And torment,” Ongamar offered.

Naumi shook his head. “Only by doing our duty, but the how is not as important as the why, Keeper—”

“—which is to heal our people,” interrupted Gretamara.

The little man hummed, the ants hummed, the tree hummed. “I have not been near creatures in a very long time. The rule is, one must have a bell and a gate, but I thought I’d made both very difficult indeed. Yet here you are. What have I to do with you? Who are you?”

“The human race,” I said.

M’urgi added, “You have our history in your smoke.”

“Oh, yes,” it said, peering at us with myriad eyes. “You’re not very old, and you’re quite ignorant.”

“We are imperfect,” said Gretamara to the ants, who had flown together in a swarm before her. “We are lacking. We have no memory of what we were, and thus no reach toward what we may become. We desperately need to know our past, but in all the universe only the Keeper has the racial memory of mankind.”

“That is true. I have the histories of every race, every kind, all the move-about, reproduce creatures, and also those of others that have lived without moving or creating. I have the secret lives of stones and the memories of stars. I have the initial impetus, the births of all galaxies, the deaths of a good many. I have millions of years of some races and a few moments of others. Their souls are here.”

“Their souls?” faltered Ongamar. “Of every creature?”

“Is each of you a creature?” asked Keeper.

“That’s a trick question,” Naumi said quickly. “We couldn’t have found you if we each were a separate creature. No, all of us are one creature.”

“I know that,” said Keeper. “All of you are human, and billions
more are human, and all humans are one creature, sharing one soul. Yes. And one for birds, and one for the dinosaur…”

“One soul for the dinosaur?” asked Mar-agern. “Then one soul for the umoxen, as well?”

“Oh, an enormous, ramified soul for umox, going back to the very beginning of life on its planet. Umox arose from a star race that went before, as the soul of Bird arose from the soul of Dinosaur. The soul of the scurrying lizard inhabits every warm-blooded winged thing, the soul of the brachiating gibberer inhabits the soul of man, and the soul of great singers and sages inhabits the soul of umox and chitterlain…Oh, yes. Keeper has seen this. Keeper has perceived it.”

“But no…no soul for each of us?” asked Margaret.

The man turned his head, the tree turned a twig toward her, each leaf an eye that seemed to look into her heart.

“Each of you?” the Keeper asked. “One brief life of limited experience, barely informed? Full of false starts, marred by misinformation, rife with regret? Much given to embarrassment and sorrow, lit here and there, if you are lucky, with delight. Do you really want to spend an eternity being only that? What of the lives you’ve lived within your minds, and what of your other selves in other worlds? Each time you make a choice, your universe splits. One of you does one thing, one of you does the other. One of you goes on to fulfillment and joy, the other is mired in pain and anxiety, each in a separate world, but they are all you…

“All the fragments, all the sundered parts come here, melded then into a single me-ness with all possibilities realized, all pains endured, all joys delighted in, one mind containing all that it was and could have been or hoped to be or imagined itself to have been!

“You need not go back to fix it, Margaret. In some world, you did fix it! You need not go back to unsay it, Mar-agern. In some world, it was unsaid. Ongamar, in some life it was untouched. And when you are assembled, you will know it, in that everlasting instant…” Keeper paused, stared, as if dreaming.

“An everlasting instant?” whispered Naumi.

“That instant when the whole being that is you is aware of itself as a whole and dances together upon the green meadows of eternity in a dance that seems endless…”

“Only that instant?” asked Wilvia longingly.

“Long enough for you to
know
! Once you know, you know. Once you are complete, you are complete forever. And all that, every moment of every day of every lifetime, makes only one leaflet growing on the sprig of humanity. Still, that leaflet is one I keep forever…”

Everything became very still. All movement stopped. The Keeper swelled in size: “The Gentherans sent you here, did they not?”

“The Gentherans are our friends,” said Gretamara.

“Keeper knows that. You are here because of them, and because my daughter, the Gardener, has espoused your cause. You are here because she and her friends conspired so that nature’s laws might be broken without disobeying me. Ah, she is clever, my daughter. Wily, too. And now she sends you here, telling you what?”

“Telling us nothing,” said Wilvia in her most queenly voice. “Except that we may die in the attempt. We have agreed to that, even if this plea is fruitless. It is a chance we took to benefit our people.”

Keeper seemed to ponder this before replying. “Who is to say the memory of all mankind would work for you as you believe it will? What do other races think? Perhaps they would prefer you fade and die, becoming only a footnote in my journal. Who would speak for you?”

“We would,” said someone outside the circle. Margaret looked over her shoulder. “Falija,” she murmured.

“Falija,” the little person affirmed. “Together with a number of our people, Keeper.” She murmured their names as they came into view, a great many of them, gathering into a ring around the seven. “My parents, their Gibbekot and Gentheran friends, their friends of other races who have found humans to be worth the saving.”

Naumi tried to see into the fog, but saw only shapes there. He heard a chittering, a birdsong, a bray that was half cow, half horse, the chatter of people.

Falija said, “My people have watched the human struggle for thousands of years. Without the means to be good, still they struggle to be so. Seeing such a struggle, any ethical and powerful race would do what could be done to ease it. Such a powerful race would say, ‘Other races have a racial memory, can we not provide man with one of his own?’

“We could try. Still, no matter how much truth it might contain, the whole would be a lie. Should we ask a race to gamble its future on the basis of a lie? Only Keeper records only truth.”

“True,” said Keeper.

Falija went on, “In the great history of the Pthas we read of the delegation they sent to the Keeper. They found you, they spoke to you, you spoke to them. They asked a boon, you granted it. Will you do as much for Genthera?”

Keeper seemed to look elsewhere, into infinite distances. “Keeper might not will to do it for Humans, who are silly infants, meriting very little. Keeper might not do it for the Gibbekot or their Gentheran kin, for even they are not yet fully grown.”

A sigh breathed through the circle, the tiniest moan.

“But,” said Keeper, “Keeper would do it for umoxen, whose soul is far older than Genthera.” He stared at Mar-agern, and Mar-agern returned the stare, astonished.

Keeper turned to M’urgi. “M’urgi, Keeper would do it for chitterlain, whose ancestors moved among the stars a billion years ago. Ongamar, Keeper might do it for the humble Hrass. Naumi, Keeper might do it for the gammerfree, and Margaret, for the hayfolk Dame. And you, Wilvia and Gretamara, Keeper might do it for a Trajian juggler upon whom one took pity and the other avenged. Yes, all of them are older, and far wiser, than mankind.

“You were kind to their people,” said Keeper, focusing on each of us in turn. “There will be a price to pay, of course, but Keeper is fond of their people, and so would be kind to your people.”

Into the wordless and shocked silence, Wilvia spoke. “We thank you, Keeper.”

The beings who had surrounded us had vanished, drawn backwards into the great wind that came all at once, loosening the grip of our seven pairs of hands and wrenching us apart. I, Margaret, felt them blown away into the howl of a black storm, bodies incapable of movement, wills paralyzed, minds in confusion, scraps of perception driven into an unimaginable otherwhere, each of us holding, only briefly, the same clear, perfectly accepted thought.

Well, this is death, but we have done what was to be done.

And yet I was still somewhere, with the Keeper, now in a shape I
have tried since to remember and cannot. It spoke into my ear: “Don’t forget what your father told your mother, Margaret. About what he was trying to do on Mars…”

“Father never really knew what would happen,” I cried.

“No. The Scientist does not know the result until it happens. You are part of its workings. I am the record it keeps of what succeeds and will be used again and what fails and will be excluded forever…”

And then, only silence.

On the world called Shore by the people who lived there, and Hell by those who didn’t, the people woke one morning with a strangeness in them. None of them rose from their beds. They just lay there very quietly, thinking.

“Did you know we were humans once?” said one to his mate.

“I didn’t know it before,” she said. “We were humans when we came here on the moon. Except it wasn’t a moon. It was a starship, a Quaatar starship.”

“Do you think we are human now?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “If we’re not, why do we remember being? I remember we gave up living in trees…”

“I remember we killed Earth,” he said.

“I remember we were going up the river soon to cut trees to make a new town and build many boats…”

“I remember we have to make room for more…”

Outside the house, some of the people were moving about. The town leader came out of her house and sat down on her stool, by the door. Each day the leader did this and the people came with their questions.

They gathered now.

The leader did not wait for questions. “Mika, Dao, Tinka. We have made a nasty at the creek. It smells bad. Nothing grows there. Dig a pit inside the forest, put all the nasty into the pit, and cover it with earth. In time it will feed trees. Choun, Bila, Fet, consult your minds and make a plan so no more nasty happens, then come tell me.” The leader fell silent.

“Today we plan to go upriver and make a new town,” said one of them. “We will cut trees to make room for more?”

“Not today,” said the leader. “Today we count people. Today we count how many trees each person uses every year. Today we count fishes for each person, mollusks for each person, freshwater for drinking. Today we begin to learn how many people can live on this world without ruining it.”

“What shall the rest of us do?” someone asked helplessly.

“Today,” the leader said, “you all stop making room for more and take time to remember.”

On Tercis, the Gardener waited, her head bowed. Falija had gone. Time stretched thin, the sound of its tenuity becoming intolerably shrill. No one returned. At last, with a shuddering sigh, the Gardener entered the way-gate before her.

On Fajnard, she found the Siblings guarding the way-gate. “All quiet, ma’am,” they reported.

“Come with me,” she said.

On Thairy there were other Siblings to join the group, and again on B’yurngrad, Cantardene, and Chottem. They stepped into the last gate but one and emerged into the buried starship on the planet called Hell. A naked woman lay on the metal floor, faceup, hands folded upon her breast. Gardener squatted beside the body, laying her long hands on the woman’s face and neck.