The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “But I think his painting is awful,” I said once.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think,” my father, Harry Bain, said. “You can find something pleasant to say about it.”

  “The colors were all muddled,” I offered doubtfully.

  “Then you say that you appreciate the earthy, organic tones,” said Louise Bain, my mother.

  One time, when the didactibot and I were getting along better than usual, we decided the wheels on Phobos were greased with meticulous, painstaking, fastidious, and scrupulous insincerity. The didactibot said it could find out if I was musical, or arty, or actorish if I wanted it to, but since no one ever suggested I might be, I assumed children weren’t supposed to have ennui and left well enough alone. Diddybot said I was lazy. I don’t think I really was.

  My pastime was sewing. I did not enjoy it, but it was what Mother did, and Mother felt we should spend time together, “doing something.” I actually learned to sew quite well. I made several sets of clothing for myself that were just as good as those brought from Earth on the Ninja, the Piñata, or the Santa Claus. Those were the three ships the Gentherans had given to Earthgov in 2062, shortly after they discovered Earth. The ships were given those names, the Gentherans said, because they had discovered a new world and appeared out of nowhere bearing goodies. It was supposed to be a pun, a kind of joke. I could understand the Piñata and Santa Claus part but not the Ninja part. Ninjas came out of nowhere, too, but they usually damaged people. Anyhow, people said it was nice to know the ETs had a sense of humor. Earthgov couldn’t pay for the ships, but the Gentherans didn’t mind. They were very helpful. Everyone said so.

  Since very few children had ever been born on Phobos, and I was the only one who stayed, no one thought to make provision for entertaining a child, especially not one who was inquisitive or bored, which I was, by age six. By then I had experienced every variation of every possible human encounter—the public ones, at least—and I was tired of them all. I started hiding in corners and behind doors, listening, trying to learn new words and ideas. I became a sneak. My didactibot defined sneakiness as an antisocial adaptation to threat, mostly engaged in by solitary animals. I thought that was right. I was about as solitary as anybody could be. I didn’t mean to be antisocial, but at least I learned that adults talked about other things when they thought they were alone.

  They had many whispered words and phrases that were evidently not fit for saying out loud. I didn’t know what they meant and didn’t dare ask anyone, but I used them all the time. In my toy village, I staged plays with my dolls as the actors, assigning them forbidden words and phrases.

  “If you don’t behave, the proctor will get you,” said a mother doll to a child doll as they walked down the tiny business street of the toy village, with its toy houses and toy church and toy trees, even though there were no trees on Earth, for no water could be spared for such things. “I’ll tell him you’re not two-three-four.”

  When I was about eight, the didactibot opened a library file for me that had whole books in it, some of it fiction, which is imaginary, and some of it real things I should know about, like history. At first, the fiction confused me. The characters mentioned things the other characters understood but I knew nothing about. The first few times I noticed this, I asked for explanations, only to find that whatever book I was reading immediately vanished from my library file. Babies was a bad word; proliferate was a bad word. Even my dictionary, though I didn’t know it at the time, was carefully pruned to keep inappropriate subjects unthinkable.

  All this did was make me determined to learn everything inappropriate in the whole universe, and I spent day after day digging into diddybot’s files finding out what people didn’t want me to know. That’s where I learned about the six human colonies the Gentherans had secretly set up for us on other planets: B’yurngrad, Chottem, Cranesroost, Eden, Tercis, and Thairy. The settlement on Thairy was discovered by the Mercan Combine and the Omniont Federation in 2080, and they traced the people back to Earth, and they’d been going back and forth ever since. The Mercans and Omnionts were bunches of different races, almost all from carbon-based, free-water planets rather like Earth. There were other combines and federations of other kinds of life, too, but I didn’t know anything about them.

  Sometimes, when Earth was visible, I used my telescope to watch the Mercan and Omniont ships moving between the wormhole and Earth. They were huge ships, the size of little moons, but they might as well have been invisible. No one on Phobos ever mentioned them. The only explanation I could come up with was that all the adults had been on Phobos for so long that they had seen everything, knew what they thought about everything, and didn’t need to discuss anything anymore. They were used to exchanging the same greetings many times each day and hearing the same jokes told over and over. I didn’t think they realized there were no ideas in anything they said or that every single day they said the same words over and over, like birdcalls: chirrup, chirrup, tweet, tweet chirrup; caw caw cwaup, caw cwaup. Not that I had ever heard a live bird, but my didactibot was capable of vocalization!

  Each year more books were added to the library list, and I was careful not to lose any of them. Years later I learned they had been bowdlerized, but the screeners hadn’t been attentive or draconian enough to prevent a steady seepage of real information. Ideas oozed out of books like magma out of volcanoes. They solidified into whole, wonderful worlds, and I populated each one with beings and places I read of or invented: flora, fauna, forests, mountains, seascapes, all of them named, though no one knew those names but me, just as no one knew the names of the people I became in my various worlds: here a warrior who led the tribe through many dangers; there a shaman who could send her spirit to far places; here a healer who knew secret ways to cure sickness; there a telepath who could see into the hearts of others and communicate with animals; here a linguist who could understand all languages, ancient and new; there a queen who inspired her realm; here a spy who found out all the things the queen needed to know.

  At the time it seemed perfectly normal to be six or seven other people. After all, I didn’t have anyone else to play with. I knew, on one level, the different selves were imaginary, but at the same time they felt completely real. “I will be a queen,” I told myself, repeating this until it became a mantra. I, a queen will be. Queen Willbea. No. That had an ugly sound to it. It should be softer. Wilvia. Queen Wilvia. That pleased me, and I bowed to myself in the mirror.

  The spy evolved very naturally. She was the part of me who hid in corners, who was unobserved, who always listened and picked up information. Someone inoffensive that no one would ever suspect. Just like me. I didn’t give her a name. Spies don’t have names, just aliases.

  “Others have been warriors, now me!” I cried to my mirrored self. I spelled it “Naumi.” He was a quiet but very clever one. He wasn’t huge and muscular, so he had to outthink other people. He became the warrior who guarded the borders, who protected the queen, and being him was fun because I liked being a boy sometimes. We had no animals on Phobos or Earth, but there were animals on many of my imagined worlds. Yaboons and gammerfrees and umoxen. I talked to them all the time in my guise as Mar, the telepath, who could talk to animals, and humans. I explored things as dark, smoky Margy, the shaman, the one who would travel in her mind. Traveling in my mind was something I did a lot of.

  The linguist was going to be me, myself, I decided. I loved words. Learning words was the best part of learning anything, so plain Margaret was the linguist. The healer was young and very kind. She wasn’t as clear as the others. I supposed she would come into being later, as I learned more about her particular talents, because a healer would be very useful.

  Together, we were friends and companions. Wilvia the queen occupied a throne and meted out justice. Margy sent her mind to distant places to see what was happening, while the spy sneaked about and learned specific things about people. Naumi built barricades against the dreaded mind-worm, a creature
I had run across in a footnote and could define only by implication. Deadly, certainly. Horrid in some unspecified way, and directed always by some malign and inhuman intelligence. This was enough to make me oppose it, or them, for all my people were on the side of good, always. As warrior, shaman, telepath, healer, spy, linguist, and queen we lived each day among wonders and marvels and were for the most part contented with our lives.

  Shortly before my ninth birthday, one of those days came along that goes wrong from wakeup! My hair had horrid knots in it, my clothes wouldn’t fasten, my head hurt, I spilled my breakfast on some of Father’s papers, and he yelled at me. Halfway through the morning, I grew frustrated over something and heard, with dismay, my own mouth spewing a few of the words I had always kept secret! The result was worse than I had imagined. My mother washed out my mouth with Filth-away and told me I could not go down to the Mars surface on the birthday expedition I had been promised for over a year.

  That trip had been my beacon, my lighthouse of hope, my only chance to see and do something new and interesting. I can’t explain what happened then, though I suppose it was a tantrum. I had read of tantrums, I’d just never had one myself; but this time, I did. I screamed and threw myself on the floor and shrieked all my hatred and boredom, and I was so completely savage that both Mother and Father were frightened. They were no more frightened than I was, but at least they withdrew the punishment. When I got control of myself, more or less, I was servile in my thanks and fulsome in my promises of better behavior in the future.

  Over the following days, however, my abject groveling gave way to an unfamiliar resentment, though only one of my people, Queen Wilvia, felt it deeply. My parents had forced Queen Wilvia to lower herself, to give in to them, and Queen Wilvia had done nothing to merit it. She didn’t like them anymore.

  Wilvia didn’t hate them. Wilvia knew the word hate because I knew it, but experiencing it required a stomach-hurting, churning kind of feeling, the way I had felt during the tantrum. I labeled it carefully. It had been a very strong emotion, the first strong emotion I had ever felt except the arms-from-my-stomach feeling that I got sometimes at night, as though I had arms reaching out of my middle toward something I wanted terribly but had no name for.

  Considering the matter calmly, over several days and wakeful nights, I decided what I wanted more than anything was simply to be somewhere other than Phobos Station. I didn’t say any of this or even convey it by being sulky. I was docile. My “Yes, ma’am”s and “No, sir”s poured forth with honeyed smoothness. On the promised day, the excursion to Mars took place, beginning with a shuttle ride down into the great canyon, where my parents were welcomed by acquaintances of theirs who worked in the hydroponic gardens. In the gardens, I stood transfixed while a green leaf fell, lazily turning, spinning almost purposefully to land by my foot. I was allowed to take it, a souvenir of all that was alive and lovely-smelling. I saw the commissary, which had thick windows looking out over the dramatically shadowed canyon walls. The shadows moved entrancingly as luncheon and birthday cake were served. Then, while the adults talked (about nothing, using the same words, over and over), I excused myself politely and pressed close to the window. Farther down the canyon stood a magical building where Queen Wilvia might live, the ruby dome and golden towers of Dominion Central Authority, the governing body for all free humans who lived off-Earth: us on Phobos and Mars, the people on Luna Station, and those in the six colonies.

  One of the commissary workers happened by and took a few moments to point out several outstanding features in the landscape, including the dome.

  “Who’s in Dominion?” I asked.

  The worker stopped, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean, who?”

  “Is it humans?”

  “Some,” he said thoughtfully. “Some Gentheran, so I’ve heard.”

  “What are they like, Gentherans?”

  He laughed shortly. “They’re little, about your size, and that’s all anybody knows. They wear full suits and helmets that cover their faces.”

  “But they’re part of Dominion.”

  “Well, they found us, and they helped us…”

  “Why did they help us?” I asked. I’d been wondering about this for a long time.

  The worker shrugged. “They told us they owe us a debt, but they didn’t go into any detail. Just said they owed us, take what they were offering and be grateful. That’s what we’re doing, I guess. We are grateful they’ve kept us out of the grip of ISTO, so far…”

  “Isstow?” I had never heard it spoken.

  “Interstellar Trade Organization,” he whispered, with a glance over his shoulder to the table where the adults were sitting. “ISTO has given Earth a provisional membership because the Gentherans asked them to. So long as we have that, the Mercans can’t cut up Earth for scrap.”

  “Margaret,” my father called.

  The worker hurried away. My brain spinning, I went back to the table to learn that one of the maintenance staff had offered to take me up onto the lip of Valles Marineris when she did her routine maintenance visit to a wind generator. It took a moment to take this in, because I was still lost in what the worker had told me.

  “Well, Margaret?” said Mother impatiently.

  “Oh, yes, ma’am, yes, please.” I said, daring to say nothing more than that.

  While my parents remained below with their acquaintances, I was outfitted for the excursion. I wore the helmet and air supply unit I had worn during the shuttle trip, an item owned by every person on Mars or Phobos, just in case, and I was inserted into a dust suit that was actually quite a good fit, as it was owned by a “little person” on the maintenance staff, one Chili Mech, who had been hired, so I was told, at least partly for her ability to get in and out of tight places. Thus clad, I rode beside the worker in the elevator that took us to the rim.

  When we emerged, I followed the worker to the “stem tower,” which is what the upright part of the windmill was called, and was told to stay there while the worker climbed the ladder to the rotor. I was not to wander away or go near the rim, even though there was a protective railing along it. Accordingly, I looped my arm through an upright of the ladder and stared ecstatically at the surroundings, relishing the differences from everything I had known before. There was a real horizon; there was distance and perspective; there was wind sound; there were dust storms moving about like whirling dancers. There were colors in the rocks and hills, new colors!

  I turned to peer along the length of the canyon to the shining dome. There were Gentherans there, Gentherans who had helped Earth so the Mercans couldn’t cut Earth up for scrap. Why would they want to cut up Earth for scrap?

  This train of thought was interrupted by a metallic shriek from above, and I looked up to see that the worker had opened a large door into the rotor housing. The door closed behind her with another shriek, and for a little time, I watched the dust devils that formed out of nothing and engaged in wild dances that carried them halfway to the distant mountains before they vanished. The dance was accompanied by soft, barely heard wind song that subsided into a momentary and unusual calm.

  Out of nowhere, silent as the dried leaf drifting down in the greenhouse, a whirling thing came out of the sky and landed in the dust not fifty feet from where I was standing.

  It looked like a dragonfly, or rather, like the pictures of dragonflies I had seen in my book about the wetlands Earth once had. A hatch opened in the side of the golden thing. A woman came out, unhelmeted, unmasked, her movement stirring the flowing robes she wore into crimson billows.

  “You, girl,” she called in a glorious, glad voice. “Come with me!”

  I felt…I felt something I had never felt before. Joy! Ecstasy! I felt…I felt the arms-reaching feeling, that this was it, the thing I’d needed, that I must go (that I must obey and stay where I was), that the woman was calling me (that I was probably imagining it). Standing there, with my arm thrust tightly through the stanchion, I felt my legs pounding, I saw
the back of myself running away, not wearing a helmet or a suit, just free as air. I reached the woman, saw myself seized up by the woman, was seized up, saw myself taken, was myself taken into the dragonfly, and felt it go.

  Then I swayed with dizziness, my eyes fell shut, and everything slipped away.

  I Am Wilvia

  Aboard the dragonfly, I was seized with shyness. No one else was there but the red-robed woman and a boy about my age. He was the first young person I had ever seen, and he was looking at me just as curiously as I was at him. His hair was dark as the shadows on the canyon walls. His eyes glittered, as though they had lights in them. I liked the way his lips moved, the upper one curving and straightening, like a bow, I thought, one of those bows ancient desert horsemen had used, that same curve.

  The woman lifted me into a seat, murmuring, “Girl, this is Prince Joziré. I am taking him to a place of safety. Joziré needs a companion, and we have chosen you to accompany him.”

  The boy reached out a brown hand to touch my paler one. I felt…I felt the arms-from-my-stomach reaching, and it was almost as though the boy had taken those invisible hands in his own and held them tight. “What’s her name?” he asked the lady.

  “What is your name, girl?” She smiled at me.

  It took only a second before I realized who I was. “Prince Joziré, my name is Wilvia.”

  “Wilvia,” said the boy, returning my smile with a companionable one of his own. “I like that very much.” He turned to the pilot to ask, “And where is it we are going, again, ma’am?”

  “Look there,” said the woman, turning to the controls of her vessel. “Look there, Wilvia. See the road?”