The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “You probably wouldn’t,” I said without thinking. “They wear suits and helmets. Nobody ever sees them.”

  She looked momentarily offended, then relaxed. “Of course. I’d forgotten that you were on Mars.”

  The upshot was, I signed, and she gave me an identity card that had a password under a seal and told me where to go on the following day and not to mention it to anyone, not my parents, not my boyfriend, if I had one, or anyone else. I really would have loved to tell Bryan, but he was working that evening, so I was saved from temptation.

  The following day, I went as directed, presented my card, seal intact, and was fed through a whole series of identification procedures involving eyes, fingers, biometric, physiometric, how I smelled, and the like. Finally, I was shown to a seat at the back of a windowless room containing a large conference table and chairs plus the usual side table holding drinks: nova-coffee, nova-tea, bottled Swish in three flavors that differed only in color. Each chair was equipped with a full-sense viewer, very advanced technology that I’d been exposed to only a time or two. I was gawking at the viewers when three of my fellow students came in, we nodded to one another without speaking, and they sat down at some distance. At first I was surprised to see them, for these very elite students were not particularly good at their studies. They made error after error in class (many of which our teachers simply ignored); on written tests they always scored incredibly well (adjective chosen for precision, in that no one believed the scores were real). They had a sneering attitude toward students from less exalted backgrounds than their own very moneyed ones. All of them had family members among the Directors of the College, and that probably explained why they were here. I had bested all of them scholastically, which had led more than one of them to advise me, sneeringly, that my test scores didn’t matter, for the “way things were,” they would succeed, and I would fail. So far as I could tell, none of them had any experience whatsoever with the way things really were, having been untouched by reality since birth.

  Within moments, doors at the other side of the room opened, and several humans and Gentherans (small, as I’d been told, and in suits and helmets) filed in and were seated. I was so amused to see that the Gentherans were seated in elevator chairs, permitting them to rise to the level of the table, that for a moment I did not recognize that one of the ascending chairs held someone I knew: Chili Mech! She was staring at me.

  I grinned and waved. She said something to her neighbor, lowered her chair, and came over to me. “Margaret, is that you?”

  “Chili. It’s so good to see you! I had no idea you’d be here.”

  “You must be one of the ACoLaP students! Good for you. You always said you were going to learn every language in the universe.”

  “If I said anything that egotistical, I was very young and foolish.”

  Chili said, “I must get back. They’re going to convene. In case you didn’t know it, Margaret, this is a meeting of both Dominion Central Authority and Earthgov Executive Council. You’ll understand why when you hear what’s going on. Can we get together during the break?”

  “Certainly,” I said. “I’d love to.”

  When the roll was called, I noted there were representatives present from the colonies, Chili being the one from Mars. The Gentheran names were real tongue twisters, the first speaker being named Sister someone. It sounded a little like Lorpa, if one accepted that there wassomething subtly wrong with both the L and the R. We were not allowed to record or take notes, but nothing had been said about not remembering, and I have a very good memory.

  Sister Lorpa spoke Earthian very clearly, in a high, sweet voice, starting without preamble to describe something called the “ghyrm.” I recognized this as a Cantardene word meaning “eater.” She said Gentherans and Earthians had become aware of these creatures when several hundred human bondslave miners on Cantardene were killed by them.

  “At the time,” she said, “we considered this to be some kind of plague that would affect only people on Cantardene. We were shortly disabused of this idea when several humans in transit to Chottem from bondslave planets farther into Mercan space were also slain by the ghyrm. Since that time we have bent all our resources toward discovering what the ghyrm are and where they come from. Thus far, we have had virtually no success in answering the latter question.”

  She went on to tell us what her people had learned about the ghyrm. It was not a bacterium or virus, it was an organism that could take various shapes or appear to do so. Genetically, it was all one creature, and perhaps it had been cloned, though it appeared and acted differently in different circumstances or, possibly, when directed by some outside agency. It could take over a person or invade a small area and move rapidly from person to person to wipe out all human life as it had done on Cranesroost, where Settlements Two, Five, and Six were wiped out.

  We students were not the only ones who exclaimed at this. Evidently, almost no one in the room had known about Cranesroost. The speaker asked us to put on the viewers, which we did. Silence fell. Someone, somewhere, turned them on.

  The technology was beyond anything I had experienced. I actually became the person on Cranesroost. I was a settlement captain who knew all about the place. The settlement lay just within a hillside grove of miraculous trees, huge as cathedral towers and as bulky, effective barriers to wind and the worst of weather. Just outside the grove, the glittering sand of the lakeside sloped toward silver water, placid in moonlight, riffling recurrently as though from something breathing on the farther shore, perhaps something very large, one titanic arm pillowing its head as relaxed lips puffed, and puffed, and puffed, touching the quivering surface with the gentlest of exhalations.

  I was the captain of the settlement, standing at the edge of the lake near a roost of cranes that appeared almost real in this quiet light. I knew the children had built them out of bits of wood and pipe, an evocation of times long gone, a time when cranes really lived, danced, mated, hatched, brought forth young. Seeing them in the moonlight, I, the captain, almost believed in them, or something like them. The Cranesroost settlement had seen birds, or things like birds. They didn’t fly, but they ran very fast, and they ate the fishy things in lakes as cranes no doubt had done. We settlers called them fishers and hadn’t learned much about them yet, for winter was pressing, and shelter had to come first. Observing birds would no doubt be a pleasant pastime in later years.

  Unknown things were worrisome, the captain thought, even though the Gentherans gave the planet a good bill of health. There were native creatures, yes, some of them poisonous but none of them ferocious or sneaky or particularly intelligent, being more of the “I’ll leave you alone, you leave me alone” variety. The captain relied on this when he had sent the scouting team out early that morning, but if there was nothing dangerous out there, they should have been back.

  So he stood watch, waiting for three men and one woman who trekked around the lake to the north. Their orders had been to go as far as they could go by noon, then turn around and come back by suppertime. Suppertime was over hours ago. Suppertime was a dimming memory.

  “Captain?”

  “Who?”

  “Me, sir. Gruder.”

  “I haven’t seen a thing, Gruder.”

  “This isn’t like Kath.”

  The captain snorted. “It isn’t like any of them. You should be getting some sleep.”

  “The little one keeps waking, asking for his ma. I keep telling him she’ll be home in the morning. Do we send out a search party, or not?”

  “I don’t know. I thought four of them was enough to be safe, you know. Four pairs of eyes. Eight strong legs and arms.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know what to think. Maybe they saw something a little farther off and kept going after noon. Then, coming back, the dark caught up to them. Maybe they’re lying up there along the bank, just waiting for light.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “Let’s, a
nd if they did, damn ’em, they can stand watch for the next hundred nights. Worrying us like this…what’s that?”

  “Where?”

  “Down there, north. Along the lakeside. I saw light, fire. Like a torch. See it, there it goes again!”

  We watched, nearly hypnotized as the one spark was repeatedly occluded by trees, then steadied, became two, then four, moving slowly in a line along the shore. The captain sighed. “I guess they got tired. Decided to rest before they made the trip back. Or maybe they’re carrying something. Go on back to bed, Gruder. She won’t be here for another hour, at least.”

  The other man yawned widely, took a deep, relieved breath, and returned to his cabin, one of the first ones built, the nearest to being finished. In the little paddock alongside the house a goat bleated, briefly disturbed in her rest. The captain stayed where he was, though he sat down on a stump to rest his legs. The sparks continued their arc around the edge of the lake, growing in brightness, then disappearing behind the nearer trees and emerging again, four of them, bright as stars.

  “Welcome,” he said at last, when the missing four stumble up from the shore.

  “Captain?” said Kath.

  “Yes. And Gruder’s been up, too, waiting for you. Where in the hell did you all get to?”

  “Brought you a present,” said Kath. “Something we found.” She approached, holding something out in one hand. We all peered at it.

  “What’s that? Beads? On a thong or a thread? Now who in heaven’s name put that together on this world?”

  Kath shrugged as I took it from her. “It was just lying there, on the bank, on top of a rock. Like it had been put there for us to find. Red bead, yellow one, blue one, a couple black ones. Funny, huh?”

  “So, what kept you?”

  She rolled her head on her neck as though it hurt. “We just…I guess we lay down for a while. Must have fallen asleep. We’re really tired.” She yawned, her eyes rolling away from me in the torchlight, whites showing all around like a frightened animal.

  “Kath?” I said urgently. “You all right.”

  “Oh, sure, Captain. Sure. Just tired. See you in the morning.”

  I, we, the captain, glanced once more at the thing in our hands. A mere thread, like a bit of string, with half a dozen beads on it. Now who in heaven’s name…Well, it didn’t matter. Let it go. We could talk about it in the morning…

  We felt only a few moments of what followed before someone, blessedly, shut off the viewer. There were exclamations, cries of distress, a general murmur that slowly quieted.

  Sister Lorpa was still on her feet. “The beads were actually a ghyrm, perhaps more than one. We have established that the ghyrm take over the minds of the persons who carry it or them. We infer the ghyrm are directed by a reasoning force that may be a part of the ghyrm race or something quite outside it. This is pure speculation. We don’t know.”

  Someone asked how the Cranesroost infestation had been discovered.

  “In settlement Six, the last person infested woke to find everyone dead and the thing around her throat. Though close to death, she was able to com the neighboring village, to describe the thing, to say she could not get it off her and that it was killing her. The person she reached followed standard emergency procedure: That is, he made no effort at rescue and informed Dominion immediately. Dominion personnel in noncontact suits found everyone in the three villages dead. They scouted the areas around the surviving villages and found nothing like the necklace of small beads mentioned in the com. From the captains of the destroyed villages, they retrieved the sensory recorders, one of which you have just experienced.”

  Someone said indignantly, “Cranesroost was off the wormtrails! Its location was known only to the settlers and to Dominion! How did the ghyrm find it?”

  This led to charges and countercharges, back and forth, much heat, little light, and the Chairman put an end to the discussion.

  Sister Lorpa concluded, “We have had some breakthroughs. We have succeeded in capturing ghyrm, caging them so they cannot escape, and habituating some of our members to their presence. These captive ghyrm are infallible locators of others of their kind. Certain members of the Siblinghood have been trained to hunt ghyrm, using a captive ghyrm as ‘finders.’ They are very successful on a planetary surface, though all efforts to use them in space have failed.”

  That item disposed of, the Chairman introduced an elderly woman as “a member of the Siblinghood, Lady Badness.” I saw one of my fellow students silently convulsed at this introduction, though from the look of the lady’s face, amusement was not appropriate.

  She introduced herself as the chairman of a biracial committee of Gentherans and Humans that had spent some forty-odd Earth-years trying to devise a nontraumatic method of depopulating Earth in order to prevent the final collapse of the biome on the one hand and a visit by ISTO slaughterers on the other. She spoke of the colonies as “emergency, last-ditch attempts to guarantee human survival and the survival of thousands of species of Earth organisms in case the slaughterers could not be forestalled.”

  She said she had several points to make. I set myself to remember them.

  Firstly, she said Earth’s governments had been warned that depopulation was an absolute necessity for Earth’s survival. Secondly, she said the government had justified its inaction by quoting the standard statistical projections indicating that population growth was slowing, that as soon as all parts of the world had equal economic opportunities, population growth would stop, and total population might even drop. Thirdly, she admitted the standard projections were irrefutable but totally irrelevant, as human population had exceeded the number Earth could support over a century ago. Even while ice caps melted, while prehistoric aquifers dried up and the lands over those aquifers began to subside, governments had refused to acknowledge that humans were responsible. Only when aliens arrived in starships to tell them the end had come did governments try to deal with the situation, and by then, it was too late.

  She said, “Outshipment, as you know, has slightly slowed but failed to stop the process.”

  Several people around the table uttered angry variations on “We know all that,” rather loudly and, I thought, rudely.

  Lady Badness merely stared at them until they subsided. “Of course you do. So do I, but we’re putting it into the record one more time, just in case at some future time someone questions what we’ve said and thought and decided. This brings us to the fourth and final point. We must choose between two repellent futures:

  “A, we do nothing, and the ISTO slaughterers will kill over ninety percent of all of the people now alive on Earth. I have seen records of that process. The best one can say for it is that it doesn’t take long. It is both quicker and bloodier than the demise of Cranesroost. It is not a process I wish on any population, however, no matter how pigheaded that population may be.

  “B, we impose the solution Dominion and the Siblinghood have been working on since Dominion was formed: the sterilization of ninety-nine point something-or-other percent of Earth’s population.”

  I happened to be looking across the table at Chili. I saw her shoulders heave as she took a deep breath. I glanced at my fellow students. They looked outraged. I had been numb since the Cranesroost experience, and I stayed that way.

  Lady Badness went on:

  “Gentheran Research Laboratories has completed testing of the planetary sterilant. It will kill no one. It will simply make ninety-nine-plus percent of the fertile persons on Earth live out their lives without progeny. A small, random fraction of human beings has a genetic resistance to the sterilant. This genetic resistance is found among all subgroups of the population. There will be no genocide of any cult, culture, or coloration.”

  I sat with my mouth open, unable to believe what I was hearing. Around the table were murmurs and outcries. My fellow students were now whispering to one another.

  “Those affected by the sterilant will produce a pheromonic byproduct attrac
tive only to other sterilized persons. There will be no other changes. People will continue to ‘fall,’ as they say, in love, but it will be the sterile with the sterile, the fertile with the fertile. Natural life cycles will go on, but very few people will have children.

  “Today our only decision is to choose: A or B.”

  The Chairman spoke: “We will have no more discussion today. We act, or ISTO acts. Suffering is minimized if we act. Slaughter is certain if we do not. Will someone move the question?…I recognize Maintainer Chili Mech.”

  Chili moved that the Gentherans be directed to go ahead with the sterilant. The Chairman called for a second and got it. The vote was yes. Someone asked when it would take place. Sister Lorpa said within the year. Then nobody said anything for what seemed to be a very long time, and the Chairman announced a break for refreshment.

  Chili came over and led me to a little table against the wall. All three of my fellow students had Lady Badness trapped in a far corner and were talking at her, too volubly, I thought, too disrespectfully. Chili followed my line of sight and shook her head, very slightly. “That’s not a good idea,” she said.

  “I know,” I murmured. “But it’s very much in character for them. Usually, if they don’t like something, the something ceases to exist.”

  “Really,” she said. “Wait for me, Margaret. I’ll get us something to drink.”

  I saw her speaking briefly to a couple of guards, who went to Lady Badness’s rescue. Chili returned with the Gentheran, Sister Lorpa, whom I recognized by the insignia on her helmet. I rose and gave the half bow that is considered polite among Gentherans, saying, “It is rude of us to drink when you are denied refreshment.”

  “Not at all,” she said, in that high, sweet voice. “Our suits provide whatever hydration we need. I understand you are here as an observer, under a vow of silence. You were much surprised by what you heard?”

  I said, yes, I was, though I understood the reasons. What I was actually thinking at that moment was whether it had ever been important to me to have children.