The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “It’s beautiful,” I said. “Can we go closer?”

  The Escort laughed. “If you want to be shot out of the sky, maybe. We’re as low as we’re allowed to be.”

  “They don’t let you land there?”

  “I told you, it’s Gentheren country. Humankind stay off. Entry by invitation only.”

  “I thought Thairy was a human colony,” I protested. “They told me in school it was.”

  “It’s a human colony, down below, off the mesa. Plenty of room down there. The Gentherens don’t bother us, and we don’t need to bother the Gentherens.”

  Soon the city was behind us, though the forested height went on for hours. I yawned, stretched, yawned again, fell into a doze. Later I woke and looked down to see the far edge of the continental mesa approaching. On this side it ended abruptly in a sheer cascade of black stone that flowed all the way down to the sea.

  There, on the narrow shore between precipice and beach, was a town, a ribbon city only two or three streets wide but endlessly long. Directly below us, a hook of land extended into the sea, a curving extrusion covered with walls, squared-off fields, streets, structures, all of them as rigidly angled and paralleled as ruled lines.

  The Escort pointed down. “Fort Point Zibit.”

  “The academy?”

  “Right. Now, Naumi, that’s your name, right? Naumi, I’m going to let you in on a secret. When you get there, some snotty cadet is going to ask you your name. You say, ‘Naumi on X, sir.’ The joke is, while you’re on Academy grounds, you’re ‘on X-zibit.’ That’s because the upperclassmen watch everything the younger ones do and the officers watch the upperclassmen. Every cadet is somebody on exhibit.”

  “That’s silly,” said I, flushing.

  “Well, do it or don’t do it,” said the Escort. “But if you don’t, you’ll wish you had. Weathereye said you had louts back there in Bright.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, Naumi, there’s louts here, too. The difference is, these louts have to play by rules, but sometimes they make the rules, and they can lout you to death if you don’t play by the same rules they do, silly and otherwise. I’m telling you this because that friend of yours, Weathereye, asked me to.”

  The flier landed on a strip of paving by the sea, and when I stepped down onto it, the sun made a glittering road of light stretching from the sea edge at my feet to the great orange orb hanging only a finger’s width above the ruled rim of the horizon. I had left in the morning, without breakfast. I had come all the way west to the sea, and now I was hungry. It had been a long day.

  “You Noomi?” called a voice from beyond the fence.

  I started to say yes, then stopped. The person there had an unmistakably loutish look to him. I picked up my light pack and plodded across the yard until I was only an arm’s length away.

  “Nah-ow-me on Ex,” I said very quietly.

  “What kinna name’s that?” the stranger asked.

  “Any kind at all,” said I.

  “Well, I don’t like it,” said the other. “I think I’ll rename you noomi. That’s a kind of worm.”

  “That could work both ways,” I offered, with a level stare into the other’s eyes. “Them as names, get named.”

  “Grangel!” someone yelled. “Quit slopping about and bring the new cadet over here.”

  Grangel turned slightly red and spun on his heel. “Yes, sir,” he called, then, over his shoulder, “This way, noomi.”

  I followed him at a sufficient distance to avoid being either tripped or elbowed. As we approached, the uniformed officer at the controls of the hovercar got out and stood erect. Though I was untutored in what might be expected, Mr. Weathereye had always said that civility could not possibly be resented by any civilized person; that if resentment were offered, it was a sure sign of loutdom.

  “Naumi Rastarong, sir,” I said, bowing slightly.

  “Welcome, cadet,” said the officer. “I’m Captain Orley. Pile yourself in the back there. You’ve had a long trip, and I imagine you’re hungry.”

  “Yes, sir,” I replied, salivating. “Very.”

  “Then we’ll leave the civilities for another time. Grangel, you have post duty this shift.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well then, I’ll let you go on over to the gate. No need to go all the way back into the Point, then turn around and come back. You did have early mess?”

  “Yes, sir,” grudgingly.

  Grangel was left to plodding while I was whisked, the captain giving a running commentary as we went. “These are the main gates. Post duty is guard duty, standing watch at the gates. All cadets do it sometimes, but most of the time it’s done by what we call black-checkers, those who accumulate black checks on their record for fighting, harassing, disobeying orders, or showing disrespect to officers.”

  The gates fled by, huge stone pillars flanking metal grilles on wheels—open—and half a dozen statue-stiff cadets standing guard. “Sometimes the black-checkers get tired of being idiots and shape up. Sometimes they get tired of being punished for being idiots and quit. We don’t care which, quite frankly. Too many cadets are children of privilege who think we’re here to serve them instead of the other way round. I know you’re not, so I can say this without fear you’ll quote me to your parents.” The vehicle turned into a wide street that ran straight toward the sea. “This street is called The Parade. That’s the armory to your right, to your left is the officers’ residence, then the officers’ dining room. Right is the cadet mess. That means dining room, too, but officers get to use fancier words. Same food, both places. Now, that’s First Cadet Row going off to the right, men’s and women’s houses on the left, classrooms on the right. Four streets, First Row for first years, Second Row for second years, and so on.”

  By the time we reached the fourth street, I could see that it was shorter by far. “Not as many fourth-year cadets, sir?”

  “Not so many, no. The big break comes at the end of years one and two. Most everyone who gets into third year goes on to finish, including some of those children of privilege I mentioned earlier. People send their children here because they can’t do anything with them, then they act surprised when we can’t either—though not as surprised as we are when we can do something with them. Off to the left are the sports fields. You like sports.”

  “Not much, sir. I’m better at other things.”

  “What things would those be?”

  “Battle games, sir. And academics.” This was Mr. Weathereye’s word. Mr. Wyncamp just called it schooling, but this place seemed to call for Weathereye kind of language.

  “That’s interesting,” said the captain. “A word of advice, if I may.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  “Pick some sport, don’t care what. Something you hate the least, maybe. Claim it. Make that yours. It’s useful to have while you’re here. Something you can do in the games for your Row or your House, whether it does you any good or not. Understand?”

  “Swimming, sir?”

  “Of course, swimming. You like that?”

  “I’m fairly good at it, sir. And mountain climbing.”

  “When you say mountain climbing…”

  “Cliffs, sir. Straight-up places. Places other people don’t usually go.”

  “Hmmm,” said the captain, swerving the vehicle to head back the way we had come. Outside the cadets’ mess, he beckoned to a tall, bearded fellow who was lounging by the steps and called, “Sergeant Orson. Here’s the one you’ve been expecting.” Then, to me, “Sergeant Orson is a good man. Pay attention to him. Tell him your troubles, if you have any. If you don’t, tell him you don’t. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir, Captain Orley.”

  Then I was standing on the roadside, smelling food as the man approaching me grew larger with every step until he loomed like a tree. “Cadet Naumi,” he purred from a truly overwhelming loftiness. “Welcome to Point Zibit.”

  The seventh morning after my arrival, the
sixty male and female residents of Houses 4A and 4B ran up the side of a mountain. I was accustomed to running, though not on an uphill track. Still, I acquitted myself fairly well, coming over the last rise and down into the final clearing slightly ahead of the middle of the pack. Stamina, Mr. Weathereye had always told me, is half attitude and half practice. I had the attitude, and the practice would no doubt come.

  Sergeant Orson stood at the entrance to the clearing, pointing across it to the large commissary wagon, already thronged by earlier arrivals. I joined them, noting the wide choice of foods, including several things I would eat only if I were starving. I took a modest plateful of the tastier stuff and wandered about the clearing as I ate it.

  East of the wagon, a section of cliff had fallen to create a vast pile of scree. Behind the wagon, north, the road continued upward along the cliffs, separated only by a narrow strip of sloped woodland from the seaward precipice to the west. The south side of the clearing held the road we’d come in by, as well as a picket line where eight huge horses were tied. As I passed, I stroked all eight enormous soft noses and leaned my head against one or two huge, silver-maned shoulders. The horses’ feet were feathered with brushes of silver hair above hooves as big as dinner plates.

  Grangel, the cadet who had renamed me Noomi and whose cronies had helped in making it a universal term of ridicule, dragged in close to last. He was loud in his outcries of displeasure at the food choices left for the laggards until Sergeant Orson silenced him and climbed into the wagon bed, calling for attention. Reading from a prepared list, he divided our group into teams of six and told us we could take a short rest, after which we were to collect stones from the scree along the base of the cliffs and use them to construct drystone walls “this long…” displaying lengths of cord, “…and this high…” displaying shorter ones, “…in the areas already staked out west of the road.

  “I’m going back to Zibit with the wagon,” he cried. “We’ll return with your supper about sunset. Have the walls done by then.”

  The hostler and the sergeant busied themselves stowing the mess wagon and hitching the team. I, who had decided it would do no harm to get a good look at everything, picked up two measuring cords from where they’d been dropped, strolled over to the staked area, and looked it over, then walked over to the edge of the scree and looked carefully at the stones there. What seemed at first glance to be a mountain of raw material would actually yield a much smaller volume of usefully flat and stackable rock. A much better selection of flattish stones lay above my head to the left, where a narrow shelf extended above and along the upward road. What stones had collapsed there had not fallen as far, and less stone had fallen on top of them, making them less splintered than most, though the shelf would take some climbing to get to. On my way back, I saw the hostler remove a number of shovels from the wagon and lay them under the thorny growth at the foot of the trees, where they were easily visible to anyone who was using his or her eyes.

  I returned my plate to the wagon and sat for a few minutes, taking deep breaths. Sergeant Orson bellowed at us to start work, and the horse-drawn vehicle rolled slowly away down the hill. I stared after it, feeling the rumble of those wheels up through my feet and legs. We had flown over the high mesa to Zibit in a flier. The officer who met me had used a floater. The obviously heavy commissary wagon was drawn, however, by eight huge horses. All very interesting.

  My team was number six. The other five members of it, two girls and three boys, immediately began rushing or staggering back and forth as they fetched stones to the assigned site. I went a bit farther up the road, thrust my fingers into a few narrow slots, found a few almost invisible footholds, and worked my way up to the shelf where the flat stones had piled. I began dropping the stones onto the roadway beneath, taking care not to drop them upon one another. When the largest one of my teammates came near, I said over my shoulder, “Hey, Ferni. I’m picking flat ones for the bottom row. If I drop them down there, can you help me carry them over? It’ll go faster if somebody picks and the other people carry, you or me, one or the other?”

  Ferni, a generally affable cadet, took a look at the wall I had ascended and said, “Go ahead. It’s easier to take them from here than dig them up out from under all the little ones anyhow.”

  Within a very short time, Ferni was joined by the other two boys, Caspor and Poul, and the girls, Jaker and Flek, who also found it easier to take the stones I dropped down than to dig them out of the general rockfall, especially with all the squabbling over territory that was going on. Meantime, I mentioned quietly to Ferni that one of them should always stay by our stone pile to prevent it being borrowed from by neighboring teams, and Ferni quietly passed the word to the others.

  I, meantime, was counting to myself: so many stones to the row, so many rows to the layer, so many layers to make the wall. Midafternoon came, and team six had not built a foot of wall while some of the others had sizable structures. Grangel, working with one of the fastest teams, was loud in his mockery and direct in his abuse.

  “Look at the noomi bunch!” he cackled. “Buncha real slow worms!”

  “We better build something,” complained the smallest of the group, Poul. “Everybody’s ahead of us, and they’re calling us names.”

  “Good enough,” I conceded. “I think we have almost enough stone to complete the job. We’ll start with the largest flat ones we have, but let’s grab a couple of those shovels over there to level the soil first.”

  We leveled, to cackles of derision, particularly when I poured a thin stream from my water bottle at various spots on the leveled area to see if it went anywhere.

  “They think old Orley told them to dig a latrine!”

  “Ho, Noomi, you puttin’ in a swim pool?”

  The leveling process uncovered several jutting stones, the smaller of which I insisted we remove. We bridged the larger ones when we set flat base stones around them. The big, flat stones were laid up quickly into courses one and two. As we were midway through the third course, cries of dismay erupted from the neighboring group five, whose quickly built wall suddenly collapsed in a cloud of dust when one hasty rock carrier tripped and fell into it.

  “Slowly,” said I in a low voice. “Don’t look at them, look at what we’re doing, starting on course four. Make sure every stone is level and wedged to the next one. If it teeters, it’s in wrong!” With no comment, the other five went on building while I fished my coil of twine from my pocket, one of the things I’d brought in my memorabilia box, tied one end of it around a small stone, and heaved it over a low branch that jutted just above where we were working, lowering the stone until it hung just above the earth alongside their wall.

  “What are you doing?” demanded Ferni.

  “We did our best to level the bottom,” I replied. “Now we have to be sure it’s rising straight, otherwise it’ll topple over like that other one. Point your fingers, lay your palm where it just touches the string and your middle finger just touches the wall, move it up and down and you can tell whether the wall’s going straight up. If we had some really straight sticks, we could put in some stakes, but there aren’t any.”

  “There’s shovels,” said Ferni. “Nobody’s using them.”

  I grinned at him, and together we brought over the shovels and made a line of them, each handle adjusted by plumb line to be straight up and down. No one had watched us doing this because all eyes were on group two, where Grangel was summoning attention by showing off what heavy stones he could lay in place. As he heaved an especially large one atop their structure, I clenched my teeth and held my breath. The rock immediately below the space Grangel was attempting to fill was roughly spherical, wedged into position with small, also rounded pebbles. When Grangel’s burden hit the wall, the round rock slipped sideways, the smaller pebbles shot out of place, and half the wall collapsed as the spherical stone bounded across the space between walls two and three, hit wall three a resounding blow and destroyed a large part of it.

&
nbsp; Groups two and three began to direct their scorn at Grangel instead of at me.

  “Pay no attention,” said I. “Caspor and Ferni, we’re going to need more middle-sized and small flat rocks to finish off. You’ll find the best ones right under where I was getting them. The four of us will go on building if you’ll gather more stones for us, and don’t waste a trip. Pick them carefully.”

  The wall went on growing. Almost flat, it rose regularly equidistant from the vertical shovels, needing only a final layer to reach the required height. Each layer contained stones of varying thickness, but all were leveled and interlocked, with no rounded ones used at all. While Jaker, Poul, Flek, and I leveled the course for the last layer, Caspor and Ferni moved back and forth with the smaller flat stones I had asked for.

  Only four teams were still building. Teams two and three were madly piling rock, making up for lost time; five had not yet totally recovered from its collapse, and six was still leveling its last course while the teams that had finished amused themselves by insulting those who had not. “Noomi” had become a favorite word, and I noticed our team looking sideways at me. “Don’t expect me to notice that nonsense,” I said quietly. “We’re all too busy doing what we’re supposed to do: build wall.” When team six laid the last few stones securely on the layer beneath and took the shovels back where they’d been found, the sun was sinking beneath the sea, its rays penetrating the western fringe of trees, turning our work into sharply contrasted shapes of shadow and brilliance. Around the clearing, the teams were lying about, their backs against convenient tree trunks.

  Ferni murmured to me, “The more even the walls are, the fewer shadows on them, did you notice that?”

  “Enough to decide where I want to sit down,” said I, leading the way to a large tree, well away from the building area. The others assembled around us, sprawling around the tree’s roots. Lying as I was, my eyes fixed on a shadow above the shelf I’d climbed earlier. “Ferni, Jaker,” I said. “What’s that up there on the rock wall?”