The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “It’s a bush,” said Ferni.

  “Above the bush,” I said.

  “A shadow,” said Jaker. “But see the way the light goes into it. It could be a cave.”

  I started to stand up, so I could get a better look, when I felt a premonitory shiver in my feet. “Listen,” I murmured to the group. “When the wagon gets here, no matter what happens, just don’t say anything. No yelling or jeering.”

  “But I’m hungry,” whispered Caspor.

  “We all are, but we’re not going to yell about it.”

  “Wagon coming,” called someone from team two.

  The team nearest the road got to their feet and began cheering.

  Our team six remained where we were, sprawled around the tree as the horses came into view at the top of the rise sloping down into the clearing. By now, most of the cadets were on their feet. The driver clucked to the team, the horses bent to their collars, jerking the wagon over the top, and down they came at a gallop, thundering, the stones echoing the noise. The ground shook. The walls shivered. Small stones popped out here and there; minor avalanches began. The horses kept coming. One by one the walls slumped, tottered, fell.

  “Ours stood up,” whispered Caspor, sitting up. Then more loudly, “Ours stood up!”

  “Shhh,” said I, loudly enough that all five of them could hear me. “Don’t you dare cheer or yell or anything.”

  There was a good deal of shouting going on as blame was assigned and denied, resulting in several bloody knuckles and at least one split lip.

  The wagon came to a halt. Sergeant Orson jumped from the wagon seat and moved among the collapsed heaps.

  Our group got up, everyone yawning and stretching, making good theater of it, as Lady Badness used to say back home in Bright. The other five were giving me little looks, grinning.

  The side of the wagon went down. Food smells drifted out.

  “Well,” said the sergeant. “You bunch, team six, there by the tree. Come get your plates while I walk around and inspect the others.”

  We were back under the tree with highly piled plates on our laps by the time group four, with two-thirds of their wall still standing, went to eat. Teams one, eight, and nine each had half a wall standing, and they ate next. Five, seven, and ten had some wall standing, though not much, but still, they got to eat before groups two and three, who were sullenly watching others enjoying their supper.

  When all had been fed, the officer strolled over to our tree. We put our almost empty plates aside and stood up.

  “Good job, cadets. Who’s the leader here?”

  “It was a group task, sir,” said I. “I think we all worked equally hard.”

  “Built rock wall before, have you?” the officer asked, moving his gaze across us, receiving several no sirs, including one from me.

  “Hmmm,” he said, turning to look at the newly built wall behind him. “You leveled the soil?”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” said three or four voices.

  “I don’t see a large pile of unused stone. Selected the stones carefully before you hauled them over here, did you?”

  “Oh yes, Sergeant,” said Caspor and Ferni.

  The sergeant turned to Caspor. “I’d have to swear somebody knew what he was doing. What is it you’re best at?”

  “Not much, Sergeant, except numbers. I do real well with them.”

  “And you?” to Ferni.

  “I’m good with animals, Sergeant. Like those big horses.”

  Jaker, Poul, and Flek disclaimed any abilities whatsoever. Sergeant Orson frowned.

  “And you,” he said to me.

  “Battle games,” said I without expression. “I’m very, very good at battle games, Sergeant.”

  “You mean strategy, Cadet?”

  “Of course, sir. What else is there?”

  One day, just for exercise, I decided to run up the track along the cliff to the clearing where we had built the walls. I had some free time, and though the shadow on the cliff side was only a tiny mystery, I never did like mysteries, especially ones that might be solvable in an hour or so of free time.

  Getting up the wall was only a minor problem. There were a number of grips and good places to put one’s feet if one had the wits to see them and remember where they were when the time came to climb down. The shadow was indeed the very narrow entrance to a cave, one that would show up only when the sunlight hit it at a particular time of day. I climbed onto the lip of it with some elation. Since it was morning, there was no sunlight to fall inside the west-facing entrance, but I’d brought a torch, just in case. It lit a level floor that went straight in, past a dark recess to the left, then bent around a corner to the right. I walked it quietly, just in case there was something in residence, though it didn’t seem likely. Unless it was something with wings.

  I had no sooner had the thought than the torch was knocked from my hand by a flurry of wings, headed out. Birds! Rather large birds. They circled over the clearing, complaining loudly at my intrusion. I looked up to see nests stuck tight to the walls, visible even without the torch in a flickering blue light that came from farther in.

  The light was just around the corner in a section of tunnel that looked just like any section of tunnel except for the light itself, a whatever that I couldn’t really see. It was more a blue shivering in the air, an evocation of some other…what? Without thinking about it, I took two steps into it and found myself somewhere else. Though I couldn’t see where, not clearly, it was very definitely somewhere else.

  I held very still for a long moment. This was not something I wanted to do right at that moment. Some other time, maybe, but not right now. Carefully, I stepped back, one step, and two, and was back in the tunnel once more, with the very strong feeling I had just avoided some very great danger.

  Watching my feet carefully to be sure I didn’t stumble into some other unsuspected threat, I climbed carefully down the rock face and jogged back to Zibit, all the while reviewing what I’d seen and felt in the cave, saving it, as it were, in my mental memorabilia box. Something to take out and look at from time to time. Something to keep for the future.

  Occasionally, as time went on, and only when I was out of sorts, I regretted having been so successful in that first cadet exercise, for it had an unanticipated result. I had ended up with Caspor, Ferni, and Poul as constant companions in the dormitory, and with Jaker and Flek tightly attached to the group during field exercises. Ferni, I really, genuinely liked. It was a feeling I couldn’t really identify, one I’d never had before, an internal heat, a wanting feeling. It wasn’t an appropriate feeling. Or maybe it was an appropriate feeling but not…not for an appropriate person, even though something inside me felt Ferni was…completely appropriate. More likely I felt this way because he and I were so much alike. We were both orphans. Both reared by foster parents. Both, surprisingly, with vacant spaces in our memories, and both of us ending up at the academy without warning or provocation. After some thought, I decided it would be best for me just to set the feeling aside and enjoy working with him.

  As for the others…Jaker and Flek could have been sisters, both quiet, both unexpectedly strong and very determined in everything they did. Caspor and Poul had been sent by their parents. None of them seemed to have particular skills except for Caspor’s uncanny mathematical abilities and Flek’s mysterious affinity for armaments—she could break down and reassemble the model RB27 faster than the rest of us could decide how to start.

  “What they’re like doesn’t matter,” I told myself sternly. “It’s just like building rock wall. You don’t complain about what you have to work with, you just make it work!”

  I set out to learn everything I could about each of the five, so we could knit together to stand strong and indivisible. It turned out, the best way to do this was by involving the whole group in solving problems. It let us see everything from as many points of view as possible. Even though Jaker didn’t usually solve problems on her own, she always saw something
in them the others had not seen, and the same was true of each of them. I began to see things differently myself. Here was the problem, and there was the way it went, and it swerved around Caspor and fled toward Ferni, then Flek, then went on, touching each of them, sometimes circling back, until suddenly, one of us saw it! There it was, the route laid out as if in flashing lights, an avenue so well marked that we could not possibly mistake it. A high road, paved and guttered. We had only to point it out to the others, lead them down it, and at the end, there was the solution, right where it should be.

  “The talk road,” Ferni called it. “Let’s help old Naumi find the talk road.” And help they did, to their own benefit no less than mine. It was a new experience, this having friends and working together. I hadn’t realized until then how lonely my life had been before.

  Neither Sergeant Orson nor Captain Orley seemed to take any notice of this. Several dormitory mates did take notice of this to their dismay, for we had become so tight that bullying any one of us brought a quick and unpleasant retaliation.

  A plump, gray-haired woman who worked in the kitchen had taken a bit of liking to me. She thought I looked like her son, long since grown and gone away, so she sneaked me extra cookies that I shared with the others, and she kept me up-to-date on the local news, like who was dropping out and who wasn’t. So, one evening I went to see if she had anything for us. She told me to go through into the kitchen next to the officers’ dining room and wait for her while she finished putting tomorrow’s loaves in the oven.

  I went where she told me, quietly, as was my habit, though not with any idea of sneakiness. I heard people talking in the dining room. One of my professors said, “Cadet Poul. You know the boy, Captain Orley.”

  “Of course I know the boy, the son of…”

  “Very much the son of the largest import-export firm on Thairy, right! I didn’t think he’d last out the year.”

  “You mean he will?” asked the captain in amazement.

  “He will. It seems a trio of his dormitory mates plus a couple from the women’s dorm have a study group led by young what’s-his-name, the foundling boy from Bright? Ah, Naumi.”

  “A study group?” in a tone of slight dismay.

  “It’s not unheard of, Captain. We even suggest it.”

  “I wasn’t saying it’s a bad idea. I was just surprised. Poul’s actually learning something? He’ll pass?”

  “Better than merely pass, by a good bit. So will the others. It seems Caspor is in charge of things mathematical. Ferni is in charge of things biological. Flek, it turns out, has a family interest in armaments…”

  “I didn’t know that!”

  Well, neither had I known it, and I found it very interesting indeed, so I went nearer the hatch between kitchen and dining room and sat down quietly on the floor.

  “Surely you know of Flexen Armor. Flexen Magma Canon, FMC? Her grandfather is Gorlan Flekkson Bray. Originally from Chottem.”

  “She’s that family? I had no idea.”

  “Cadet’s the offspring of one of the daughters, her surname isn’t the same, and the mother didn’t make anything out of it when her daughter was registered. She’s been wandering around the factories with her maternal grandfather since she was old enough to walk. She chose to come here, and her grandfather recommended her to the academy. She’s packed to the gills with engineering information she has no idea she knows, or knows the usefulness of.”

  “I suppose the rest of them have hidden qualities as well?”

  “Not that we know of. Jaker is a quiet, self-contained young woman from another extremely wealthy import-export family. The Jakers and the Pouls are linked, matrimonially, with cousins in common. She has no outstanding abilities, but she, too, is learning. And Naumi…well, he doesn’t shine in any particular class. He doesn’t attract attention. That pack that follows Grangel—all of whom will be dropping out any day now, one fondly hopes—harassed him a bit when he first arrived, but that’s dwindled off to nothing…”

  “But he leads this group?”

  “Oh yes, sir. He wouldn’t say that, of course, but he does. That’s his outstanding quality, I guess. That and something else…”

  “Which is?”

  “You know we give the cadets problems to solve. Tactical problems. You know. We’re looking for optimum, seventieth, eightieth percentile answers. Most cadets are lucky to rate over fifty percent with a solution. Naumi and his group come up with the optimum answer nine times out of ten. The tenth time, they come up with an answer we’ve never received before, and when we give it to the battle simulator, it comes back as an even more highly rated response, one that the simulator hadn’t thought of. He always says it’s a group effort, what he calls a talk-road effort, and from what we can learn, it is, but he’s always the one that pulls the group together.”

  This was news. I knew we’d been doing well, but not that well.

  “It seemed to us,” said a professor, “that is…we all thought he should be recommended to the war college, at once. Why wait four or five years with ability like that?”

  There was a long pause, then Captain Orley said, “I objected to the boy being admitted, nobody that he was, late in the year as it was. I thought it would be a handicap both for the boy and for his house. However, I’m a man who can eat my earlier opinions for breakfast without choking on them, which is a good thing. This boy got in because he was recommended.”

  Mr. Weathereye. I knew it!

  Someone said “Every cadet who comes to Point Zibit is recommended by somebody!”

  The captain said ruefully. “Oh, he had that sort of recommendation from his schoolmaster and friends back in Bright. That’s not what I’m talking about. Naumi was recommended by the Third Order of the Siblinghood.”

  Someone, I think it was Professor Hilbert, the mathematics man, said something in a harsh voice. “The Order. I find a great deal wrong with that, Captain Orley. First, though I know the Siblinghood is real enough, I find some difficulty in believing the Third Order actually exists. Secondly, if it exists, why is this supposedly all-powerful, all-knowing group interested in a schoolboy? And finally, assuming such an organization does exist, how does one verify that any information comes from that organization and not merely some clever-cock who wants to pull strings?”

  Captain Orley murmured a reply while I was wishing I could have seen his face, to know how he felt about it. “It’s a bit like discussing God, isn’t it? Is there one? If there is one, how do we know it is speaking? How do we know what it wants?”

  “Exactly,” snapped Hilbert.

  “The eternal questions,” the captain went on. “Which always come down to the same answer. One has to trust the interface between oneself and it. The prophet. The sacred writing. The beatific visions. Then the second prophet who clarifies the issues. Then the new writing, and the new visions. Then a declaration of heresy and a reformation. Then a schism. Then a sect. Except that with the Third Order there is no writing, no visions, no prophet that we know of…”

  “Then how in the name of all good sense…?” yelled Hilbert, while two or three other people said, “Shhh, shhh.”

  Captain Orley raised his voice. “…how does the lowliest member of the selection committee, myself, wake up one morning to find the message pinned to my shirt, which was in my locker, which was locked, which was inside my room, which was locked, which was in the officers’ quarters, which are guarded. A real message, which I read half a dozen times before it disintegrated into shiny dust.”

  Hilbert huffed. “Ascribe it to whatever you ate and drank the night before, Captain. You were seeing things.”

  “I could tell myself that. There are five of us on the committee, however, and we had not dined together for a long time. Nonetheless, it happened to all five of us. Same message, same location, more or less, all in places protected against intrusion, all signed, ‘The Third Order.’ I’ll be glad to give you the names of the other four if you’d like to hear it directly fro
m them.”

  I noticed I could see them reflected in the side of one of the big pots hanging on the wall. I saw them glancing at one another. I wondered if they were reviewing everything they had said, wondering if maybe this Third Order might be listening.

  “Tread carefully, gentlemen. If what you tell me is true, if what I have told you is believable, it is likely Naumi will come to us, or someone will come on his behalf, if and when he, or they, consider the war college is a good idea. If Naumi chooses not to stand out, then I would suggest you let him…stand in, just where he is, where the Third Order recommended he be.”

  I told Ferni about it, back at the dorm. He asked what the Third Order was.

  “I never heard of it,” I said. “Honest, I never. But I was called for life-duty, so maybe…maybe it’s just something they want me for.”

  “That makes you out to be pretty important,” Ferni said with a lofty look. I swear, sometimes the way he drew himself up that way you’d swear he thought he was king of the world.

  I said, “Not necessarily, Ferni! A squirt of axle grease can be important if that’s what you need. That’s probably all I’m supposed to be. Something to help turn a wheel.”

  We left it at that. I think Ferni forgot all about it. I put it away among my mental memorabilia and tried not to think about it, though sometimes I did, wondering what it all meant.

  I Am Margaret/on Earth

  Except for the rumors and whispers that followed the disappearance of our three classmates, college life was undisturbed for a time. I was fully focused on the final section of my “lateral studies,” those intended to broaden understanding of linguistic development. Everything known about the Pthas and their linguistic survivors had been reviewed; the aeon-long changes in the Quaatar language likewise; along with the accepted works on dialect development among Mercan and Omniont planets. The last thing on the list was to consider a speaking race that had lost its use of language, as recorded by a Gentheran exploration ship. My friend Sybil, Bryan’s sister, had made a vomit face when mentioning it, so I’d been putting it off.