The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I tried to reason with him, without success. He wouldn’t let up. He went on arguing, demanding. Over and over, becoming more intense with every repetition.

  Finally, in acute misery, I cried, “Oh, Bryan, if you really do love me, then leave me alone for a little while and let me think about it. I can’t stand any more of this.”

  Bryan went away. When Father returned to the house, I did not mention Bryan’s visit. I hoped Bryan would have second thoughts and give it up. I was shamed enough. I couldn’t bear to carry any more humiliation than I already felt, and if Bryan made such a sacrifice, he would hate me, and I would spend my life regretting it. It was absurd, preposterous.

  I went on packing and repacking, finally achieving the best arrangement anyone could achieve who had no idea where she was going. Bryan did not return, and as I wiped tears from my face, I gave silent thanks for that. In the morning, however, as we were about to leave for the assembly point, he came back, a pack on his back, traveling cases in both hands.

  Father blurted, “Bryan, what are you doing here?”

  “Came to get Margaret, sir.”

  “To get…you’ve volunteered for bondage?” It wasn’t unheard of, but it was exceptionally rare.

  Bryan turned and grasped my hand. “You didn’t tell him what I’ve decided?”

  I cried, “I wanted…I hoped you’d change your mind.”

  “I haven’t.” Without releasing his grip, he turned to face my father. “I love Margaret. I’ve volunteered to provide medical service on Tercis. Margaret and I will be there together. It’s not a high-tech civilization, but it’s far from bondservice. I have the authorization papers with me. All Margaret and I have to do is com the Bureau of Volunteer Services to record a contractual union, then she can go with me.”

  I stood dumb, incapable of words or feeling.

  Father broke from his astonishment to ask, “What colony, Bryan? Do you know anything about it?”

  “It’s a good-sized planet, one the Dominion has divided into sections for human populations of various types. The place that most needs a doctor is called Rueful.” He laughed briefly. “It’s also inhabited by the Rueful, who practice a religion called Rue.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  “Just an ordinary human population, rural, needless to say. Rueful has a few small towns, half a dozen middle-sized ones, one small city, a lot of open country. Almost entirely agricultural. Fewer than a million people in the whole place. The Dominion Settlement Board provided the original supplies: seeds, domestic animals, the usual settlement stuff. According to the Board it’s very natural, trees, rivers, some local wildlife, birds, that kind of thing.”

  “What technological level?” Father asked.

  “Three,” Bryan said, flushing a little.

  “Three! So they have electricity.”

  “That’s about it. Horses for transportation. Actually, you can go all the way across the settled area in a couple of days on a horse. It never gets really cold on Rueful, and they heat the houses with stoves burning wood or coal. There’s a coal mine and a lot of forests.”

  “What language do they speak?” I asked.

  “Regular Earthian standard plus some Mercan or Omniont jargon the ex-bondspeople have picked up. We’ll understand one another. The area we’ll go to is called The Valley. It has no doctor. No hospital. Not much of anything in the way of health care.” Bryan’s brows pulled together, making a deep furrow between his eyes. “We’ll have to build something, a clinic, a small hospital. But I can practice medicine the way I need to, without all this damned bureaucratic red tape! And Margaret will make a good nurse…”

  Which would have been the last thing I would ever have considered being! Even as a child, I, Margaret, hadn’t played at being a nurse…a healer. The healer part of me had been totally…separate. I wasn’t interested in people’s bodies. The very idea was appalling! I tried not to let my dismay show on my face. The whole universe was conspiring to make my education useless.

  He pleaded, “Margaret, we don’t have much time!”

  “Margaret?” urged Father.

  I cried frantically, “Father, I tried to talk him out of it. This isn’t fair to him…”

  I was talking to his back. He was leaving, saying, “I can’t offer anything to this discussion!” The door shut behind him.

  Bryan stared after him.

  “My father…often…departs when things are difficult.”

  Bryan took my hand. “Margaret, we’ll be together, you’ll have a job to do that needs doing, your life expectancy ought to be the same as on Earth or better, you won’t be eaten by some ET monster or worked to death in the fields by some ET slave driver.”

  I drew away from him. “But you were so enthusiastic about your new residency…”

  He almost snarled at me, face darkened with passion. “Damn it, listen to me, Margaret! I’ve given it up. No matter what you say, yes or no, I can’t get it back. It’s gone!”

  The words clanged at me as though I were inside a huge bell! Something inside me snapped. If I had to be dragged away against my will, at least let it be by someone who cared about me.

  “All right, all right! I suppose it’s for the best. I’ll go with you.”

  Bryan seized me in his arms, laid his cheek against mine, then released me. There was no time for talk, he said. No time for anything but continuing the process, getting to the assembly point. It took only moments to make the com contact with the Bureau of Volunteer Services, to give my identity number to the authorization clerk, and the whole thing was done.

  Rather than drag my father back into the situation, I did what I knew he would prefer. I added a postscript to the note I had already written, saying Bryan and I were going together. I was numb, in the grip of that same, weird vacancy I had felt on the day the first proctor came, as though I had been split in two, as though some monstrous cleaver had irrevocably sliced me apart from myself.

  And yet, when I turned to Bryan, ready to argue once more, I saw on his face an expression of exaltation. He clasped my hand between his and smiled gloriously at me. I bit my lips, choking back what I’d meant to say. If this was how he felt, it had to be all right. It would turn out to be the best thing I could do. He had given up…whatever he had given up, but I would make it up to him. No matter what it took. I told myself this, over and over again. A mantra. I will make it up to Bryan.

  At the assembly point, we were taken aside by a young usher who led us to a smaller area set aside for volunteers. There our papers were processed by an efficient woman who, when she saw we were headed to Tercis, shook her head and bit her lip.

  “Are you leaving anyone here on Earth that you hope to communicate with in the future?” she asked.

  “My father,” I said haltingly. “Bryan’s family,” turning to him, only to find him staring, red-faced, at his feet.

  “You weren’t told that will be impossible?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “There’s a time anomaly on the Tercis route. The way around it is too expensive to consider. You’ll arrive on Tercis…sometime before you leave here.”

  I thought of the international date line on Earth and nodded, showing I understood. I thought I did.

  “The difference is about fifteen to twenty years,” she said. “Any message you sent might arrive before you were born.”

  “You knew this?” I asked Bryan.

  He confessed that he did. For a moment I was furious, then I wondered what difference it actually made. The Gentherans were the only ones who could travel among the stars without losing their lives to time. Bryan and I had known we would not see our families again. In fact, it made no difference at all.

  “You should have told me,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter.”

  In the dormitory we sat for most of a day and a night, silently holding hands. I repeated the mantra to myself whenever I began to get edgy, echoing it again as we queued for the subway. Once we were seated
, exhaustion took both of us, and we slept all the way to preshipping.

  Anxiety didn’t return until we actually boarded the elevator. We stood at the mouth of the pod, confronting all those heads, like beads, like bubbles, a pavement of heads, all going away, to where? To what? Was it even certain there was a destination at the other end? Then we were seated; officers came through with their calming sprays; and all my concerns were temporarily put to rest.

  I remember turning to Bryan, and saying dreamily, “Bryan, do you know anything about the Third Order of the Siblinghood?” His eyes were shut. He didn’t answer. I went back to the mantra. We were going up to the shipping station, to Departure. We would be put aboard a ship. We would go to Tercis. Bryan and I would live on Tercis, together. All I had to do was just…do what I was told to do, go where I was told to go. Everything…everything would be all right. I would make it up to Bryan.

  I Am M’urgi/on My Way to B’yurngrad

  …I drew away from him. “But you were so enthusiastic about your new residency!”

  Bryan almost snarled at me, face darkened with passion. “Damn it, Margaret, listen to me, I’ve given it up. It doesn’t matter what you say, yes or no, I can’t get it back. It’s gone!”

  The world clanged at me as though I were inside a huge bell! Something inside me snapped. If I had to be dragged away against my will, let it be by Earthgov, by the Dominion, by someone I could hate. Let me not be eternally burdened with someone else’s sacrifice! “No, Bryan. No,” I screamed at him. “You had no right to do this without my agreement. I will not.”

  Brian turned white, stared at me in disbelief, then turned on his heel and left me without another word. Numbly, I took up my pack, waiting only a moment to be sure he was gone. I would leave now, while Father was out of the room. I would find my own way to the assembly point and avoid his reproaches for not accepting Bryan’s offer. During the previous sleepless night I had written a farewell note. Let that suffice.

  At the assembly point, the usher led me through vaults sonorous with regret. “What do they call this place?”

  “We just call it the separation lobby. People from their kin. Earth people from their planet. The optimistic from their hopes, and the pessimistic from their estimations of how bad it can be. The answers are always none and worse.”

  I was stunned. “You don’t try to be comforting, do you?”

  “If we’re honest, there’s nothing comforting we can say. Some of us lie. Some of us don’t, like me. I have to put it into words I can handle or the scope of it swallows me. We see millions go through here, and damn few of them go smiling. Today it’ll be a bit easier on you. Several ships have come in for immediate loading, so we’re sending people directly to the subways. Here’s your check-in pass, follow the red line down that way. It takes almost a day to get there, use the toilet before you go, don’t drink anything after.”

  I stumbled away amid others, to join the long queue of émigrés lined up to board the continental subway that would move us a daylong journey to the elevators. Away. Going away, and I couldn’t feel anything.

  When I arrived at preshipping, one of the ubiquitous ushers saw me standing alone, and said, “Down that hallway, that’s your dormitory. Lately we’ve sped up the process. You shouldn’t be here more than a day.”

  “And then where?”

  “You’ll probably be in the third or fourth ship out. Either way, you’ll be going to B’yurngrad in the Omniont Federation. Actually B’yurngrad is an Earth-colony planet in Omniont Fed space, but it’s also a transshipment point for the Omniont worlds in the area. You’ll probably change ships there.”

  “Probably?”

  “To smaller ships that’ll take the cargo to various Omniont planets. You should be glad it’s Omniont space, by the way.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Omniont Federation is marginally better than Mercan Combine.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We know how many ships go to bondslave worlds, and how many go from those worlds to the colonies. Omniont and Mercan get about equal numbers of bondspeople to start with, but more of those from Omniont worlds survive to go on to the colonies later.

  “Don’t let it get you down. You look strong. You’ll make it. And don’t think about sending messages. Travel through space is also through time. Bondspeople are always asking us how they send messages back to their people here on Earth. We tell them, don’t bother. More likely it will get here after your people are all dead.”

  “But…representatives from our colonies have meetings every year, on Mars!”

  “Sure, and the Gentherans provide the travel on little ships that go point to point with a technology no one else has. No one knows how they do it but them. They say it wouldn’t help the trading races, because trading ships are too huge to use it, though the time problem is one reason the ET long-distance ships are so huge. They carry whole families aboard. Toward galactic center, among the crowded worlds, time is less of an issue. You can actually travel among them without losing all your friends every time you leave one world to go to another.”

  I gaped at him. No one had ever mentioned this.

  “You probably haven’t slept much lately. Go that way, then right to section ninety-seven, row eighty-eight’s at the back, bed five-A will be extreme left, here’s your bed ticket. Get some rest.”

  Wondering how the usher expected anyone to rest, I plodded into the cavernous dormitory. Though almost every bed had an occupant, it was almost frighteningly quiet. I found the row and section without difficulty, thrust my bags under bed 97-88-5A, and fell onto it. I was exhausted, I was frightened. I admitted to myself that I should have gone with Bryan. Finally, I told myself I had the choice to cry about it or throw a tantrum or to go to sleep. Of the three, only one would do me any good, so I turned on my side, shut my eyes, and concentrated my whole attention on not screaming. Eventually, I actually did sleep.

  Later, how much later I have no idea, I was awakened by a loudspeaker. “Any outshippers able to speak any Omniont or Mercan languages, please report to your dormitory office at once.”

  I heard it perfectly well, but decided it was part of the frustrating dream I’d been having. They damn well had my records, and if my language skills had been any use to them, they should have let me know before now. Without opening my eyes, I turned over and kept on dreaming.

  I Am Mar-agern, Going to Fajnard

  “Outshippers, attention. If you speak any Omniont or Mercan languages, please report to your dormitory office at once.”

  I heard it perfectly well. I sat up, stood up, paused, looking at my bags for a moment, then collected them and trudged down the long aisle toward the distant office. The sleepy-looking officer inside looked up when I entered.

  “I speak some of the Omniont and Mercan languages,” I said.

  “I’m sure that’s a great comfort to you,” snorted the officer. “Why tell me about it?”

  Angrily, I snarled, “Because there’s a loudspeaker announcement that anyone who speaks those languages is supposed to report to the dormitory office. Is that here, or somewhere else?”

  He sat up, shook himself, and went to his com, where he spoke in muted tones for some little time. “Come with me,” he said over his shoulder as he headed out the door. “They’re sending transport to take you to the elevators. Oh, by the way, what’s your number?”

  “All I have is my bed number?”

  “That’ll do. Give me your bed ticket. We can cross-check it to your identity. A Mercan ship was delayed here when their cargo translator for the voyage took sick. They can’t wait any longer to leave.”

  “A Mercan ship?” I whispered. “Their cargo translator?”

  “Mercan, right. When they say cargo translator, they mean the person who translates commands to the cargo, the bondslaves, the outshipped.”

  I could not reply. Seemingly, all the fates in the universe were stacked against me, and I was absolutely incapable
of making a beneficial decision about anything at all. The choices that had seemed best to me, possibilities that had shone with hope and encouragement, if only slightly, always turned to shit. Perhaps it would be better simply to take what came, refuse to choose anything, leave the choosing to others who were not damned as I was to do the wrong thing at every opportunity.

  I Am Ongamar/on Cantardene

  I, Ongamar the spy, was kneeling between the left feet of a K’Famir pleasure-female, pinning up her skirt so the gold-plated graspers above the pads would show seductively, when I realized I could hear the chatter from an adjacent fitting booth through the floor-level ventilation duct. The pleasure-female had been drinking xshum all morning, provided by House Mouselline. She was barely able to stand and would not have heard an earthquake, so I had no need to ask many loud questions about the fitting to disguise the fact I had heard what was going on. Human hearing was far better than that of the K’Famir. To normal human ears, they always sounded as though they were shouting.

  “Tonight there will be a midnight sacrifice on Beelshi,” squealed the customer in the next booth. “I asked Wonbar to take me, but he said no females. I think they sacrifice females, that’s why they don’t want females watching.”

  “Surely not,” said Lady Ephedra in a conciliatory tone. “We would hear of such a thing. People would disappear.”

  “Pocomfis disappear all the time,” said the first voice. “They have no place to live, they work at ugly things, who cares if they disappear.”

  “What God would accept the sacrifice of a pocomfis?” asked Lady Ephedra chidingly. “Sacrifices must be worthy, which means expensive. Half a flibit would buy a pocomfis. There now, move your upper arms, now the lower. Ah, it doesn’t bind, does it. Good. If you’ll take it off, I’ll have it ready for you by closing time tonight.”