The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  I whispered, “What do you call this place, Falija?”

  “I guess I’d call it a very good place from which to watch what goes on down there,” Falija said, pointing through the gap in the stones. The ledge followed the half circle of the cliff; directly across from us water poured from the cliff top into a pool far below, where a wide green lawn was edged by young trees. The trees were horsing around in the wind, like boys at a school dance, pretending not to notice there were girls there—and there really were girls there, though it took me a little while to see them, for they were pale as moonlight, their skins shining firefly green and their eyes glowing like lamps.

  If they had clothes on, they were transparent, but clothes or no clothes, they looked nothing like human schoolgirls. I wasn’t sure they were girls at all. They could be…just themselves, not male or female.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “They’re nyzeemi,” said Falija. “At least that’s what they are in our language. I just found this place this morning, and when I got back, I looked in your encyclopedia to see if you had anything like them. You don’t. Nyzeemi aren’t human, or female, or mythical.”

  “Where did they come from?” Glory asked her. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never seen them.”

  “You’ve lived back there, but never here, in their world,” Falija said. “Though we’re not actually in their world. We’re just inside a way-gate. It’s something like the window above the cemetery, where we went to see the dancers. You get to that one by jumping off the rock between the thimble-apple trees.”

  Bamber shook his head. “Falija, how did you know about the gates?”

  She said, “My people use way-gates to go back and forth. They’re instantaneous. If you can see way-gates, you can move around the galaxy like moving around your house. My people came here through a way-gate. It was all in my mother-brain.”

  Glory blurted, “You didn’t come in a spaceship?”

  Falija laughed, a kind of purr-hiccup, a prrrit prrrit prrrit, with the pitch going up at the end of each syllable. “From Chottem, where my parents came from, it would take several years to get to Tercis in a spaceship. Spaceships go through wormholes to get from one planet to another, but not all places are connected by wormholes. Really big spaceships, with lots of power, can generate their own wormholes and the protective field that lets people go through without getting scrambled.

  “Way-gates are different. There’s no other kind of space involved, they just step across folds, if you know right where they are. My mother-mind remembers hundreds of them. Why did you think they came in a spaceship?”

  “I just supposed it,” Glory told her. “Your people sure didn’t come from anyplace on Tercis that I’d ever heard about.”

  “No,” Falija admitted. “And neither did those men who are hunting for me. They probably came through a wormhole, and something evil sent them after you three.”

  “Me!” Glory squealed like a snared gaboon.

  “Glory?” I blurted, sounding just as surprised.

  Falija nodded seriously. “I think so,” she said. “Maybe it’s more like a feeling because you and Glory and Bamber…all three of you are part of my duty.”

  I, of course, with my usual arrogance, had been assuming that Falija was part of mine, so this set me back on my heels.

  “Why me or Bamber?” Glory asked.

  “I don’t know why,” Falija said. “Do you know why, Grandma? I’ve seen you biting your lips a lot lately, as though you were thinking.”

  I shook my head. “I have no idea, Falija. And since I’m usually thinking something or other, lip-biting is more or less a constant.”

  She turned and pointed to the trees below. “It’s selection time. The nyzeemi are picking their trees. They have to do it while the trees are still young, so they can grow old together…”

  Behind the young trees, the forest stretched endlessly away in ranks of hills before jagged lines of mountains against blue distances. Some little way back from the clearing, at the end of a glade, a grove of huge old trees towered above the others, only their leaves shivering, for the branches were too huge to be moved by the wind. I happened be to be looking at them as several old nyzeemi melted out of the bark and wandered out into the clearing, followed by others. They weren’t as thin as the young ones, they moved more stiffly, they were wrinkly and aged, with twisty arms and long, long fingers. The old ones spoke to the young ones, pointing at the trees, their clouded heads nodding.

  “They’re advising the young ones whom to pick,” said Falija.

  “All the trees I see are from old Earth,” I said. “Earth sent tree seeds with our colonies, so it must be a colony planet down there.”

  Falija considered this. “I suppose that could be, but considering the size of those trees down below, it’s more likely the seeds came from Earth thousands of years ago, when there were still forests on Earth.”

  “It’s so beautiful,” Glory whispered.

  Falija whispered, “There’s an ubioque down there who keeps the moss soft and the waterfall beautiful, just to attract nyzeemi for the trees.”

  “There’s an ubi-thingy for every place?”

  Falija shook her head. “Only beautiful, natural places. There were ubioques on Earth, but once their habitat was gone, they died…”

  She stopped suddenly, her ears pricking. All the wind and murmur sounds from below had stopped. We heard something approaching: loud, inappropriate, a hideous clamor like rocks bashing together. Falija whispered, “It can’t see us, but it might be able to hear us. Be still.”

  The nyzeemi vanished. The wind dropped. The trees drooped in absolute quiet. The soft purling of the waterfall was lost in the clamor as a long, gray thing like a huge, lumpy snake came bashing through the trees.

  “The people here call it a gizzardile,” whispered Falija. “This is a huge one, and those lumps are the stones inside it that it uses to mash up the creatures it swallows.”

  The gizzardile attempted to coil itself into a circle, a task made more difficult by the many unyielding lumps inside itself, which the gizzardile seemed to be working back toward its rear end. When the heavy rear end was bunched together, the more sinuous front part began to rise, much like the pictures I have seen of cobras rising out of snake charmers’ baskets, except that this creature’s rising seemed to have no upper limit. We held our breaths as it came ever higher, stopping with the top of its head no great distance below us, facing into the waterfall, where it dipped its huge, fanged mouth with loud slurping sounds.

  I couldn’t take my eyes from it, from the multiple pairs of bowed legs along its sides, the spiny extrusion that might be a dorsal fin, though just now it lay in a wrinkled pile along the creature’s spine. I am not usually afraid of serpents, knowing as I do that most of them are harmless and useful in keeping vermin in check, but the look and smell of this thing could have been designed to instill fear. It had a stink peculiar to itself. If malice smelled, it would smell like that.

  After slurping at the falls for what seemed an interminable time, the creature lowered itself, redistributed its lumps, and moved away through the trees with the sound of a retreating avalanche. It left a slick gray-slimed trail on the ground. As the end of the tail disappeared, a crowd of tiny people came out of the woods pushing barrows and carrying shovels. They dug the grayness up and carried it away. Immediately, the green mosses moved back into the places the slime had been, and the little people followed the slime trail back into the trees.

  “Where are they taking the stuff?” Glory asked.

  “They probably know of a way-gate nearby, one that opens into a fire pit or a volcano or even into a little sun, and they’ll dump it to be burned.”

  “And what are those little people?” Bamber demanded.

  “I’m not sure,” said Falija. “In your world, little people are mythical, and they’re called different things. These are quite real. In their language they’re called a word tha
t means filth-carriers. They have no sense of smell and no aesthetic perceptions, they aren’t bothered by nastiness, though they themselves are quite clean, so they make their living cleaning it up when it intrudes on special places.”

  “So that’s a magical world down there?” asked Bamber

  Falija replied in an astonished voice, “No, of course it’s not magical. It’s completely real. It simply has a lot of life-forms that you’re unfamiliar with.”

  Glory asked, “What do you mean, it’s not magical, it’s real?”

  “It’s a real world. It has real qualities. Up is always up and down is always down. Fruit falls from a tree, it doesn’t float to the sky. Creatures are born in this world, and grow up and eventually die. What’s true today is also true tomorrow.

  “If this were a magical world, all those things would be subject to change by anyone who had power or could command it by spell or enchantment. Magical worlds can’t exist in our universe because their rules change constantly, and there’s no difference between evil and good. Power is power, and everyone does whatever they can get away with.”

  “I always thought magic was sort of nice,” said Glory.

  Falija’s ears drooped. “Humans are fascinated with magic. Your people like to believe in powers that will break all the laws of the universe, just for you.” Falija shivered. “My bones feel it’s getting really late back home. It’s time to go.”

  So we went back through the shimmering gate, down to my house, all of us silent and full of wonder. Falija and I stopped off while the other two went on down the hill. For a moment I wondered if I should call them back, tell them not to mention what had happened tonight, not even to Maybelle or James. I decided they knew enough to keep their mouths shut, and in fact, they did.

  The first day of the following week, I drove Bamber and Glory over to Remorseful to school. Some of the people who had been taking care of Dorothy Springer’s cats were interested in setting up an animal refuge in her memory, a place for stray cats and dogs and whatever. They’d asked me if I would help, and I’d said I’d talk with them about it that morning. School hadn’t started yet, and most of the students were out on the lawn when we arrived. The children got out of the buggy just as a series of unusual noises came from the main street, down the hill, where the stores and bank and offices were, like a huge door slamming repeatedly. Everyone jumped up, peering down the street and jabbering. Before anybody could move in that direction, the head teacher came out of the school and told everyone to get inside until we knew what had happened.

  I hitched the horse and went inside with the children, thinking how ridiculous this was, in Rueful, of all places. Bamber went out the back door of the school before I had a chance to ask where he was going. Inside the doors, the head teacher was telling everyone the Dominion Alarm system had already summoned Dominion officers, and everyone was to stay inside with their belongings at hand, in case they needed to be sent home.

  A moment later, a Dominion Police flier buzzed up over the hills and headed for the downtown, and only moments after that, Bamber Joy sneaked back into the school and came to find Glory and me. He said he’d sneaked over to Main Street where supposedly armed men had robbed the bank. He’d seen Ned and Walter in front of the bank, waving their arms and claiming to have seen the robbers running off into the woods. Since woods covered most of the mountains around town, the alleged robbers could be anywhere. That’s the way Bamber said it, alleged robbers. The police had already sent for scent-hounds and fliers and heaven knows what else.

  Not long after that, a Dominion Officer arrived to tell everyone to go home and lock themselves in. Bamber disappeared. Glory, Til, and Jeff got into the wagon with me, and we were just at the edge of town when we saw Billy Ray’s wagon with him and Benny Paul in it, recruiting people for search parties. They yelled at Jeff and Til to get in the wagon, and Til was over there before I could say a word. Jeff said he’d wait and go with his dad, which was quite sensible of him.

  We left Jeff unhitching the horse at Maybelle’s, while Glory and I went up to my house to discuss the matter.

  “I think this is another decoy,” she said. “Even if the bank really did get robbed.”

  I said, “Real or not real, when a so-called robbery scatters every able-bodied man and boy from The Valley into the mountains, it makes me a little nervous, doesn’t it you?”

  Falija’s eyes were as big as teacups, and her ears were back.

  “There,” Glory said, stroking Falija’s head. “That’s exactly what Bamber thought, especially since Ned and Walter were telling the sheriff where the robbers went. But, Jeff isn’t gone, and neither is Bamber. His stepdaddy probably went with everyone else, but Bamber will show up here just as soon as he finds out what’s happening.”

  And he did, a fairly short time later, sticking his head in the door, panting like he’d run five miles, which likely he had.

  “Ned and Walter are back,” he said. “They’ve got four or five other guys with them, and they’re going house to house down the valley road, coming this way, waving fake badges and saying they’re deputized by Dominion to search every house for the bank robbers.”

  “They’ll find me,” said Falija, sounding a little panicky. “They will. They’ll sniff me out.”

  “Then we need to go somewhere else,” Glory said in a determined tone. “Don’t we, Falija?”

  Falija looked at her, and the creases between her eyes went away. “Of course! Up the mountain! Where I took you the other evening!”

  “Right,” said Bamber Joy. “Through that gate! Maybe we could even close the gate behind us. Glory and I’ll come along to keep you company.”

  “Glory, and you, and I,” I said. “Unless Falija would be safer going alone.”

  “Grandma,” said Falija, “there’s no time to explain now. They’re looking for me, yes, but they’re also looking for anyone who helped me, and that includes all three of you. I wouldn’t be safer alone, and I’d have failed my duty.”

  Glory said, “They were asking for scent-hounds to be brought in…”

  Falija said, “In that case, they’ll find me or anyone I’ve been with or anyplace I’ve been lately…”

  “Should we take Lou Ellen?” Glory asked, sounding worried. I started to say something, then bit my lip.

  Falija gave Glory a troubled look. “Glory, Lou Ellen will be all right. She’ll either meet us on the way or she can visit her other friends, and they’ll keep her safe.”

  A few more words bubbled up among us, and we confused each other for a few minutes with ifs and buts, but the upshot was that I wrote a note saying I had the notion to go camping up the river over the next few days, and I was taking Glory and Bamber Joy along to fetch and carry. Glory took the note down to her house, put it on the kitchen table, dumped her books and stowed a few things in her backpack, grabbed her bedroll and jacket, and rejoined Bamber and me, who were making up a couple of packs and bedrolls ourselves.

  I said, “Spare socks? Underwear?”

  Glory said, “I brought some of Til’s clothes for Bamber, since he didn’t have time to collect anything.”

  I locked my door behind us but left the curtains open so anybody could look in and see nobody was home. Just about that time, Bamber saw two cars coming along the road from the bridge. If they got to the Judson house, they’d see the note, but since we weren’t really going where the note said we were going, it didn’t matter much if Ned and Walter followed the false lead.

  We went uphill, walking on rocks so as not to leave a visible trail. Bamber came last to be sure no one had made any marks or dropped anything. We reached the spire of black rock, and from there we could hear men yelling down the hill. Glory climbed halfway up the rock to get a better view and reported there were two cars in the driveway as well as her daddy’s buggy, her parents, and Jeff, along with several other people.

  When we got to the slit rock, Falija told us to help her make a rock pile right beside it. Bamber and
Glory fetched some bigger ones while I gathered small ones. Glory went into the slit in the rock, took my hand, and helped me over the pile. Falija and Bamber came through and reached back to arrange the stones into a teetery heap that looked as if it had fallen that way, a perfect place to break a leg. They topped it off with a few broken, dried branches that pretty well filled the crack between the stones.

  This time we went straight through the watery tunnel and out the other end onto the ledge. It was daytime, and the nyzeemi weren’t there. When we looked back, a black pool filled the whole width of the ledge behind us.

  Falija said, “Get up on top of the railing stones.”

  “On top?” I said, shocked. We were quite high enough already.

  “It’s the only way down,” said Falija, climbing onto a stone herself.

  Bamber and Glory climbed up, each took hold of one of my arms and pulled me up between them. Falija said to shut our eyes and jump, and that’s what Bamber and Glory did, dragging me off the ledge with them. I thought of screaming, but by the time I’d decided on it, we were floating. We landed soft as featherweed floss. Bamber and Glory let go, and I stood there trembling. After I decided I was all in one piece I took a deep breath and asked Falija, “What was that?”

  “My people put a kind of elevator there. It isn’t magic. It’s just a force field. They sometimes put them in places like this where the way-gates end up in difficult places. I knew the field was there. I could feel it.”

  “The people can’t follow us?”

  Falija shook her head. “Not unless they know precisely where this way-gate is, because if they are what we think they are, they can’t smell it or see it, the way my people can. Each gate creates an aversion field so nonsensors walk on past it without even noticing.”