“True,” said Keeper.
Falija went on, “In the great history of the Pthas we read of the delegation they sent to the Keeper. They found you, they spoke to you, you spoke to them. They asked a boon, you granted it. Will you do as much for Genthera?”
Keeper seemed to look elsewhere, into infinite distances. “Keeper might not will to do it for Humans, who are silly infants, meriting very little. Keeper might not do it for the Gibbekot or their Gentheran kin, for even they are not yet fully grown.”
A sigh breathed through the circle, the tiniest moan.
“But,” said Keeper, “Keeper would do it for umoxen, whose soul is far older than Genthera.” He stared at Mar-agern, and Mar-agern returned the stare, astonished.
Keeper turned to M’urgi. “M’urgi, Keeper would do it for chitterlain, whose ancestors moved among the stars a billion years ago. Ongamar, Keeper might do it for the humble Hrass. Naumi, Keeper might do it for the gammerfree, and Margaret, for the hayfolk Dame. And you, Wilvia and Gretamara, Keeper might do it for a Trajian juggler upon whom one took pity and the other avenged. Yes, all of them are older, and far wiser, than mankind.
“You were kind to their people,” said Keeper, focusing on each of us in turn. “There will be a price to pay, of course, but Keeper is fond of their people, and so would be kind to your people.”
Into the wordless and shocked silence, Wilvia spoke. “We thank you, Keeper.”
The beings who had surrounded us had vanished, drawn backwards into the great wind that came all at once, loosening the grip of our seven pairs of hands and wrenching us apart. I, Margaret, felt them blown away into the howl of a black storm, bodies incapable of movement, wills paralyzed, minds in confusion, scraps of perception driven into an unimaginable otherwhere, each of us holding, only briefly, the same clear, perfectly accepted thought.
Well, this is death, but we have done what was to be done.
And yet I was still somewhere, with the Keeper, now in a shape I have tried since to remember and cannot. It spoke into my ear: “Don’t forget what your father told your mother, Margaret. About what he was trying to do on Mars…”
“Father never really knew what would happen,” I cried.
“No. The Scientist does not know the result until it happens. You are part of its workings. I am the record it keeps of what succeeds and will be used again and what fails and will be excluded forever…”
And then, only silence.
On the world called Shore by the people who lived there, and Hell by those who didn’t, the people woke one morning with a strangeness in them. None of them rose from their beds. They just lay there very quietly, thinking.
“Did you know we were humans once?” said one to his mate.
“I didn’t know it before,” she said. “We were humans when we came here on the moon. Except it wasn’t a moon. It was a starship, a Quaatar starship.”
“Do you think we are human now?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “If we’re not, why do we remember being? I remember we gave up living in trees…”
“I remember we killed Earth,” he said.
“I remember we were going up the river soon to cut trees to make a new town and build many boats…”
“I remember we have to make room for more…”
Outside the house, some of the people were moving about. The town leader came out of her house and sat down on her stool, by the door. Each day the leader did this and the people came with their questions.
They gathered now.
The leader did not wait for questions. “Mika, Dao, Tinka. We have made a nasty at the creek. It smells bad. Nothing grows there. Dig a pit inside the forest, put all the nasty into the pit, and cover it with earth. In time it will feed trees. Choun, Bila, Fet, consult your minds and make a plan so no more nasty happens, then come tell me.” The leader fell silent.
“Today we plan to go upriver and make a new town,” said one of them. “We will cut trees to make room for more?”
“Not today,” said the leader. “Today we count people. Today we count how many trees each person uses every year. Today we count fishes for each person, mollusks for each person, freshwater for drinking. Today we begin to learn how many people can live on this world without ruining it.”
“What shall the rest of us do?” someone asked helplessly.
“Today,” the leader said, “you all stop making room for more and take time to remember.”
On Tercis, the Gardener waited, her head bowed. Falija had gone. Time stretched thin, the sound of its tenuity becoming intolerably shrill. No one returned. At last, with a shuddering sigh, the Gardener entered the way-gate before her.
On Fajnard, she found the Siblings guarding the way-gate. “All quiet, ma’am,” they reported.
“Come with me,” she said.
On Thairy there were other Siblings to join the group, and again on B’yurngrad, Cantardene, and Chottem. They stepped into the last gate but one and emerged into the buried starship on the planet called Hell. A naked woman lay on the metal floor, faceup, hands folded upon her breast. Gardener squatted beside the body, laying her long hands on the woman’s face and neck.
“Who is it?” whispered one of the Siblings.
Gardener shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen her before, but whoever she is, she’s alive.”
One of the strong Sibling warriors, Sister Ella May Judson, stepped forward to throw her cape across the person before lifting her in her arms. Together they went through the last gate, back to Tercis.
“Will you stay here, Gardener?” Ella May asked. “I was born in this place, and there is a house nearby you can use.”
The Gardener said, “We’ve already been to the house, Ella May, and people are waiting for us there. Carry her for me if you will.”
Ella May murmured, “It is Margaret’s house, my Grandmother’s house. I will stay with you, Gardener. You will need someone to fetch and carry, and I know Rueful.”
“That would be a kindness. Thank you, Ella May.” She turned to the other Siblings. “The rest of you may return to your own places, with my thanks.”
Ella May carried the woman’s body down through the woods, and from below them, someone called, “They’re coming.”
Bamber Joy and Gloriana were awaiting them on the porch, as was Ferni, sitting on the step, staring at Ella May and her burden, his face wet with tears.
Gloriana cried, “Is that you, Ella May! Who’s that you’re carrying?”
The Gardener replied, “Gloriana, we don’t know.”
Ella May laid the quiet body on the couch.
Bamber looked at the face somberly. “Not our mother, Glory. Not Grandma, either.”
“I think…I think it does look a little like Queen Wilvia,” Glory said. “And a little like Grandma, too. From those pictures we have of her, when she was a lot younger.”
Ferni had come in from outside. Now he spoke in a lost, weary voice. “Is there something of M’urgi there. Something of Naumi?”
“Both, I think,” said Glory. “Did the Keeper put her back together?” She turned to the Gardener. “Is that what happened? You never mentioned that!”
“No,” the Gardener confessed, with a low, self-mocking laugh. “With all our thought, all our planning, we never thought of that. We recited the old stories, over and over, ‘Seven makes one, seven makes one,’ each time thinking of the road, never considering the walkers.”
She knelt by the couch, searching the face before her for Gretamara. This woman was older than Gretamara, though much younger than Margaret. She had lines of pain in her face, as Ongamar had had, though not as deep. Her hands were hard and strong, as Mar-agern’s had been. The mouth…Naumi’s mouth, and M’urgi’s. The skin was not as dark as Mar-agern’s, but darker than Gretamara’s. The hair was longer than Mar-agern’s, shorter than Wilvia’s, but she had Wilvia’s eyes…which had just opened.
“You’re awake,” cried Glory.
The woman turned her head. “Gloriana,” she whispered. “And Bamber Joy. My…our children.”
“Gretamara,” said the Gardener.
“Gardener,” she said.
“Grandma,” said Ella May, with certainty.
“Why…Ella May. How strong and well you look, my dear.”
“Naumi?” said Ferni. “Naumi?”
“Oh, damn, Ferni. Yes, I’m here!”
“M’urgi? Wilvia?” he whispered.
But her eyelids had closed, and she slept.
“Well,” said the Gardener, rising to her feet. “I wonder if Keeper did anything besides reuniting Margaret.”
“Oh,” cried Glory. “You don’t know. Well then, you must not be…”
“Not be what, child?”
“Human,” said Bamber Joy. “You must not be human, or you would know!”
“Just tell me what it is I should know!”
Bamber Joy said, “Just a few moments ago. Something happened. We all know things now. Things we never really knew before.”
“It worked!” the Gardener said, marveling. “It really worked? I hadn’t stopped to consult my source.” She closed her eyes, after a moment opening them once more to beam at them.
Gloriana smiled at her, a bit tremulously. “It really did, Gardener. And we’re all just the way Falija was when she got her mother-mind. We’re all itchy and uncomfortable, because our heads are too full, and it’s like trying to find our way around a strange house that has too many rooms with too many doors in it.”
Ferni said, “Forgive me, Gardener, but is it true? You’re not human?”
“Oh, Fernwold, of course not!” she said with some acerbity. “I am not human, and my colleagues are not human. We wonder at ourselves, coalesced, as we are, out of human hope and need and pain. We see, we speak, we are seen, we are heard, yet every thought, sight, word has been created for us by others. We have no creativity; we have no imagination; and yet we seem both creative and imaginative because we have such a vast grab bag of ideas and dreams to draw from. Each thought, plan, idea, notion is like a piece in an enormous jigsaw puzzle. At the end of time, they will all fit together to make a picture of mankind we have no conception of…” She stood up.
“In the meantime, we seem to have power, if it is only the power to take an idea from one mind and plant it in another, as a bird takes a fruit from a far, lone tree and lets fall a seed in quite another place. Old gods sometimes do that in their retirement. They become galactic social workers, self-appointed do-gooders.”
Falija said from the doorway, “But that’s only a lesser part of the truth, Gardener, because you can do things the other gods can’t do. They can’t move a material thing, but you can and do. You’re Pthas, aren’t you?”
Gardener looked up, for a moment seeming larger and older than she had ever looked before. “Why, how very perceptive of you, Gibbekotkin! Yes. I am Pthas. As is Weathereye, and Lady Badness, and a few more. The boon we asked of the Keeper just before most of us left this galaxy to go on to another, was that some of us be allowed to stay on, to take a new form and help others who need help. We had long contended against vile races, vile ideas, and we thought our experience would be valuable. The vile races we contended against are long gone. The vile ideas seem to be immortal.”
Falija said, “The Keeper called you its daughter. And being Pthas would explain a lot of things, like how you knew about the Keeper. The Gentherans will be interested in that!”
Ferni had been sitting quietly in the corner, his eyes fixed on the woman they had brought from the gate, who was now struggling to sit up, staring wildly at him, and whispering, “Is that you, Joziré?”
“Yes he is,” said the Gardener. “Though he still does not know it. Lady Nepenthe has moved in and out of his life several times, but there will be time to talk of that later.”
Ferni almost growled, then stood very tall and demanded, “One thing will not wait until later! What’s happened on B’yurngrad?”
Gardener was startled. “I don’t know. Mr. Weathereye went back to see the end…”
“I did see it,” said Mr. Weathereye.
They turned to see him leaning in the doorway. “The three races continued dropping ghyrm,” he rumbled. “More and more of them at a time. They had unlimited numbers of them aboard, and the persons on the ships were drunk with destruction. It seems Naumi and his talk road had had what Caspor calls ‘a hunch.’ They had changed the calibration of the instrument so that it covered less surface area but reached much, much higher. The ships came lower and lower, so they could watch the carnage below them, oh, so well acted by the tribesmen, who writhed and twisted and screamed, then crawled away, recovering only to die again. They have a talent for dramatics, those men, born, I should think, from many generations of braggadocio around the campfires…”
“What happened?” shouted Ferni.
“We watched the ships drop down, watched the gauge on the fuel cell of the machine, dropping as the ships did, almost reaching zero, and just as the machine approached the end of its power, the ships themselves dropped within range of it, and every ghyrm still on the ships died.”
He heaved a great sigh. “…and not only the ghyrm.”
“Not the tribes? The umoxen,” we Margarets cried.
“Quite safe, lady. Not so, however, the K’Famir, the Frossians, the Quaatar on board the ships, for they died as their creatures died. You will remember the size of those ships? They were the ones the trading races use to carry huge cargoes plus huge numbers of crew and their families, and they were full to bursting with Frossians, K’Famir, and Quaatar who wanted to see us die. There might have been a million of them on those ships, the entire ruling class of three starfaring races. We had no idea they would do that…”
“We did,” said I from my place on the couch. “Naumi did.”
The Gardener peered at Weathereye. “But Ongamar thought they made the creatures out of human children!”
“They made them out of human pain,” I said. “But it was themselves they put into the making! The tissue, the flesh, was most closely matched to human, in order to be able to attach to it, feed on it, but it wasn’t the flesh that mattered! It was the bloodlust that moved them, and whatever will kill the ghyrm will kill those who made them as well.” I lay back; my eyes closed; I heard them go on talking.
Gardener asked, “What has the Siblinghood done? They haven’t started a war?”
Weathereye shook his head. “They had planned to ship a machine to Cantardene. Then the change happened, you know, the mother-mind thing. Everyone was very confused. When the confusion grew a little less, and when they saw what had happened on B’yurngrad, they decided not to do it. They’ve put the machines in storage.”
The Gardener nodded. “Something in their history has moved them to patience. Wise leaders do not go to war with enemies, not even evil enemies, unless they have thought it through to the end.”
Time went by on Tercis.
Gloriana and Bamber Joy went to Maybelle, Jimmy Joe, and Jeff, to tell them, and only them, what had happened. It took more than one telling, over considerable time, and once again Gloriana was accused of telling fairy tales. Despairing, Gloriana took Maybelle to visit the Margarets. Maybelle had tea with them, her, and they talked for hours. When Maybelle left, she still appeared confused and a bit teary, but she looked happier than when she had arrived.
Subsequently, in the Ruehouse in Crossroads, Pastor Grievy held a memorial service for Margaret Mackey, lost in the river while escaping from the bad men during the recent unpleasantness in The Valley. Gloriana and Bamber Joy had been unable to save her; but it gave them solace, they said, to dedicate the stone that was set in the cemetery, next to Dr. Mackey’s, in her memory.
“And it’s true, sort of,” said Gloriana. “Our grandma is really gone.”
The Allocation people on Tercis, following the acquisition of mother-mind and after lengthy consultation with the Gentherans,
changed many of their assignment procedures. Most of those on Tercis had reacted to the acquisition of mother-memory with significant and positive personality changes, but some had proven to have a mental defect that made them impervious to history. Among the latter were Billy Ray and Mayleen, who together with Benny Paul, Janine Ruth, and Sue Elaine were moved to a new Walled-Off, created especially, as Jimmy Joe put it, “For them as are pigheaded, mule-stubborn, and thick as a post!” Jeff ’s brother, Til, was assigned to the same Walled-Off, with the understanding that he might receive, from time to time, a chance at reassignment. Trish was moved to a small Walled-Off created especially for people like her, where she could be contented and cared for.
Maybelle and Jimmy Joe agreed to foster Orvie John and little Emmaline while keeping their fingers crossed.
Ferni stayed on Tercis, spending much of his time with Margaret, though he didn’t call her that. Or M’urgi. Or anything except you, or lady, or very occasionally, dear one.
Lady Badness dropped by one day and ran her hands over his head while the Margarets looked on.
“Who are you and where did you live your first twelve years?” she asked him in a chuckling voice.
“My name is Prince Joziré. I lived on Fajnard with my mother, the queen. We had to go into hiding. The Gardener took me, and also a girl named Wilvia. We went to B’yurngrad, to school…”
“And then where did you go?”
“To the academy, on Thairy. I forgot about Wilvia. Oh, how could I have…”
“Don’t worry about it. How long were you there?”
“I was there for four years. I met my best friend there. His name was Naumi…”
“And then?”
“Then…I went to work for the Siblinghood, on B’yurngrad. That’s where I met M’urgi…But they wouldn’t let me stay there, I forgot about M’urgi, I forgot Naumi, I remembered my mother, and I remembered Wilvia, and we were married. We ruled the Ghoss together, for five years. We were expecting our first child, then the Thongal invaded at the behest of the Quaatar…”
The Margarets Page 52
