The Margarets (3 page)

Time went by. Sometimes in the evenings a long, fat thing would come down right on top of several towers, squashing many of them. Shiny people came out of the ships to dig up several other towers. The shiny people made sounds.

“How many this time?”

“Whatever we can catch.”

“What in hell does d’Lornschilde do with them?”

“How should I know. He pays well, that’s all I care.”

The shiny people pulled “mes” out of the wreckage one by one, discarding those who were injured or dead. They put the live ones in cages, the cages into the long fat thing, then squashed other towers and filled other cages before going away. In towers not yet squashed, the creatures slept curled against the walls, but the long fat thing soon came back, again and again and again…

The last time it came, some unsquashed mes ran away and hid at the edge of the sea in a little cave where they could stay warm. When day came, they stayed there, for they had no tower to return to, nothing to pick, no fungus to eat, and the forests were dead. They were very few, and very hungry. Eventually, hunger drove them to try eating the things that grew in the sea…

This account of the great task undertaken by the Third Order of the Siblinghood is written for my great-grandchildren. Even though they “know” what happened, children, as I know from experience, always want the details. “What happened next?” “What did he say?” “Did they live happily ever after?” The “I” doing the writing am…are Margaret. No matter what name I am given wherever I may be, “I” am always Margaret, for this is my story as well as the story of mankind, and the Gentherans, and, possibly, a good part of the galaxy.

When I was about five or six, I liked lying in the window of my bedroom watching the Martian desert move beneath me as the planet whirled. My didactibot taught me how to make a pinwheel out of paper and a pin, and told me to attach it to a railing by the ventilation duct. It whirled and whirled until the hole wore out, and it fell apart. It was the only thing I had ever made, and I wept over it, but my didactibot said in its usual mechanical, self-satisfied voice, that nothing whirls forever, not even planets and stars. At the moment, I thought it was just getting even with me for calling it a diddybot, which it didn’t like at all.

That night, on the edge of sleep, however, I remembered that diddybots can’t lie or mislead people because
truth is built in, and therefore it was true that nothing whirled forever. The end of all whirling meant me, too. Terror grabbed me, and I cried out. Mother came in and comforted me, assuming I was having a bad dream. I didn’t know how to tell her I was afraid of being a pinwheel, for she was a pinwheel, too, and someday whatever kept us spinning would wear out, and we would stop.

When I was older, I realized that all sane children come to this realization, but just then it was like a nightmare that I would wake up from. I didn’t wake up. It stayed there, that dark hole in the future. Eventually I asked about it. Why did we exist? What were we for? Mother said hush don’t think about it. Father said, take care of her, Louise. After a while I realized we never wake up from the nightmare, but we do learn not to think about it.

I watched the Mars surface, near Olympus Mons, where nests of snaky whirlwinds squirmed across the craters. The wind swept the surface all the time, erasing any marks the exploration robots made. Humans didn’t do exploration. They stayed in the canyon depths of Valles Marineris except for maintenance trips to the wind generators on the rim. I couldn’t see the towers with their huge, balanced vanes from my window, but I knew all about them. I knew about the water mines at the pole, too, where the coring machines chewed the ancient ice into slurry and sent it south, down long pipes to the canyons.

We were on Mars and Phobos because depopulating Earth was urgently important, and Mars was to be colonized as part of Project Compliance, to keep us from being classified as barbarians. I had no idea what that meant, and the didactibot refused to tell me. It didn’t lie, but it only told me the things people thought I ought to know, so, obviously, I wasn’t supposed to know about barbarians.

I was the only child on Phobos, and most of the things people said to me were politenesses. “Good morning, Margaret.” “Too bad, Margaret.” “Well done, Margaret.” “How are you today, Margaret?” Each of these had an answer I had been taught to give: “Good morning to you, as well.” “Yes, it is too bad.” “Thank you for noticing.” “Very well, thank you for asking.” They never said anything different or strange or new.

Besides politenesses, people talked about work. Mother kept records in the hydroponic gardens, and she talked about sorting sys
tems and constructive interfaces. Father worked in the lab, and he talked about new oxygen-creating bacteria and newly constituted biomic-clusters being sent down to the surface. Once I asked Father why they kept on doing it. He said it was to find out what would happen.

I asked if he didn’t already know what would happen.

“Tell her,” my mother said. “Tell her the way you told me.”

Father flushed. “That was private,” he said, leaving the room and shutting the door behind him.

Mother shook her head. “He told me about it when we were just getting to know one another. It was romantic and eloquent and nonscientific, so of course he doesn’t like to repeat it.”

“But you do,” I said.

She smiled, a tiny secret smile I had never seen before. “It was a happy time for us, and he was eager about the work. He told me he dreams of creating a paradise down there in the ravines, a world in which all the living things work together to form a functioning miracle, something beautiful and marvelous and good. He never told anyone but me.”

“But he doesn’t know what will happen?”

“Not really, no. Sometimes experiments end up doing the opposite of what they intend; some tiny organism is wrong, and everything rots and dies. Other times, the project shows great promise, but it doesn’t quite get there. Your father says no one will know for sure until it happens. That’s how science works.”

The other thing people talked about was the weather down on Mars. Sometimes there were storms that blew up so much sand they hid the planet behind a gray veil. When that happened, I pretended the storm had spun us off into nothingness, and when the dust cleared we’d have gone somewhere else. I didn’t tell anyone this. They had been very upset with me when I cried about the pinwheel wearing out. I didn’t want to upset them again.

The people down in Valles Marineris lived in the “green ravines.” That’s where the water came out of the polar pipes to be used and collected and used and collected, over and over. Green ravines had transparent roofs. Mirrors on the canyon walls reflected the pale sunlight down through the roofs, and the plants inside produced breath
able air. I thought when I grew up I’d get a job on the surface where I could live in a green ravine and do something real: run a corer in the water mines or help maintain the wind power stations. Being a child on Phobos Station didn’t seem real at all.

Grown-ups on Phobos had regular jobs, but my only job was to be schooled. Each year my didactibot added words to my vocabulary list, and that helped me explain things. I learned that the adults on Phobos were meticulous and painstaking and sedentary. Nobody ever went anywhere or did anything. Everybody had constipation and insomnia. Everyone talked about that, even in front of me. Politenesses, work, weather, constipation, insomnia, and ennui.

The consultants recommended more use of the gym for constipation and insomnia and more attention to hobbies to fight ennui. Phobian hobbies included playing in the orchestra, singing in the chorus, working with the theater group, or joining arts and craft exhibits. Everyone did things or made things fastidiously and meticulously, but not superlatively, so that nobody on station would think they were trying to show off. Showing off or “winning” caused ill feelings. So did criticism.

“But I think his painting is awful,” I said once.

“It doesn’t matter what you think,” my father, Harry Bain, said. “You can find something pleasant to say about it.”

“The colors were all muddled,” I offered doubtfully.

“Then you say that you appreciate the earthy, organic tones,” said Louise Bain, my mother.

One time, when the didactibot and I were getting along better than usual, we decided the wheels on Phobos were greased with meticulous, painstaking, fastidious, and scrupulous insincerity. The didactibot said it could find out if I was musical, or arty, or actorish if I wanted it to, but since no one ever suggested I might be, I assumed children weren’t supposed to have ennui and left well enough alone. Diddybot said I was lazy. I don’t think I really was.

My pastime was sewing. I did not enjoy it, but it was what Mother did, and Mother felt we should spend time together, “doing something.” I actually learned to sew quite well. I made several sets of clothing for myself that were just as good as those brought from Earth on the
Ninja
, the
Piñata
, or the
Santa Claus.
Those were the
three ships the Gentherans had given to Earthgov in 2062, shortly after they discovered Earth. The ships were given those names, the Gentherans said, because they had discovered a new world and appeared out of nowhere bearing goodies. It was supposed to be a pun, a kind of joke. I could understand the
Piñata
and
Santa Claus
part but not the
Ninja
part. Ninjas came out of nowhere, too, but they usually damaged people. Anyhow, people said it was nice to know the ETs had a sense of humor. Earthgov couldn’t pay for the ships, but the Gentherans didn’t mind. They were very helpful. Everyone said so.

Since very few children had ever been born on Phobos, and I was the only one who stayed, no one thought to make provision for entertaining a child, especially not one who was inquisitive or bored, which I was, by age six. By then I had experienced every variation of every possible human encounter—the public ones, at least—and I was tired of them all. I started hiding in corners and behind doors, listening, trying to learn new words and ideas. I became a sneak. My didactibot defined sneakiness as an antisocial adaptation to threat, mostly engaged in by solitary animals. I thought that was right. I was about as solitary as anybody could be. I didn’t mean to be antisocial, but at least I learned that adults talked about other things when they thought they were alone.

They had many whispered words and phrases that were evidently not fit for saying out loud. I didn’t know what they meant and didn’t dare ask anyone, but I used them all the time. In my toy village, I staged plays with my dolls as the actors, assigning them forbidden words and phrases.

“If you don’t behave, the proctor will get you,” said a mother doll to a child doll as they walked down the tiny business street of the toy village, with its toy houses and toy church and toy trees, even though there were no trees on Earth, for no water could be spared for such things. “I’ll tell him you’re not two-three-four.”

When I was about eight, the didactibot opened a library file for me that had whole books in it, some of it fiction, which is imaginary, and some of it real things I should know about, like history. At first, the fiction confused me. The characters mentioned things the other characters understood but I knew nothing about. The first few times I noticed this, I asked for explanations, only to find that
whatever book I was reading immediately vanished from my library file.
Babies
was a bad word;
proliferate
was a bad word. Even my dictionary, though I didn’t know it at the time, was carefully pruned to keep inappropriate subjects unthinkable.

All this did was make me determined to learn everything inappropriate in the whole universe, and I spent day after day digging into diddybot’s files finding out what people didn’t want me to know. That’s where I learned about the six human colonies the Gentherans had secretly set up for us on other planets: B’yurngrad, Chottem, Cranesroost, Eden, Tercis, and Thairy. The settlement on Thairy was discovered by the Mercan Combine and the Omniont Federation in 2080, and they traced the people back to Earth, and they’d been going back and forth ever since. The Mercans and Omnionts were bunches of different races, almost all from carbon-based, free-water planets rather like Earth. There were other combines and federations of other kinds of life, too, but I didn’t know anything about them.

Sometimes, when Earth was visible, I used my telescope to watch the Mercan and Omniont ships moving between the wormhole and Earth. They were huge ships, the size of little moons, but they might as well have been invisible. No one on Phobos ever mentioned them. The only explanation I could come up with was that all the adults had been on Phobos for so long that they had seen everything, knew what they thought about everything, and didn’t need to discuss anything anymore. They were used to exchanging the same greetings many times each day and hearing the same jokes told over and over. I didn’t think they realized there were no ideas in anything they said or that every single day they said the same words over and over, like birdcalls: chirrup, chirrup, tweet, tweet chirrup; caw caw cwaup, caw cwaup. Not that I had ever heard a live bird, but my didactibot was capable of vocalization!

Each year more books were added to the library list, and I was careful not to lose any of them. Years later I learned they had been bowdlerized, but the screeners hadn’t been attentive or draconian enough to prevent a steady seepage of real information. Ideas oozed out of books like magma out of volcanoes. They solidified into whole, wonderful worlds, and I populated each one with beings and
places I read of or invented: flora, fauna, forests, mountains, seascapes, all of them named, though no one knew those names but me, just as no one knew the names of the people I became in my various worlds: here a warrior who led the tribe through many dangers; there a shaman who could send her spirit to far places; here a healer who knew secret ways to cure sickness; there a telepath who could see into the hearts of others and communicate with animals; here a linguist who could understand all languages, ancient and new; there a queen who inspired her realm; here a spy who found out all the things the queen needed to know.

At the time it seemed perfectly normal to be six or seven other people. After all, I didn’t have anyone else to play with. I knew, on one level, the different selves were imaginary, but at the same time they felt completely real. “I will be a queen,” I told myself, repeating this until it became a mantra. I, a queen will be. Queen Willbea. No. That had an ugly sound to it. It should be softer. Wilvia. Queen Wilvia. That pleased me, and I bowed to myself in the mirror.

The spy evolved very naturally. She was the part of me who hid in corners, who was unobserved, who always listened and picked up information. Someone inoffensive that no one would ever suspect. Just like me. I didn’t give her a name. Spies don’t have names, just aliases.

“Others have been warriors, now me!” I cried to my mirrored self. I spelled it “Naumi.” He was a quiet but very clever one. He wasn’t huge and muscular, so he had to outthink other people. He became the warrior who guarded the borders, who protected the queen, and being him was fun because I liked being a boy sometimes. We had no animals on Phobos or Earth, but there were animals on many of my imagined worlds. Yaboons and gammerfrees and umoxen. I talked to them all the time in my guise as Mar, the telepath, who could talk to animals, and humans. I explored things as dark, smoky Margy, the shaman, the one who would travel in her mind. Traveling in my mind was something I did a lot of.