The Margarets Read online

  The Quaatar had not known they had stowaways until they saw Ahn’s people leaving the ship and disappearing into the underbrush. The sight infuriated them. It should be mentioned that an infuriated Quaatar is something no reasonable individual wants to deal with. An aroused Quaatar is somewhat comparable to a tsunami engendered by an earthquake measuring eight or nine on the Richter scale while several supervolcanoes erupt simultaneously during a category five hurricane. The Quaatar ordered the ship to destroy the planet and were dissuaded only when the automatic system governor harshly reminded them the Galactic Court would not allow destruction of living planets.

  Quaatar annoyance, once aroused, however, had to be slaked, not least because their vessel, sacred to the holy Quaatar race, had been defiled and would have to be resanctified. All non-Quaatar personnel were sequestered, for their own safety, while every deck was washed down with the blood of sacrificial victims (a supply of whom were always carried on Quaatar ships), who were first flayed to yield skins with which the entire exterior hull had to be scrubbed. Finally, skin, bones, and remaining tissue were ritually burned. This was time-consuming, yielding only mild amusement during the flaying part, and it was all the fault of the stowaways.

  When the ritual was completed, the Quaatar turned their attention back to vengeance. Honor demanded that revenge be exacted upon those who had committed the trespass. Since the Quaatar could not find the beings who had fled the ship, they decided to maim them from a distance by using a recently and illicitly obtained brain block ray, which could be set to atrophy parts of the brain of any animal that had one. Since they had no sample stowaway to set the machine with (and would have been unlikely to do it correctly had they had one), they entered an arbitrary and random setting, trusting that their god, Dweller in Pain, who had been properly propitiated, would see to the seemliness of the punishment.

  Accordingly, the stowaways’ brains were fried. This left untouched the race from which they had come, which was equally guilty since it had produced the offenders. The Quaatar “captain” ordered the ship to be returned to the penultimate planet, where the brain block ray, still on the same setting, was set to cover the entire surface of the world during one complete revolution.

  When the Quaatar departed, they left monitors behind to send images they later watched with great gratification as several generations of the creatures struggled to compensate for their new handicap. The ray had not made them completely mindless. It had merely wiped out the memory of certain things. This loss was a considerable handicap, however, and by the time several generations had passed, there were only fifteen or twenty thousand of them left.

  “Can they ever get it back?” a junior Quaatar asked its elder. Very young Quaatar sometimes had ideas, before their brains solidified.

  The senior drew itself up pompously. “There is no it! The it no longer exists!”

  “Legend says everything exists, you know, where Keeper keeps everything.”

  “Tah. Is dirty K’Famir legend! If kept, is in a place these filth could never find, never!”

  “Somebody says Pthas did.”

  “Tss,” the senior sneered. “Dirty K’Famir legend says Pthas went many places nobody wanted them. K’Famir say Keeper much annoyed by visit of Pthas. K’Famir say Keeper changed rules, told Pthas only person walking seven roads at once can ever see Keeper. That is like saying nobody, never. That is good thing. Seven is unlucky for Quaatar. Six is enough number.”

  “If something had seven all-same-time universes, it could…”

  “Enough!” roared the senior. “You are bad-lucking us with utterance? You want go in hold with sacrifices? You want skinning?”

  The junior member tardily, wisely, kept silent.

  Before continuing their journey, the Quaatar celebrated by torturing several of the non-Quaatar crew members, whose families later received the generous life insurance payments that had been guaranteed by the mining interests before the crew members could have been ordered onto the Quaatar vessel. Thereafter the Quaatar often talked about their vengeance with others of their kind, though always without mentioning the return to the planet of origin or the use to which certain crew members had been put. The return had not been approved by the chiefs of Quaatar, and both the torture of crew members and the use of the brain block was specifically forbidden by the Galactic Court, a body greatly feared though not at all respected by the Quaatar.

  In time the Quaatar crew died, those with whom they had spoken died, and nothing about the happening was remembered except the prejudice that had been engendered against a race of bipedal, naked, rather ugly creatures, forever anathema to the Quaatar. The bipeds were Crnk-cha zibitzi, that is half-brained defilers, which was the worst thing they could have been. When humans finally made it off their home planet, the Quaatar greeted their appearance with revulsion, knowing immediately they were not fit for anything but killing, which was generally true of all other races except the Thongal, K’Famir, and Frossians, who were considered merely dirty and occasionally useful.

  On the planet where the stowaways had left the ship, however, the people did go on living. They all knew that something was wrong, but they didn’t know what it was. Something was missing, something they’d had before and didn’t have anymore. Still, the growths were good to eat, with juicy roots, fruits, nuts, succulent leaves. The women had babies that grew very fast, for there was no hunger on this world. No hunger, no danger, no threats. A good place, this world, even though it had no moon at all. Very soon the word for moon was forgotten.

  “Wake up little one,” said Ahn’s woman to the new baby. “Wake up, take milk, grow up fast.” The older children played follow the leader, yelling to one another. “Up the tree, over the stump, down the bank, into the water, back again,” they cried. “Right, left, right, left, right, left!”

  “The fruit is ripe,” the women called. “We should all pick it now, it’s so juicy and good. We can dry what’s left over.” Lots of women were having babies.

  Seasons were long in this new world, but eventually the winter came, not a cruel winter, just chilly and unpleasant. The people took mud from the riverbank and piled it into walls. They learned to make thick walls, let them dry, then tunnel through them to get from one room to another. When the rooms were nice and dry, they could build new rooms on top. They made baskets from tree roots and limber branches. “We’re going out to get fruit,” they cried. “We’ll bring a basketful.”

  They cleared everything from around the mud houses, making a smooth, packed-down place where the women could sit making baskets and the children could play. If the children were too noisy, the men would cry, “Cross the ground! Go into the woods!” The woods were safe; there were no beasts. The words for beasts were forgotten.

  Rooms piled on rooms until their dwelling was as high as they could build it. “We have to make room for more,” they said. Some of them went a day’s journey away and started another tower to house some of the children the women were having. Soon each tower had daughter towers out in the woods, many cleaned places for the women to work and the children to play. They had to go farther now to get fruit and roots, but it was still a very good place.

  Time went by. Daughter towers had granddaughter towers and great-granddaughter towers. The people fought over picking grounds. “This is my picking ground, our people’s ground! We’ve always picked here,” the men cried, waving clubs. “Go away.”

  They went away. They had more and more babies. “We need a new place. We have to make room for more,” they said. They followed rivers, they went along shores, all over the world. They had babies, and the babies had babies. The food was far less abundant. Each generation the babies were smaller.

  Time went by. A plague spread among the people. Most of them died. The forest recovered. The plague stopped, the survivors went on living. Another plague; again the forest recovered. An asteroid struck. The people lived on.

  “Wake up,” the mothers said. “Wake up, drink.”
<
br />   “Follow,” the children cried. “Right, left, right, left.”

  “Fruit now,” the women said. “Now, hurry.”

  “Commin,” cried the children. “We commin.”

  “My pick ground,” the men said, clubbing one another.

  Millennia went by. One night, when all the people were asleep, a Gentheran ship landed on a rocky outcropping where there were no towers. Gentherans in their silver suits came out of it and moved around looking at the towers and the cleared ground. They set tiny mobile recorders tunneling into the towers and tiny fliers hovering over the remaining forest. They talked among themselves and to the large ship in orbit.

  “It looks like a total extinction coming!” said a Gentheran. “Can we get genetic samples?”

  “Not without the permission of the people if they’re intelligent.”

  “It’s hard to tell whether they are or not.”

  “Leave it for now. We can always come back. You want to leave the monitor ship in place for a while?”

  “We’ve never encountered an extinction in process before. It’s certainly worth recording.”

  Accordingly, the large ship burned a deep, round hole in the rocky area, the monitor ship lowered itself into the hole and buried itself, with only a few well-camouflaged antennae and optical lenses exposed. A shuttle picked up the explorers.

  On the planet, the people were so hungry they were eating the fungus that grew on the latrine grounds, down at the bottom of the towers. It was tasteless, but it kept them alive. When they couldn’t find food, they would bring dead leaves or bark or bodies to put in the latrine grounds for the fungus to grow on.

  Most of the women were no longer fat enough to have babies, so they picked special women to fatten and have babies for everyone. The fungus they were eating was full of their own hormones and enzymes; they became smaller and smaller yet. They no longer had teeth. They no longer had hair. Their ears were longer, their eyes smaller.

  “Wakwak,” woke the sleeping ones. “Rai lef rai lef rai lef,” moved the food gatherers. “Krossagroun, krossagroun,” they chanted as they went off into the remnants of the forest. “Mepik, mepik,” as they searched for anything organic. They had no names. Each one was “me.” At night all the “mes” lay curled against the tunnel walls, in the warm, in the safe. Gradually, words lost all meaning. They made sounds, as crickets do.

  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…

  I Am Margaret/on Phobos

  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 systems 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 breathable 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.