I Am Margaret and Mar-agern on Fajnard
On Fajnard, when I, Margaret, woke in the morning, warm between Gloriana and Bamber Joy, I sat up to confront a younger self who was crouched at my feet, staring intently into my face.
“Margy?” I said.
“Mar-agern,” said the other, in my—our voice. “Who’re you?”
I looked around. Rei, the Ghoss, was rolled in blankets, sound asleep next to the wall. Maniacal and Mirabel had already gone, probably back to Howkel’s house. Gloriana and Bamber still slept. Among all these sleepers, my other self had wakened and found herself duplicated. She was younger, thinner, and more muscular than I. Her skin was darkened by the sun, her hair bleached almost white and cut very short. Her hands were a laborer’s hands, hard and somewhat gnarled.
“We,” I said carefully, slowly, “are both Margaret. I don’t know how, or why. We both left Earth at the same age, we both had the same parents. I assume we will both remember the same things, up until the time we left Earth.”
The Mar-agern one of us thought. What thing might two of us have shared? Well, one at least this other would not have forgotten. “Who was my…our lover?”
“Bryan,” I answered. “He volunteered to go to Tercis if I would marry him. I accepted his offer.”
“I refused him,” Mar-agern said. “I didn’t think it was fair to him.”
“Neither did I,” I replied, “but I accepted and spent my life trying to make it up to him.”
“I was shipped as a bondslave, here, to Fajnard. Among the Frossians.”
“We speak Frossian,” I said. “Fairly well.”
“I speak it a good deal better than fairly well,” said Mar-agern, her lips curving into a wry smile. “I’m also quite an expert on umoxen.”
“I know nothing about them,” I confessed. “You seem to be younger than I am.”
“They told us about that,” said Mar-agern. “It’s the wormholes. Different ones take different amounts of time. Some even go back in time, getting there.”
“Yes,” I said. “Tercis is one of those.”
We sat for a while, staring at one another, wondering.
Gloriana rolled over, and said, “Good morning, Grandma.” Then, to Mar-agern, “You never were my grandma, so I’ll just call you by your name. Good morning, Mar-agern.”
“Mar-agern,” said Bamber, sitting up and yawning. “The Gibbekot gave you a mother-mind, did you know that?”
“Know what?” Mar-agern asked in surprise.
“You don’t know yet?” came a voice from above—Falija. She had been curled up on a rock shelf some distance above our heads, and we had not seen her until that moment. “Well, there will be a book here, somewhere. Glory, I think it’s over there in that pile of things by the wall.”
Gloriana went to find it, brought it back, and handed it to me, and I looked Mar-agern in the face as I read the first page. “‘Our word for insight is Ghoss.’”
While I read to Mar-agern, Bamber and Gloriana chopped kindling, raked the ashes from the coals, added splints of firewood, and blew the flames to life before hanging a pot of water on the spit above it. Rei, awakened by the noise, got up, folded up his blankets, went around the corner, and emerged moments later with his hair combed and his face washed. By the time the three of them had breakfast cooked, I had finished the first reading of the book, and Mar-agern was reading it again to herself, myself, on the ledge outside the cave entrance.
“Will it be as hard for her as it was for you?” Gloriana asked Falija.
“Probably not,” Falija said, bounding from stone to stone down the wall. “She’s spent a lot of time with the Ghoss, and they’ve got mother-memories, though theirs go back only to the time they received them from the Gentherans.”
Outside, Mar-agern laid the book aside, put both arms around her knees, and rocked to and fro, making an unpleasant grating sound in her throat.
“On the other hand,” said Falija from behind me, “I suppose it might be harder.”
“Take her this,” said Rei, handing Gloriana a mug of tea. “The Gibbekot who brought the mother-mind said it might help.”
Gloriana took the tea to Mar-agern and coaxed her into drinking some of it before sitting beside her to talk about nothing in particular until Mar-agern stopped rocking and moaning. Falija came out, sat down on Mar-agern’s other side, and said, in her own language, “You’re doing very well. Much better than I did.”
Mar-agern responded in the same language, “Really! I feel like a plether sat on me!”
Gloriana sniffed, saying, “Well, if you two are going to converse privately, I’ll just have a bite more breakfast,” as she returned to the cave.
I greeted her with a question. “I don’t suppose I’m just dreaming, am I?”
“Sorry, Grandma. No. She’s really you. And she isn’t. She doesn’t know me or anything about me, so she isn’t Grandma. But she’s like you, like a sister, maybe.”
“Our…mission? Our quest? Is she part of it?”
“Falija thinks she has to be. Remember, she said something last night…that there had to be seven of you.”
I felt myself turn pale, and I whispered, mostly to myself, “Seven. I can’t believe it. Where could they be? Who would they be?” And even then, I knew who they would be. There had always been seven of me, of us.
“Maybe where we’re going,” Gloriana answered. “Where the way-gate goes, to Thairy.”
“And the way-gate is where?”
“Rei says Maniacal told him where it was before they left early this morning. Not far from here.”
I said nothing more, just put my nose in my cup of tea and kept it there, using the fragrant steam as a barrier between myself and whatever was going to happen next. Eventually, I said, “Gloriana, I thought you told me Falija’s people sought you out by name. How did I get involved?”
Bamber Joy looked up
