New Margarets/Who Are We?
“Bain, Margaret,” said the checker, rubbing his eyes. “Number seven-seven-zero-five-nine-eight-two. That way, to your right.”
The hallway to the right was crowded, traffic in it made more difficult by the baggage everyone carried. As I moved forward, I heard loud and emphatic voices ahead: “Enter your number, take your chances.” “That way.” “That way, move it. Wait, you dropped this.” “Enter your number.” “That way.” “Another that way.” “Okay, go with your friend there.” “Now, you can go this way.”
The boarding-tube ports were at a lower level. As those ahead of me moved down the slope, I could see over their heads to the tube ports. Two uniformed men operated a device and called out the results. As I approached, I saw it, some kind of number pad and a lever. Numbers were entered, and arrows lit up, right or left. The line ahead of me shortened, and soon there were only half a dozen left.
“You two together? Okay. Enter one number. Either one.” “That way.” “You two together?”
“No,” a woman cried passionately. “We are absolutely not together.”
“Okay,” said the bored official from somewhere ahead of me. “Enter your number, sweetheart. Go that way.” “Watch it, Bondy! She says you’re not together, let her alone. Besides, your number comes up the other way.”
I was next. The lever snapped. The arrow pointed right.
“That way, colony girl. Down to your right.”
“Where is the ship going,” I asked, without any real hope of receiving an answer.
“The colonists end up on Thairy, love. Run on now.”
As I turned to my right, I looked back. Another me was standing there, looking at the arrow that had lit.
“That way, bondy girly. Down to your left.”
I saw myself turn left, heard myself ask, “Where is the ship going?”
“It’s off to Cantardene. Get moving.”
Cantardene. What had someone told me about Cantardene? The K’Famir. The dreadful, evil K’Famir…somehow, she’d been mixed up. It wasn’t a colony planet at all…
Margaret/on Earth
So, I, Margaret, dreamed I had been sent away from Earth, split off from myself, not once, but three times! When I woke, it was perfectly clear in my mind, and I wrote it down in my journal, just to remember it. Gradually, as the day passed, the dream faded. I forgot all about it until a long time later, a day when I felt terrible and lay in my bed full of fever and aching. To comfort myself, I did what I had not done for a year or more: I went among my people. The little shy one, the healer, she was gone. The one who had been my spy was gone. My warrior was gone. I took out my journal and read what I had written about the dream. Which one had gone to Chottem? Which one to Cantardene? Which one to Thairy? And where was Wilvia now?
I Am Gretamara/on Chottem
The Gardener called me Gretamara. She took me to Chottem, a blue-and-green planet. We flew across enormous, rolling grasslands into high, splintered mountains near the western sea. We dropped down a valley into a little village, a hamlet called Swylet. We alit near her house and walked to it through her garden, surrounded by a fence with a gate in it. A bell hung by the gate, and she said that people rang it when they needed her help. She was a physician, or perhaps something more than a physician, and she told me my task was to learn from her, to be a healer.
She told me about herself. Everyone in Swylet who had ever ailed knew the Gardener, and even the indomitably healthy had seen her moving about in the shade of the moss-draped trees beyond the fence. Gardener told me about the people, about generations of them, for she seemed to know everything they had ever thought, or wanted, or dreamed of. Gardener said there was always a Grandmother Sage, a Grandmother or Grandfather Vinegar, an Uncle Salt, an Aunt Pepper. The current Grandmother Sage, who was young when she had first sought help from the Gardener, was fond of saying that the Gardener’s appearance had not changed over the years, that she was still as young-looking as in Grandmother’s youth. Grandfather Vinegar—the current one—claimed that Grandmother Sage had probably dealt with three generations of Gardeners, the current one being the granddaughter of the one Grandma had known in her youth.
“But she’s the same, the very same!”
“Ah, no, Granny,” said the vinegary one. “It’s just the appearance of this latest one has rubbed up against the memories of those others, wearing against one another like coins in a pocket until all the little differences are worn away.”
Since the Gardener never left the garden by a route any of them could see, not so much as to step outside the gate, even Grandfather Vinegar could not venture a guess as to how she might have come by a child or a grandchild. Only women and children were invited inside her gate, and they only rarely, and a dreadful penalty was exacted from trespassers. Some of the grandmothers claimed to remember David Highnose opening the gate and walking two steps inside, two steps back out, and falling dead on the path, shriveled as an old leaf.
Aunty Pepper gave it as her opinion that the Gardener was married to the moon, though Uncle Salt said it had to be the sun, for what garden burgeoned by moonlight? Grandma Sage said if she was married to anything natural, likely she was married to the rain, for it was true that sweet rain came to the Gardener’s place, even in droughtful times when the rest of Swylet got only the shout and splatter of a thunderstorm traveling through, much noise and little help. Those near the Gardener’s fence sometimes heard rain falling, and if a person put a hand on the top rail, that hand would be wet with rain, though not a single drop
