“They’ll tell us to build a dormitory for fourteen Thrackians found floating, because maybe the Thrackians can give us some information about this, or that, or something else. Or they’ll say they need a new kitchen for the Pfillians who have ritual requirements for their food. Or, as now, they’ll tell me you Earthians habitually segregate by sex, so we need two temporary dormitories, please…”
He touched my shoulder lightly. “Of course, such segregation is fully voluntary. I have very nice quarters if you’re not intent on that old Earth rule.”
“I am quite intent on obeying all such rules,” I said, resentfully intractable. “Who are they, the Siblinghood?”
“What do you care, Salvage? Fate has dropped you into kinder hands. No real bondage for you.”
“My name is not Salvage. It’s Margaret. And I love it, the way you say no real bondage?” I laughed. “I don’t know what you call building walls and laying floors, Silencer, but bondage isn’t far from it.”
“So, give me a reason to assign you somewhere else, pretty one. I’m not hard to get around. Anyone with a warm heart can do it.”
I took a moment to think. “I’ve already said I know languages, Sibling. Several. Even many. Surely among all this important work your Siblinghood is busy doing, there must be a position open for a translator.”
“Hmmm.” He stood, stretched thoughtfully, glanced at the barred windows and doors, said, “Don’t go away,” in an amused voice, and left.
I was there for several days while all those around me were assigned here and there. I sat. I borrowed a book on the language and customs of the Hrass and read it cover to cover. When he returned, it was with a different demeanor. “I have your assignment,” he said. “Eventually, your language skills will be of great use. For the time being, however, you are to be trained by a shaman who has sent word you are to be renamed. This is necessary, I am told. You are to be called M’urgi.” He wrote it down for me. “It means ‘explorer’ in a dialect spoken here about. Pronounced as I did, MAR-gee.”
“Gee as in game,” I said witlessly. Something in what he had said had rung a bell in my brain. The reverberations made me tremble. “As in gossip, gamble, garden, or even Mar-gar-et, which is what the Mercan crewmen on the ship called me, with a giggle and a slither when they did so! Why must my name be changed?”
“Shamans on B’yurngrad always name their novices, and it’s customary to do it in advance of training so the novice can get used to it. That’s what we’ll all call you from now on…”
When I started to speak, he shook his head at me. “Don’t ask. I am as surprised as you are, and anything I might tell you could be wrong. You’re to wait here until your…ah, ‘mentor’ gets to someplace where you can safely be handed over to her. Meantime, you’re to learn your new name and report to the supplies officer to be fitted out with clothes.”
“I have clothing with me,” I said.
“Not the kind you’ll be needing,” he replied with a wry, sideways grin. “Yours don’t smell right. Not smoky enough.”
Before I could ask what he meant, he was gone.
A shaman. Shamaness. Shamana. What was the female version? Did it matter? Why did it sound so very, very familiar?
It wasn’t until that night, when I was just falling asleep, that it came me with such force that I sat up, fully aware. A shaman. Of course. That was one of my people. Margy! M’urgi? Close enough. I lay down again in the quiet darkness, mind spinning with something weirdly like hope.
The next day, he came back.
“It will be a while, M’urgi,” he said. “Your future teacher is off on the edge of nowhere, seeing what the tribes are up to…”
“Tribes?”
“Bondsmen from Mercan planets who arrived here in no mood to settle down. Wildmen. They kidnapped a few shiploads of females, and they live out in the grasses in skin-covered huts, taking their herds north and south with the seasons and practicing a strange, violent, blood-and-honor religion. They come into the towns maybe once a year to sell their wool and hair and cheese. They learn nothing, for they’re convinced they know everything that matters. They’re boring. Even hearing about them is boring, so why don’t we relieve your boredom. And mine.”
We did so, finding much to talk of, much enjoyment in the talk. When I asked him to tell me about the Siblinghood, Fernwold said:
“Since you’re to be a shaman, I can tell you this, though we don’t speak of it usually. The Siblinghood is an organization of humans and Gentherans and a very few persons of other races. Most of the humans are a different kind we call Ghoss, though some of them are ordinary people, like me. Along with the humans and Gentherans are some extraordinary members who have strange and wonderful capabilities, men and women who are…something else.”
“And what does it do, this organization?”
“It helps out here and there, when the human race itself gets into trouble. Which we inevitably seem to do. And the Third Order is trying to achieve some other grand vision…”
“And you’re a member of this group?”
“A very, very minor member, yes.”
“If there’s a Third Order, I suppose there’s a first and second one.”
“Not any longer. Both existed; both were destroyed. The only thing I know about the Orders is they’re attempting to find a unique spacial configuration, some esoteric galactic connection. What they call a ‘cluster.’ The First Order found one, the Second Order found one, and both times it promptly broke apart and killed a lot of the Siblinghood people who were exploring it.”
“Someone broke it?”
“Maybe, or it may have just happened. The configurations they’re looking for are only temporary. Finding them is like finding dew on the grass. Just because it’s there
