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.
The linguist was going to be me, myself, I decided. I loved words. Learning words was the best part of learning anything, so plain Margaret was the linguist. The healer was young and very kind. She wasn’t as clear as the others. I supposed she would come into being later, as I learned more about her particular talents, because a healer would be very useful.
Together, we were friends and companions. Wilvia the queen occupied a throne and meted out justice. Margy sent her mind to distant places to see what was happening, while the spy sneaked about and learned specific things about people. Naumi built barricades against the dreaded mind-worm, a creature I had run across in a footnote and could define only by implication. Deadly, certainly. Horrid in some unspecified way, and directed always by some malign and inhuman intelligence. This was enough to make me oppose it, or them, for all my people were on the side of good, always. As warrior, shaman, telepath, healer, spy, linguist, and queen we lived each day among wonders and marvels and were for the most part contented with our lives.
Shortly before my ninth birthday, one of those days came along that goes wrong from wakeup! My hair had horrid knots in it, my clothes wouldn’t fasten, my head hurt, I spilled my breakfast on some of Father’s papers, and he yelled at me. Halfway through the morning, I grew frustrated over something and heard, with dismay, my own mouth spewing a few of the words I had always kept secret! The result was worse than I had imagined. My mother washed out my mouth with Filth-away and told me I could not go down to the Mars surface on the birthday expedition I had been promised for over a year.
That trip had been my beacon, my lighthouse of hope, my only chance to see and do something new and interesting. I can’t explain what happened then, though I suppose it was a tantrum. I had read of tantrums, I’d just never had one myself; but this time, I did. I screamed and threw myself on the floor and shrieked all my hatred and boredom, and I was so completely savage that both Mother and Father were frightened. They were no more frightened than I was, but at least they withdrew the punishment. When I got control of myself, more or less, I was servile in my thanks and fulsome in my promises of better behavior in the future.
Over the following days, however, my abject groveling gave way to an unfamiliar resentment, though only one of my people, Queen Wilvia, felt it deeply. My parents had forced Queen Wilvia to lower herself, to give in to them, and Queen Wilvia had done nothing to merit it. She didn’t like them anymore.
Wilvia didn’t hate them. Wilvia knew the word hate because I knew it, but experiencing it required a stomach-hurting, churning kind of feeling, the way I had felt during the tantrum. I labeled it carefully. It had been a very strong emotion, the first strong emotion I had ever felt except the arms-from-my-stomach feeling that I got sometimes at night, as though I had arms reaching out of my middle toward something I wanted terribly but had no name for.
Considering the matter calmly, over several days and wakeful nights, I decided what I wanted more than anything was simply to be somewhere other than Phobos Station. I didn’t say any of this or even convey it by being sulky. I was docile. My “Yes, ma’am”s and “No, sir”s poured forth with honeyed smoothness. On the promised day, the excursion to Mars took place, beginning with a shuttle ride down into the great canyon, where my parents were welcomed by acquaintances of theirs who worked in the hydroponic gardens. In the gardens, I stood transfixed while a green leaf fell, lazily turning, spinning almost purposefully to land by my foot. I was allowed
