It had been a battle that took its toll on flesh and spirit, but I had not let Bryan see it. All my youthful dreams had been lost. The doubts had begun to circle almost as soon as we’d arrived, like those ancient carrion birds, scenting the rot that was setting in. And for what? If we could have made a real difference in Rueful, I would have been proud of our struggle, but all we really did was exhaust ourselves to keep a few pigheaded people alive a year or so past their time. Not a great achievement. If it hadn’t been for the idyllic fantasy Bryan had woven for me during the few days before we left Earth, I wouldn’t have been hypnotized by his exuberance, caught up in his certainty that love would see us through life, that it was a fair bargain for both of us, that it would all work out well.
“I’ve loved you since I first met you, Maggie. You were worth every year.” He had told me that, time and again. I wish he hadn’t said it. If he’d been angry with me, just a few times, I could have given myself some room. As it was, I had to be as faithful and helpful as was humanly possible. Even so, I never honestly felt the scales were balanced. All the good times we planned were things we would be doing now, and he was gone. There were more doctors in Rueful now, things would have been easier. We could have had time together. My fault. I shouldn’t have let him bring me here. I should have taken my chances like everyone else.
Instead, here I was, grandma to a very troubled brood. What the proctor had said back on Earth was true: my family did indeed run to twins, lots of them, and of them all, only Maybelle, and Jeff and Gloriana seemed capable of love and joy. No, that wasn’t fair. Probably Joe Bob, which is why he’d left, and Ella May’s joining the Siblinghood of Silence meant she had it in her to be happy and good, or the Siblinghood wouldn’t have taken her. And little Emmaline and Orvie John? They might turn out all right, too, if they didn’t starve to death first. The others though, well, they were fruit of a blasted tree, born because of bad choices I’d made, one after the other.
Likely, if I said any of that to Gloriana, the girl would say, “Well, Grandma, if that’s so, here’s right where you belong! You sound mighty rueful to me.”
And, as Gloriana all too often was, she would be right.
All of which was fruitless and melancholy. I needed to get out of the house and do something. I knew the way to the ferry pool, where Gloriana was going, and I decided to join her there.
I Am Margaret/on Tercis
Sparkle in the noon-light, river running, road dust fluffing in a teasing wind, grass bending and swaying, Gloriana on her way to the ferry pool. From the road, I saw her running through the meadows down toward the river. Ahead of us, the Great Dike ran east to west, a wall of black stone, onetime southern edge of a mighty water that had covered a great part of south Rueful to a considerable depth. The water had worn its way through the top of the dike and begun chewing a channel all the way to the bottom. How many millennia it had taken to gnaw its way down, no one in The Valley knew, but we all gave thanks for the wide-cupped plain of loamy soil it had left behind. This was fat soil, coveted by anyone who knew how to farm.
The day had warmed, and my face was wet, though it would be cooler near the river. Something was pushing the season. Every weed patch had turned into a jungle, every garden was sprouting a thicket, and each day was already full of lazy stupefactions from noontime right up ’til supper. I watched as Gloriana crossed the grassy riverside, eaten into a lawn by the Birkin’s geese, who honked at her querulously as she went by. “Glory, why such a hurry, have some nice grass.”
“Thank you, no,” she said. “I’m meeting Lou Ellen, and I’m already late.” That’s what it sounded like to me, at least. Not that I spoke Goose. Not that I spoke anything much anymore. Sometimes I lay in bed at night thinking in Earthian, then translating those thoughts into Gentheran, or Pthas, or one of the other tongues I’d taken so much trouble to learn. I grieved over that. I grieved over the possibility I was losing my mind, too. Sometimes lately I had thought something was being said when there wasn’t a sound; sometimes I had known something had happened even though I hadn’t seen it. Senility. The madness of the old. I had gone so far back in time getting to Tercis that I was probably older than my own father right now. And thinking that, madam, I said to myself, will drive you bonkers.
Gloriana climbed down into the river bottom to walk under the high arch of the bridge. Dominion had built the bridge to speed transport of materials quickly from Walled-Offs in the west to Walled-Offs in the east. Some nights we could hear the trucks roaring far across The Valley, growling and echoing as they crossed the bridge, then fading to a distant beelike hum among the mountains. They never came the other way, so we supposed they must return through other Walled-Offs, north or south, taking export stuff to the spaceport near the Western Sea.
I didn’t follow Gloriana’s route. Under the bridge,
