The Margarets

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Falija talked more clearly every day. She was able to get out of sight very quickly, so I stopped worrying about her going places with Glory. Whenever Glory went fruit-picking, Falija helped her. There was scarcely a branch too thin for her to climb out on and scoop fruit off the tree quick as anything. Glory could spread out a blanket and Falija would drop the fruit onto it fast as Glory could put it into baskets.

  One night the two of them wakened me in the middle of the night. Glory said, “Falija found something she thinks we ought to see, Grandma.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll go see it in the morning.”

  “No,” she said. “Falija says it has to be now.”

  I wavered between outrage and curiosity. Curiosity won. I put on shoes and a big sweater. Falija led the way down to the road, up the valley, until we got to the rise before the cemetery.

  Glory said, “I don’t go in there, Falija.”

  Falija said, “I’m not taking you in there. We’re going up the hill.”

  So we clambered up the ridge of the rise, past the cemetery fence, and onto a big flat rock between two thimble-apple trees. Beside the rock was some deep grass where we could sit in the moon shadow of the trees, and the fiddlebugs were making a noise so much like a ringing in the ears you couldn’t tell if it was inside or outside your head.

  “There,” whispered Falija.

  Down the hill two little girls were running stark naked, hand in hand, along the meadow, and behind them some other children, all naked, some of them paired off and some alone. Along behind them came Lou Ellen.

  That’s when I realized I was dreaming again. I had that same, misty feeling I’d had down at the ferry pool. The naked children gathered around Lou Ellen. Glory started to get up, and Falija put a claw into her arm. “Don’t,” she said. “They’ll run away if you go down there.”

  Some older, familiar-looking children came through the trees. They were as tall as grown-up people, but they had no breasts, and there was no hair on their bodies. I thought I should know them, but I couldn’t remember who they were.

  “They’re all children,” Glory said in confusion.

  “Well,” Falija said, “not so much children as just young, and they’re all the same person, really. Some grown larger, some not.”

  “Why not?” Glory whispered.

  “Oh,” Falija whispered. “Where they are, they don’t need to be old. They’ve already learned everything they can.”

  I was dreaming again. I had to be. A woman wearing red robes that billowed and flowed around her like a rosy cloud came out of the woods. She stood for a time, watching the children until they wandered into the trees on the far side. Lou Ellen was with them. I had never seen her with that expression of joy on her face. Bliss, I’d call it. Absolute bliss.

  “Who is that woman in red, Grandma?”

  “I can’t quite remember,” I said.

  I remembered when I wakened in the morning, though. It was the woman who had taken Wilvia away, and it had all been a dream. Even after I found my big sweater there on the bed, I told myself I’d just been chilly in the night, that was all.

  School started the next week. Glory, Bamber Joy, and I went down to Ms. McCollum’s store to buy school supplies. I always went in first and paid Ms. McCollum for the children’s supplies while he and Glory sat on the stoop enjoying a cold drink. This time, I heard heavy footsteps coming onto the front stoop, and two men came slamming in, walked up to the counter, and asked Ms. McCollum if there was anybody in town who had a new cat.

  Ms. McCollum looked as though she didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry. It was a silly question, but at the same time, it sounded threatening. She had to swallow before she answered, very slowly. “I guess everybody in the valley has a new cat at least once a year. There’s kittens everywhere you look.”

  “Not a kitten, ma’am. This is a dangerous kind of cat from another world.”

  “There’s a lady over in Remorseful who sort of collects cats, but they’re just ordinary cats. I sure haven’t heard about anything like that.”

  I knew she meant Dorothy Springer, a retired schoolteacher who had a barnful of cats and spent her whole pension feeding them and having the vet fix them. The two men didn’t react; they just stood there for a minute, silent. They sounded so mechanical, I had the strange idea that maybe they were shifting gears, or waiting for instructions. Then, with not so much as a thank-you, they turned around and left.

  When we got home we told Falija about it, and the hair on her neck rose until she looked like a lion.

  “They didn’t come from your people,” Glory said to Falija. “Your people know where you are.”

  “Her people?” I asked, with lifted eyebrows.

  “She means my parents,” said Falija firmly. “Anyone sent by my people would know exactly where I am.”

  “We’ve got to be sure no one else in the family says anything,” Glory said in a worried voice.

  All this was extremely upsetting. I had spent months sorting out what I chose to believe was real from what I had dreamed from the fictional stuff that was left over. At least, I thought I had. Now this new thing! A threat from who knows what from who knows where against someone who shouldn’t exist in the first place!

  I cleared my throat, turned toward Glory, and said in my most portentous voice, “You had a cat earlier in the summer, but it went away some time ago, didn’t it?”

  Glory stared at me for a minute before she caught on. “Yes. Of course. The lady who left it with me came and got it.”

  I said, “The family hasn’t seen it for some time.”

  Glory shook her head and grinned at me. “No, ma’am.”

  I was invited to supper that night, and at the table, Glory said, “I kind of miss the cat I was keeping for that lady. None of the barn cats are very friendly. Maybe Ma Bailey’ll give me one of her kittens.”

  I said wonderingly, “The cat you were taking care of. Is it gone?”

  “The lady came along the road when I was riding my bicycle. She told me thank you and let me keep the rest of the money.”

  “I thought it ran off,” grunted Til.

  “You gave it enough reason to,” muttered Jeff.

  After the dishes were done and the chickens shooed in, Glory walked back up the hill with me. We sat down on the porch, and I said what I’d been thinking about for days, “Glory, I’ve cultivated blindness as long as I can. I’ve always congratulated myself on being a realist, but it’s getting so I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and half real and mostly supposition. I want you to tell me everything, whether you think I’ll believe it or not.”

  Glory gave me a look.

  “I won’t doubt you,” I said firmly. “Whatever you say.”

  She took a deep breath and started in. The cat-people. The money bag. I have never believed in telepathy, not really, even though one of my childhood imaginary people was supposed to be a telepath, and the only alternative to having seen it myself was to think I had read it from Glory’s mind. Believing I had seen it was easier. It had not been a dream, it had been real, but I had suppressed the reality of it.

  Surprisingly, to me at least, when I finally took it in, things made more sense than they had up until then. Falija was not just an anomaly. She really was a treasured creature of some other race, and we really had to keep her safe.

  Glory said, “I never fed Falija cat food any more than the barn cats get cat food. They eat what they catch. Falija eats what I eat. There’s no cat-food trail anybody can follow, and Falija doesn’t even associate with other cats. She won’t go into the barn at all. Whenever she sees a barn cat, she gets all strange.”

  “How do you mean, strange.”

  “All sad, upset, silent. So I don’t take her in there.”

  “What about the money bag?” I asked her. “The one the people gave to you to pay for Falija’s needs.” Glory had given me the money so Sue Elaine couldn’t borrow it without asking, which
was one of Sue Elaine’s many unattractive habits.

  “It’s in my boot,” Glory said. “With some dirty socks shoved down on top of it.”

  I mused, “It has to have a power source. People use detectors to find metal and things like radioactivity.”

  We went down the hill together and up the back stairs to her room. She shook the bag out of her boot, and something else fell out with it: the little book Falija’s mother had given Glory, which Glory had told me about. We had both forgotten what the person had told Glory to do with it. Glory stared at it with her face all knotted up. I felt absolutely idiotic. Here between the two of us we’d forgotten the one thing we were supposed to do for Falija, even though I hadn’t really believed it until tonight!

  We talked about a safe place for the little bag, and we eventually decided to bury it next to metal, not as easy as you’d think on Tercis, where metal was rare and expensive. We finally thought of the cemetery fence. Glory got a trowel out of Maybelle’s gardening basket, and we hiked over to the cemetery to bury the bag next to a fence post. If anyone used a metal detector, they’d think it was reacting to the post, though I thought it likely that the bag was of a technology far, far beyond metal detectors. Chances were, whoever might look for it would be equally sophisticated. Nonetheless, we scattered the place with rocks, weathered side up, then we went up to the thimble-apple rock to be sure we hadn’t left any sign of being there.

  When we looked down the meadow, there they were, all Lou Ellen’s friends with Lou Ellen among them, moving out into the moonlight on the meadow, dancing like leaves dance on the wind, almost weightless, floating up and down, free and glorious, as though they had forever to dance in. They sang, too, with Lou Ellen’s voice among them, joyful and blithe.

  I looked down at Glory. She was gazing down the hill with such longing that it almost broke my heart. She wanted to go down there with Lou Ellen. I started to say something, then stopped. Some things couldn’t be fixed with words. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, then stared, way across the meadow. I followed her gaze. There was the woman in red, looking straight at us from the edge of the trees. I could feel the woman’s eyes on me, almost stroking. I lifted my hand; the woman smiled and waved and disappeared into the forest.

  “Who is she?” Glory asked.

  “A dream from my past,” I said. “A woman who flies a dragonfly ship. Everything down there in the valley is a dream.”

  Falija wasn’t around when we got back, but the next morning, Glory came up to apologize for forgetting about the book.

  “I forgot what your mama told me to do, Falija. I was supposed to read it to you when you began to talk.”

  “I’ve been talking for a long time,” Falija said, with a little frown between her eyes.

  Glory flushed. “I know, Falija. It’s my fault. I’d forgotten it until last night. Now listen.” She opened the book. On each page there were only a few words. The first page started out: ‘Our word for insight is ghoss.’ Ghoss was spelled out as guh-HOSS, so the reader would know how to pronounce it. The next page had another few words, and so on, a few hundred of them altogether.

  Then I took the book to look at it, and Falija stared at me in a funny way and said, “Please, read it to me again, Grandma.” I did. When I’d finished, Falija went off in a corner by herself after putting the book on one of my bookshelves, hidden behind some other books.

  That night, Falija came into my bedroom and climbed up onto my bed, digging her claws into my shoulder. I woke to see her frightened face inches from my own, eyes as big as moons. I held her while she curled up on my chest, shivering as though she’d been frightened half to death.

  “What is it?” I whispered. “Falija, what is it? Tell me.”

  “In my head,” she said. “There’s a whole world in my head, and I can’t shut the door in between…” Then she said something in another language that went on and on, and she shut her eyes and just lay there, shivering like an abused animal. At first I didn’t realize what she’d said, but then it came to me. She was speaking Gentheran. I wrapped my arms around the little person, to comfort her, and we stayed that way for a long, long time. Falija would shiver, then she’d calm down, then she’d make this pitiful little noise and shiver all over again.

  “My home,” she whispered. “My home is the land of Perepume on the world of Chottem. I can see the cliffs of Perepume, where the spray from the green ocean smells like spicebush and pine. I see the forests, where the wind sings in the boughs. I hear the tongues of Perepume, lilting and laughing through the long nights. They were there, inside my head, in my mother-memory. The words you read to me opened the door to the mother-memory all at once, and it scared me. I didn’t know where I was!”

  I held her tight. “That must be how your people pass on information,” I said, trying to sound very calm, as though it wasn’t anything unusual or strange. “I wish our people could do it that easily. I’ll bet you know all the history and geography now, without even having to read a book or study about it.”

  Falija looked confused for a moment, but then her ears came forward, and she did her cat smile. “I think I do. I really do.”

  “That would be wonderful,” I said enthusiastically. “Gloriana will be so jealous! Just think, no homework.”

  “What’s homework?” Falija asked.

  I explained about school. It seemed to soothe her to hear me talk, so I went on about being in school myself, when I was younger, and how difficult some classes were. “But your way, you just have one sort of scary night—and that’s our fault for forgetting the book until now. But, you have it! It’s all right in there. Oh, Falija, I really envy you.” And it was true, I did.

  Falija curled a little tighter against my chest and seemed to doze off for a while. Then she woke up, and said, “Grandma, they have human people in my world.”

  I half opened one eye and said sleepily, “Do you suppose that’s why your family left you with Gloriana? Because they already knew about human beings?”

  Falija looked puzzled. “Maybe. They’re in my world…no, a special few of them live among us. And there are bad creatures, Thongals. They were on Fajnard, too. They tried to capture the king and queen of the Ghoss, who barely escaped…” Her eyes got big, and she didn’t say anything more for a long while. I slept.

  “It’s part of a story,” said Falija loudly enough that my eyes snapped open. “It starts at the beginning, and it goes on to the end. Shall I tell it to you?”

  “You can’t just pick out the important parts?” I suggested sleepily.

  “No. One tells it all, or one doesn’t tell it. I think Glory should hear it, too. It’s a long story…” She stood up. “I’ll go get her. We’ll come back here.”

  And she was out the door, silent as a shadow.

  They came back up the hill together, Falija draped over Glory’s shoulder. I turned on the light as they came near, the light scoring deep shadows into the ledge before the house and throwing an amber glow on the bottoms of the branches.

  Glory opened the door and yawned. “Falija says you have something important going on here.”

  I was at the stove, putting on the kettle. Falija jumped up on the sofa while Glory came to set out the cups and get the sugar and tea out.

  “What kind of tea, Grandma?” she asked.

  “Oh, that strong one I use to wake up with,” I said. “I’ll never get back to sleep, after, but never mind.”

  Glory measured the tea. The kettle boiled, the tea was steeped, and we moved over to the sofa, where I put my nose in the steaming cup and felt better immediately.

  “All right,” I said to Falija. “What is it?”

  Falija said, “I now have the memory I got from my mother before I was born. It just didn’t open up until tonight.”

  “How did this mother-memory get into your head?” I asked.

  Falija got wrinkles between her eyes, looked puzzled for a moment, then said, “In early pregnancy, our females duplicate a certai
n part of their brain, and the duplicate moves down what’s called an epispinal duct to the womb, and this mother-brain part connects to the baby’s mind before the skull grows around it. Then, after the baby is born, that mother-mind gradually makes connections with the baby’s brain, and, when the child learns to speak our language, the words link up and open the way to all that information.”

  I chewed on this for a while. “Not until the child learns to speak?”

  Falija said, “That’s why the book was so important. Ideas are expressed in words, and even the ones that are thought of in pictures or feelings need words to decode them, so babies have to have words in our language to tie them to the mother-brain. If I’d grown up among my own people, I wouldn’t have needed the book, because I’d have heard the words from the first. It’s very interesting, isn’t it? There’s so much of it, it will take a long time to absorb it all.”

  I said, “You already know some things, though. You know where you’re from.”

  “From Perepume, yes. I know there are humans on my world, and the humans call the planet Chottem. Perepume is a separate part, a…continent. I have memory of a world called Thairy and one called Fajnard. My people live on both of those as well, and so do humans. I know the names of a lot of other worlds, all of them occupied by different people, all spread out and joined together by…channels, ropes…”

  “Wormholes?” I offered.

  “Spcc’ci in my language,” she crowed. “Yes, wormholes. The whole network is huge. Almost none of the people in it know about all the other people in it, but my people know secret ways to get from place to place very quickly. And I know the story, the one I said both you and your grandmother should hear.”

  “The one you woke me up about,” I said.

  “That one. Yes.”

  “Well, nighttime is a good time for storytelling. Let me turn out some of these lights. Open the stove door and bring the teapot over here, Glory. We’ll sit in firelight.”

  And then, to Falija, “Tell the story.”

  “In the long, long ago, the Gentherans came to Earth the very first time…”