The Margarets (22 page)

When I arrived on Fajnard, in the Mercan Combine, I was still well shy of my twenty-third birthday. On arrival, our group of bondservants were chained together, though lightly, and escorted on foot across the port, which swarmed with races I had read of or heard about, and as many more I had never known existed. Our destination was a warehouse where a group of Bondsfolk Relief workers fed us and gave us bondservant clothing: trousers, shirts, long vests with pockets, a light jacket with pockets, a heavy, waterproof jacket with pockets, and a wide-brimmed waterproof hat, plus some softer material from which to make our own underwear.

Prior to our being sold, we were examined by two human doctors from Medecines Sans Limites who explained that they had volunteered to work on Mercan planets in order to care for those in bondage. Their existence in this far-off place brought Bryan vividly to my mind. Seeing my distress, the doctor asked me if I was injured or ill, I blurted out Bryan’s name, and what had happened, while the doctor regarded me, unmoved.

“Though I can understand your reluctance, from my point of view, you were a fool,” he said calmly. “None of us want to start a life from a position of indebtedness, even though everyone alive profits from the past. You’re here now, however, and if you’re to have any kind of life
after you leave here, you must forget the past. Regret and nostalgia will result in depression, which is fatal on this planet. Pay attention to what I’m about to say: The most important rule is to repress how you feel about things and be supremely alert to what is happening around you. How you feel, what you think isn’t important. What you do, how you act, is important! Don’t act or speak until you have some inkling of what the result will be.

“I’m picking the first part of your own name, Mar, and I’m adding the suffix ‘agern’ to it. On Fajnard, long names are indicative of aristocracy or nobility. Bondsfolk are allowed the shortest possible names, and the suffix ‘agern’ means ‘slave.’ Your tag says Mar-agern! That’s your label! Repeat it over and over to yourself, keep it in mind so you can be quick when some Frossian utters it. When a Frossian yells ‘agern,’ it means whatever bondsfolk are closest, so be alert for that, too.

“Sleep whenever you can, wherever you can. Try to stay as clean as possible. The purchase contract specifies bathing facilities, but that doesn’t mean your buyers will have them, or that they’ll be sanitary, or that they won’t be frozen in winter. That means you sometimes use your drinking water to wash with, or the water that’s used to water stock, usually umoxen. Since they produce the finest wool among the known worlds, the Frossians are careful of them, and their water is probably kept clean. If you have any difficulty staying clean, cut your hair off, all of it, everywhere on your body, as that will reduce infestation.

“Frossians are a three-sex race. All the queens are on one planet, elsewhere. Never ask where. That question can get you killed. There are a few hundred breeding males on Fajnard, the workers and soldiers are neuters, and they’re the ones who’ll be ordering you around. They’re touchy, easy to anger, preoccupied with their own status in their own particular work crew. Anything you do wrong reflects on them, so don’t do anything wrong.

“Eat sparingly and save the least perishable of what you’re given in a pocket. If you don’t have a pocket, use the materials we gave you to contrive one. You may be given three meals today and only one or none tomorrow. If you feel just slightly unwell, don’t let it show. Even if you feel quite sick but can put on appearance of working, do so.
This marks you as a noncomplainer and builds a store of tolerance among the overseers. Then, if you think you’re dying, kick up a real fuss, and if you’re loud enough, they’ll probably send for one of us, particularly before they’ve had their value out of you, that is, during the first ten to twelve years you’re here.”

“They send for one of you?”

“There are several MSL doctors here, male and female, and we’ve trained some helpers who’ve worked out their bondage. The Frossians tolerate us because they get more work out of healthy servants. We’re certifying that you’re healthy to start with. If you’re careful, you may stay that way.”

That was my last earth-human contact. On the following day, our shipload of émigrés was sold. I had dreaded the poking and prying that I expected to accompany this process, but seemingly the buyers were not interested in touching the merchandise. A scaled, bone-crested, tailed, four-legged, two-armed Frossian emerged from a crowd of similar beings, put a rope around my neck, and led me and two others to a weirdly ornamented wheeled vehicle that lurched as though it had no gyros. We went through the city into the countryside, grasslands on all sides, occasional copses of strange, bulboustrunked trees with horizontal, cylindrical branches from which huge straplike leaves hung like shutters, turning as the sun moved. The end of each branch ended in something that looked very much like an eye, and the eyes followed the progress of our vehicle.

At the end of the journey, a cluster of shabby buildings in the midst of endless grass, another Frossian led me, still roped, to the barn. The ceilings were low enough that I knew I could touch them by reaching up. I did not reach up, for I had already learned that any voluntary motion on my part brought a choking jerk on the leash. A long aisle ran down the center of the building between open pens on either side, pens without fronts, just three walls dividing the structure into equal areas filled by huge animals.

They were furry…no, woolly. Enormous brown eyes peered at me with unmistakable intelligence. The ears were long enough to be amusing, even funny, and the horns were long enough to be dangerous. And the tails! Curving upward and forward, each of them spread long, fine wool in a perfect parasol above each animal or,
when lowered, a blanket, so evenly distributed it might have been spread by some domestic who had just changed the linens. I could not see their feet, for the hind legs were bent under their bodies and the front feet were curled against the ponderous chests. Four-legged. Not unfamiliar, as though I might have seen their like in a book, or more likely their attributes. Horns like cattle. Faces like buffalo. Coat and ears like poodle dogs. Those marvelous umbrella tails? Giant anteaters came to mind, though as I recalled, their tails had been more brushlike. Of course, I knew them only from books.

The Frossian spoke in his own language. “You are responsible for feeding them, and watering them, and cleaning up after them and taking them to pasture and bringing them back. Any one of them gets hurt or dies, you get hurt or die. You stupid humans don’t understand anything Frossians say, but the whip will teach you.”

“On the contrary,” I said in only slightly halting Frossian, “I understand very well.”

The Frossian’s eyes widened momentarily, before his arm lashed out, clubbing me across the face as he hissed, “I explain! We don’t talk to slaves, and we don’t want them talking to us, especially if they contradict what we say!”

He left me lying in the straw, facedown, half-stunned, realizing suddenly that the word for
contradict
in Frossian was the same word as
insult
, that the word for
explain
was from the same root as the word
demean oneself.
From the umox nearest me, a strange, whistling call rose up. Still dazed, I looked at the creature and saw that it fluted the sound through its nose. Within moments, I was surrounded by a group of people who looked so like me, I would have sworn they were family. They were Ghoss, they said, speaking to me in Frossian.

“Oh, girl, umox say you spoke to overseer. Such a bad idea to speak where any overseer can hear you!”

“Why did you do such a thing?”

“Didn’t they warn you. The doctors? Didn’t they say not to speak? Not to move or speak? Surely they warned you!”

“Ummm? Here, let us see your eyes, let us see your arms.”

“Not too bad. You’ll have a strange-colored face for a few days.”

“Now you can count on that one’s enmity so long as you are here.”

Finally, then, I remembered the doctor telling me not to speak, and I cursed myself silently. So proud of my ability to speak, I had to do it! Pride. Rotten pride. Obviously, pride was something to be forgotten.

“Who are you?” I asked.

One of the women spoke. “I am Deen. We are Ghoss, dear girl, as you no doubt are yourself.”

“I’m not Ghoss, whatever. I’m human.”

“Well, of course, Ghoss are human. Tsk. Here, let me put some salve on that. Don’t worry, the doctors gave it to us. It won’t harm you.”

And so my servitude began with the first lesson: Do not speak unless among the Ghoss and where no Frossian could hear. With the Ghoss I spoke Frossian while I learned their own language, one with strangely familiar words in it, an old language, they said, dating back to the time they had been brought from Earth by the Gentherans and given to the Gibbekot, the indigenes of Fajnard.

“The indigenous race? You mean, this isn’t a Frossian home planet?”

“The Frossians have no home planet except one place where the queens live. Frossians eat up planets as a plether of umoxen eat a field of hay.” Deen snorted her derision.

“What’s a plether?”

“So many as will fit into a pen, Mar-agern. A plether of umoxen is fewer than a plether of Gnar, but both take the same barn space. As I was saying, the Frossians take everything they can take without triggering action by ISTO, then they go ruin some other world. When they came here, our Gibbekot friends went into the mountains, but some of us…well, let us say we do not hide as well as they. The Frossians forced us to stay here and work for them.”

I thought this last was less than truthful. The Ghoss had nothing about them of abasement or servitude. I conjectured that they might be here for some other reason. What that reason might be, I had no idea, and it wasn’t explained, even though I became woven into the life of the Ghoss, almost one of them.

I would have been quite content to be Ghoss if I could have managed it, for they had invisible networks of solidarity and succor
that prevented even the least among them from being trod upon and broken. If you were Ghoss, you just knew when help was needed, but I had no such connection. For me, help did not come unless some Ghoss actually saw my trouble or the umoxen let them know. Either way, they would arrive with salve for the welts, with painkiller, with soft words, with behind-the-scenes string-pulling to save me further punishment. They claimed me in kinship, even though I knew I was not kin.

“You always claim not to be Ghoss, but you obviously are!” said Rei-agern, a middling old one, with an interestingly ugly face.

“I am a bondservant from Earth. None of my family ever were Ghoss, there are no Ghoss on Earth.”

“Well, there obviously were sometime, because that’s where we came from originally, some thousands of years ago.”

“Captured and enslaved,” said I sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

“No such thing,” cried the other. “We were never slaves of the Gibbekot! We were their friends, their coworkers. We stayed at their invitation, true, but it was not into slavery! Many of us went with them when the Frossians came, and those who did are still with the Gibbekot, back in the hills.”

I thought the talent they had might have been a gift from the Gibbekot, for they were something other than merely human now. Perhaps they had mutated, or evolved.

I soon learned the routine. Rise early, go to the privy, wash in the bucket, go to the kitchen, take whatever food was offered, return to the barn, open the big door, and urge the plether to get up and move. The umoxen seemed to take a perverse pleasure in being difficult to rouse, and it was days before I realized they were playing with me. When I stopped chivvying them and took to leaning on the doorpost, chewing a straw, careless of whether they moved or not, they moved. The same ones always led, the others followed with one small, brown one at the rear, and I walked by that one, soon enough with my arm across the creature’s shoulder, feeling through the wool for any sharp seed or spine that might fret an umox.

As I walked I watched everything, looked at everything, attentive to the presence of continuous miracle. There had been no grass, no fog on Earth. I had suppose these things to be of one kind. Grass was
green. Fog was gray. Instead, neither was ever a single color, ever a single thing. The umoxen relished the fog, murmuring their way through it, the moisture condensing on their wool so that when the sun broke through, it lit a procession of jeweled chimeras, garbed in rainbow.

Sometimes an umox would come up behind me, so softly I did not hear it, then suddenly
whuff
at me from behind, frightening a yelp from my throat, and at that they laughed. I knew it was laughter, though silent, for their shoulders shook with it.

“You are naughty animals,” I told them. “Shame on you.” At which they laughed the harder. They had voices that ranged from that same high, fluting call I had heard the first time I met them to a low, satisfied rumble I could hear through the soles of my feet.

“Can you get me some brushes?” I asked the Ghoss. “Some brushes, a pair of pliers, maybe a large comb.”

“We can,” they said. “But the herdsman won’t let you keep them.”

“I’m going to hide them in the pasture,” I confessed. “In a hollow fence post.”

So equipped, I began grooming my charges. First the little brown one that I walked with to the pasture each day. I worked the comb through its wool, slowly, carefully. I brushed the long wool of its tail, strand by strand, not hurrying. It was a way to pass the time, not something I had been told to do. Soon the little umox began to rumble-hum, the sound of a deep-toned stringed instrument, stroked with an endless bow. The next umox added a tone, then the one next to it, and soon there were twenty humming, one vast, endless harmonic chord that sounded upward, through my bones.

When I had finished with the little brown one, I turned to find my next victim and was confronted by the leader of the plether, who looked at me significantly and turned, offering its tail. From that day on, I spent my days grooming the plether, two days per umox, strictly in rotation. I hid my implements in the hollow post each night. Before long, I was telling them stories of Queen Wilvia and the nazeemi and the yaboons while they rumble-hummed along, not only my own plether but all those within hearing, a vast harmonic sound that continued until my brain sang with them, and time went by without my noticing it.