The Margarets (46 page)

Falija said, “There’s also a saying, and it’s shorter. ‘Who knows? The Keeper knows. Well then, ask the Keeper. Where do I find it. All alone, walk seven roads at once to find the Keeper.’ The story repeats the phrase ‘Seven roads are one road.’”

“What’s a keeper?” asked Jaker.

“In the story, it was the little statue with a book in which everything in the whole universe was written,” Falija said.

“The Holder,” cried Ferni. “The…rememberer that fills the universe and senses everything that happens. M’urgi knows about that!”

“Ah,” said Caspor, turning back to the map. “Seven. Seven directions. Now, how would that work out in pairs? Divided into our customary three hundred sixty degrees would be fifty-one-point-four-two-eight-five-seven-one and so on, more or less forever.”

He punched keys on the map control and spun Tercis toward the top, another key and a line down from Tercis, slightly to the left. “Margaret came from Tercis to Fajnard,” Caspor said. Another line, upward to the right, “Margaret and Mar-agern came from Fajnard to Thairy. If I come away from Tercis at the same angle…” One more line off at a weird angle. Caspor fiddled with the controls, spinning the line into a cone. “It ends up in the nowhere,” he said.

“Let me try it,” said Falija. She went to the map and stared at it for a moment before entering the next line. “I seem to recall that from there…” The line bounced back from nothingness and hit a star. “Chottem. Where my people are!”

“That’s a colony world,” said Margaret. “Where from there?”

“From Chottem…Cantardene.”

“There’s no colony on Cantardene! That’s a Mercan world.”

“We have people on Cantardene,” said Naumi. “Bondspeople. The Margaret there may be a bondsperson.”

“We have an import-export office on Cantardene,” said Jaker. “That is, Poul-Jaker Import-Export does. There’s a freeport area, Crossroads of the World, they call it. The bondservant market is there, and so is all the gossip twenty races can spread around. By
wormhole, it’s only a couple of days from here.”

“We can send someone,” said Poul. “That salesman of yours, Jaker! We could get him on the next ship out. You know who I mean, the one who seems to be able to talk anyone into anything, what’s his name?”

“Stipps,” said Jaker, grinning. “Stipps the Lips.”

“I’ve met him,” said Ferni. “On B’yurngrad somewhere. Do you have an export arm there?”

“We have an export arm everywhere,” replied Jaker.

“Aha!” said Caspor as he spun the lines from Thairy and Cantardene. “They don’t intersect anywhere. They come close at B’yurngrad. No, they don’t. Yes, they do…didn’t…”

“What?” blurted Naumi.

“I mean, let me play with it a while. I need to update the galactic shift…”

We turned our eyes away from the chart, unable to keep them away for long. Ferni said, “Flek, will you help me?”

“Ferni, I’ll do everything possible. I’ll see what knives we have in stock…”

“Can you lend us the prototype?” asked Naumi.

“If we can think of a good way to use it, sure. We can disassemble it so you can carry it. Jaker, you’d be welcome to go with me.”

Jaker shook her head. “I’d just be in the way, Flek. I think Poul and I’d be more useful getting one or several spies into Cantardene and seeing if we can find the other person we’re looking for. The K’Famir are among the universe’s most despicable creatures; but they do business, and when creatures do business, they have to make deals, and you can’t make a deal without betraying something of your nature. We’re accustomed to snooping around to ascertain what people will buy or sell.

“I saw Stipps this morning, here on Thairy. He’s one of those cocksure, egocentric people you love to hate, a very youthful arrogance for a person that age—and with only one eye, at that—but at least ninety percent of his opinion about himself usually pans out…”

“One eye?” asked Naumi. “How old?”

“Oh, middle years or more, and yes, one eye. Some kind of acci
dent in his youth, he says. Why?”

“No reason, except that I knew, know someone like that, though I haven’t seen him in years.”

Jaker gave him a questioning look, but when he said nothing else, she continued. “If no one has any objections, we can get Stipps on the ship tonight, though…the task is a bit vague. Who are we looking for?”

“For me,” said Mar-agern and I, as with one voice. “It would have to be a bondslave who looks very much like us,” I continued. “Could be older or younger…”

“Younger,” said Falija. “Somewhere around Naumi’s age because they split off at the same time, and Cantardene isn’t that far from Thairy.”

I nodded. “She’ll speak several of the local languages. Can’t be too many women like that among slaves.”

“What other skills will she have?”

Mar-agern and I looked at one another. “If she was only twelve?” I said at last, shaking my head.

Mar-agern said, “She would probably sew quite well. I did.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “She would sew well.”

“Aha!” shouted Caspor. “Yes! Ferni, until this very moment that link didn’t go to B’yurngrad! It’s a new link.”

“What?” “What do you mean,” cried several voices.

“I mean, if we start on Tercis, it goes from Tercis to Fajnard, from Fajnard to Thairy, from Thairy to B’yurngrad, from B’yurngrad to Cantardene, from Cantardene to Chottem, from Chottem to that point out in nowhere…”

“I know what’s there,” said Falija. “My people found it ages ago.”

“…and from nowhere back to Tercis. One way. The whole way. Seven roads is one road, but it’s only been one road since the last automatic update on galactic shift! B’yurngrad wasn’t in position until very, very recently.”

“How long does it stay in position?” I asked.

Caspor turned back to the map, whispering to himself, “There has to be some stretchiness in the connection, something that holds on for a while…”

Falija said into the silence, “This means the configuration is not a
permanent one. We know some parts of it have been in use for some time. The one from Tercis to Fajnard and Fajnard to Thairy, for instance. Howkel knew where those roads ended up, so people came and went through them. Other points have come into contact more recently. And this last link…has only very temporarily completed the one road.”

Caspor had been playing with the star guide, rotating the strangely angled image. Now it bloomed on the screen as a seven-pointed star. “From this point of view, it’s a septagram, but all the end points are in motion. I postulate that once the connection is made, there’s enough stretchiness to keep it in contact for a while, probably not very long. In a few days, the whole thing should fall apart.”

Falija said, “So the seven roads are one road now. Seven Margarets on seven planets with one road among them…”

“And everything dependent upon time,” said Ferni. “I wonder if that’s what has the Siblinghood in a furor…”

Flek, Jaker, and Poul had risen, and they were gone almost before those of us remaining had digested what had just happened.

“I’m suddenly hungry,” Mar-agern said. “Would it be possible to have something to eat?”

“Certainly,” Naumi replied. “Especially if, during supper, we can hear more about this mother-mind business.”

The eight of us, including Falija, dined alone in a small dining room at the officers’ mess, an exceptionally good dinner, as the academy cooks were trying out the menus they had selected for the reunion. As we ate, we decided what else needed to be done before we could go to B’yurngrad. When we had freed M’urgi from her captors, we would continue through the B’yurngrad way-gate to Cantardene (assuming Caspor’s map of the way-gates was accurate) to find another of us, if and only if Jaker’s one-eyed egotist hadn’t found her first.

“The gates on Cantardene may or may not be close together,” I remarked. “The ones here and on Fajnard were. I never saw the one that enters Tercis…”

“I did,” said Falija. “It was very near the one we used, hidden back in a cleft in the rock where most of them seem to be. It makes sense that each pair would be close together.”

I murmured, “I should mention that we left Tercis because a couple of pseudohumans were chasing us. Or trying to. On Fajnard, they were definitely chasing us.”

“Robots,” said Bamber Joy, who, while eating enormously, had said very little up until then. “Acted like robots, talked like robots. Might have come from some technological Walled-Off on Tercis.”

“What Walled-Off did you come from?” Ferni asked curiously.

“Rueful,” I answered. “The name says it all, and it’s too long a story for tonight.”

“Not a high-tech place, though?” asked Naumi.

I shook my head. “No, Naumi, not a high-tech place. We had electricity, and that was about the extent of it. No powered vehicles except for those from Tercis Central we occasionally saw, plus the one Ned and Walter drove.”

“Let’s leave it until morning,” Naumi said. “Our minds will go on worrying at it overnight, and they may give us a head start after we’ve slept.”

We finished our meal and trooped back to the cadet house, where Mar-agern and I were given rooms down the hall. Falija, Bamber, and Glory took their pick of bunks in a nearby dormitory.

I returned to the common room, needing to sit quietly for a time before attempting sleep, but I found Naumi, Ferni, and Caspor still there. When I came in, Naumi rose, went to a low cupboard along the wall, and took out a bottle.

“Caspor? Ferni? Margaret? Yes? Me, too.” He poured, distributed, and sat down opposite us, turning the glass idly in his hand. “Have any of you ever hear of a planet called Hell?”

“Yes,” I said. “We learned of it in school, back on Earth, and Falija mentioned it to me just a few moments ago. The native race has almost gone extinct several times. By now, they probably are.”

“That seventh star-point, hanging out there in the nowhere. That’s how someone described that planet, Hell, to me.”

“That’s what Falija said. That’s a seventh planet.”

“We’re a long way from walking road number seven,” said Caspor. “Right now I’m a good deal more worried about a place like Cantardene in the known-where than anyplace in the nowhere. And there’s always the possibility I’m totally wrong about this whole
thing.”

Naumi emptied his glass, yawned, rose, and bid us good night, concluding, “You’re usually right, Caspor. I don’t see we have any choice but taking a chance on it.”

They went off to bed. I sat there for some time, thinking of that seven-pointed star, wondering about Hell, and what one of us could be doing on it, out in the nowhere.

The Gardener arrived in Bray late in the evening. She found Sophia and me sitting on the terrace beneath the tree. As we rose to greet her, she said, “You’ve found out what was rotten here on Chottem!”

Sophia said, “Gardener, you knew something was wrong!”

“I’d smelled it, Sophia. This is too recently settled a planet to permit any legitimate accumulation of great wealth, not in one lifetime, not in several, yet Stentor was a rich man, and Von Goldereau grows richer by the hour.”

“Slaves,” I said. “Men grow rich selling slaves.”

“Yes, selling slaves, including children, has always been a quick way to riches.”

I said, “The children don’t come from this world, Gardener. They have to come from somewhere else.”

“An old man brought me the keys to the cellars,” said Sophia. “He said he’d given his grandson to my grandfather to be sent to another world to be educated as a gentleman. I’m afraid this was a cruel and vicious joke. What world needs human children to educate and make gentlemen?”

“There is no such world. There is a world, however, where children are surplus, and another where children are bought and sold.”

“Earth,” I said. “And Cantardene.”

Gardener nodded. “Yes. Anyone needing a guaranteed source of children would deal with Earth.”

“Would any parent sell…?” I breathed.

“Earthians have sold their children for thousands of years,” said the Gardener. “Surplus daughters have been sold as prostitutes, surplus sons to the army. Among the sterile castes of K’Famir, human pets are common, but that does not account for the numbers necessary to have amassed this fortune.”

I was gripped by the memory of my own feelings when I had been ripped away from my home. Through tears, I said, “With riches like those in the cellars, Stentor must have brought enormous numbers from Earth. But how? On what ships?”

“Omniont or Mercan captains wouldn’t transport cargoes to Chottem that would sell for more on Cantardene,” mused Sophia.

“True,” Gardener agreed. “But the Lorn and Bray families were wealthy on Earth, and they bought ships to bring settlers from Earth. The wealth in these cellars could have purchased an armada!”

I thought out loud. “Stentor could have claimed the children were to be colonists, but where did he keep them?”

Sophia gestured widely. “Manland is vast, and mostly uninhabited. People have come here since we arrived, winking and nodding to say that they did business with him, Von Goldereau among them. Perhaps he knows.”

“We know none were sent through these cellars since Stentor died,” I said. “The notes we read make that clear. If Von Goldereau is in the same trade, he has another route.”

“You left none of the dead creatures down there?” the Gardener asked. “I would like to have seen one.”

“I left none, but I can describe them for you,” I offered. “The size of my two hands, clenched together, with ten or eleven arms or legs or tentacles…”

“Ghyrm,” said the Gardener. “Well, that’s what I thought they must be. When Stentor did not reply, they were angered, and they sent ghyrm through the gate to destroy him. He was too wily to be taken so. Tomorrow we will go down there, Sophia, and have a look at this place, this doorway. Whoever is buying these children has access both to great wealth and to ghyrm, and I need to send word of
that to my friends. Also, if your cellar can spare some of its riches, we may use some of it to pay for what we must accomplish next.”

“I have never known you to buy anything,” I cried, astonished.

The Gardener replied, “Warriors like to be paid, even those of the Siblinghood, who are choosy about what they fight for. We will have need of more than a few of them.”

“Would my grandfather have approved of this expenditure?” Sophia asked with a sly smile.

“Almost certainly not.” The Gardener grinned.

“Then you may use as much as you can, with my blessing,” said the heiress.