“Margy?” I thought he said.
“Mar-agern,” she corrected him.
“But you…she…Naumi! Except for the hair, she looks exactly like M’urgi! They could be twins! What’s going on?”
Naumi held up his hand, hushing him. “Ears are quivering over there at the guard post. Let’s find somewhere less public. May I suggest the dorm common room? Plenty of room for the…ah…people who have joined us. The reunion doesn’t start for two more days, so there’ll be no one there but us.”
Chatting over his shoulder about the weather, the beauty of the sunset, how wonderful it was to see everyone, Naumi led our group past the guards at the gate. We went down a central road and turned right to enter one of the large buildings facing the side street. Inside, Naumi took us straight back through the building to a large room opening onto a central courtyard.
“All right,” Naumi said. “Somebody tell me what’s going on.”
We looked at one another. Gloriana took a deep breath, and said, “This all started when Falija’s parents left her with me…” She went on to describe briefly how that had happened. Falija, dutiful as ever, picked up the story from that point: her fostering on Tercis, her acquisition of the mother-mind, the threat on Tercis, our travels to Fajnard, where we had picked up Mar-agern, and our trip to Thairy. She said we had learned that the way-gates go one way in pairs, one coming in, one going out, and had verified that in the cave we had come in through.
“You came through that thing up on the cliff,” Naumi said. “So that pool of light is a way-gate! I found it the first year I was here, but I’d never heard of way-gates, and it seemed a bit dangerous to try on my own. I’d almost forgotten about it!” He turned to Margaret. “But you called me by name. Both of you.”
I said, “When I…that is, when we were a child, I, we invented imaginary people, roles to play, fantasies to act out. Now me was a warrior. I said to myself, ‘I will be a queen,’ and ‘will be a’ turned into ‘Wilvia,’ and there really is a Queen Wilvia, but we don’t know where she is. Margy was our shaman…”
“That’s M’urgi,” cried Ferni. “The woman I’m in love with, the reason I came to Thairy! She’s a shaman! She’s been captured by tribesmen. They won’t hurt her, at least not for a while, but…”
“Shhh,” Naumi said. “Just a moment.” He turned to me, I suppose because I was the eldest of the group. “I’ve found it isn’t smart to believe or disbelieve too early in any situation, but one thing we need to know immediately: Are any of you in immediate danger? Are you being pursued? Is there an emergency of some kind?”
I turned to the others, who looked quite blank. Even Falija shook her head, no, not right now.
Naumi turned back to Ferni, took him by the upper arm, and sat him down. “Now. Everyone sit. Flek, will you and Poul get us something to drink? How about our visitors? Are you hungry? Well then, just something to drink while Ferni tells us whatever he has to tell us, because that does sound like an emergency.”
Ferni, openly staring at me-Margaret and other-me-Mar-agern, began his story with the arrival of another Margaret on B’yurngrad. “Her name was Margaret,” he said. “She was twenty-two. She was from Earth.”
“So were we,” Mar-agern and I said simultaneously.
Ferni went on with M’urgi’s name change and education by the shaman. “I wasn’t with her again, not for years,” he said. He told of his search for her, of their ghyrm-hunting in the northlands. “I love her,” he declared almost defiantly. “We love each other, and they took her! The tribes are being eaten by ghyrm, and they want her to kill them all, which she can’t do by herself!”
“The Siblinghood won’t help?” Naumi asked.
“I can’t reach anyone above midmanagerial-not-allowed-to-decide-anything-unless-it’s-in-the-book!” cried Ferni, pounding the table with one clenched fist. “Which makes me think there must be some great crisis going on somewhere. Someone may be available when I get back, two days from now, but I knew our old talk road was assembled here, and I thought we might come up with some answers.”
“Talk road?” asked Falija.
Caspor laughed. “We used to call it that. When we had a problem, we’d talk about it, sometimes forever, and eventually we could almost always figure it out. Ghyrm infestations of tribesmen on another planet are a little outside our expertise, I’m afraid.”
“Possibly not,” said Flek. “The company has been working on a weapon.”
“May I ask, what company?” I asked.
“My grandfather was Gorlan Flekkson Bray, originally from the city of Bray on Chottem. He didn’t like some of the family ways, as I understand it, so he moved here, to Thairy, to start a company he later called Flexxon Armor. In Bray, he’d traded with the Omniont races for technological information. Here on Thairy, he recruited some very bright young people who developed their own refinements, and he began by manufacturing high-quality armor for the colonies…”
“Are the colonies under attack?” I demanded.
Flek shook her head. “Not yet. Everyone knows what the Mercans are like, though, and we’re right in the middle of Mercan space! So, while we publicly supply armaments for the colony police and the frontier scouts, we’re also developing and stockpiling very-high-tech arms and armament to help the colonies resist invasion. Gorlanstown, up the coast a way, is the only city large enough to furnish our work force. We have twenty different buildings there, under twenty different names, so that almost no one knows the full extent of what we do.”
“Are you sure you should be telling us?” I asked.
Flek smiled, a surprisingly wicked smile. “I would tell Naumi anything. You either are or are not Naumi. If you betray us, you’re not Naumi, and you’re stupid, besides.”
Glory choked back a giggle, but Mar-agern laughed until tears ran down her cheeks. “We’re being tested, Margaret! What about the others who obviously aren’t Naumi. Glory? Bamber Joy? Falija?”
Caspor said, “We’ve been told the Gentherans are completely honorable. If this young…Gibbekot is related to them, we may trust her honor. If these are your grandchildren, reared by you, then they, too, should be completely honorable.”
I thought of explaining that neither of them was actually my grandchild, but let it go. It didn’t matter. I trusted the boy at least as much as I trusted Gloriana. “You imply you have something to kill ghyrm.”
Flek nodded. “We developed a metal that kills them, and we’ve been providing the Siblinghood with knives made from it. Recently, we’ve developed a machine that kills ghyrm in confined areas. The Siblinghood sent you one, Ferni, not long ago. Did it work well?”
“So I understand,” he replied.
“That’s good, because the first few models killed humans and a lot of other creatures as well. The problem was that the genetic code of the damned things is very similar to the genome that ninety-odd percent of all Earth mammals share, including humans.”
“As though humans were the intended target?” Naumi asked.
“We’ve considered that possibility. The rest of the genome is a weird amalgam that no one has been able to identify! We’ve improved greatly on that model, however. What we have now is a small prototype of a weapon that, when we enlarge it, can wipe ghyrm off whole worlds without killing people or umoxen or whatever. The prototype only covers fifty square jorub.”
“Jorub?” I asked.
“Thairy measurement,” said Caspor. “A jorub is ten taga, which is roughly three miles, old Earthian. Say four hundred fifty square miles. But how high?” he demanded of Flek.
Flek said, “The dimensions of the field, length, width, height are variable. Since ghyrm don’t fly, the fifty-jorub figure has a low ceiling, to cover more ground. It would have to be set higher for mountainous terrain, of course. At this point we’re sure it doesn’t kill Earth animals or any creatures native to any of our colony worlds, but there’s always the possibility it will kill some essential something that we aren’t awa
re of. Eventually, if we can locate the place where the ghyrm are coming from, we plan to drop some really big machines on that location and wipe them out at the source. Anyhow, it seems relevant to our discussion.”
Ferni said earnestly, “For my situation, it would be helpful if we could give the tribes a lot of those knives you mentioned. M’urgi and I both used them when we went ghyrm-hunting. We have to give the tribe something to make them let M’urgi go.”
Caspor had been staring at the ceiling, his lips moving silently, and suddenly he demanded, “Where’s the star map we used to have in here?”
Naumi looked up, puzzled. “Behind the screen, over there. It’s a new one. The old one’s display circuits were so worn, no one could read it. Why do you want a star map?”
“This way-gate business interests me. I’m wondering what the underlying logic of all this business may be. Margaret—if you’ll excuse the familiarity, ma’am—came from Tercis to Fajnard. Then the group came from Fajnard to Thairy. They tell us the gates are one way, that each place has one gate coming in and one gate going out. It would be interesting to know where all the gates are…” He went to the screen, moved it aside, and stood before the map pedestal, mumbling to himself and switching it back and forth among view planes.
All of us newcomers were staring at Caspor wonderingly. Ferni said, “He’ll do that for quite a while. Caspor has to figure everything out. If it doesn’t have a logical, mathematical solution, he drives himself crazy.”
“If he wants to know where the way-gate is that leads away from here,” said Gloriana, “it’s up in that same cave, just around another corner.”
“There are two of them?” Naumi was astonished. “When I discovered it, I thought there was only one.”
“You saw the outgoing one. The incoming ones are black,” said Falija. “Don’t try entering them from that direction.”
“But I stepped inside the light…”
Falija said, “Yes. And then what?”
“I stepped back out.”
“Then you never went all the way through. You were just inside the gate. If you’d gone on through, you couldn’t have come back. Not the way you went.”
Naumi furrowed his brow, staring at the ceiling as he tried to remember. “There was a dark recess to the left when I went in. The way in must have been in there…”
“We were discussing weapons,” reminded Falija.
Flek nodded. “We have the next model of the machine in the final stages of assembly.”
“Is it something you could do in a hurry?” asked Ferni. “I’m not worried about M’urgi, not really, but—”
“Well, I’m worried about her,” I interrupted. “If she’s one of us. It seems that seven of us may be necessary in order to do something important, and if M’urgi is one of the seven, she’s probably irreplaceable.” I thought about this for a moment, saying with surprise, “Any of us are!”
“Why seven?” demanded Caspor, from his position before the star map.
“It’s a story,” Falija responded. “About a fish and an angry man.”
“Can you tell it briefly?” Caspor asked, turning toward her.
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 accident 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 s
peak 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…”