The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page A

passed…” She fell silent, staring at nothing for a time. I waited. “And what they’d been afraid would happen, did happen! The anti–population control people started rioting. Those opposing them began rioting back! Some religious fanatics took advantage of the disorder to start a biowar. That was the Great Plague of 2082 that killed a billion people while those huge ships just hung up there, watching.”
    “They didn’t help?”
    “Gentherans help. Omnionts observe. Mercans profit,” her mother snarled. “At least that’s what the Gentherans tell us.”
    “That’s why…it was the terrible eighties?”
    Mother wiped her eyes. “That was the start of them. While the plague was going on, all the local wars joined into one big war among former nations and states and tribal areas. That was the so-called Eight-Week War that killed another billion people.”
    “I wasn’t even born.”
    “No. The war happened right after your father arrived on Phobos. It’s a good thing we were there. Otherwise, we might not be alive today.” Her voice, already unfamiliarly shrill, went up another half tone. “We might have been just two more of the two billion people the plague and the war had killed, which still wasn’t enough to suit ISTO, which started an inquiry…”
    “Into what?”
    “If the plague had been started purposely by Earthgov, ISTO would have regarded it as a good-faith effort to reduce population; if the plague was simply a crime or accident, it wouldn’t have helped our rating at all. Everyone knew Earthgov hadn’t started the plague, because the fanatics who did it had told the whole world their god had commanded they do it! However, the fanatics were all dead by that time, so they couldn’t prove they’d done it, and that gave the Gentherans a loophole through which they negotiated with ISTO. They claimed that Earthgov had known the plague was going to start and had chosen not to stop it. That turned out to be ‘reasonable grounds’ for classifying us as semicivilized.
    “ISTO agreed, but only if we immediately started enforcing our own laws by selling all our over-fours to the Combine and the Federation.”
    “They’d never been enforced.”
    Mother shrilled: “How could they have been! What with the plague and the war, nobody could enforce anything! ISTO said either comply at once, or the robot slaughterers would start arriving.” Her voice rasped, she coughed, before going on in her piercing, unfamiliar voice:
    “Earthgov declared martial law and began shipping people out, and that bought us provisional status as a semicivilized and threatened world. We’ve been shipping people ever since, and we’re still provisional.”
    Mother’s tone and expression were forbidding, but I wanted to know! I said, “I still don’t understand why we can’t talk about it!”
    Tears pouring down her reddened face as she grated through clenched teeth, “Have you been listening to me, Margaret? I sound like a—a crazy person! I’m screaming! Even telling you about it makes me crazy! The war happened, and the plague happened, and even in the middle of all that, the proliferators just went on having child after child after child! Other people, those who called themselves the limiters, they blamed the others, the lifers, for destroying the world. If you want to know all the awful details, I’ll remove the block on your didactibot and you can look up the Lifer-Limiter Uprising!
    “Your father and I weren’t here, but we’ve heard about it from people who were! The hostility was everywhere, in everything. Pregnant women were stoned! Obstetricians’ offices were bombed. Hospitals were bombed. Mentioning babies in public could get you killed! We still can’t talk about it!”
    The door opened, and Father came back into the room, his face drawn. “I’m sorry, Louise. I just…”
    “I know,” she croaked. “I know.”
    The looks on their faces actually frightened me. I said placatingly, “I