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Category: Science Fiction/Science Fiction
Description: The Margarets marks the long-awaited return of one of the most respected authors in the sf community; a writer who has earned accolades and the admiration of every true aficionado of bold, brilliant, risk-taking speculative fiction. Sheri S. Tepper dazzles yet again with a powerful tale of ingenious survival and strange destiny. The only human child living in a human work colony on the Martian satellite Phobos, little Margaret Bain has devised a system for keeping the suffocating demons of boredom and loneliness at bay: She invents six imaginary companions, each an extension of her own personality, to play with. When the unproductive Phobos project is shut down, and after Margaret is forced to return to Earth with her parents, the child's other selves are lost to her. But they are not gone. Left behind, each one flourishes--refining its own persona, acquiring its own history--before ultimately dispersing to far-flung destinations throughout the universe. On a near-barren homeworld denuded by thoughtless-ness and chemistry, Margaret grows to adulthood and marries, despite the seemingly utter hopelessness of humanity's future. The Earth is so impoverished that its inhabitants must import water and other basic necessities of life--trading the only viable product the planet has left to offer ... slaves. The time will come when Margaret must leave this world as well, expelled as part of a desperate survival plan millennia in the making--an astonishing scheme that will require her to gather together the many Margarets who are now scattered throughout the galaxy. The creator of the Margarets must now bring all her selves home ... or watch her race perish.
eBook Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc./HarperCollins e-books, 2007
Books By Dames Release Date: June 2007

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Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/eReader (recommended)/Adobe PDF/Adobe EPUB - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT [454 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [581 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [459 KB], SECURE ADOBE PDF FORMAT [4.1 MB], SECURE ADOBE EPUB FORMAT [1.1 MB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [881 KB]
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Once a very long time ago, between fifty and a hundred thousand years, a small group of humans fleeing from predators took refuge in a cave. Clinging to one another during the night, they heard a great roaring, louder and more fierce than the roars of the beasts they knew, and when they peeked out at dawn, they saw that a moon had fallen out of the sky. The sun was just rising, the changeable baby moon they were used to was with Mother Sun, so the fallen moon belonged to someone else.

The someone elses were walking here and there, clanking and creaking. Ahn, the leader of the people, noticed holes around the bottom of the moon, open holes as large as caves. The clanking things were frightening, but not so scary as the animals howling among the nearest trees. Ahn, the leader, had no memory of such things; neither did any of the other of his people. No clanking things. No falling moons.

Ahn nodded, thoughtfully. It was harder when it was a new thing. If they had a memory of the thing, it was easier to figure out what to do. Otherwise, they had to decide, then see what would happen. It did seem to Ahn, however, that hiding inside the moon was a good idea. When the moon went back up into the sky, the beasts couldn't follow. The holes smelled strange, so Ahn went first in case there were bad things inside.

Just as there had been no memory of fallen moons, there had been no memory of those who owned the moon: the Quaatar, who disliked being fooled with, bothered by, or trespassed upon by anything. Even if Ahn had had such a memory, the immediacy of his people's situation might have made him risk it. Since he did not know it, he had no qualms about leading his people up the vent tubes and thence into a hydroponic oasis.

The ship's robots found nothing worth ravening upon the world; the ship departed. Inside, the stowaways lived rather pleasantly on the juicy bodies of small furry vermin that infested the ship and the garden produce that fed the noncarnivorous creatures aboard. When the ship finally landed, the people went out to find themselves not in the sky, as they had expected, but rather upon some other world, where their eager senses informed them there were no predators at all. The world was a paradise, and they fled into it.

Ahn's people never knew how they got there; the Quaatar were and are a little-known people. The females are said to be solitary, aquatic, and planet-bound. The males return to the water only to breed. It is said if one imagines a huge, multilegged lizard, hundreds of years old, who is able to talk and count from one to six, one has imagined a Quaatar. The race became starfaring only by accident. Early in their evolutionary history, they were approached by an advanced people who offered to trade for mining rights on the several lifeless, metal-rich planets of the system. Galactic Law required that they need deal only with the most numerous indigenous group. The Quaatar demanded first that three lesser tribes, the Thongal, Frossians, and K'Famir, who had long ago branched treacherously from the Quaatar genetic line, be wiped out. Since Galactic Law did not permit such a thing, the mining concessionaires offered many other inducements, finally agreeing, among other things, to move the other tribes or races far away. The Thongal, Frossians, and K'Famir, all of whom were more agile and far cleverer than the Quaatar, had no objection at all to being removed from the dismal swamps of Quaatar and given drier planets of their own. They were accordingly transported, leaving the Quaatar alone and unchallenged in their insistence that themselves, their world, and their language were sacred and...