The Margarets Read Online Free PDF

rim.
    When we emerged, I followed the worker to the “stem tower,” which is what the upright part of the windmill was called, and was told to stay there while the worker climbed the ladder to the rotor. I was not to wander away or go near the rim, even though there was a protective railing along it. Accordingly, I looped my arm through an upright of the ladder and stared ecstatically at the surroundings, relishing the differences from everything I had known before. There was a real horizon; there was distance and perspective; there was wind sound; there were dust storms moving about like whirling dancers. There were colors in the rocks and hills, new colors!
    I turned to peer along the length of the canyon to the shining dome. There were Gentherans there, Gentherans who had helped Earth so the Mercans couldn’t cut Earth up for scrap. Why would they want to cut up Earth for scrap?
    This train of thought was interrupted by a metallic shriek from above, and I looked up to see that the worker had opened a large door into the rotor housing. The door closed behind her with another shriek, and for a little time, I watched the dust devils that formed out of nothing and engaged in wild dances that carried them halfway to the distant mountains before they vanished. The dance was accompanied by soft, barely heard wind song that subsided into a momentary and unusual calm.
    Out of nowhere, silent as the dried leaf drifting down in the greenhouse, a whirling thing came out of the sky and landed in the dust not fifty feet from where I was standing.
    It looked like a dragonfly, or rather, like the pictures of dragonflies I had seen in my book about the wetlands Earth once had. A hatch opened in the side of the golden thing. A woman came out, unhelmeted, unmasked, her movement stirring the flowing robes she wore into crimson billows.
    “You, girl,” she called in a glorious, glad voice. “Come with me!”
    I felt…I felt something I had never felt before. Joy! Ecstasy! I felt…I felt the arms-reaching feeling, that this was it, the thing I’d needed, that I must go (that I must obey and stay where I was), that the woman was calling me (that I was probably imagining it).Standing there, with my arm thrust tightly through the stanchion, I felt my legs pounding, I saw the back of myself running away, not wearing a helmet or a suit, just free as air. I reached the woman, saw myself seized up by the woman, was seized up, saw myself taken, was myself taken into the dragonfly, and felt it go.
    Then I swayed with dizziness, my eyes fell shut, and everything slipped away.

I Am Wilvia
     
    Aboard the dragonfly, I was seized with shyness. No one else was there but the red-robed woman and a boy about my age. He was the first young person I had ever seen, and he was looking at me just as curiously as I was at him. His hair was dark as the shadows on the canyon walls. His eyes glittered, as though they had lights in them. I liked the way his lips moved, the upper one curving and straightening, like a bow, I thought, one of those bows ancient desert horsemen had used, that same curve.
    The woman lifted me into a seat, murmuring, “Girl, this is Prince Joziré. I am taking him to a place of safety. Joziré needs a companion, and we have chosen you to accompany him.”
    The boy reached out a brown hand to touch my paler one. I felt…I felt the arms-from-my-stomach reaching, and it was almost as though the boy had taken those invisible hands in his own and held them tight. “What’s her name?” he asked the lady.
    “What is your name, girl?” She smiled at me.
    It took only a second before I realized who I was. “Prince Joziré, my name is Wilvia.”
    “Wilvia,” said the boy, returning my smile with a companionable one of his own. “I like that very much.” He turned to the pilot to ask, “And where is it we are going, again, ma’am?”
    “Look there,” said the woman, turning to the controls of her vessel. “Look there, Wilvia. See