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attacked the Collectivity lived; on their spaceships, perhaps. This planet is called Starlight. Of course the Starlight people claim they are not pirates, but anarchists; but that's another story. Still, they do try to reach people who disagree with the Collectivity, and that's how they found you.
And all these years, I have lived on Starlight I never knew I had grandchildren. We believed the planet where Martin lived had been obliterated by atomics. Shattered to space dust. My son no more than the atoms from which future stars would be formed. You can imagine what a grief that was to me.
Actually you can't - I was never allowed to be with him enough to find out if he was really as obnoxious as he seemed. He always looked like a spoiled brat to me. Not his fault of course.
But you can certainly imagine my astonishment when a young woman from the space patrol came to tell me Starlight had rediscovered Martin's planet. She said your world had survived, but without means to contact the rest of humanity. The planet's leader was one Mesfun of Tarcuna, and he had three children: Passarin, a boy of ten; Tiannu, a girl of thirteen; and Geishangdi, a man at nineteen.
It was your ages that started me off. If you had been older I don't think I would have bothered.
Your father took a while getting around to having you, didn't he? What is he now, sixty? I last saw him on Tarcuna at the height of the events that changed the Galaxy, when he was barely older than you, Geishangdi. He never knew I was his father. He passed as the son of a man named Xidas, who was a masterly politician far above the likes of me. You may show your father my story if you like. He will prefer not to believe it. But I hope at least one of you three will.
Not because I really care whether you come to call me Grandfather or not.
Hell, of course I care. I desperately want to be called Grandfather. I really ought to at least start this tale being honest.
But I care even more about a bigger thing. I want you to know about Martin as she really was.

Have you noticed how we make the great people of history into figures so different from ourselves, so big, so grand, that none of us could dream of emulating them? But I don't want you to be afraid of trying to be like Martin. I want you to know that when your grandmother was twenty, she was not sophisticated. I think I know how she changed from the girl who fainted to the woman who laid ambitious plans to alter the Galaxy. It happened quickly, during the so few months that I knew her. Others can tell what she did later, but this is the story I have to tell: of how it all began.
Of course I am nothing. I'm just a stick man, like children draw, a man without guts. But your grandmother was a whole person, a whole woman. When our paradise rejected her, she created her own.
Don't let your father's tales blind you to what your grandmother was really like. Can a man who invents a name for his own mother be telling the truth about her? I was about to say something harsh about your father, but old Nokomis - she's my housekeeper and she keeps me in order - leaned over and looked at the screen and said, "You can't start your first ever letter to your grandchildren by insulting their father!" So I took it out. Nokomis thinks I'm a crusty old guy, but I'm not. I'm still the innocent young fellow who came upon your grandmother in her first days on Tarcuna. I'll do my best to stay out of this story, not let myself show through.
By the way, did I tell you she was named Mariammo on her home planet?

Go to Chapter 1. Mariammo

Children of Arable
Foreword

On her twentieth birthday Mary saw a pregnant woman, and fainted.
That, my dear grandchildren, was how the whole damn thing began.
That first sentence has been knocking holes in my old brain for months now, like a chick trying to break out of an egg that's too hard for its own good.
Mary! Your grandmother. The woman who at the height of her powers held the whole Galaxy to ransom. Fainting! There's a story behind that, and I want to tell it before I die.
Even at twenty she wasn't the sort to faint, you know. But you don't know that. I'll bet you don't even know her real name.
The gene labs of Arable which created her named her Mariammo. Four days before she fainted, she was renamed Martin. It's only on your Godforsaken - or Godswamped - planet they call her Mary. Most likely because your father and his followers could not stand the thought that his sainted mother had a man's name.
Male names, female names - I grew up not knowing there were such things. Male and female were not important principles in our life. To us, the sexual body parts were like a strange and beautiful survival from early evolution. That world we lived in was a paradise, of sorts. Without knowledge of male and female. And your grandmother brought us that knowledge, and was expelled, and now you live in… Well, enough of that.
Names don't matter. Mary, or Martin, or Mariammo was the same person throughout.
So why do you bristle when I call her Martin? All right, I admit it. One reason I am writing this is so that you will come to call your grandmother Martin, not Mary, which was a name your father dragged up from ancient history: it was never on the list of approved names. And perhaps at the same time you will come to call me Grandfather.
I should start my story again, now you know who I'm talking about, with the name by which most of the Galaxy knew her.
On her twentieth birthday your grandmother Martin saw a pregnant woman, and fainted.
That is where I see it all beginning, the great events that shaped our Galaxy, that put you on your planet and me on mine. Sometimes I hate this planet. Can I come and visit you? Don't worry, there's no chance of that, exquisitely embarrassing though it would be for your father. I'll be dead soon, and glad of it. But first I have to explain how I come to be writing these pages for you.

Here I am, a crotchety old man on a bizarre little planet far off the spaceways. When I was a child there was a time when I could, or claimed I could, remember all the names of all the 990-something planets inhabited by humans. I had never heard of this one. All the planets I knew then belonged to the Galactic Collectivity. I suppose I never wondered where the pirates who