Glory Season (28 page)

While drying herself, she looked over her body. After months of hard labor, it was only natural she should find
muscles where none had shown before. Nor did she mind the fine scars that laced her hands and forearms—all earned by honest labor. What did surprise her was a pronounced development of her breasts. Since her last inspection, they had gone from petite to appreciable—or ample enough to be a bit sore from being jounced, the last hour or so. Of course, it was common knowledge that Lamai mothers passed on a dominant gene for this. They seldom left their var-daughters unendowed. Still, predictable or not, it was an event. One Maia had not expected to celebrate in jail.

She had, in fact, always envisioned someday sharing it with Leie.

Shaking her head, she refused to be drawn into bleakness. For distraction, Maia walked back to the carpet and sat down in front of the electronic Life simulator.

If only there were a manual, or some teaching program to go with this damn game
, she pondered. Maia had glimpsed men at dockside carrying around heavy reference books, which they pored over between matches. There would also be treatises on the subject, written by female anthropologists, filed at Caria University and big-city libraries. None of which helped her here.

Those two little lights attracted her notice again.
PROG MEM
, one label read. Some sort of memory? For storing preplanned programs, I suppose.

The other button said
PREV.GAM.STOR.

“Previous game storage?” She had presumed this board was new, having been shipped in for men who would now never arrive. But the light winked, so maybe there
was
an earlier game stored in memory.

Guess I could replay it and pick up a pointer or two
, she thought, then noticed nearby a tiny window with a string of code letters displayed.
VARIANT RULE: RVRSBL CA 897W
, it said mysteriously. Maia made a guess. Sometimes men changed the rules of the game, as if Life itself
weren’t complicated enough. It might take
five
living neighbors for a black square to stay alive. Or the program made squares to the left more influential than those on the right. The possibilities were endless, which helped the whole thing seem all the more pointless to most women.

Oh, this is idiotic. I’ll never learn anything from this.
Maia paused, then impulsively pressed the button to see what the memory cache contained. Immediately the game board swirled into action. First the checkered boundary contracted inward from all sides till it enclosed a much smaller number of squares. She counted fifty-nine across and fifty-nine lengthwise. Surrounding the restricted game area was a border much more complex than the simple mirror pattern of before. The board flickered another time, and all at once the zone within the new boundary filled with chaos. A splotchy scattering of black dots covered the first nine rows, like choca-bits strewn across a birthday cake.

Lysos!
This was completely over Maia’s head. The
WIPE
button beckoned … but curiosity stayed her hand. After all, this represented a lot of labor by the game’s previous owner. If nothing else, the patterns might be pretty to watch.

Sighing, she touched the referee symbol. The clock ticked down, eight, seven, six, five, four …

The dots began to dance. Wherever an open space had the right number of neighbors, next round there was a black, or living square at that location. Others that had been black, but failed the programmed criteria, turned white the following round. With each clock throb, the patterns changed in whirling waves, some fragmenting or scattering upon touching the boundary, while others reflected back, adding to the maelstrom within. Ephemeral shapes appeared and vanished like bubbles passing through the plane of the board. Maia could only breathe a sigh as waves crashed against stable entities, transforming
them. She saw gliders and noted their simple, crushed-triangular form. In one corner appeared a “glider gun,” which spat out little flapping arrows at regular intervals, sending them whizzing across the board. There were spectacular collisions.

It was enthralling to watch. Maia wondered if this would turn out to be one of those programs that became self-sustaining, with the whole board in a state of perpetual flux for as long as the machine was left on, each moment’s array unlike any that had come before.

Then, the pace began to slacken. Rapidly zipping entities started merging into complex but stationary units, arrayed in five deep columns across the board. Each of these underwent further evolution, slowing the rate of change still further as they converged on what she guessed must be a preplanned, final form.

She could see it happening. Each step grew out of the one preceding it. Still, it took her by surprise when the patterns coalesced into individual letters.

Words.

The letters flickered, as if seen through turbid water, their component dots still blindly switching on and off, obeying set rules, unaware of anything more than two rows or columns away. Only collectively did they carry meaning, and that began dissolving as stern, mathematical laws tore fleeting cogency into swirls of returning chaos. Some driving force was spent. Blank patches spread, devouring the brief patterns.

In seconds it was over. Maia stared at the pale game board—now empty, featureless—trying to convince herself she’d seen it:
meaning
, startling and unforeseen.

M
any species use environmental cues to trigger reproduction at certain times of year, leaving the rest peaceful and quiet. Humans have lost this ancient linkage with the calendar, resulting in our incessant obsession with, and subjugation to, sex.

The time has come to restore wisdom to our rhythm of life, reestablishing serenity and predictability to the cycle of our years. Stratos seems ideal for this purpose, with its distinctive, planet-wide seasons. The birth ratio we foresee—of clones to old-style, sexually-derived offspring—need not be programmed-in. It will arise naturally out of two uneven periods of potential impregnation, separated by long stretches of relative calm.

There are plenty of environmental effects we can utilize as cues, to trigger desire at appropriate times. Take the incredible, world-wide aurorae of high summer, during
the planet’s closest approach past tiny, fierce Waenglen’s Star. If male chimpanzees are visually aroused by a mere flash of pink female swelling seen at long range through a forest, how difficult can it be for us to program a similar color-response in our males, triggered by these startling blue sky displays? Similarly, winter’s special frost will signal changes in our women descendants, preparing them for amazonogenic cloning.

There will be side-effects we cannot now predict, but the possibility of error should not deter us. We are only replacing one rather arbitrary set of stimuli and impulses with another. The new rules will, in fact, be more flexible and varied than the monotone lusts of old.

One thing will remain constant. No matter what changes we make, the drama of birth and life will remain a matter of choice, of mind. We are not animals, after all. The environment may suggest. It may provoke. But in the end, our descendants will be thinking beings.

It is by their thoughts and sentiments and strong wills that their way of life will be decided.

A
round midnight, the star-filled patterns of the winter sky rose over the high mountains crowning the eastern horizon, casting glittering reflections across glaciers tucked in alpine dales. Summertime’s celestial rush was over, tapering to a planetary glide as Stratos climbed its elliptic track toward the longest season. More than two Earth years would pass before the great plummet into spring. Till then, the Pelican of Euphrosyne, Epona, and the Dancing Dolphin would be regular occupants of night’s high throne.

Maia often used to wonder what it might be like to live on Florentina, or even Old Earth. Very strange, she imagined, and not just due to the primitive breeding patterns still followed there. She had read that on most habitable worlds, seasons were due to axial tilt, rather than orbital position. And winter was a time of
bad
weather.

Here, under the thick atmosphere of Stratos, summer’s necessary but brief disruptions passed quickly and were soon forgotten, while winter brought a long time of placid predictability. Rainclouds arrived in periodic, sweeping fronts, showering their moist loads across the continents, then replenishing over humid seas. For protracted
intervals between storms, the sun nourished gently bowing, light-hungry crops, outshining its companion, Wengel Star, so overpoweringly that the white dwarf was no more than a faint glitter in the daytime sky, too dim to provoke even a sailor on leave. At night, no aurorae blared, only sprinkled constellations, twinkling like mad above the restless jet stream.

It will be Autumn-End Day soon
, Maia thought, watching the constellation Thalia climb slowly toward zenith. They’ll be putting up decorations in Port Sanger. All the pleasure houses will close till midwinter, and men from the sanctuaries will stroll through wide-open gates, making paper airplanes of their old visitor passes. They’ll get sweets and cider, and children will ride their shoulders, pulling their beards, making them laugh.

Although rutting time had been effectively over before she and Leie departed on their ill-starred voyage, Autumn-End Day would mark the true start of winter’s extended time of peace, lasting for nearly half of the long, uneven track of seasons, during which males were as harmless as lugars and the biggest problem was getting them to look up from their books, or whittling, or game boards. Half of the City Watch would disband till springtime. What need for patrols, with the streets as safe as houses?

Maia had known she would probably never again celebrate Autumn-End in Port Sanger. But she hadn’t figured on spending a festival day in prison. Would she still be here at Farsun Time, as well? Somehow, she doubted her jailers would throw a gala then, either—offering hot punch and luck tokens to passersby. (
What
passersby?) Nor were any of the Guel guards likely to dress up as the Frost Lady, carrying her magic ladder, waving a wand of plenty, and giving treats and noisemakers to good little girls.

No, dammit! By Farsun Day, I’m going to be far away from here!
She quashed a wave of homesickness.

Maia shook away distracting thoughts and lifted her miniature sextant, concentrating on the immediate problem. She could not be sure of the exact time, let alone the date. Without an accurate clock, it was impossible to fix her east-west position accurately, even if the instrument was in perfect working order. Longitude was going to be fuzzy.

But you don’t need the exact time to figure
latitude.
You just have to know the sky.

I wish I had my book of ephemerides
, she thought, wondering if the stationmistress at Holly Lock had thrown out her duffel yet, along with her meager possessions. The slim volume carried the positions of major sighting stars to all the accuracy she’d ever need. Without it, memory would have to do.

Maia rested her elbows on the sill of the narrow opening in the wall, and took another reference on Taranis, a compact stellar cluster where it was said the Enemy long ago laid waste to two planets before coming here to meet defeat on Stratos. Twisting a dial moved the image in her cross-hairs till it kissed the south horizon’s prairie-sharp edge in the sextant’s tiny mirror. She lowered the device in order to peer at the dial, and jotted another figure in her notebook.

At least there had been a ready solution to the problem of writing implements. Near the base of her makeshift observing pyramid, awkwardly covered by piled-up rugs, lay the broken ruin of a storage box. Maia had struggled for over an hour, soon after sunset, to heave the crate all the way up here by the window. Then, just half a second after she pushed it off, the box lost all that altitude, hitting the stone floor edge-on.

The crash made a horrible racket, bringing guards to the door with muttered inquiries. But she had managed to appease the Guels, shouting that she’d only fallen while
exercising. “I’m all right, though. Thank you for being concerned!”

After a long pause, the Guels finally went away, grumbling. Maia dared not count on their incuriosity surviving a repetition. Fortunately, the crash had loosened several slats, spilling paper and writing utensils onto the floor. By then, the stars were out. For the next hour, she applied her rusty navigation skills to fixing the location of this high-plains prison.

Maia lifted the notebook into Durga’s wan light and added up the final result.
Longitude is close to the one in the message
, she thought.
And latitude’s nearly identical!

At first, contemplating the communiqué that had appeared so astonishingly on the Game of Life board, she concluded it must be a bad joke. Someone at the factory must have inserted the plea—the way, as kids, she and Leie used to carefully pry open petu nuts and replace the meat with slips of paper saying, “Help! Squirrels are holding us in a petu tree!”

Now she knew better. The message had not been coded before shipment. Whoever logged the memorandum had done so in a location very close to here. Within tens of kilometers. Yet she had seen no sign of any towns or habitations near this stone monolith. It was doubtful the countryside could support any.

In effect, that could only mean the writer dwelt in this same tower, perhaps just meters away. Maia felt a bit guilty that another person’s predicament could bring such joy.
I’m not happy you’re in jail
, she thought of her fellow prisoner.
But Lysos! It’s good not to be alone anymore!

They must be in similar situations—locked in storage chambers not designed as jail cells, but effective nonetheless. Yet, the other prisoner had proved resourceful. Finding herself in a storeroom filled with male-oriented recreation devices, she had managed to see in them a way to send the equivalent of messages in bottles.