Glory Season (45 page)

It’s actually a simple shape
, she recalled thinking numbly. Boys probably memorize it before they’re four.

As if that weren’t enough, the invader pattern began displacing the guardian’s undamaged core. Beat by beat, the pseudobeast she and Renna had built was pushed backward, rending and flailing helplessly, smashing through all their fences. Helplessly, they watched the destructive retreat grind all the way to the near left corner, where their vulnerable oasis was promptly and decisively crushed. From that moment on, life quickly dissipated
from their half of the game board. Laughter and amused booing had sent Maia fleeing in shame to her cabin.

It was only a game
, she tried convincing herself the next morning, as she swept.
At least, that’s what women think, and they’re the ones who count.

Still, memory of the humiliation lingered unpleasantly as glory frost evaporated under the rising sun. Those thin patches she and the other young var had missed soon sublimed. With visible reluctance, Captain Poulandres went to the railing and rang a small bell.

At once, the deck thronged with women passengers and crew, inhaling the last aromas and looking about with liveliness in their eyes. Maia saw one broadly built var come up behind a middle-aged sailor and pinch him, causing the man to jump with a low yelp. The husky victim whirled around, wearing a harassed expression. He responded after an instant with a wary laugh, shaking a finger in admonishment, and quickly retreated to the nearest mast. An unusual number of sailors seemed to have found duties to perform aloft, this morning.

It wasn’t a universal reaction. The assistant cook seemed pleased by the attentions of women gathered round the porridge pot. And why not? Aroused fems were seldom dangerous, and it was doubtful the poor fellow got much notice during summertime. He would likely store a memory of brief flirtation to carry him through lonely months in sanctuary.

Two nearby vars, a short blonde and a slender redhead, were giggling and pointing. Maia turned to see what had them going.

Renna
, she thought with a sigh. The Visitor had approached one last, half-full bucket she had neglected to dump overboard. He bent to scoop a handful of glory frost, bringing it up to sniff, delicately, curiously. Renna looked perplexed for a moment, then his head jerked back
and his eyes widened. Carefully, he dusted off his hands and thrust them into his pockets.

The two rads laughed. Maia didn’t like the way they were looking at him.

“I guess if one were desperate enough …” one said to the other.

“Oh, I don’t know,” came the reply. “I think he’s kind of exotic-looking. Maybe, after we reach Ursulaborg.”

“You got hopes! The committee’s already picked those who’ll get first crack. You’ll wait your turn, and chew a kilo of ovop if you’re lucky.”

“Yuck,” the second one grimaced. Yet a covetous gleam did not leave her eye as she watched the man from space depart for the quarterdeck.

Maia’s thoughts whirled. Apparently, the rads had designs to keep Renna busy while they sheltered him and dickered with the Reigning Council. Her first reaction was outrage. How dare they assume he’d go along, just like that?

Then she bit back her initial wrath and tried hard to see it calmly.
I guess he’s in their debt
, Maia admitted reluctantly. It would be churlish to refuse his rescuers at least an effort, even in the dead of winter. The Radical organization had no doubt promised members of the rescue party rewards if they succeeded—perhaps sponsorship of a winter sparking, with an apartment and trust fund to see a first cloneling child through primary schooling.
The leaders, Kiel and Thalla, will be first
, Maia realized. Given her education and talents, Kiel would then be in a good position to become a founding mother of a growing clan.

So politics is just part of it
, Maia thought, considering the motives of her former cottage-mates.
None of my damn business
, she told herself, knowing that she cared intensely, anyway. The first rad glanced at Maia standing nearby, listening. “Of course, there’s an element of choice on
his
part, too,” she said. “Equal rights, y’know. And there’s no
accounting for alien tastes.…” The var turned to Maia, and winked.

Maia flushed and strode away. Leaning on the starboard rail, she stared across foam-flecked waves, unable to contain her roiling thoughts. The busybody had voiced a question Maia herself hadn’t admitted:
I wonder what Renna likes in women?
Shaking her head vigorously, she made a resolute effort to divert her thoughts. Troublesome maunderings like these were at best impractical, and she had vowed to be a practical person.

Think. Soon they’ll take Renna far away and you’ll be alone in a big city. When he’s long gone, you’ll be left to live off what you know
.

What assets do you have? What skills can you sell?
She tried to concentrate—to bring forth a catalog of resources—but found herself facing only disconcerting blankness.

The blankness was not neutral. Born in a tense moment of angst, it spread outward from her dark thoughts and seemed to color her view of her surroundings, saturating the seascape, washing it like a canvas painted from a savage palette, in primitive and brutal shades. The air felt charged, like before a lightning storm, and a sense of fell expectation set her heart pounding.

Maia tried closing her eyes to escape the distressing epiphany, but extracted impressions only pursued her. Squeezing her eyelids shut caused more than familiar, squidgy sensations. A coruscation of light and dark speckles flickered and whirled, changing too fast to be tracked. She had known the phenomenon all her life, but now it both frightened and fascinated her. Combining in overlapping waves, the speckles seemed to offer a fey kind of meaning, drawing her away from centered vision toward something both beautiful and terrible.

Breath escaped her lungs in a sigh. Maia found the will to rub her eyes and reopen them. Purple blotches throbbed concentrically before fading away, along with
that eerie, unwelcome sense of formless form. Yet, for a stretch of time there lay within Maia a vague but lingering surety. Looking outward, she no longer saw, but continued imagining a vista of everchanging patterns, stretching in infinite recursion across the cloud-flecked sky. Momentarily, the heavens seemed made of ephemeral, quickly altering, emblematic forms, overlapping and merging to weave the illusion of solidity she had been taught to call reality.

Relief mixed with awed regret as the instant passed. It could only have lasted moments. The atmosphere resumed its character of heavy, moist air. The wood rail beneath her hands felt firm.

Now I know I’m going crazy
, Maia thought sardonically. As if she didn’t have troubles enough already.

Breakfast was called. Tentatively, as if the deck might shift beneath her feet, Maia went to take her turn in line. She watched the cook serve two portions—one for Renna and a double scooping for herself, by order of the ship’s doctor. She turned, looking for the Visitor, and found him deep in conversation with the captain, apparently oblivious to the fool he had made of himself last night. She approached from behind, and caught his attention just long enough to make sure he noticed his plate on the chart table, near his elbow. Renna smiled, and made as if to speak to her, but Maia pretended not to notice and moved away. She carried her own bowl of hot, pulpy wheatmeal forward, all the way to the bowsprit, where the ship’s cutting rise and fall met alternating bursts of salty spray. That made the place uncomfortable for standing, but ideal for being left alone, tucked under the protective shelter of the forward cowling.

The porridge nourished without pretense at good taste. It didn’t matter. She had mastered her thoughts now, and was able to contemplate what she might do when the ship reached port.

Ursulaborg—pearl of the Méchant Coast. Some ancient clans there are so big and powerful, they’ve got pyramids of lesser clans underneath them, who have client families of their own, and so on. Clones serving clones of the same women who first employed their ancestors, hundreds of years ago, with everybody knowing her place from the day she’s born, and all potential personality conflicts worked out ages ago.

Maia remembered having seen a cinematic video—a comedy—when she and Leie were three. Coincidentally, the film was set in the magnificent Ursulaborg palace of one such grand multiclan. The plot involved an evil outsider’s scheme to sow discord among families who had been getting along for generations. At first, the stratagem seemed to work. Suspicions and quarrels broke out, feeding on each other as women leaped to outrageously wrong conclusions. Communication shattered and the tide of misunderstandings, both incited and humorously accidental, seemed fated to cause an irreparable rift. Then, at a climactic moment, the high-strung momentum dissolved in an upswell of revelation, then reconciliation, and finally laughter.

“We were made to be partners,”
said one wise old matriarch, at the moral denouement.
“If we met as vars, as our first mothers had, we would become fast friends. Yet we know each other better than vars ever could. Is it possible we Blaine sisters could live without you Chens? Or you without us? Blaines, Chens, Hanleys, and Wedjets … ours is a greater family, immortal, as if molded by Lysos herself.”

It had been a warm, mushy ending, leaving Maia feeling terribly glad to have Leie in her life … even if her sister had muttered derisively, at the movie’s end, about its manic illogic and lack of character development.

Leie would have loved to see Ursulaborg
.

There was no land in sight. Nevertheless, she looked past the bowsprit to the west, blinking against spray that hid a salty bitterness of tears.

Renna found her there. The dark-eyed man called down from the foremast. “Ah, Maia, there you are!”

She hurriedly wiped her eyes and turned to watch him clamber into the sheltered area. “How are you doing?” he asked cheerfully. Dropping to sit across from her, he leaned forward to squeeze her hand.

“I’ve been unhappier,” she answered with a shrug, somewhat befuddled by his warmth. It pierced the protective distance she had been working to build between them. Maia made sure not to yank her hand back, but withdrew it slowly. He appeared not to notice.

“Isn’t it a fine day?” Renna inhaled, taking in the broad expanse of sunny and cloud-shaded patches of sea, stretching to every horizon. “I was up at dawn, and for a little while I thought I saw a swarm of Great Pontoos, off to the south among the clouds. Someone said they were just common zoor-floaters.… I’ve seen lots of those. But these looked so beautiful, so graceful and majestic, that I figured—”

“Pontoos are very rare now.”

“So I gather.” He sighed. “You know, this planet would seem perfect for flying. I’ve seen birds and gasbag creatures of so many types. But why so few aircraft? I know spaceflight might disrupt your stable pastoralism, but what harm would it do to have more zep’lins and wingplanes? Would it hurt to give people a chance to move around more freely?”

Maia wondered how a man could be so talkative, so early in the day?
He would’ve gotten along better with Leie
.

“They say long ago there were a lot more zep’lins,” she answered.

“They also say
men
used to fly them, like seaships, but then were banished from the sky. Do you know why?”

Maia shook her head. “Why don’t you ask them?”

“I tried.” Renna grimaced, looking across the ocean. “Seems to be a touchy subject. Maybe I’ll look it up when I
get back to the Library, in Caria.” He turned back to her. “Listen, I think I’ve figured something out. Could you tell me if I’m wrong?”

Maia sighed. Renna seemed determined to wear down her carefully tailored apathy with sheer, overpowering enthusiasm. “Okay,” she said warily.

“Great! First, let’s verify the basics.” He held up one finger. “Summertime matings result in normal, genetically diverse variants, or vars. Is that word derogatory, by the way? I’ve heard it used insultingly, in Caria.”

“I’m a var,” Maia said tonelessly. “No point being insulted by a fact.”

“Mm. I guess you’d say I’m a var, too.”

Of course. All boys are vars. Only the name doesn’t cling to them like a parasite.
But she knew Renna meant well, even when dredging clumsily through matters that hurt.

“All right, then. During autumn, winter, and spring, Stratoin women have parthenogenetic clones. In fact, they often can’t conceive in summer till they’ve already had a winter child.”

“You’re doing fine so far.”

“Good. Now, even cloning requires the involvement of men, as
sparklers
, since sperm induces placental—”

“That’s
sparkers
,” Maia corrected in a low voice.

“Yeah, right. Okay, here’s the part I’ve been having trouble with.” Renna paused. “It’s about how Lysos meddled with sexual attraction. You see, on most hominid worlds, sex is an eternal distraction. People dwell on it from puberty to senility, spend vast measures of time and money, and sometimes act incredibly disagreeably, all because of a gene-driven, built-in obsession.”

“You make it sound awful.”

“Mm. It has compensations. But, arrangements on Stratos seem intended to cut down the amount of energy centered on sex. All in keeping with good Herlandist ideology.”

“Go on,” she said, growing interested despite herself.
Do people on other planets really think about sex more than I do? How do they get anything done?

Renna continued. “Stratoin men are stimulated by visual cues in the summer sky, when women are
least
aroused. Today, on the other hand, I got to witness this peculiar ice-frost you get in winter—”

“Glory.”

“Yeah. A natural product of some pretty amazing stratospheric processing that I plan looking into. And it stimulates
women
?”

“So I’m told.” Maia felt warm. “According to legend, Lysos took the Old Craziness out of men and women, and looked around for someplace to put it. Up in the sky seemed safe enough. But one summer Wengel Star came along. He stole some of the madness and made a flag to wave and shine and put the old rut back into men, through their eyes.”