Glory Season (25 page)

Maia exercised for a while, washed up, tried again futilely to pry open some of the crates, and made a decision not to wait for her keepers to warm toward her. It was time to take initiative.

“From now on,” she told one of them over lunch. “Your name shall be Grim. And
yours
,” she said, pointing at the other, “will be
Blim.
”

They looked at her with expressions of surprise and dismay that pleased her no end. “Of course, I may choose better names for you, if you’re good.”

They were grumbling unhappily when they took the dishes away. Later, over dinner, she switched names on them, confusing them further still.
Why not?
Maia pondered. It was only fair to share the discomfort.

Sunset, day number two
, she thought, using a nail she found to scrape a second mark on the inside of the wooden door. The sun’s spot on the wall climbed higher, dimmed, and went out. Shadows of crates and stacked bundles grew progressively more eerie and intimidating as dusk fell. Last night, she had been too stupefied to notice, but with the arrival of full darkness, the shapes around her seemed to take on frightening gremlin forms. Outlines of unsympathetic monsters.

Don’t be a baby.
Maia chided herself for reacting like a bedwetting two-year-old. With a pounding heart, she forced herself to stand and approach the most fearsome of the silhouettes, the teetering pyramid of boxes and carpets she herself had stacked below the little window.
See?
she thought, touching the scratchy side of a crate.
You can’t let this drive you crazy.

Nervously, she fondled her sole possession, the little sextant. A glitter of stars could be seen through the stone opening, tempting her. But to climb up there in the dark …?

Maia screwed up her courage.
Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you.
That was how Naroin, her old bosun, would have put it. She had to do this.

Moving carefully from foothold to handhold, Maia climbed the artificial hill, sometimes stopping to hold on tightly as a creak or abrupt teetering set her pulse racing. The ascent took several times as long as it would have in daylight, but Maia persevered until at last she was able to peer through the slit opening. A breeze chilled her face, bringing scents of wild grass and rain. Between patches of glowering cloud, Maia could just make out the familiar
contours of the constellation Sappho glittering above the dark prairie.

Okay. We go back down now?
her body seemed to ask.

Trembling, Maia forced herself to stay long enough to take a sighting, although the horizon was vague and she could not read the dial of the sextant.
I’ll do better tomorrow night
, she promised herself. Gratefully, but with a sense of having won a victory over her fears, she carefully clambered down again.

As she lay upon her makeshift bed, exhausted but stronger in spirit, the clicking sound resumed. The one from last night, which she had associated with a dripping faucet. It was real, apparently, not a figment of her dreams. Another irritant among many.

Maia shrugged aside the distant noise and the looming figures her imagination manufactured out of shadows.
Oh, shut up
, she told them all, and rolled over to go to sleep.

“I’m going to lose my mind without something to do!” she shouted at her jailers the next morning. When they blinked at her in confusion, she demanded. “Haven’t they got books here? Anything to
read
?”

The jailers stared, as if uncertain what she was talking about.
They’re probably illiterate
, she realized.
Besides, even if the sanctuary architects designed in a library, shelves and all, it still would have been up to the men themselves to bring books and disks and tapes.

So she was surprised when Blim (or was it Grim?) returned after a while and laid four dog-eared paper-paged books on the table. In the stocky woman’s eyes Maia saw a flicker of entreaty.
Don’t be hard on us, and we won’t be hard on you.
Maia picked up the volumes, probably abandoned here by the construction workers. She nodded thanks and
played no name games with her warders when they carried off her tray.

Rationing herself to a book a day, she decided to start with the one bearing the most lurid cover. It depicted a young woman, armed with bow and arrows, leading a band of compatriots and a few protected men through the vine-encrusted ruins of a demolished city. Maia recognized the genre—var-trash—printed on cheap stock to sell for the delectation of poor summerlings like herself. A fair number of nonclone women loved reading fantasies about civilization’s collapse, when all of society’s well-ordered niches would be overturned and a young woman might win her way to founder status by quick thinking and simple heroics alone.

In this book, the premise was a sudden, unexplained shift in the planet’s orbit. Not only did this cause melting of the great ice sheets of Stratos, toppling all the stolid clans and opening the way for newer, hardier types, but in a stroke the inconvenient behavior patterns of men were solved, since now, by a miracle of the author’s pen, the aurorae appeared in winter!

It really was trash, but wonderfully diverting trash. By the end of the story, the young protagonist and her friends had everything nicely settled. Each of them seemed destined to have lots of lovely, look-alike daughters, and live happily ever after.
Thalla and Kiel would love this
, Maia thought when she put the novel aside. It must have been left by some var on the construction crew. No winter-born clanling would enjoy the scenario, even in fantasy.

She scraped another mark on the door. That evening Maia climbed the pyramid with more confidence. Through the narrow window, she watched the steady west wind push sluggish, red-tinted clouds toward distant mountains, where steeply angled sunlight also caught a double row of tiny luminescent globes—a small swarm of migrating zoor-floaters, she realized. Their airy sense of freedom
made her heart ache, but she watched until dusk grew too dim to see the colorful living zep’lins any longer.

By then the constellations had come out. Her hand was steady as she peered closely through her portable sextant, noting when specific stars touched the western horizon. Recalling the date, this gave her a fairly good way to keep track of time without a clock—as if there were any need.
Maybe next I can figure a latitude
, she thought. That, at least, would partly pin down where her prison lay.

Knowing the time told her one thing. The clicking resumed that night, almost exactly at midnight. It went on for about half an hour, then stopped. For some time afterward, Maia lay in the darkness with her eyes open, wondering.

“What do you think, Leie?” she whispered, asking her sister.

She imagined Leie’s response. “
Oh, Maia. You see patterns in every smuggy thing. Go to sleep.
”

Good advice. Soon she was dreaming of aurorae flickering like gauzy curtains above the white glaciers of home. Meteors fell, pelting the ice to a staccato rhythm, which transformed into the cadence of a gently falling rain.

The second book was a Perkinite tract, which showed that the work crew must have been mixed—and rather tense.

The line of reasoning was too convoluted for Maia to follow closely, but the book’s author seemed to be saying that male humans were better defined as domestic animals, useful, but dangerous to let run around loose. The only mistake made long ago, on the Perkinites’ beloved, lamented Herlandia, had been not going far enough.

This was heresy, of course, defying several of the Great Promises sworn by Lysos and the Founders, when they made men small in number, but preserved their rights as citizens and human beings. In theory, any man might aspire to heights of individual power and status, equal to even a senior mother of a high clan. Maia knew of no examples, but it was supposed to be possible.

The writer of this tract wanted no shared citizenship with lower life-forms.

Another Great Promise had ordained that heretics must be suffered to speak, lest rigor grasp women’s minds.
Even loony stuff like this?
Maia wondered. To try understanding another point of view, Maia kept reading. But when she came to a part that proposed breeding males to be docilely milked on special farms, like contented cows, she reached her limit. Maia threw the book across the room and went into a flurry of exercise, doing pushups
and situps until pounding sounds of pulse and breath drowned out all remnants of the author’s hateful voice.

Dinner came and went. Darkness fell. This time, she tried to be ready just before midnight, lying on her back with eyes closed. When the clicking started, she listened carefully for the first ten seconds, and tried to note if there was a pattern. It followed a rhythm, all right, made of repeated snapping sounds interspersed with pauses one, two, or more beats in duration.

click click, beat, click, beat, beat, click click click
 …

Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. It sounded like no code she had ever heard. There were no obvious spaces that might go between words, for example. Was there any reason for the clicking to happen at the same time each night?

It might just be a faulty timepiece in one of the great halls, or something equally mundane.
I wonder how the sound carries through the walls.

Sleep came without any resolution. She dreamed of brasswork clocks, ticking with the smooth, just rhythms of natural law.

The third book was even riper than the prior two—a romance about life in the old Homino-Stellar Phylum, before Lysos and the Founders set forth across the galaxy to forge a new destiny. Such accounts, dealing with an archaic, obsolete way of life, ought to be fascinating and instructive. But Maia had read widely in the genre as a four-year-old, and been disappointed.

Like so many others, this tale was set on Florentina, the only Phylum world familiar to most schoolgirls, since that was where the Founders’ expedition began. The story even featured a cameo appearance by Perseph, a chief aide to Lysos. But for the most part, the exodus was seen in glimpses, being planned offstage. Meanwhile, the poor heroine, a sort-of everywoman of Florentina, suffered the trials of living in a patriarchal society, where men were so
numerous and primitive that life could only have been a kind of hell.

Maia could only take it half a chapter at a time. The writing was execrable, but that wasn’t what made her stomach queasy. The incessant violence repulsed her.
What kind of masochist reads this kind of stuff?
she wondered.

If the point was to show how different another society could be, the book was successful, in a gut-churning way. On Stratos, it was virtually unheard-of for a man to lift his hand against a woman. The Founders had laid an aversion at the chromosome level, which was reinforced from one generation to the next. Summer matings were a man’s only chance to pass on his genes, and clan mothers had long
memories when the time came to send out invitations during aurora season.

On Florentina, though, there had been a different arrangement.
Marriage.
One man. One woman. Stuck together forever. Apparently, women even
preferred
quasi-slavery to a single life, because vast numbers of other men patrolled outside, in ceaseless rut, always eager to pounce. The brutal consequences depicted on page after page of the historical novel left Maia nauseated by the time she finished.

Of course she had no way of knowing how accurate the depiction was, of Old Order life on a Phylum world. Maia suspected just a little authorial exaggeration. There might have been specific cases like the one described, but if things were this bad for all women, all the time, they surely would have poisoned their husbands and sons long before gene-molding came along with alternate solutions.

Still, it was enough to give a girl religion again.
Bless the wisdom of Lysos
, Maia thought, drawing a circle over her breast.

Again that evening she exercised hard, running in place, doing pushups and step workouts, on and off crates. At dusk, she went back to the window and found that she could just manage to squeeze into the long, narrow passage. Thoughts of escape blossomed, until she reached the far end where it was possible to look straight down at the valley floor … a hundred meters below.