Glory Season (4 page)

Rounding a corner, the twins nearly plowed into a tall Sheldon, hurrying downhill from the upper-class neighborhood. Her guard uniform was damp, open at the collar. “Excuse me,” the dark-skinned officer muttered, dodging by the two sisters. A few paces onward, however, she suddenly stopped, whirling to peer at them.

“
There
you are. I almost didn’t recognize you!”

“Bright mornin’, Cap’n Jounine.” Leie greeted with a mocking half-salute. “You were looking for us?”

Jounine’s keen Sheldon features were softened by years of town life. The captain wiped her brow with a satin kerchief. “I was late catching you at Lamatia clanhold. Do you know you missed your leave-taking ceremony? Of course you know. Was that on purpose?”

Maia and Leie shared brief smiles. No slipping anything by Captain Jounine.

“Never mind.” The Sheldon waved a hand. “I just wanted to ask if you’d reconsidered—”

“Signing up for the Guard?” Leie interrupted. “You’ve got to be—”

“I’m sure we’re flattered by the offer, Captain,” Maia cut in. “But we have tickets—”

“You’ll not find anything out there”—Jounine waved toward the sea—“that’s more secure and steady—”

“And boring …” Leie muttered.

“—than a contract with the city of your birth. It’s a smart move, I tell you!”

Maia knew the arguments. Steady meals and a bed, plus slow advancement in hopes of saving enough for one child. A winter child—on a soldier’s salary? Mother Claire’s derision about “founding a microclan of one” seemed apropos. Some
smart moves
were little more than nicely padded traps.

“A myriad thanks for the offer,” Leie said, with wasted sarcasm. “If we’re ever desperate enough to come back to this frigid—”

“Yes, thanks,” Maia interrupted, taking her sister’s arm. “And Lysos keep you, Captain.”

“Well … at least stay away from the Pallas Isles, you two! There are reports of reavers …”

As soon as they turned a corner, Maia and Leie dropped their duffels and broke out laughing. Sheldons were an impressive clan in most ways, but they took things
so
seriously! Maia felt sure she would miss them.

“It’s odd, though,” she said after a minute, when they resumed walking. “Jounine really did look more anxious than usual.”

“Hmph. Not our problem if she can’t meet recruitment quotas. Let her buy lugars.”

“You know lugars can’t fight people.”

“Then hire summer stock down at the docks. Plenty of riffraff vars always hanging around. Dumb idea expanding
the Guard anyway. Bunch of parasites, just like priestesses.”

“Mm,” Maia commented. “I guess.” But the look in the soldier’s eye had been like that of the Mizora sweets-merchant. There had been disappointment. A touch of bewilderment.

And more than a little fear.

A month ago wardens had stood watch at the getta gate, separating Port Sanger proper from the harbor.

Maia recalled how the care-mothers used to take Lamatia’s crèche kids from the high precincts down steep, cobbled streets to ceremonies at the civic temple, passing near the getta gate along the way. Early one summer, she had bolted from the tidy queue of varlings, running toward the high barrier, hoping to glimpse the great freighters in drydock. Her brief dash had ended with a sound spanking. Afterward, between sobs, she distantly heard one matron explain that the wharves weren’t safe for kids that time of year. There were “rutting men” down there.

Later, when the aurorae were replaced in northern skies by autumn’s placid constellations, those same gates were flung back for children to scamper through at will, running along the docks where bearded males unloaded mysterious cargoes, or played spellbinding games with clockwork disks. Maia recalled wondering at the time—were
these
men different from the “rutting” kind? It must be so. Always ready with a smile or story, these seemed as gentle and harmless as the furry lugars they somewhat resembled.

“
Harmless as a man, when stars glitter clear.
” So went a nursery rhyme, which finished,

But wary be you, woman, when Wengel Star is near.

Traversing the gate for the last time, Maia and Leie
passed through a variegated throng. Unlike the uphill precincts, here males made up a substantial minority, contributing a rich mix of scents to the air, from the aromas of spice and exotic cargoes to their own piquant musk. It was the ideal and provocative locale for a Perkinite agitator to have set up shop, addressing the crowd from an upturned shipping crate as two clone-mates pushed handbills at passersby. Maia did not recognize the face type, so the trio of gaunt-cheeked women had to be missionaries, recently arrived.

“Sisters!” the speaker cried out. “You of lesser clans and houses! Together you outnumber the combined might of the Seventeen who control Port Sanger. If you join forces. If you join with
us
, you could break the lock great houses have on the town assembly, and yes, on the region, and even in Caria City itself! Together we can smash the conspiracy of silence and force a long-overdue revelation of the truth—”

“
What
truth?” demanded an onlooker.

The Perkinite glanced to where a young sailor lounged against the fence with several of his colleagues, amused by the discomfiture his question provoked. True to her ideology, the agitator tried to ignore a mere male. So, for fun, Leie chimed in. “Yeah! What truth is that, Perkie?”

Several onlookers laughed at Leie’s jibe, and Maia could not hide a smile. Perkinites took themselves and their cause so seriously, and hated the diminutive of their name. The speaker glared at Leie, but then caught sight of Maia standing by her side. To the twins’ delight, she instantly drew the wrong conclusion and held out her hands to them earnestly, imploringly.

“The truth that small clans like yours and mine are routinely shoved aside, not just here but everywhere, especially in Caria City, where the great houses are even now
selling our very planet to the Outsiders and their masculinist Phylum …”

Maia’s ears perked at mention of the alien ship. Alas, it soon grew clear that the speaker wasn’t offering news, only a tirade. The harangue quickly sank into platitudes and clichés Maia and her sister had heard countless times over the years. About the flood of cheap var labor ruining so many smaller clans. About laxity enforcing the Codes of Lysos and the regulation of “dangerous males.” Such hackneyed accusations joined this year’s fashionable paranoid theme—playing to popular unease that the space visitors might be precursors to an invasion worse even than the long-ago horror of the Enemy.

There had been brief pleasure in being mistaken for a “clan,” just because Maia and Leie looked alike, but that quickly faded. Autumn meant elections were coming, and fringe groups kept trying to chivvy a minority seat or two in the face of
en masse
bloc-voting by holds like Lamatia. Perkinism appealed to small matriarchies who felt obstructed by established lines. The movement got little support from vars, who had no power and even less inclination to vote.

As for men, they had no illusions should Perkinism take hold in a big way on Stratos. If that ever seemed close to happening again, Maia might witness something unique in her lifetime, the sight of
males
lining up at polling booths, exercising a right enshrined in law, but practiced about as often as glory frost fell in summer.

Though Leie was still chuckling over the Perkinites’ political tract, Maia nudged her sister. “Come on. There are better things to do with our last morning in town.”

The rising sun had sublimed away a shore-hugging fog by the time the twins reached the harbor proper. Midmorning heat had also carried off most of the gaudy zoor-floaters
that Maia had glimpsed earlier. A few of the luminous creatures were still visible as bright, ovoid flowers, or garish gasbags, drifting in a ragged chain across the eastern sky.

One laggard remained over the docks, resembling a filmy, bloated jellyfish with dangling, iridescent feelers a mere twenty meters long. A baby, then. It clutched the main mast of a sleek freighter, caressing the cloth-draped yards, groping for treats laid on the upper spars by nimble sailors. The agile seamen laughed, dodging the waving, sticky suckers, then dashed in to stroke the knotty backs of the beast’s tentacles, or tie on bright ribbons or paper notes. Once a year or so, someone actually recovered a ragged message that had been carried in such a fashion, all the way across the Mother Ocean.

There were also stories of young cabin boys who actually tried hitching rides upon a zoor, floating off to Lysos-knew-where, perhaps inspired by legends of days long ago, when zep’lins and airplanes swarmed the sky, and men were allowed to fly.

As if proving that it was a day of fate and synchrony, Leie nudged Maia and pointed in the opposite direction, southwest, beyond the golden dome of the city temple. Maia blinked at a silvery shape that glinted briefly as it settled groundward, and recognized the weekly dirigible, delivering mail and packages too dear to entrust to sea transport, along with rare passengers whose clans had to be nearly as rich as the planet goddess in order to afford the fare. Both Maia and Leie sighed, for once sharing exactly the same thought. It would take a miracle for either of them ever to journey like that, amid the clouds. Perhaps their clone descendants might, if luck’s fickle winds blew that way. The thought offered some slight consolation.

Perhaps it also explained why boys sometimes gave up everything just to ride a zoor. Males, by their very natures, could not bear clones. They could not copy themselves.
At best, they achieved the lesser immortality of fatherhood. Whatever they most desired had to be accomplished in one lifetime, or not at all.

The twins resumed their stroll. Down here near the wharves, where fishing boats gave off a humid, pungent miasma, they began seeing a lot more summer folk like themselves. Women of diverse shapes, colors, sizes, often bearing a family resemblance to some well-known clan—a Sheldon’s hair or a Wylee’s distinctive jaw—sharing half or a quarter of their genes with a renowned mother-line, just as the twins carried in their faces much that was Lamai.

Alas, half resemblance counted for little. Dressed in monocolor kilts or leather breeches, each summer person went about life as a solitary unit, unique in all the world. Most held their heads high despite that. Summer folk worked the piers, scraped the drydocked sailing ships, and performed most of the grunt labor supporting seaborne trade, often with a cheerfulness that was inspirational to behold.

Before Lysos, on Phylum worlds, vars like us were normal and clones rare. Everyone had a father … sometimes one you even grew up knowing.

Maia used to ponder images of a teeming planet, filled with wild, unpredictable variety. The Lamai mothers called it “an unwholesome fixation,” yet such thoughts came more frequently since news of the Outsider Ship began filtering down, through rumors and then terse, censored reports on the tele.

Do people still live in old-fashioned chaos, on other worlds?
She wondered. As if life would ever offer any opportunity to find out.

With storm season over and the getta fence wide open, the harbor was a lively, colorful precinct. A season’s pent-up commerce was getting under way. People bustled among the loading docks and slate-roofed warehouses, the chapels and recurtained Houses of Ease. And ship chandleries—a
favorite haunt while the twins were growing up, crammed with every tool or oddment a crew might need at sea. From an early age, Maia and her sister had been drawn by the bright brasswork and smell of polishing oil, browsing for hours to the exasperation of the shopkeepers. For her part, Leie had been fascinated by mechanical devices, while Maia focused on charts and sextants and slender telescopes with their clicking, finely beveled housings. And timepieces, some so old they carried an outer ring dividing the Stratoin calendar into a little more than three “Standard Earth Years.” Not even hazing by fiver boys—itinerant midshipmen who often knew less about shooting a latitude than spitting into the wind—ever kept the twins away for long.

Peering into the biggest chandlery, Maia caught the eye of the manager, a bluff-faced Felic. The clone noticed Maia’s haircut and duffel, and her habitual grimace slowly lightened into a smile. She made a brief hand gesture wishing Maia good luck and safe passage.

And good riddance, I’ll bet.
Recalling what nuisances she and her sister had been, Maia returned an exaggerated bow, which the shopkeeper dismissed with laughter and a wave.

Maia turned around to find Leie over by a nearby pier, conversing with a dockworker whose high cheekbones were reminiscent of Western Continent. “Naw, naw,” the woman said as Maia approached, not pausing in her rapid knotting of the sail she was mending. “So far ain’t heard nary judgment by the Council in Caria. Nary t’all.”

“Judgment about what?” Maia asked.

“The Outsiders,” Leie explained. “Those Perkie missionaries got me wondering if there’s been news. This var works on a boat with full access.” Leie pointed toward a nearby fishing craft, sporting a steerable antenna. It wasn’t farfetched that someone spinning dials with a rig like that might pick up a tidbit or two.

“As if th’ owners invite
me
to tea an’ tele!” The sailmaker spat through a gap in her teeth toward the scummy water glistening with floating fish scales.

“But have you overheard anything? Say, on an unofficial channel? Do they still claim only
one
Outsider has landed?”

Maia sighed. Caria City was remote and its savants only broadcast sparse accounts. Worse, the Lamai mothers often forbade summer kids to watch tele at all, lest their volatile minds find programs “disturbing.” Naturally, this only piqued the twins’ curiosity. But Leie was taking inquisitiveness too far, grilling simple laborers. Apparently the sailmaker agreed. “Why ask me, you silly hots? Why should I listen to lies hissing outta the owners’ box?”

“But you’re from Landing Continent.…”

“My province was ninety
gi
from Caria! Ain’t seen it in ten year, nor will again, never. Now go way!”