Glory Season (64 page)

Renna says the savants in Caria still know about such powers, but won’t release anything that might “destabilize a pastoral culture.”

If this was a more benign use of the same power that had fried Grimké, and many other islands in this chain, Maia could well understand why Lysos and the Founders chose such a path. Perhaps they were right, on some grand, sociological scale. Maybe the hunger she felt within was immature, wrongheaded, a dangerous, flaming curiosity like the madness Renna had spoken of—the sort that drove what he had called a “scientific age.”

Maia recalled the wistful longing in Renna’s eyes as he recalled such times, which he had said were rare among human epochs. She experienced a pang deep inside, envying what she had missed and would never know.

“The plates seem to always go back where they started,” Brod commented. “Come, Maia. Let’s see if we can push two at once.”

“All right,” she sighed. “I’ll try this one with a horse etched on it. Ready? Go.”

At first she thought her chosen plate was one of those that wouldn’t budge, then it began gliding under her hand, building up momentum in response to her constant pushing. She let go after it had crossed three of its own body lengths, but it drifted onward, now slowing with each passing second, until it collided at an angle with the hexagon Brod had pushed, carrying the image of a sailing ship. The two caromed off each other, moving in new directions for several more seconds before coming to a stop. Then each of them reversed course, and the pair went through a negative version of the same collision. Finally both of the plates drifted back to rest at their starting positions. Two minutes after starting the experiment, the wall was back as they had found it, a jumble of hexagons laid out in a pattern that made no immediate sense. Maia exhaled heavily.

There’s got to be a logic to it. An objective. The Game of Life looks like a meaningless mass of hopping pieces, too, until you see the underlying beauty.

Also, like the game, the men who designed this might have thought it alien enough to keep out women. That could be an important clue, especially with Brod here to help.

Unfortunately, there was a problem inherent in her “shared context” insight. For all she and Brod knew, the puzzle might be based on some fad current a thousand years ago, and now long forgotten. Perhaps a certain drinking song had been popular at the time, featuring most of these symbols. Almost any man of that era might have known the relationship between, say, the bee rendered in one plate and the house etched on another. One clever inscription seemed to show a slice of bread dripping globs of butter or jam. Another showed an arrowhead, trailing fire.

Maia changed her mind. It had to be based on something longer lasting.

Whoever put so much care into this obviously meant it to endure, and serve a purpose long after he was gone. And men aren’t known for thinking ahead?

Clearly, all rules had exceptions.

A growling sound distracted Maia, accompanied by an unpleasant churning in her stomach. Her bruised body wanted to be fed, the sooner the better. Yet, in order to have a chance of doing so, she must ignore it. Somehow, she and Brod would have to make it through what had apparently stymied countless interlopers before them. The only difference being that those others—hermits, tourists, explorers, pirates—had presumably come by boat in peace, able to leave again. For Maia and Brod, the motivation was stronger than greed or curiosity. Their only chance of surviving lay in getting beyond this wall.

“Sorry there’s no sauce, or fire to cook it, but it’s fresh. Eat up!”

Maia stared down at the creature that lay on the ground in front of her crossed legs, still flopping slightly. Emerging from a trance of concentration, she blinked at the unexpected sight of a fish, where none had been before. Turning to look at Brod, she saw new lacerations that bled fine lines across his chest and legs and arms. “You didn’t climb back
down
, did you?”

The boy nodded. “Low tide. Saw some stranded critters on the bar. Anyway, we needed water. Here, tip your head back and open wide.”

Maia saw that he carried in the crook of one arm a sodden ball of fabric, made of bits of canvas and his own rolled-up shirt. These he held out, dripping. With sudden eagerness arising from a thirst she hadn’t recognized till now, Maia did as told. Brod wrung a stream of bitter
saltwater, tanged with a faint hint of blood, into her mouth. She swallowed eagerly, overlooking the unpleasant taste. When finished drinking, she picked up the fish and bit into it ravenously, as she had seen sailors do.

“Mm … fank you, Broth … Mm delishush …”

Sitting beside her, Brod chewed a fish of his own. “Pure self-interest. Keep up your strength, so you can get me outta here.”

His confidence in her safecracking abilities was inspiring. Maia only wished it were well-founded. Oh, there had been progress, the last ten hours or so. She now knew which plates would move and which wouldn’t. Of the stationary ones, some served as simple barriers, or bumpers against which moving tokens might bounce or reflect. A few others, by a process she was never able to discern clearly, seemed to
absorb
any plate that ran into them. The moving hexagon would merge with or pass behind the stable one, and stay there for perhaps half a minute, then reappear to reverse its path, returning the way it came. Each time one of these temporary absorptions occurred, Maia thought she heard a distant, low sound, like a humming gong.

Unfortunately, there weren’t direct shots from movable hexagons to all the rigid ones. Nor would all combinations produce the absorbtion plus gong. Maia soon realized the solution must entail getting several plates going at the same time, arranging multiple collisions so that pieces would enter certain specific slots during the brief interval allowed.

For a while, I thought there was a clue in the fact that the puzzle is reversible … that everything returns to the same starting condition. The variant Life game that Renna used to send his radio message was a “reversible” version. But, as I think about it, that seems less likely. It’s got to be simpler, having to do with those symbols inscribed on the plates.

There she counted on Brod. He knew many of the emblems from their use as labels in shipboard life.
Box, can
, and
barrel
, were tokens for containers, written, appropriately enough, across several of the static, “target” plates. Quite a few food items were included on movable ones. Beer was portrayed by a stein with foam pouring over the sides. There were also
biscuit, hardtack
, and the bread-and-jelly symbol she had seen earlier. Other insignia Brod identified as standing for
compass, rudder
, and
cargo hook
, while some still eluded interpretation. He had no idea what the fire-arrow stood for. Nor the depictions of a bee, a spiral, or a rearing horse. Still, Maia felt reinforced in her notion. This puzzle was meant to be easy for men to understand.

Or easier. I don’t imagine all men were welcome, either. You’d still need to have been told some trick. Something simple enough to pass on from master to apprentice for generations.

Refreshed by food and drink, though not fully sated, they resumed experimenting for as long as the dim light lasted. That wasn’t very long, unfortunately. Outside, it might remain day for several more hours. But even with their irises slitted wide, too little illumination pierced cracks in the cave wall to allow work past late afternoon, when Maia and Brod had to stop.

In darkness, huddled together for warmth, they listened to the tide return. Lying with her head on Brod’s chest, Maia worried about Renna. What were the reaver folk doing to him? What purpose did they have in mind for the man from the stars?

Baltha and her crowd definitely had reason to make common cause with Kiel’s Radicals, back when Renna languished in Perkinite hands. Perkinism preached taking Stratoin life much farther along the track designed by Lysos, toward a world almost void of variation, completely dedicated to self-cloning and stability. It suited the interests of both groups of vars to fight that.

Rads wanted the opposite, a
moderation
of the Plan, in which clones no longer utterly dominated political and economic life, and where men and vars were stronger, though never as dominant as in the bad old Phylum. Their idea was to sacrifice some stability for the sake of diversity and opportunity. That made the Radical program as heretical as Perkinism, if not more so.

Ironically, Baltha’s cutthroat gang of reavers had a goal far less broad in scope, more aimed at self-interest. As Baltha hinted back on the Manitou, she and her group wanted no change in the way of life Lysos had ordained, only to shake things up a little.

Maia recalled the var-trash romance novel she had read back in prison, about a world spun topsy-turvy, in which stodgy clans collapsed along with the stable conditions that had made them thrive, opening fresh niches to be filled by upstart variants. She also remembered Renna’s comments on Lysian biology—how it had been inspired by certain lizards and insects, back on Old Earth. “
Cloning lets you keep perfection. But perfection for what? Take aphids. In a fixed environment, they reproduce by self-copying. But come a dry spell, or frost, or disease, and suddenly they use sex like mad, mixing genes for new combinations, to meet new challenges.
”

Baltha and the reavers wanted enough chaos to knock loose some ancient clans, but solely in order that
they
might take those heights. It was a scheme more classically Lysian than either of the Perkinite or Radical dogmas.
The Founders included vars like me because you can never be sure stability will last. They must have known it would mean some vars plotting to help nature along.

In fact, it must happen more often than she had imagined. Whenever such a scheme succeeded, it would be toned down in the histories. No sense encouraging
other
vars, downstream, to try the same thing! If Baltha managed to whelp a great house, she would not be depicted as
a pirate by her heirs. It made Maia wonder about those embroidered tales told about the original Lamai. Had she, in fact, been a robber? A conniver? Perhaps Leie had it right, choosing such company. If Maia’s twin had tapped a ruthless side to their joint nature, should she be cheered, rather than reproved?

How does Renna fit into all this?
Maia wondered.
Do the reavers plan to provoke some sort of war among factions on the Reigning Council? Or retribution from the stars? That would shake things up, all right. Perhaps more than they realize.

She worried.
What is Renna doing, right now?

Earlier, while twilight settled, Maia had spoken to Brod about these quandries. He was a good listener, for a man, and seemed genuinely understanding. Maia felt grateful for his company and friendship. Nevertheless, after a while she had run out of energy. In darkness, she eventually lay quietly, letting Brod’s body warmth help stave off the night chill. Breathing his male musk, Maia dozed while an odd sensation of well-being pervaded within the circle of his arm. Half-dreaming, she let images glide through her mind—of aurorae, streaming emerald and blue-gold sky curtains above the glaciers of home. And Wengel Star, brighter than the beacon of Lighthouse Sanctuary, at the harbor mouth. Those summertime themes blended with a favorite memory of autumn, when men returned from exile, singing joyously amid swirls of multicolored, freshly fallen leaves.

Seasons mixed in Maia’s fantasy. Still asleep, her nostrils flared in sudden, unprovoked recollection—a distant scent of frost.

She awakened, blinking rapidly, knowing too little time had passed for it to be dawn. Yet she could see a little. Moonlight shone through cracks in the cave entrance. The whites of Brod’s eyes were visible.

“You were quivering. Is something wrong?”

She sat up, embarrassed, though she knew not why.
Within, Maia felt an odd stirring, an emptiness that had nothing to do with hunger for food.

“I … was dreaming about home.”

He nodded. “Me too. All this talk about heretics and rads and Kings, it got me thinking about a family I knew, back in Joannaborg, who followed the Yeown Path.”

“Yeown?” Maia frowned in puzzlement. “Oh, I’ve heard of them. Isn’t that where … it’s the
clone
daughters who go out to find niches, and the vars who stay behind?”

“That’s right. Used to be some of the cities along the Méchant had whole quarters devoted to Yeown enclaves, surrounded by Getta walls. I’ve seen pictures. Most boys didn’t go to sea, but stayed and studied crafts along with their summer sisters, then married into other Yeown clans. Kind of weird to imagine, but nice in a way.”

Maia saw Brod’s point of view. Such a way of life offered more options for a boy—and for summer girls who stayed where they were born, living with their mothers.…

And
fathers
, she supposed, finding it hard to conceive.

Without her recent studies, Maia might not have perceived how, unfortunately, the Yeown way ran counter to the drives of Stratoin biology. There were basic genetic reasons why time reinforced the tendency to need a winter birth first, or for mothers to feel more intense devotion to clone-daughters than their var-offspring. Humans were flexible creatures, and ideological fervor might overcome such drives for a generation, or several, but it wasn’t surprising that Yeown heresies remained rare.

Brod continued. “I got to thinking about them because, well, you mentioned that book about the way people lived on Florentina World. You know, where they still had
marriage
? But I can tell you it wasn’t like that in the Yeown home I knew. The husbands …” He spoke the word with evident embarrassment. “The husbands didn’t
make much noise or fuss. There was no talk among the neighbors of violence, even in summer. Of course, the men were still outnumbered by their wives and daughters, so it wasn’t exactly like a Phylum world. With everyone watching, they kept real discreet, so as not to give Perkie agitators any excuse …”