Glory Season (81 page)

Maia’s thoughts had already plunged ahead.
The Council rulers must have flooded Stratos with the stuff, during the battle to fight off the Enemy foeship.

Imagine every male a warrior. Almost overnight, it would have multiplied the colony’s strength, complementing female skill and planning with a wrath like none other in the universe.

Only, what happened after victory?

The good men—those who might have been trustworthy on any Phylum world, even before Lysos—would have voluntarily given up the powder. Or at least kept their heads until it ran out.
But men come in all types. It’s not hard to picture a plague like the Kings’ Revolt erupting during the
chaos after a war. Especially with tons of Tizbe’s drug floating around.

Was that enough cause to betray the Guardians of Jellicoe?

Maia knew that the Council didn’t do things without reasons.

“I guess your assignment changed, by the time we met again,” she prompted Naroin.

The petite brunette shrugged. “I heard some odd things. Known mercenaries were gettin’ offers, down the coast. Radical agents were reported drifting into parts around Grange Head. Wasn’t hard to figure where I might get a billet close to things going on.”

Maia frowned. “You didn’t suspect Baltha …”

“Her treason, going over to the reavers? No! I knew there was tension, of course. Lookin’ back, maybe I should have surmised.…” Naroin stopped, shook her head. “Take it from an experienced hand, child. It’s no good blamin’ yourself for what you couldn’t prevent. Not so long as you tried.”

Maia’s lips pressed together. That was exactly what she had been telling herself. From the look in Naroin’s eyes, it didn’t get much more believable as you got older.

That evening she learned who had lived, and who had died.

Thalla, Captain Poulandres, Baltha, Kau, most of the rads, most of the reavers, nearly all of the Manitou crew, including the young navigator who had helped Maia and her twin find their way through the dazzling complexity of the world-wall. The tally was appalling. Even hard-crusted Naroin, who had seen many formal and informal battles, could scarcely believe the prodigious manufacturing of bodies that had taken place at and near Jellicoe.
Is this what war is like?
Maia thought. For the first time she felt she understood, not just in abstract, but in her gut, what
had driven the Founders to such drastic choices. Nevertheless, she felt determined not to let Perkinite propagandists seize on this episode.
If I keep any freedom of action at all, I’m going to make sure it’s known. Poulandres and his men were forced to fight. This was more than a simple case of males going berserk.

What was it, then? There would surely be those who pictured
Renna
as the culprit, a blight carrier whose mere presence, and threat to bring more of his kind, inflamed the worst in several branches of Stratoin society. To Maia, that seemed cruelly like blaming the victim. Yet, the point could be made.

After dinner, while Hullin wheeled her along the promenade deck, Maia encountered Kiel a second time. On this occasion, she saw the other woman more clearly, not through a curtain of resentment over things that were already ancient history. The rad agent had lost everything, her closest friends, her freedom, the best hope for her cause. Maia was gentler with her former cottage-mate. Commiserating, she reached out to console and forgive. In gratitude, the forceful, indomitable Kiel broke down and wept.

Later, as dusk fell, the western horizon began to glitter. Maia counted five, six … and finally ten slowly turning beacons whose rhythmic flashes cut across the miles of ocean with reassuring constancy. From maps studied in her youth, she recognized the tempos and colors and knew their names—Conway, Ulam, Turing, Gardner … famed lighthouse sanctuaries of the Méchant Coast. And, beyond far Rucker Beacon, a vast dusting of soft, glimmering diamonds covering a harbor and surrounding hills. The night spectacle of great Ursulaborg.

She was taken to a temple. Not the grand, marble-lined monument dominating the city from its northern bluffs,
but a modest, one-story retreat that rambled over a fenced hectare of neatly coppiced woods, several kilometers upriver from the heart of the busy metropolis. The semirural ambience was an artifact, Maia could tell, carefully nurtured by the small but prosperous clanholds that shared the neighborhood. Clear streams flowed past gardens and mulch piles, windmills and light industrial workshops. It was a place where generations of children, and their daughters’ daughters, might play, grow up, and tend family business at an unhurried pace, confident of a future in which change would, at most, arrive slowly.

The walled temple grounds were unprepossessing. The chapel bore proper symbols for venerating Stratos Mother and the Founders in the standard way, yet Maia suspected all wasn’t orthodox. Vigilant guards, arrayed in leather, patrolled the palisade. Within, the expected air of cultivated serenity was overlaid by a veneer of static tension.

Except for Naroin and her younger sibling, none of the women looked alike.

After passing the chapel, the lugars bearing Maia’s palanquin approached an unassuming wooden house, detached from the main compound, surrounded by a covered plank veranda. The doctor who had treated Maia aboard the Gentilleschi conferred with two women, one tall and severe-looking, dressed in priestly habits, the other rotund, wearing archdeaconess robes. Naroin, who had walked alongside during the brief journey from the riverside quay, took a quick lope around the house, satisfying herself of its security, while Hullin briskly looked inside. Upon reuniting near the porch, the pair exchanged efficient nods.

With the help of a nurse-nun, Maia stepped down, bearing stoically the profound pain spreading from her knee and side. They assisted her up a short ramp into the
house, pausing at the entrance when the tall, elderly priestess bent to meet Maia’s eye.

“You will be at peace here, child. Until you choose to leave, this will be your home.”

The round woman wearing deacon’s robes blew a sigh, as if she did not approve of promises that might prove hard to keep. Despite pain and fatigue, Maia felt she had learned more than they intended. “Thank you,” she said hoarsely, and let the nurses guide her down a veranda of polished wood into a room featuring sliding doors made of paper-thin wood panels, overlooking a garden and a small pond. The mat bed featured sheets that looked whiter than a cloud. Maia never remembered being helped to slip between them. The sounds of plinking water, and wind rustling boughs, lulled her to sleep.

She awoke to find, next to her bed, the slim volumes given her by the Pinnipeds, plus a small box and a folded slip of paper. Maia opened the note.

I’ll be gone a while, varling,
it read.
I’m leaving Hullin to keep an eye open. These folk are all right, tho maybe a bit nutty. See you soon. Naroin.

The detective’s departure came as no surprise. Maia had wondered why Naroin stuck around this long. Surely she had work to do?

Maia opened the box. Inside a tissue wrapping she found a case made of aromatic leather, attached to a soft strap. She opened it and found therein a gleaming instrument of brass and gleaming glass. The sextant was beautiful, perfect, and so well-made she found it impossible to tell how old it was, save by the fact that it possessed no readout window, no obvious way to access the Old Net. Still, it was on sight far more valuable than the one she had left behind, at Jellicoe. Maia unfolded the sighting arms and ran her hands over the apparatus. Still, she hoped Leie would manage to recover the old one. Cranky and half-broken as it was, she felt it was hers.

She pulled the blanket over her head and lay in a ball, wishing her sister were here. Wishing for Brod. Wishing her mind were not full of visions of smoke spirals and glittering sparks, spreading sooty ashes amid stratospheric clouds.

A week passed slowly. The physician dropped by every morning to examine Maia, gradually notching downward the anesthetic effects of the agone leech, and insisting that the patient take gentle walks around the temple grounds. In the afternoons, after lunch and a nap, Maia was carried by lugar-litter for a promenade through the suburban village and up to a city park overlooking the heart of Ursulaborg. Accompanying her went several tough-looking nuns, each flourishing an iron-shod “walking stick” with a dragon-headed grip. Maia wondered why the precautions. Surely nobody was interested in her, now that Renna was gone. Then she noticed her attendants glancing backward, keeping a wary eye on a foursome of identical, formidable-looking women trailing ten meters behind, dressed as civilians but walking with the calm precision of soldiers. It marred the sense of normality that otherwise flowed over her while passing through bustling market streets.

For the first time since she and Leie had explored Lanargh, Maia felt immersed back in ordinary Stratoin life. Trade and traffic and conversation flowed in all directions. Countless unfamiliar faces came in trios, quintets, or even mixed-age octets. No doubt it would have seemed terribly exotic, had two innocent twins from the far northeast come ashore here on their first voyage from home. Now, myriad subtle differences from Port Sanger only seemed trivial and irrelevant. What she noticed were
similarities
, witnessed with new eyes.

Within a brick-lined workshop, open to the street, a family of artisans could be seen making a delicately specialized assortment of dinner ware. An elderly matriarch
supervised ledger books, haggling over a wagonload of clay delivered by three identical teamsters. Meanwhile behind her, middle-aged clonelings labored at firing kilns, and agile youths learned the art of applying their long fingers to spinning wet mud on belt-driven wheels, molding shapeless lumps into the sturdy, fine shapes for which their clan was, no doubt, locally well-known.

Maia had only to shift her mental lens a little to imagine another scene. The walls withdrew, receding in the distance. Simple handmade benches and pottery wheels were replaced by the clean lines of pre-molded machinery, accurately tuned to squeeze clay into computer-drawn templates, which then passed under a glazing spray, then heat lamps, to emerge in great stacks, perfect, untouched by human hands.

The joy of craft. The quiet, serene assumption that each worker in a clan had a place—one that their daughters might also call theirs. All that would be lost.

Then, as her litter bearers threaded the market throng, Maia saw the stall where the potter clan sold their wares. She glimpsed prices … for a single dish, more than a var laborer earned in four days. So much that a modest clan would patch a chipped plate many times before thinking of buying a replacement. Maia knew. Even in wealthy Lamatia Hold, summer kids seldom dined off intact crockery.

Now magnify that by a thousand products and services, any of which might be enhanced, multiplied, made immeasurably cheaper and more widely available with applied technology.
How much would be gained?

Moreover, she wondered,
What if one of those clone daughters someday wanted to do something different, for a change?

She spied a group of boys running raucous circles around the patient lugars, then onward toward the park. They were the only males she had seen, even now, in
midwinter. All others would be nearer the water, though no one barred their way this time of year. Maia found it odd, after so long in the company of men, not to have any around. Nor were vars like her common, either. Except within the temple grounds, they, too, were a tiny minority.

On arrival at the park, Maia gingerly got off the litter and walked a short distance to a walled ledge overlooking Ursulaborg. Here was one of the world’s great cities, which she and Leie had dreamed of visiting, someday. Certainly it far exceeded anything she had seen, yet now it looked parochial. She knew the place would fit into the vest pocket of any metropolis, on almost any Phylum world … save only those others which had also chosen pastoralism over the frantic genius of
Homo technologicus.

Renna had earnestly respected the accomplishments of Lysos and the Founders, while clearly believing they were wrong.

What do I believe?
Maia wondered.
There are tradeoffs.
That much, she knew.
But are there any solutions?

It was still terribly hard, thinking of Renna. Within a corner of her mind, a persistent little voice kept refusing to let go.
The dead have come back before
, it insisted, bringing up the miraculous return of Leie. Others had thought Maia herself finished, only to find out reports of her demise were premature.

Hope was a desperate, painful little ember … and in this case absurd. Hundreds had witnessed the Visitor’s vaporization.

Let go.
She told herself to be glad simply to have been his friend for a while. Perhaps, someday, there might come a chance to honor him, by shining a light here or there.

All else was fantasy. All else was dust.

•  •  •

As she gradually improved, Maia started getting visitors.

First came a covey of erect, gracile clones with wide-set eyes and narrow noses, dressed in fine fabrics, modestly dyed. The priestess introduced them as mother-elders of Starkland Clan, from nearby Joannaborg, a name that sounded only vaguely familiar until the women sat down opposite Maia, and began speaking of Brod. Instantly, she recognized the family resemblance. His nose, his wide-open, honest eyes.

Her friend had not been exaggerating. The clan of librarians did, indeed, keep caring about its sons, and even, apparently, its summer daughters, after they left home. The elders had learned of Brod’s misadventures, and wanted Maia’s reassurance, firsthand. She was moved by their gentleness, their earnest expressions of concern. Midway through an abbreviated account of her travels with their son, she showed them the letter proving he was all right.

“Poor grammar,” one of them clucked. “And look at that penmanship.”

Another, a little older, chided. “Lizbeth! You heard the young lady speak of what the poor boy’s been through.” She turned to Maia. “Please excuse our sister. She true-birthed our Brod, and is overcompensating. Do go on.”