Brin, David - Glory Season

by Glory Season (mobi)

  To think I used to dream of seeing the inside of a man sanctuary, Maia thought sardonically, and climbed down.

  She tried prying at a couple of crates, but nothing persuaded them to open. Maia did manage to get some of the rugs unrolled to make a bed of sorts—more like a nest—over in one corner. Her stomach growled. She drank and used the chamber pot again. Beyond that, there seemed nothing left to do. . .

  "Now," the voice of despair said with assertion, unwilling to brook further delay, and Maia buried her face in her hands.

  Why me? she wondered. Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content. Its return visits were each more brutal than the last, ever since that awful storm tore the ships Wotan and Zeus apart from one another, and she from her twin. Maia had thought that tragedy her nadir. What more could the world possibly do to her?

  Apparently, a whole lot more.

  Maia lay down with a length of soft blue curtain material wrapped around her shoulders, and waited for her keepers to come with food ... or word of her fate. Thalia and Kiel will worry about me, she thought, trying to raise an image of friendship for whatever tenuous comfort it offered. She had sunk too low to fantasize that anyone might actually search for her. The solace she sought was simply to imagine somebody on Stratos cared enough to notice she was gone.

  The dour-faced guardians returned soon after Maia fell into an exhausted, fitful slumber. Their noise roused her, and she rubbed her eyes as one of them dropped a clattering tray onto the rickety table. Maia could not tell if it was the same pair that had freighted her from Lerner Hold, or if those two had rotated duties with others exactly like them. Stepping back to the door, the sisters watched her with eyes as round and brown and innocent as a doe's.

  They had brought food, but little news. When she asked between ravenous spoonings of nondescript stew what was to become of her, their monosyllable answers conveyed that they neither knew nor cared. About the only information Maia was able to pry loose was their family name—Guel—after which they fell into taciturn silence.

  What talent or ability had enabled the original ancestress of such broody, beetle-browed women to establish a parthenogenetic clan? What niche did they fill? Surely none requiring affability or great intelligence. Yet, for all Maia knew, the trio she had seen were part of a specialized hive with thousands of individual members, all descended from an original Guel mother who had proved herself excellent at ...

  She wondered. At driving prisoners crazy with sheer sullenness? Perhaps Guel Clan operated jails for local towns and counties across three continents! Maia could hardly disprove it from past experience, this being her first time in prison.

  Watching them carry off the dishes, shuffling awkwardly and muttering to each other as they fumbled with the key, Maia contemplated an alternate theory—that these were the sole clone offspring of one farm laborer whose strength and curt obtuseness were qualities some local clan of employers had found useful. Useful enough to subsidize producing more of the same.

  Now that hunger was abated, Maia recalled other discomforts. "Hey!" she cried, hurrying to the door and pounding until a querulous voice answered from the opposite side. Maia shouted through the jamb, asking her keepers for soap and a washcloth. And oh yes! Some of the dried takawq leaves all but the rich in this valley used as toilet paper. There came a low grunt in response, followed by the sound of heavy, receding footsteps.

  Come to think of it, unless the idea was to torture her with minor annoyances, this lack of amenities indicated her jailers were indeed amateurs. Just a trio of bullies hired locally for a special assignment. Recalling some of the radical declarations she'd heard over Thalia's radio, Maia made herself a promise. She would not show her keepers any of the habitual respect a unique was supposed to offer those fortunate enough to be born even low-caste clones.

  They can't keep me here forever, can they? she wondered plaintively.

  Try as she might, Maia could not think of a single reason why they couldn't.

  There were other, hurtful questions, such as why Calma Lerner had turned her in to the Joplands. How much did they pay? Not very much, I bet. Her heart felt heavy thinking about the betrayal. Although there had been no fealty between them, she had been so sure Calma liked her.

  Like has nothing to do with it, when rich clans are involved.

  Clearly this was about the drug that made males rut out of season. The clan mothers of this valley had an agenda for its use, and weren't about to brook interference. Perkinites dream of a nice, predictable world, where everyone grows up knowing who and what she is. Every girl a cherished member of her clan, knowing her future. No muss or fuss from gene mixing. No vars and as few men, as seldom, as possible.

  According to Savant Judeth, the aristocracies of ancient Earth used to justify suppressing those below them on the basis of "innate differences," an assumption that almost never survived scrutiny, once opportunity came to children of rich and poor alike. But there would be no need for oppression or false assumptions in a Perkinite world. Each family and type would find its own level and niche based on talents well-proven by time. Each clan would do what it did best, what it liked doing best, in a changeless atmosphere of reliable and mutual respect. Perkinite preachers spoke of a utopic end to all violence, uncertainty, chaos. A stratified world, but a fair one.

  Men and vars, even as minorities, irritated this serene equation.

  Back in Port Sanger, Perkinism was a mere fringe heresy. Each summer, the clans would invite chosen sailors to come up from the Lighthouse Sanctuary, partly in order to have some var and boy children, but mostly for good, neighborly relations. It kept the shipping guilds happy, and helped make men feel duty-bound to try their best, half a year later. Besides, even in summer, it was sometimes nice to have men around, so long as they behaved.

  But opinions varied on that. The Long Valley Perkies just wanted to see men when clones had to be sparked.

  But the summer ban robs men of what they look forward to all the other seasons. No wonder they lack enthusiasm in winter.

  Men had another reason to feel cheated in the Perkinite equation—of the sons they needed to replenish their guilds. It didn't take genius to see the trap the radical separationists had fallen into. With a low birthrate, the labor shortage draws outsider fems like me, seeking work but also disrupting the peace with our strange faces and voices, our unpredictability.

  It was a cycle the Perkinites couldn't win, as shown by the decision to build this sanctuary, where men might live inland year-round. The thin edge of the wedge. Change would gain momentum as more vars were born, and Perkinite mothers learned to like, or even love them a little. The Orthodox church would gain members. Things would grow more like elsewhere on Stratos.

  Then came the Bellers' shiny blue powder—offering the Perkies a way out. All they'll need is a few dozen doped-up males. Work 'em from clanhold to clanhold like drone bees, till they collapse. They may die smiling, but it's still cruel and stupid.

  Maia shuddered to think what kind of male would put up with more than a week or two in such a role. The kind who'd father low-quality variants, if you took one to bed during summer.

  But the Perkinites weren't looking for "fathers" at all! In winter, any sperm would do. It might work, Maia saw. No need to keep the railroad men around, with their stiff, easily provoked pride. No summerlings to mess your tidy predictabilities. Producing clones at will, the valley's population could fill to exact specifications, set by the richest clans. Even var laborers could be replaced at society's lowest rung. Simply choose a few with the strongest backs and weakest minds, and make them clone mothers. A tailor-made working class.

  It wasn't what the Founders had in mind, long ago. The priestesses of Caria wouldn't approve. Guilds of men and ad hoc societies of vars would fight it ... especially radicals like Thalia and Kiel. Clearly, the Perkinites wanted time to establish a fait accompli before facing this inevitable opposition from a position of strength.

  Earlier, Maia had nurs
ed hopes that Tizbe's backers might let her go with a stern lecture and admonishment to keep silent. That possibility seemed less likely, the more she pondered all the implications.

  She tracked time by the progress of a narrow trapezoid of light, cast through the window onto the opposite wall. Her jailers returned with an evening meal just as the oblong shape climbed halfway toward the ceiling and took a rosy tint. They brought the takawq leaves but had forgotten the other items. Listening to her repeated request, they responded with sullen nods and departed, leaving Maia to deal with her loneliness and the oncoming night.

  Enforced inactivity brought forth all the aches and strains that had come from weeks laboring in furnaces at Lerner Hold—not to mention the aftermath of being drugged, tied, and bounced around the back of a wagon. Maia's muscles had gradually stiffened during the course of the day, and her tendons throbbed. Stretching helped, but with the coming of darkness she quickly fell into a doze that alternated between comatose slumber and shallow restlessness, exacerbated by her never-absent fears.

  In the middle of the night she dreamed the water tap in the corner of her bedroom was dripping. She wanted to bury her head under her pillow to cut off the sound. She wanted Leie, whose cot lay closer to the faucet, to get up and turn it off! It stopped just as she floundered toward wakefulness.

  Had she dreamed it? "Leie . . . ?" she began, about to tell her twin about the absurd, awful nightmare of imprisonment.

  In a rush, Maia recalled. She threw her arm over her eyes and moaned, wishing with all her might to go back into the dream, as irritating as it had seemed. To be back in her aggravating little attic room, with her aggravating sister safely in bed nearby. She groaned, "Oh . . . Lysos," and prayed desperately that it were so.

  When her keepers came with breakfast, they brought a small bundle wrapped in cord. Before sitting down to eat, Maia opened it and found all the items she had asked for, including a new shirt and set of breeches sewn from scratchy but clean homespun. By the sheepish expressions on the warders' faces, she guessed they were supposed to have provided the basics from the start, and had just let it slip what they used for minds. Perhaps they had even gotten a dressing-down from their bosses. So much for the notion that they were hereditary, professional jailers.

  She felt more alert today. By lunchtime, Maia had explored every meter of her prison. There were no secret passageways she could find, though most castles in fairy tales seemed replete. Of course, palaces of fable tended to be far older than this shiny new fortress on the high steppe.

  New in one sense, ancient in others, as revealed by looking at the walls. The stone, which from miles away looked like layers of some grand confection, was up close a complex agglomerate of many textures and embedded crystals. A few looked vaguely familiar from ancient, blurry, color plates Savant Mother Claire had passed around, too faded to be used any longer in the upper school, but good enough to teach summerlings a dollop of geology. Unfortunately, the only minerals Maia could recognize were biotite, for its gray flecks, and dark, glossy hornblende. Too bad these were granitic rocks, not sedimentary. It might have been diverting to scan the walls for fossils of ancient life-forms that had thrived on Stratos long before the planet's ecosystem was forced to compromise with waves of modified Terran invaders.

  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 me
n 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. Thalia 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.