Brin, David - Glory Season

by Glory Season (mobi)

  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.

  ". . . it is therefore obvious that the seat of the human soul can lie only in the mitochondria, which are the true life-motivators within each living cell. Now, of course, even men have mitochondria, which they inherit from their mothers. But sperm-heads are too small to contain any, so no summer baby, whether female or male, gets any of its essential soul-stuff from the male 'parent.' Only motherhood is therefore truly a creative act.

  "Now we have already seen that continuity and growth of the soul takes place via the miracle of cloning, which enhances the soul-essence with each regeneration and renewal of the clonal self. This gradual amplification is only possible with repetition. Just one lifespan leaves a woman's soul barely formed, unenlightened, which is one reason why equal voting rights for vars makes no sense, biologically.

  "For a man, of course, there is not even a beginning of soulness. Fatherhood is an anachronism, then. The true role of the soul-less male can only be to serve and spark ..."

  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.

  "I did not mean to encourage him!" Rabaka cried, covering the left side of her face so that her husband would not see the bruises. "I only smiled because—"

  "You SMILED at a strange man?" he roared at her. "Have you lost your mind? We men will seize any gesture, any imaginable cue as a sign of willingness! No wonder he followed you, and pushed you into the alley to have his way."

  "But I fought. ... He did not succeed—"

  "No matter. Now I shall have to kill him!"

  "No, please ..."

  "Are you DEFENDING him, then?" Rath demanded, his eyes filling with flame. "Perhaps you would prefer him? Perhaps you feel trapped with me in this small house, bound together by our vows for eternity?"

  "No, Rath," Rabaka pleaded. "I just don't want you to risk—"

  But it was already too late to stem his rush of anger. Rath was already reaching for the punishment strap that hung upon the wall. ...

  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.

  I might be able to come up with a plan. Find a way to get some of these crates open. Maybe start weaving a rope from yarn taken from the carpets? There were po
ssibilities, each of them dangerous. It would take some mulling over. Anyway, she obviously had plenty of time.

  There were no majestic zoor-floaters to watch as night fell, though several birds fluttered past, pausing on their way to roost long enough to taunt her, squawking at this silly, flightless human, crammed within her cleft of stone.

  Maia felt too agitated to try using the sextant. She climbed back down, fell asleep early, and had strange dreams most of the night. Dreams of escape. Dreams of running. Dreams of ambivalence. Of wanting/not wanting the company of someone for the rest of her life. Leie? Clone-daughters? A man? Images of a fictional but still vivid Florentina World confused her with combined revulsion and fascination.

  Later, when she clawed her way, moaning, out of a dream about being buried alive, Maia awakened to find herself tangled in the rough, heavy drapes she used for blankets, forced to struggle just to extricate herself. I don't like this place, she thought, when at last she was breathing freely again. She sagged back. I wonder how you go about unweaving a carpet.

  The narrow window showed a sliver of the constellation Anvil, so the night was more than half over. Missed the clicking, this time, one part of her commented. The rest didn't give a damn. When sleep reclaimed her, there were no more nightmares.

  She had saved for last what seemed the best book of the four. It was printed on good paper and came with the imprint of a Horn City publishing company. "A literary classic," proclaimed the flashing microadvert on its binding, when turned to the light. On the copyright page, Maia read that the novel was over a hundred years old. She had never heard of it, but that came as no surprise. Lamatia Hold was fanatic in preferring to teach its var-daughters practical skills over the arts.

  Certainly the writing was better than any of the other books. Unlike the historical fantasy, or the var-trash romance, it was set in the Stratos of everyday life. The story opened with a young woman on a voyage, accompanied by a fellow cloneling her own age. They were carrying commercial contracts from town to town, arranging deals, making money for their faraway hold and clan. The writer delightfully conveyed many hassles of life on the road, dealing with bureaucrats and senior mothers who, as broad and amusing caricatures, brought to Maia's lips her first faint smile in a long time. Below these picaresque encounters, the author laid a current of underlying tension. Things were not as they seemed with the two protagonists. Maia discovered their secret early in chapter three.

  The pair weren't clonelings at all. Their "clan" was a fiction. They were just a couple of vars. Twins . . .

  Maia blinked, startled to the quick. But . . . that was our idea! It's what Leie and I planned to do.

  She stared at the page, outrage turning swiftly to embarrassment. How many people must have read this book by now? Flipping to the title page, she saw that paper printings alone were in the hundreds of thousands. And that left out versions on disk, or floating access . . .

  We would 've been laughingstock, the first place we tried it, Maia realized with horrified chagrin. In retrospect, she saw with abrupt clarity how the idea must have occurred to others, countless times, even before this novel was written. Probably lots of var twins fantasized about it. At least some of the Lamai mothers should have known, and been able to warn us!

  Maia paused. Wait a minute! She flipped pages and looked again at the names of the protagonists. . . . Reie and Naia? No wonder they had sounded familiar. She shook her head in numb disbelief. We ... were NAMED after characters in this Lysos-damned storybook?

  Maia saw purple, thinking about the petty joke Mother Claire and the others had pulled on the two of them. At least Leie had been spared ever knowing what fools they'd been.

  She hurled the book across the room and flung herself onto her dusty bed, crying out of loneliness and a sense of utter abandonment.

  For two days she was listless, spending most of her time sleeping. The late night clicking was no longer of interest. Not much of anything was.

  Still, after a while boredom began penetrating even the self-pitying bleakness Maia had crafted for herself. When she could stand it no longer, she asked her jailers once more for something to help pass the time. They looked at each other, and responded that they were sorry, but there were no more books.

  Maia sighed and went back to picking at her meal. Her warders watched morosely, clearly affected by her mood. She did not care.

  At first, Maia used to fantasize about rescue by some authority, like the Planetary Equilibrium officer she had spoken to, or the priestess of the temple at Grange Head, or even a squadron of Lamai militia, wearing bright-plumed helmets. But she nursed no illusions about her importance in the grand scheme of things. Nor did any word arrive from Tizbe. Maia now saw that there was no need for the drug messenger or anyone else to come visit or interrogate her.

  Hope had no place in her developing picture of the world. Even the Lerners are so high above you, they have to bend over to spit.

  She remembered Calma, standing in the moonlight while Tizbe and the Joplands took her prisoner. Until that moment, Maia had thought of her as an individual, a decent person—a little awkward and transparent, but sweet in her way. Now I know better ... a clone is a clone. Thalia and Kiel were right. The whole system stinks!

  It was sacrilege, and Maia didn't care. She missed her friends. Even if she had only known them for a few weeks, they had shared with her the curse of uniqueness, and would understand the feelings of betrayal and desolation that swept over her now.

  Desperate for some way out of her funk, Maia reread the escapist, var-trash novel, and found it more satisfying the second time. Perhaps because she identified more with the implied wish, to see everything come crashing down. But then it was finished. A third reading would be pointless. None of the other books was worth even a second look.

  Lethargically, she spent the afternoon atop her makeshift pyramid, staring across the desert plain. It was a sea of grass you could get lost on, if you didn't know what you were doing. Here and there she thought she could trace outlines of regular features, like the footprints of vanished buildings. But no one had ever lived on this arid plateau, as far as she knew.

  The next morning, along with her breakfast, Maia's jailers brought something new. It was a large shiny box with a handle, like one of those hard suitcases rich travelers sometimes carried. "Got lots o' these stacked in 'nother room," one of them told her. "Hear it's a way to pass th' time. Y'might try it." The woman shrugged, as if such a long speech had used up her allotment of words for the day.

  After they left, Maia took the case over to where there was a good patch of light, and released the simple catch. The box unfolded once, then the two halves unfolded again. More clever hingings invited more unlayering until she had in front of her a wide, flat surface of pale material covered with finely etched vertical and horizontal lines.

  Life, she realized. Maia had never before seen a board quite like this, obviously an expensive model, too good to take to sea. It must be the kind men used while trapped in sanctuary, to help distract themselves during hot-season quarantine.

  They brought me a patarkal game of bleeding Life!

  It was too rich. Maia guffawed with a touch of hysterical release. She laughed and laughed, until at last she wiped tears from her eyes and sighed, feeling much better.

  Then, for lack of anything better to do, she felt along the front panel for the power switch and turned the machine on.

  Why, in nature, is the male-female ratio nearly always one to one? If wombs are costly while sperm is cheap, why are there so many sperm producers?

  It is a matter of biological economics. If a species produces fewer females than males, daughters will be more fruitful than sons. Any variant individual who picks up the trait of having more female offspring will have advantages, and will spread the mutant trait through the gene pool until the ratio evens out again.

  The same logic will hold in reverse, if we planners try to simply program-in a birth ratio sparse in males. Early ge
nerations would reap the benefits of peace and serenity, but selection forces will reward son-production, favoring its occurrence with rising frequency, eventually annulling the program and landing us right back where we started. Within mere centuries, this planet will be like any other, a swarm with men and their accompanying noise and strife.

  There is a way to free our descendants from this bio-economic cul-de-sac. Give them the option of self-cloning. Reproductive success will then reward women who manage to have offspring both sexually and especially non-sexually. In time, a desire to have like-self daughters will saturate the gene pool. It will be stable and self-reinforcing.