After having ridden most of the day and half the night, they made camp once more in the shelter of a gully. Kiel managed to start a fire with sticks gathered near the bone-dry watercourse. Except for cups of hot tea, they ate supper cold from the dwindling larder in their saddlebags.
As the others made ready for bed, Renna gathered several small items from his blue pouch. One was a slender brush of a kind Maia had never seen before. He also picked up a camp spade, a canteen, and takawq leaves before turning to leave. Baltha seemed uninterested, and Maia wondered, was it because there was no place he could escape to in this vast plain? Or had Baltha already gotten what she wanted from him? Maia had intended to pull Renna aside and tell him about the southerner's strange actions, the morning before, but it had slipped her mind. Now, her feelings toward him were ambivalent again, especially with Thalia and Kiel still acting decidedly wintry.
"Don't get lost out there!" Thalia called to Renna. "Want me to come along and hold your hand?"
"That may not be what needs holding," Kiel commented, and the other vars laughed. All except Maia. She was bothered by Renna's reaction to the kidding. He blushed, and was obviously embarrassed. He also seemed to enjoy the attention.
"Here," Kiel said, tossing her penlight. "Don't confuse it with anything else!"
Maia winced at the crude humor, but the others thought it terribly funny. Renna peered at the cylindrical wooden case with the switch and lens at one end. He shook his head. "I don't think I'll have any trouble telling the difference." The three older women laughed again.
Doesn't he realize he's encouraging them? Maia thought irritably. With no aurorae or other summer cues to launch male rut, none of this was likely to go anywhere, and right now the mood was light. But if he feigned interest just to tease the women, it could lead to trouble.
As Renna passed by her, carrying the camp shovel awkwardly in front of him, Maia blinked in surprise and fought not to stare. For the briefest instant, until he vanished from the light, she thought she'd caught sight of a distension, a bulge which, thank Lysos, none of the others appeared to have noticed!
The fire faded and the big moon, Durga, rose. Thalia snored beside Kiel, and Baltha stretched out next to the horses. Maia was drifting off with her eyes closed, envisioning the tall spires of Port Sanger above the glassy waters of the bay, when a thump yanked her awake again. She looked left, where a blocky object had fallen onto Renna's blanket. The man sat down next to it and began pulling off his shoes. "Found something interesting out there," he whispered.
She raised herself to one arm, touching the crumbled block. "What is it?"
"Oh, just a brick. I found a wall . . . and old basement. Not the first I've seen. We've been passing them all day."
Maia watched as he pulled off his shirt. Unshaven and unwashed for several days, he exuded maleness like nothing she had seen or smelled since those sailors aboard the Wotan, and that, after all, had been at sea. Were a man to show up at any civilized town in such condition, he would be arrested for causing a public nuisance. That would go doubly in summer, and fourfold in high winter! Being an alien, perhaps Renna didn't know the rules of modesty boys were taught at an early age, rules that held especially when glory had fallen. Attractiveness, at the wrong times, can be a kind of annoyance.
"I never saw any walls," she answered absently. "You mean people lived near here?"
"Mm. From the weathering, I'd say about five hundred years ago."
Maia gaped. "But I thought—"
"You thought this valley was settled for only a century or so, I know. And the planet just a few hundred years before that." Renna lay back against the saddle he was using for a pillow, and sighed. Apparently untroubled by the cold, he picked up the decomposing brick and turned it over. The muscles of his arms and chest knotted and shifted. Now that she was used to it, his male aroma did not seem as pungent as that of the Wotan sailors. Or was winter affecting her, as well?
"Um," she said, trying to keep up her end of the conversation. "You mean I'm wrong about that?"
He smiled with an affectionate light in his eyes, and Maia felt a mild thrill. "Not your fault. The savants purposely muddy the histories made available outside Caria City. Not by lying, exactly, but giving wrong impressions, and implying that precise dates don't matter.
"It's true that Long Valley was pioneered a century ago, by foremothers of the Perkinite clans living here today. Almost no one had lived here for a long time, but several hundred years before that, this plain used to support a large population. I figure waves of settlement and recession must have crossed this area at least five or six times . . ."
Maia waved a hand in front of her face. "Wait. Wait a minute!" Her voice rose above a whisper, and she paused to bring it down again. "What're you saying? That humans have been on Stratos for ... a thousand years?"
Renna still smiled, but his brow furrowed as it did whenever he had something serious to say. "Maia, from what I've been able to determine by talking to your savants, Lysos and her collaborators planted hominid life on this world more than three thousand years ago. That's compatible with their date of departure from Florentina, though much would depend on the mode of transport they used."
Maia could only blink, as if the man had come right out and told her that womankind was descended from rock-salamanders.
"They intended their design to last," he went on, looking at the sky. "And I've got to hand it to them. They did one hell of an impressive job." With that, Renna put aside the ancient brick and opened his blanket to slip inside. "Goodsleep, Maia."
She answered, "Goodsleep," automatically, and lay back with her eyes closed, but it took a while for her thoughts to settle down. When at last she did drift off, Maia dreamed of puzzle shapes, carved in ancient stone. Blocks and elongated incised forms that shifted and moved over each other like twined snakes coiling across a wall of mysteries.
Maia had wondered if the escape would change rhythm, now that they were in the open. Would the group hole up by day, keeping out of sight until nightfall? After hectic, almost-continuous flight, she wouldn't mind the rest.
That, apparently, was not, the plan. The sun was still low when Baltha shook her awake. "Come on, virgie. Get your tea and biscuits. We're off in a sneeze and a shake."
Thalia was already tending the rekindled fire while Kiel prepared the mounts. Standing and rubbing her eyes, Maia searched for Renna, finding him at last downstream, sitting in a semicircle of objects. When Maia drew near, she recognized the brick from last night, and several bent aluminum fixtures—a hinge and what must have been a large screw—plus several more lumps impossible to identify. The man had the Game of Life set on his lap. After examining one of his samples for a while, he would use a stylus to write an array of dots on the broad tablet, then press a button to make the pattern vanish. Into memory, she presumed.
"Hi!" he greeted cheerfully as she walked up, carrying two cups of tea. "One of those for me?"
"Yeah. Here. What're you doing?"
Renna shrugged. "My job. Found a way to use this game set as a kind of notepad, to store observations. Awkward, but anything's better than nothing at all."
"Your job," she mused. "I never got to ask. What is your job?"
"I'm called a peripatetic, Maia. That means I go from one hominid world to another, negotiating the Great Compact. It sounds grand. But really, that's just to keep me busy. My real job is ... well, to keep moving and stay alive."
Maia thought she understood a little of what he had said. "Sounds a lot like my job. Moving. Staying alive."
The man who had been her fellow prisoner laughed appreciatively. "When you put it that way, I guess it's the same for everybody. The only game in town."
Maia recalled the night before, the way shifting winds would bring his aroma as she slept fitfully, waking once to find that she was using his chest as a pillow, and he asleep with one arm over her shoulders. This morning, he seemed a different person. Somehow he had found a way to clean up.
His stubble had been scraped away, in places, transforming it into the beginnings of a neat beard. Right now she could smell herself more than him.
Moving to place herself downwind, she asked, "Then you aren't here to invade us?"
She had meant it as a joke, to make fun of the rumors spread by fearmongers ever since his ship appeared in the sky, one long year ago. But Renna smiled thinly, answering, "In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what I'm here for ... to prepare you for an invasion."
Maia swallowed. It wasn't the answer she'd expected. "But you—"
She didn't finish. Thalia called, leading a pair of horses, "Off your bottoms, you two! Daylight riding's hard and fast, so let's get at it!"
"Yes, ma'am!" Renna replied with a friendly, only-slightly-mocking salute. He left his archaeological samples where they lay and stood up, folding the game board. Maia hurried to tie her bedroll to her saddlebag, and glanced back to see Renna bending over to check the cinch buckle of his mount. I wonder what he meant by that remark. Could the Enemy be coming back? Did he come across the stars to warn us?
While Maia was looking at the man, Kiel crossed between them and smoothly, blithely, reached out to pinch him as she passed by! "Hey!" Renna shouted, straightening and rubbing his bottom, but clearly more surprised than offended. Indeed, his rueful smile betrayed a hint of enjoyment, causing Kiel to chuckle.
Lysos, what a shameless tease, Maia grumbled to herself, irritation pushing aside her earlier train of thought. Miffed without quite knowing why, she ignored the man's glances after that and rode ahead with Baltha for most of that afternoon. Her annoyance only grew as Renna took small detours several times with Kiel and Thalia, showing them ruins he spotted and explaining which structure might have been a house and which a craftworks. The two women were embarrassingly effusive in their show of interest.
Baltha snorted. "Silly rads," she muttered. "Making a fuss like that, trying to talk to a man, even when it won't get 'em anywhere. As if those two could handle a sparking if they got one now."
"You don't think they're trying to—"
"Naw. Just flirting, prob'ly. Pretty damn pointless. You know the saying—
"Niche and a House, first of all, matter,
Then sibs and allies, who speak the same patter,
Only then, last of all, a man to flatter.
"Still makes plenty sense to me," she finished.
"Mm," Maia answered noncommittally. "What's a ... rad?"
Baltha glanced at her, sidelong. "Pretty innocent, ain't you, virgie? Do you know anything at all?"
Maia felt her face flush. I know what you've got hidden in your saddlebag, she thought of saying, but refrained.
"Rad stands for 'radical'—which means a bunch of overeducated young city varlings with dimwitted ideas about changing the world. Think they're all smarter than Lysos. Idiots."
Maia recalled now, listening to the tinny radio in the cottage at Lerner Hold. The clandestine station used the word to represent women calling for a rethinking of Stratoin society, from the ground up. In many ways, rads were polar opposites to Perkinites, pushing for empowerment of the var underclass through restructuring all of the rules, political and biological.
"You're talking about my friends," Maia told Baltha, in what she hoped was a severe tone.
Baltha returned a sarcastic moue. "Am I? Now there's a thought. Yer friends. Thanks for setting me straight." She laughed, making Maia feel foolish without knowing why. She turned straight ahead, ignoring the other woman, and for several minutes they rode in silence. Eventually, though, curiosity overcame her resentment. Maia turned and spoke a question in carefully neutral tones. "So, from what you say, I figure you don't want to change the world?"
"Not a whole lot. Just shake it up a little. Knock down some deadwood to make room in the forest, so t'speak. Let in enough light for a new tree or two."
"With you being a founding root, I suppose." "Why not? Don't I look like a foundin' mother to you? Can't you jus' picture this mug on a big painting, hangin' over th' fireplace of some fancy hall, someday?" She held her head high, chin outthrust.
Trouble was, Maia could picture it. The founding mothers of a lot of clans must have been just as piratically tough and ruthless as this rugged var. "Fine. Let's say you knock down a clearing and set your own seed there. Say your family tree grows into a giant in the forest; with hundreds of clone twigs spreading in all directions. What'll be your clan policy toward some new sapling, that tries to set root nearby someday?"
"Policy? That'll be simple." Baltha laughed. "Spread our branches an' cut off th' light!"
"Don't others also deserve a place in the sun?"
Baltha squinted at Maia, as if amazed by such naivete. "Let 'em fight for it, like I'm fight'n right now. It's the only fair way. Lysos was wise." The last was intoned solemnly, and Baltha drew the circle sign over her breast. Maia recognized a look of true religion in the other woman's eyes. A version and interpretation that conveniently justified what had already been decided.
Lasting silence settled after that. They rode on and the afternoon waned. Baltha consulted her compass, correcting their southwestward path several times. At intervals, she would rise in the stirrups and play her telescope across the horizon, searching for signs of pursuit, but only twisted shrubs with gnarled limbs broke the monotony, reminding Maia of legendary women, frozen in place after encountering the Medusa-man.
When the party of fugitives stopped, it was only to stretch the kinks out of their legs and to eat standing up. There were no more jokes about Renna's wincing accommodation to his saddle. By now they were all hobbling. Dusk fell and Maia expected a call to set camp, but apparently the plan was to keep riding. No one tells me anything, she thought with a sigh. At least Renna looked as tired and ignorant as she felt.
Two hours after nightfall, with tiny, silvery Aglaia just rising in the constellation Ladle, Baltha called a sudden halt, motioning for silence. She peered ahead into the darkness, then cupped her hands around her mouth and trilled a soft birdcall.
Seconds passed.
A reply hooted from the gloom, then a pause, and another hoot. A spark flashed, followed by a lantern's gleam, barely revealing a bulky form, like a rounded hillock, several hundred meters ahead. As they rode forward, shadows coalesced and separated. The object appeared to be squared off at one end, bulbous at the other. Hissing softly, it stood where a pair of straight lines crossed from the far left horizon on an arrow-straight journey to the right. The blurry form resolved, and Maia abruptly recognized a small maintenance engine for the solar railway, sitting on a spur track, surrounded by tethered horses and murmuring women.
There were cries of joyful reunion as Baltha galloped to greet her friends. Thalia and Kiel embraced Kau. Renna dismounted and held Maia's gelding while she descended, heavy with fatigue. Leading their tired beasts around the dark engine they handed the reins to a stocky woman wearing Musseli Clan livery. Another Musseli gave Renna a folded bundle that proved to be a uniform of one of the male rail-runner guilds.
So, the Musseli weren't in cahoots with the Perkinite farmer clans. It figured, given their close relationships with guildsmen, some of whom were their own brothers and sons. Too bad I never got a chance to see what life is like in a clan like that. It must be curious, knowing some men so well.
Apparently, the cabal were going to try getting Renna out the fast way, in one quick dash by rail. Without cars to weigh it down, the engine might reach Grange Head by midday tomorrow—assuming no roadblocks or search parties cut their path. Thalia, Kiel, and the others might be collecting their reward money by dinnertime. Maia figured they'd even provide a good meal and night's lodging to their virgin mascot, before sending her on her way.
Renna grinned happily, and gave Maia's shoulder a squeeze, but inwardly she felt herself already putting distance between them, protecting herself from another inevitable, painful goodbye.
Peripatetic's Log:
Stratos Mission:
Arrival + 40.177 Ms
Caria, the capital, surrounds and adorns a plateau overlooking where three rivers join the sea. Inhabitants call her "City of Gold," for the yellow roof tiles of clanholds covering the famed thirteen hills. But I have seen from high orbit a sight more worthy of the name. At dawn, Caria's walls of crystalline stone catch inclined sunlight, reemitting into space an off-spectrum luminance portrayed on Cy's panels as an amber halo. It's a marvel, even to one who has seen float-whales graze on clouds of frothy creill, above and between the metrotowers of Zaminin.
Often, over the last year, I have wished for someone to share such visions with.
Travelers enter Caria through a broad, granite portal, topped by a stately frieze—Athena Polias, ancient protectress of urban dwellers, bearing the sage visage of this colony's chief founder. Alas, the sculptor failed to catch that sardonic smile I've come to know from studying shipboard files on Lysos, when she was a mere philosopher-professor on Florentina, speaking abstractly about things she would later put into practice.
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 29