"... not sure I like sacrificing so many to the courts, dammit."
"Ten is the least the Reeces say'll pass. Sometimes you must trust your lawyer clan."
"I suppose. What a farce, though. Especially when we've won!"
"Mm. Hard on those going down. Glad it won't be me."
The pair turned past Maia, the second voice continuing with a sigh. "Clan and cause, that's what matters. Let the law have its ..."
When the way was clear, Maia hurried up the stairs the two had just vacated. The first landing was dim, and she felt sure her goal lay higher. From her room, she had watched a light burn many times, accompanied by reverberations of tense argument. Tonight there had been jubilation.
Three levels up, an open set of doors faced the landing. An electric bulb burned under a parchment lampshade, casting shadows across towering bookshelves. An ornate wooden table lay strewn with papers, surrounded by brass-studded leather chairs in unseemly disorder. Presumably, the mess would be cleaned up in the morning. Maia entered hesitantly. It was a more impressive room, by her prejudices, than the ornate opera house. She yearned for the volumes lining the walls, but headed first for the detritus of the adjourned meeting, uncrumpling bits of scrap paper, poking through sheets apparently torn out of ledgers and covered with scribbled accounts . . until she found something more easily interpreted. Another newspaper, complete this time.
Indictments Filed in Visitor Kidnapping
The tragic events which took place in the Dragons' Teeth, during Farsun Week, reached a climax today when the Planetary Prosecutor presented charges against fourteen individuals allegedly responsible for the abduction of Renna Aarons, Peripatetic Emissary from the Hominid Phylum. This event, which led to the alien's unfortunate, accidental demise, aggravated an unpleasant year of turmoil which began when his ship . . .
Maia skimmed ahead.
. . . rogue individuals from the Hutu, Savani, Persim, Wayne, Beller, and Jopland clans are now expected to file guilty pleas, so the case will likely never go to trial. "Justice will be served," announced prosecutor Pudu Lang. "If the Phylum ever does come nosing around, they will have no cause for complaint. An uninvited guest provoked some of our citizens into unfortunate actions, but this will have been dealt with, according to the traditions of our ancestors."
To demands for an open public trial, officials of the High Court reply that they see no need to inflame today's atmosphere of near-hysteria. So long as the guilty are punished, added sensationalism will not serve the civic interest. . . .
This explained some of what she had overheard. The good news was that even the winners in the political struggle, Odo's side, could not completely co-opt the courts. Public servants were enforcing the law, by narrow Stratoin standards.
Yet ironies abounded. The law emphasized deeds by individuals. That might have made sense back in the Phylum, but here, actions were often dictated by groups of clans. As in elections, the law pretended universal rights, while securing the interests of powerful houses. There was another article.
Twelve Guilds Accept Compromise
Agreement appears to have been reached in the labor dispute now disrupting commerce along the Mediant. In giving up their more absurd demands, such as shared governance of the newly created Jellicoe Technical Reserve, the sailing guilds have at last acceded to logic. In return, the Council promises to erect a monument in honor of the Visitor, Renna Aarons, and to pass regulations allowing male crew to help staff certain types of auxiliary vessels which heretofore ...
So Brill was right. The men and their allies couldn't fight inertia, the tendency of all things Stratoin to swing back toward equilibrium. The guilds had won a token concession or two—Maia felt especially glad that Renna would be honored—and Odo's side in the struggle might have to sacrifice a few members. Nevertheless, Jellicoe was restored to its old wardens, who would now quietly resume their deadly exercises, practicing to blow up great, unmanned ships of snow.
Maia glanced at a photograph accompanying the article: Commodores and Investors Discuss New Venture, the motion read. Pictured were several sailors dressed in officers' braid, looking on as three women showed them a model ship. Maia bent to look closer, and stared. "Well I'll be . . ."
One of the women in the photo was a younger version of Brill Upsala, eagerness lighting her eyes like fire. The sleek ship was of no design Maia knew, lacking sails or smokestacks. Then she inhaled sharply.
It was, in fact, a zep'lin.
Is that the "auxiliary vessel" they're talking about? But that would mean—
A voice came out of nowhere.
"So. Always one to show initiative, I see."
Maia swiveled catlike, arms spread wide. Behind the door, in a dim corner of the room, a solitary figure lay slumped in a plush chair, clutching a cigar. A long ash drooped from the smoldering end.
"Too bad that initiative won't take you anywhere but the grave."
"You're the one that's going to feed the dragon, Odo," Maia said with satisfaction. "Your clan's dumping you to buy off the law."
The elderly Persim glared, then nodded. "We're taught to consider ourselves cells in a greater body. . . ." She paused. "I never considered, till now . . . what if a cell doesn't want to be sacrificed for the smuggy whole?"
"Big news, Odo. You're human. Deep down, you're just like a var. Unique."
Odo shrugged aside the insult. "Another time, I might have hired you, bright summer child. And left a diary warning our great-granddaughters to betray your heirs. Now I'll settle for warmer revenge—taking you with me to the dragon."
Maia fell back a step. "You . . . don't need me anymore. Or Leie or Brod."
"True. In fact, they have already been released to the Nitocris. Their vessel docks in less than a week."
Maia's heart leaped at the news. But Odo went on before she could react.
"Normally, I'd let you go as well, and watch with pleasure as your fancy friends all fall away, hedging their promises, leaving you with a tiny apartment and job, and vague tales to tell one winter child—about when you rubbed elbows with the mighty. But I won't be around for that bliss, so I'll have another. The Persim owe me a favor!"
Maia whispered. "You hate me. Why?"
"Truth?" Odo answered in a low, harsh voice. "Jealousy of the hearth, varling. For what you had, but I could not."
Maia stared silently.
"I knew him," Odo went on. "Virile, summer-rampant in frost season, yet with the self-control of a priestess. I thought vicarious joy would suffice, by setting him up at Beller House, with both Bellers and my younger siblings. Yet my soul stayed empty! The alien wakened in me a sick envy of my own sisters!" Odo leaned forward, her eyes loathing, "He never touched you, yet he was and remains yours. That, my rutty little virgin, is why I'll have a price from my Lysos-cursed clan, which I served all my wasted life. Your company in hell."
The words were meant to be chilling. But in trying to terrify, Odo had instead given Maia a gift more precious than she knew.
... he was and remains yours ...
Maia's shoulders squared and her head lifted as she gave Odo a final look of pity that clearly seared. Then she simply turned away.
"Don't try to leave!" Odo called after her. "The guards have been told. ..."
Odo's voice trailed off as Maia left the muted room and its bitter occupant. She descended the drafty stairway, but instead of turning toward her room, she continued down one more level to the ground floor, and then crossed a wide, dimly lit atrium beneath statues depicting several dozen identical, joyless visages. She pulled the handle of an enormous door, which opened slowly, massively.
Cool garden air washed her face, cleansing foul odors of smoke and wrath. Maia stepped onto a wide gravel drive and looked up at the sky. Winter constellations glittered, save where the luminous dome of the Great Temple cast a bright halo, just over the next rise. City lights sprawled below the acropolis, along both banks of a black ribbon of river crisscrossed by many bridges.
The driveway dropped gently through an open park, then past a grove of ancient, Earth-stock trees, ending at last with a wrought-iron gate set in a high wall. Maia approached without stealth. A liveried sentry stepped out of the guard booth, offering a slight, quizzical bow.
"Can I help you, miss?" the stocky, well-muscled woman asked.
"I'm leaving."
The guard shook her head. "Dunno, miss. It's awfully—"
"Do you have orders to stop me?"
"Uh . . . not since a few days ago. But—"
"Then kindly do not stand between another daughter of Stratos and her rights."
It was an invocation she recalled from a var-trash novel, which seemed ironically apropos. The keeper shifted uncertainly from foot to foot, and finally shuffled to the gate. As it swung open, Maia thanked the attendant and stepped through, arriving on a strange street, in a strange city, barefoot in the dead of night.
Of course Persim Clan wanted it this way. She was no longer needed, an embarrassment, in fact. But murder was risky. What if it restoked the waning sailors' strike? What if her disappearance prodded the lazy machinery of the law past some genteel threshold of tolerance? This way, the Persims might even solve their predicament in Odo, who had outlived her usefulness to the clan. Maia's escape might provoke that broken piece of the hive to end things neatly, skirting a degrading ritual of sentencing and punishment.
I'm still being used, Maia, knew. But I'm learning, choosing those uses with open eyes.
And now . . . what will I choose?
Not to be the founder of some immortal dynasty, that much she knew. A home and children were still fond hopes, as was warmth of the heart and hearth. But not that way. Not by the cool, passionless rhythms of Stratos. If Leie chose that route, good luck to her. Maia's twin was smart enough to start a clan, with or without her. But Maia's own goals went beyond all that now.
Earlier, she had declared herself free of duty to the legacy of Lysos. That assertion had nothing to do with returning to ancient sexual patterns, or preferring the bad old terrors of patriarchy. Those were separate issues, in her mind already settled.
What she had decided was that, if she could not live in a time of openness, of ideas and daring, then she could at least behave as if she did. As if she were a citizen of a scientific age.
She wasn't alone. Others surely had the same thing in mind. Brill had hinted as much. The "token" concession won by the guilds—regaining for men the right to fly—would change Stratos over time, and there were doubtless other moves afoot to nudge society in subtle ways. Gradually diverting the ponderous momentum of a dragon.
Renna set things in motion. And I had a role, as well. For both his sake and mine, I'll keep on having one.
Still, the Upsala and the Nitocris might be surprised by her reaction, when they made her an offer. She would listen, politely. But, on the other hand . . .
Why not do what I want, for a change?
It was the final irony. She faced the challenges of independence willingly, equipped, to stand on her own, while at the same time ready to share her heart. It seemed a natural stage in her personal renaissance, cresting from adolescence to true adulthood.
Stratos might take a while longer, but worlds, too, must waken from dreamy illusions of constancy. The cradle built by Lysos no longer protected, but constrained.
Reaching a turn in the road, Maia came upon an overlook facing west. There, slowly setting beyond the mountains, was the great nebula that Stratoins called the Claw—known in Phylum space as God's Brow. Somewhere in the cold, empty reaches between, vast crystalline ships were bearing down to finish an isolation that Lysos must have known would end, in time. Only then would it become clear if humans had achieved a kind of wisdom here, a new pattern of life worthy of adding to a greater whole.
Suddenly, the surroundings were illuminated by a sharp glow from above. Maia turned to look upward, where a single, starlike glimmer pulsed, throbbing rhythmically as it brightened, until it shone more radiant than any moon, or even summer's beacon, Wengel Star. Wave-like patterns of color stabbed her eye, causing her to squint in wonder.
At first, Maia felt she had this marvel to herself, amid a city of a hundred thousand souls. Then came sounds—doors banging open, people flooding out of houses and holds, murmuring as they faced skyward and stared. Women, children, and the occasional man, spilled into the streets, pointing at the heavens, some fearfully, others in growing awe.
It took hours before anyone was certain, but by dawn all could tell. The spark was moving away. Leaving the folk of Stratos alone again.
For a time.
This book began with a contemplation of lizards. Specifically, several species from the American Southwest that reproduce parthenogenetically—mothers giving birth to daughter clones. Perfect copies of themselves.
From there, I discovered aphids, tiny insects blessed with two modes of reproduction. During periods of plenty and stability, they self-clone, churning out multiple duplicates like little Xerox machines. But when the good times end, they quickly swing back to old-fashioned sexual mating, creating daughters and sons whose imperfect variety is nature's mortar of survival.
These miracles of diversity prompted me to wonder, "What if humans could do the same?"
The idea of cloning has been explored widely in fiction, but always in terms of medical technology involving complex machinery, a dilettante obsession for the very rich. This may serve a pampered, self-obsessed class for a while, but it's hardly a process any species could rely on over the long haul, through bad times as well as good. Not a way of life, machine-assisted cloning is the biosocial counterpart of a hobby.
What if, instead, self-cloning were just another of the many startling capabilities of the human womb? An interesting premise. But then, only female humans have wombs, so a contemplation of cloning became a novel about drastically altered relations between the sexes. Most aspects to the society of planet Stratos arose out of this one idea.
These days, nothing is politically neutral. The lizards I referred to earlier have recently been cited in a thought-provoking, if inflammatory, radical feminist tract posing the question "Who needs males, anyway?" Many times, over the ages, insurgent female philosophers have proposed independence through separation. Given the plight of countless women and children in the world, they can hardly be blamed. In fact, the name "Perkinite" was taken from Charlotte Perkins Oilman, whose novel Herland is one of the best and pithiest separationist Utopias ever penned. Her brand of sexual isolationism is far gentler than the extremist doctrine I depict, which shamefully misuses her name on planet Stratos.
Unfortunately for gender segregationists—though not, perhaps, for men—biology appears to thwart simplistic secession. Mammals seem to require a male component at a deeper level than do insects, fish, or reptiles. Recent studies indicate that "male-processed genes" initiate important fetal-development processes. So even if self-cloning without machines became possible, conception might still require at least cursory involvement by a man.
Anyway, stories excluding men altogether seem almost as bombastic as those that crudely turn the tables, in naive role-reversal fantasies. (Amazon warriors, dueling over harems of huge but meek bimbo-males? The sub-genre is a dandy source of giggles, but bears no relation to the way biology works in this universe.)
On the other hand, there are no scientific reasons not to show males relegated to the sidelines of history, a peripheral social class, as has all too often been the lot of women in our own civilization. Men are still men on Stratos, give or take some alterations. Their society isn't designed purposely to oppress them, only to end the age-old domineering and strife that accompanied patriarchy. In consequence, the folk of Stratos miss some of the joys we seek (and sometimes find) in monogamous family life. They also avoid much familiar pain.
Would self-cloning lead kinship lineages to imitate the social life of ants or bees, dwelling in "hives" with like-gened sisters? This notion, too, has
been explored before, often by cramming antlike behavior into bipedal bodies. On Stratos, the daughters of an ancient clan would exhibit solidarity and self-knowledge unimaginable to vars like ourselves, but that wouldn't necessarily make them automatons, or stop them being human.
Try to look at it from their point of view. Our world of nearly infinite sexual-genetic variation might seem too chaotic to be civilized. A society of vars would be inherently incapable of planning beyond a single generation—which is exactly our problem today, according to many contemporary critics. Too much sameness may be stifling on fictional Stratos, but too little sense of continuity may be killing the real Earth of here and now.
Some may accuse me of preaching that genes are destiny. Far from it. Men and women are ingenious, marvelously self-trainable creatures. Stratoin society is as much a matter of social evolution as it is of bioengineering. One of the lessons of Maia's adventure is that no plan, no system or stereotype, can suppress an individual who is boldly determined to be different.
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 69