The suitcase was woven from coarse fabric, with designs of abstract, interlocking geometric forms. A soft hum told of some metal part vibrating in harmony with the magnetic-pulse impeller of locomotive. Examining the lock mechanism, she saw that the simple keyhole was cosmetic camouflage. Three small buttons protruded along one side. Maia blew a silent sigh, recognizing expensive technology. There would be a code for pressing them in a certain order, or an alarm might go off.
Maia backed away cautiously, and returned with a thin, stiff length of wire, normally used to bind heavy articles of baggage. Checking once more that her “assistant” still slept, she began working one end of the wire between the heavy fabric’s warp and weft. With a final shove, it pierced through and met softer resistance, presumably Tizbe’s clothes. Pushing farther revealed nothing. Maia drew the wire out again, and repeated the procedure a few centimeters away, with the same result.
I could be wrong … about a lot of things. Maia squatted on her haunches, pondering, Prudence urged that she forget about it.
Curiosity and obstinacy were stronger. She shifted her weight, maneuvering to get at the satchel from another angle …
A floorboard groaned, like a dying animal. Maia’s breath caught. It can’t have been as loud as that! It’s just because I’m nervous. Eyeing Tizbe, Maia wondered what she’d say if the clone wakened to find her here. The hitchhiker smacked her lips and changed position slightly, then settled down again, snoring a little louder. Dry-mouthed, Maia positioned her tool at a new location and worked it once more between the fibers. It resisted, penetrated, and then halted with an abrupt, faint tinkling sound.
Aha!
She repeated the experiment several more times, delving a rough map of the satchel’s interior. For a var on the road, Tizbe seemed to be carrying few personal effects and a lot of heavy glass bottles.
Gingerly, Maia backed away until she was safely at her desk again. She tossed aside the wire, chewing her lower lip. So, now you know Tizbe’s a courier, carrying something mysterious. You still can’t prove anything illegal’s going on. All the sneaking around, the whispers at dockside, rich clones pretending to be poor vars, those might point to crime. Or they might have legitimate reasons for secrecy, business reasons.
A second aspect worried Maia more. The chaos in Lanargh may have been partly caused by this. The accident in Clay Town sure was. Could anything that makes so much trouble be legal?
In theory, the law was where all three social orders met as equals. In practice, it took time to learn the marsh of planetary, regional, and local codes, as well as precedents and traditions passed down from the Founding, and even Old Earth. Large clans often deputized one or more full daughters to study law, argue cases, and cast block votes during elections. What young var could afford to give more than a passing glance through dusty legal tomes, even when they were available? The system might seem intentionally designed to exclude the lower classes, except why bother, since clones far outnumbered summerlings, anyway?
Maia shook her head. She needed advice, wisdom, but how to get it? Long Valley didn’t even have an organized Guardia. What need, with reavers and other coastal troubles far away, and men banished during rut time?
There was one place Maia could go. Where a young var like her was supposed to take troubles beyond her grasp.
She decided she had better try something else, first.
The train’s last stop for the day was Holly Lock. This time, Tizbe didn’t even pretend to help as Maia hauled packages, struggled with the cumbersome Musseli accounting system, then faced the scrutiny of a hairsplitting freightmistress. With an airy “g’bye-see-you-round!” the blonde traveler was gone. By the time Maia finished, she was telling herself good riddance. Let those cryptic bottles be someone else’s problem.
Holly Lock was little more than a cluster of warehouses, grain elevators, and cattle chutes on one side of the tracks, and a warren of small houses for singleton vars and microclans on the other. There was nothing resembling even the modest “town center” of Port Sanger, where a few civil servants performed their functions, ignored by the population at large. Hefting her bag, Maia paused in front of the station office, where an older, slightly-less-unfriendly-looking Musseli chatted with a burly woman whose suntan was the color of rich copper. As Maia stood indecisively in the doorway, the stationmaster looked up with a raised eyebrow. “Yes?”
On impulse, Maia decided. “Excuse me for intruding, madame, but …” She swallowed. “Can you tell me where I’d find a savant in town? One who has net access? I need to buy a consultation.”
The two older women looked at each other. The stationmaster snickered. “A savant, you say? A sav-ant. I think mebbe I heard o’ such things. Is they anythin’ like smart bees?” Her sarcastic rendition of man-speech made Maia blush.
The woman with the weathered skin had eyes that crinkled when she smiled. “Now, Tess. She’s an earnest little varling. Lysos, can you figure what a consult’s gonna cost her, not gettin’ clan rates? Must need it pretty bad.” She turned to Maia. “Got no licensed savants in this part o’ the valley, little virgie. But tell you what. I’m swinging past Jopland Hold on my way back to the mine. Could give you a lift.”
“Um. Do they have—”
“An uplink, sure. Richest mothers in these parts. Got full console an’ everything. But maybe you won’t have to use it. What you’re really needing, I figure, is some good motherly advice. Could save you the cost of a consult.”
Motherly advice was what she had been taught to seek, if ever in trouble out in the world. Ideally, the mothers of the largest, best-respected local clan were available not just to their own daughters, but anyone, even man or var, who was righteous and in need. In fact, Maia didn’t have much appetite for a band of elderly clones, accustomed to holding feudal court out in the sticks, pouring platitudes and assigning her verses from the Book of the Founders.
But she says they have a console.
“All right,” she said, and turned to the stationmaster. “I’m afraid that means—”
“Don’t tell me. You may not make it back in time to catch the 6:02. Oh, shoot.” The Musseli yawned to show how upset she was. “I guess there’s always another var waitin’ in the pool. Come back and we’ll put you in queue for another run, sometime.”
Great. Lost seniority and maybe a week waiting around for another train. This is already costing me plenty.
Maia had a gnawing feeling it was going to add up to a lot more, before she was done.
We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason—because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.
It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. “Good” or “evil” had little to do with it.
That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is “natural” does not oblige us to keep it.
While Herlandia’s radicals went too far, we can surely do better than those timorous compromisers back on New Terra or Florentina, making timid, minuscule changes by consensus only. For instance, without eliminating male feistiness entirely, we can channel it to certain narrow seasons, as in rutting animals like deer and elk. Other inconvenient or dangerous traits can be quarantined, isolated, so our daughters need no longer face them year-round, day in, day out.
Boldness and insight are needed for this endeavor, as well as compassion for the inevitable struggles our descendants shall have to endure.
7
The sun was low when Maia finished helping the big woman load her buckboard. On their way out of town, they paused at the transients’ hostel, where Maia ran inside to s
tore her duffel. Not that it held much of value. Just clothes and a few mementos, including a book of ephemerides Leie had given her as a birthday present. There was also a small, blackened lump of stone. A gift from Old Coot Bennett—before the light left his rheumy eyes—which he had sworn was a true meteorite. Maia didn’t want to leave her possessions, but it made no sense to haul them to Jopland Hold and back for just one night. Stuffing a few items into her jacket pockets, she took a receipt from the Musseli attendant and hurried to catch her ride.
Heavily laden, the horse-drawn wagon moved slowly along the narrow dirt road north of town, jostling over ruts and bumps left untended since the storms of summer. Floating dust tickled the membranes under Maia’s eyelids, causing them to flutter intermittently, dimming vision. “Valley council keeps puttin’ off fixin’ these paths,” the wagon’s owner complained. “The biddies say there’s no money, but always seem to find it b’fore harvest time! Farmers run everything here, virgie. Remember that, an’ you’ll get by.”
Perkinite farmers, Maia added silently. The sect appealed to smaller clans, not long risen above the status of lowly vars. Even the wealthiest clans in Long Valley were modest by coastal standards, unless they were cadet branches of more-extended hives elsewhere.
Maia’s benefactor came from such a branch. She was a Lerner. Maia knew the family, whose scattered offshoots had wedged holdings throughout Eastern Continent, wherever there were ore deposits too meager to attract big mining concerns, and communities with needs a smalltime forging operation could fill. Hard experience had taught Lerner Clan the limits of their talents. Whenever one of their operations grew large enough to draw competition, they would always sell out and move on.
It’s a niche, though, Maia supposed. Few vars established a nameline of their own, let alone one so numerous. She was in no position to judge.
Calma Lerner seemed friendly enough. A woman with man-sized hands nearly as hard as the gritty, reddish ingots Maia had helped load, brought on today’s train from far-off Grange Head. The alloys would be mixed with local iron, using household recipes passed down from mother to daughter for generations, to make unpretentious Lerner Steel.
Back in Port Sanger, the local Lerners did not endure the prairie sun, and so were much paler. Yet, there was a sense of familiarity, as if she and Calma ought to be gossiping about acquaintances they had in common. Of course they had none. The familiarity went one way. Nor would Calma likely recall Maia if they met again. People tended not to bother memorizing, or even much noticing, a face with just one owner.
Still, as tawny countryside rolled slowly by, the older woman began showing some of her clan’s well-known affability, letting herself be drawn out about life on this great, flat, alluvial plain. Calma and her family worked the earth out north of Holly Lock, where faulting had brought to surface a rare fold of bedrock containing a promising mix of elements. Back when settlement at this end of the valley was still new, three young cadets from an established Lerner hold had arrived from the coast to work those narrow seams and set up smithies. Across four generations there had been hard times and some years of prosperity. There were now six adults in the midget offshoot clan, and four clone daughters of various ages. That did not count one summerling boy, plus a dozen or so transient var employees.
When she discovered that Maia’s education included a tape course in chemistry, Calma began warming to her, growing effusive about the challenges and delights of metallurgy on the frontier—shaping and transforming the raw stuff of the planet to satisfy human needs. “You can’t imagine the satisfaction,” she said, waving broad arms toward the horizon, where the setting sun seemed to set fire to a sea of grain. “There’s great opportunities out here for a youngster with the right hardworkin’ attitude. Yes. Fine opportunities indeed.”
Out of courtesy, and because she had taken a liking to her companion, Maia refrained from laughing aloud. Some dead ends weren’t hard to spot, and poor Calma was describing a real loser. “I’ll think about it,” Maia replied carefully, concealing amusement.
With a sudden pang, she realized she had been filing away the Lerner clone’s words. Storing them with the habitual intention of repeating them later … for Leie. She couldn’t help it. Patterns of a lifetime die hard. Sometimes harder than frail human beings.
“You’d think they already had enough wine for a funeral,” she recalled complaining to her twin one winter when they were four, as they labored at a ratcheted crank, operating pulleys to descend into a pit of stone. “Are they gonna have us goin’ up and down all night?”
“Could be,” Leie had replied breathlessly, her voice echoing down the narrow dumbwaiter shaft. Clicking softly, the winch marked each centimeter of descent like the beating of a clock. “There was glory frost on the sills this morning an’ you know that puts ’em in a party mood. I’m bettin’ the Lamais have more in mind than a ceremony to mulch three grandmas.”
Maia recalled wincing at the sarcastic image. Although Lamais were cool toward their var-daughters, they tended to mellow with age, even going as far as showing real affection late in life. Two of the departed grannies had almost been nice. Besides, it was wrong to speak ill of the dead. They say Stratos reuses all the atoms we give back to her, and each piece of us goes on to help new life.
Abstract solace had seemed pallid that day, after Maia’s first direct contact with death. The cramped elevator car had felt stifling, rocking unpleasantly as they turned the crank. Their lanterns set the stone walls glittering where moisture leaked from the poorly caulked kitchens above, and echoes of their heavy breathing had fluttered like trapped souls against the walls of the pit. When the wooden box hit bottom, they stepped out with relief. In one direction, sealed bins contained enough grains and emergency supplies to withstand a siege. Tier upon tier of shelving held kegs and glittering rows of wax-dipped bottles.
Carrying a hand-scrawled list, Leie sauntered toward the wine racks to fetch the vintages they had been sent for. Knowing her sister wouldn’t mind a brief desertion, Maia had walked down another narrow aisle, using her lantern to play light across a stone portal enclosing a door made lavishly of reinforced steel.
The surrounding rock was a maze of deep cuts and grooves. Some incisions were twisty, others straight and wide enough to slip a blade inside. A few knobs would depress a little if you pushed, emitting enticing clicks, hinting at some hidden mechanism.
The one time she had asked a Lamai about the door, Maia had received a slap that left her ears ringing. Leie used to fantasize about what mysterious riches lay beyond, while Maia was seized by the puzzle itself. Smuggling paper and pencil to trace the outlines, she would spend hours contemplating combinations and secret codes. It had to be a tough one, since the Lamai blithely sent unsupervised varlings to the cellar, on errands.
On that day, after finishing loading bottles aboard the dumbwaiter, Leie had come alongside to put an arm around Maia’s shoulder. “Don’t let the vrilly jigsaw get you down. Maybe we can sneak a hydraulic jack down here, one smuggy piece at a time. Bam! No more mystery!”
“It’s not that,” Maia had answered, shaking her head despondently. “I was just thinking about those old women, those grandmas. We knew ’em. They were always around while we were little, like the sun an’ air. Now they’re just lying in the chapel, all stiff and …” She shivered. The funeral had been their first to attend, as four-year-olds. “And all those others in the first row, lookin’ like they knew it was gonna be their turn soon.”
Full-blood Lamais normally lived a ripe twenty-eight or twenty-nine Stratoin years. When one of them went, however, a whole “class” tended to follow within weeks. No one expected this to be the last funeral of the season, or of the month.
“I know,” Leie replied in a voice gone unusually reflective. “It scared me, too.”
Maia had rested her head against her sister’s, comforted by knowing someone understood the questions troubling her soul.
On their way back up the dank el
evator shaft, Leie had tried to lighten the mood by relating some gossip picked up that morning from another town varling. It seemed several younger sisters of Saxton Clan had started a ruckus near the harbor, harassing sailors until, in desperation, the men called the Guardia and—
A covey of spiny-fringed pou birds erupted across the road, causing the sash-horses to neigh and prance while Calma Lerner pulled the reins, speaking to soothe the frightened beasts. The birds vanished into a cane brake, pursued by a clutch of pale foxes.
Maia blinked, holding her breath for several seconds. The flood of memory had briefly seemed more vivid than the dusty present. Perhaps the rocking wooden bench seat reminded her of the creaking dumbwaiter. Or some other subconscious cue, a smell, or glitter in the twilight, had triggered the unsought fit of retrospection.
Funny. Now that her train of thought was broken, Maia couldn’t recall what choice bit of hearsay Leie had shared with her that day, while the two of them hung suspended between cellar and scullery. Only that she had guffawed, covering her mouth to keep her squeals from echoing throughout the house. Her sides had hurt for hours afterward, both from laughter and the effort of suppressing it, and Leie had joined in, giggling, barely able to hold the crank still. A wine bottle tipped over, cracking and dribbling red liquid across the wooden floor. The crimson pool had spread and found its way through wooden slats to audibly splatter, after a brief delay, into the tomblike cellar far below.
Why don’t you leave me alone? Maia thought plaintively, shaking her head and fighting tears. Memory wasn’t what she wanted or needed, right now. Poignancy was a bitter tang in her mouth and eyes.
Yet it was a mixed thing. While renewed mourning hurt, the sweetness of that recollected laughter seemed to suffuse a deeper part of her, permeating the wound with a sad pleasure, a tryst solace. Against her will, Maia found herself wearing a faint smile.