There were cries of joyful reunion as Baltha galloped to greet her friends. Thalla 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. Thalla, 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 clanhold 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 philosoph-professor on Florentina, speaking abstractly about things she would later put into practice.
As our procession arrived from the spaceport, all seemed peaceful and orderly, yet I felt sure those majestic city walls weren’t built just for decoration. They quite effectively demark outside from inside. They defend.
Traffic flowed beneath Athena’s outstretched caduceus—its twined snakes representing coiled DNA. To avoid attracting notice, our cavalry escort peeled off at that point while my guides and I went on by car. My landing isn’t secret, but has been downplayed. As on most deliberately pastoral worlds, competing news media are banned as unwholesome. The council’s carefully censored broadcasts somehow portray renewed contact with the Phylum as a minor event, yet one also tinged with dire threat.
Radio eavesdropping could never tell me what the average woman-on-the-street thinks. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to find out.
Envisioning life on a planet of clones, I couldn’t help picturing phalanx after phalanx of uniform faces … swarms of identical, blank-eyed bipeds moving in silent, coordinated lockstep. A caricature of humans-as-ants, or humans-as-bees.
I should have known better. Bustling crowds thronged the portals, sidewalks, and bridges of Caria, arguing, gawking, haggling, and laughing as on any hominid world. Only now and then did I make out an evident pair, or trio, or quintet of clones, and even within such groups the sisters varied by age and dress. Statistically, most of the women I glimpsed must have been members of some parthenogenetic clan. Still, people are not bees, and no human city will ever be a hive. My blurred first impression showed a jumble of types, tall and short, broad and thin, all colors … hardly a stereotype of homogeneity.
Except for the near absence of males, that is. I saw some young boys playing, and a scattering of old fellows wearing the green armbands of “retirees.” But, it being summer, mature men were scarcer than albinos at high noon, and twice as conspicuous. When I caught sight of one, he seemed out of place, self-conscious of his height, stepping aside to make way for surging clusters of bustling womankind. I sensed that, like me, he was here as a guest, and knew it.
This city was not built by, or for, our kind.
The classical lines of Caria’s public buildings hearken to ancient Earth, with broad stairways and sculpted fountains where travelers refresh themselves and water their beasts. The clear preference for foot and hoof over wheeled traffic reminds me of civic planning on Dido, where motorcars and lorries are funneled to their destinations out of sight, leaving the main avenues to more placid rhythms. Following one hidden guideway, our handmade auto swept by the squat apartment blocks and bustling markets of a crowded quarter Iolanthe called “Vartown,” then cruised upslope behind more elegant, castlelike structures with gardens and polished turrets, each flying the heraldic banner of some noble lineage.
My escorts paused briefly at the inner palisade which guards the acropolis. There, I got my first close look at lugars, white-furred creatures descended from Vegan Ur-Apes, hauling stone blocks under the guidance of a patient woman handler. Lysos supposedly designed lugars to overcome one argument for having sons—the occasional need for raw physical strength. Another solution, robots, would have required a perpetual industrial base, dangerous to the founders’ program. So, typically, they came up with something self-sustaining, instead.
Watching the lugars heft huge slabs, I couldn’t help feeling puny in comparison—which may have been another part of the plan.
I am not here to judge Stratoins for choosing a pastoral solution to the human equation. All paths have their costs. My order requires that a peripatetic appreciate all he or she sees, on any Phylum world. “Appreciate” in the formal sense of the word. The rules don’t say I must approve.
Caria’s builders used the central plateau’s natural contours to lay out temples and theaters, courts, schools, and athletic arenas—all described in proud detail by my ardent guides. Wooded lanes accompanied the central boulevard past imposing compounds—the Equilibrium Authority, and the stately University—until at last we drew near a pair of marble citadels with high, columned porticos. The twin hearts of Caria. The Great Library on the left, and to the right, the main Temple dedicated to Stratos Mother.
… And Lysos is her prophet …
The drive had achieved its clear purpose. Their capital is a showpiece worthy of any world. I was impressed, and must be very sure to show it.
15
The Musseli engineer packed her passengers away from the controls, near the body-warm stacks of power cells that made the locomotive go. Maia’s nose twitched at a familiar scent of coal dust, rising from the reserve fuel bin, yet she felt too excited to let it perturb her. Freedom was a stronger redolence, affecting her like intoxication. Her heart sped as she leaned past the battery casing, prying open a narrow, dusty window to let rushing air play across her face.
The prairie raced by, illuminated by pearly, suffused light from newly risen Durga. There were gullies and ravines, fenceposts and ragged battalions of haystacks, and occasional pocket forests where the porous terrain stored enough rainwater to sustain native trees. Maia had come to hate these high plains, yet now, with escape at last credible, the land seemed to whisper its own side of the story, reaching out to persuade her with stark beauty.
Summer storms have their way with me. Wind and blazing sun desiccate my sodden soil. In winter, ice splits the scattered pebbles down to dust. The poor loam leaks and seeps. I bleed.
And what the wind and sun and ice leave, humans break with steel plows, or bake into bricks, or turn into golden grain which they ship across the sea.
Where are my prancing lingaroos? The grazing pantotheres, or nimble coil-boks, who used to roam my p
lain in numbers vast? They could not compete with cattle and mice. Or, if they could, humans intervened, improving strains they chose to use. New hooves mark my trails, while the old vanish into zoos.
No matter. Let invaders displace native creatures, who displaced others before them. Let my soil turn to rock, to sand, to soil once again. What difference do changes make, sifted by the sieve of time?
I wait, I abide, with the patience of stone.
Renna, and then Kiel, urged Maia to stretch out where a half-dozen other women lay together like swaddled cordwood, all facing the same way for lack of room to turn. Not that discomfort kept any of them awake. In Thalla’s words, these weren’t pampered clonelings, to be irked by a mattress-covered pea. Their synchronized r-r-ronn of breathing soon drowned the gentle whine of the electric motors.
“No, thanks,” Maia told her friends. “I couldn’t sleep. Not now. Not yet.”
Kiel only nodded, settling into a niche near the brake box to doze sitting up. Renna, too, reached his limit. After badgering the poor, confused engineer with questions for just half an hour, he uncharacteristically let that suffice, and collapsed onto the blankets that had been thrown for his benefit over the widest space—a deck plate covering the thrumming engine gearbox. Its lullaby soon had him snoring with the best of them.
Maia unbuckled her sextant and sighted a few familiar stars. Although fatigue and the car’s vibration made it a rough fix, she was able to verify they were heading in the right direction. That didn’t entirely preclude the possibility of treachery—Am I growing cynical with age? she pondered dryly—but it felt reassuring to know that each passing second brought them closer to the sea. Maia quashed her misgivings. Kiel and the others know more than I do, and they seem confident enough.
Maia wasn’t the only insomniac keeping the engineer silent company. Baltha stood watch by the portside window, caressing her crowbar like a short-style trepp bill, as if eager to have just one whack at an enemy before making good their escape. Once, the rugged woman exchanged a long, enigmatic look with Maia. For the most part, each kept territorially to her own pane of cool glass, Baltha peering ahead and sniffing for danger, while Maia pretended to do her part, keeping lookout on the starboard side.
Not that bare eyes would do much good in the dark. At this speed, we’d barely see a thing before we hit it.
Moon-glint reflections off the arrow-straight rails diffracted hypnotically past her heavy, drooping eyelids. Maia let them close—just for a minute or two. There was no arresting of images, however. She continued picturing the locomotive, rushing across a chimeric rendition of the steppe, at first just like the moonlit plain outside, then increasingly the landscape of a dream. The gentle, frozen, prairie undulations began to move, to roll like ocean waves lapping either side of the steel-steady rails.
Fey certainty struck Maia. Something lay ahead, just out of sight. Premonition manifested as a vivid, prescient image, of this hurtling engine bound unalterably toward collision with a towering pile of rocks, recently lain across the tracks by a grinning Tizbe Beller.
“Run if you like,” her former tormentor crooned menacingly, like a storybook witch. “Did you honestly think you could escape the power of great clans, if they really want to stop you?”
Maia moaned, unable to move or waken. The phantom barricade loomed, graphic and frightening. Then, moments before impact, the stones making up the wall transformed. In a stretched instant, they metamorphosed into glistening eggs, which cracked open, releasing giant, pale birds. The birds spread vast wings and bound free of their dissolving shards, exhaling fire, sailing unconstrained to join their brethren, the glittering stars.
In her dream, Maia felt no relief to have them go. Rather, waves of desolate loneliness hit her, like a pang.
How come? she wondered. A reproving plaint from childhood. How come they get to fly … while I must stay behind?
Morning broke while Maia slept, curled in a blanket that steamed when struck by the newly risen sun. Renna gently shook her shoulder, and put a hot cup of tcha between her hands. Squinting at his open, unguarded face, Maia smiled gratefully.
“I think we’re going to make it!” the man commented with a tense confidence Maia found endearing. She would have been hurt if he said it to humor her. But rather, it felt as if she were the adult, charmed and indulgently warmed by his naïve optimism. Maia had no idea how old Renna was, but she doubted the man would ever outgrow his sunny, mad enthusiasm for new things.
Breakfast consisted of millet meal and brown sugar, mixed with hot water from the engine’s auxiliary boiler. The fugitive train did not stop, or even slow, while they ate. Grasslands dotted with grazing herds swept by. Now and then, an unknowing cowhand lifted her arm to wave at the passing locomotive.
Between checks on her instruments, the Musseli driver told Maia and the others what she had heard yesterday, before coming to the rendezvous. There had indeed been fighting at the prison-sanctuary, the same night Maia and Renna saw aircraft cross the sky. Planetary Authority agents, using surprise to redress their small numbers, landed on the stony tower, seizing the erstwhile jail. Too late to do us much good, Maia thought sardonically. Except by distracting the Perkies. That could improve our chances a bit.
The next day, local militias had been called up throughout Long Valley. Matriarchs of the senior farming clans vowed “to defend local sovereignty and our sacred rights against meddling by federal authorities …” Accusations flew in both directions while neither side mentioned anything at all about the Visitor from the stars. In practical terms, there could still be plenty of trouble for the fugitive band, and no likelihood of more help from Caria City forces until they reached the sea.
To make matters worse, the population of the valley grew denser as they neared the coastal range. The locomotive streaked past hamlets and sleepy farming towns, then larger commercial centers and clusters of light manufacturing. Several times they had to slow to gingerly maneuver by heavy-laden hopper cars filled with wheat or yellow corn.
More often, the path seemed to open up like magic before them. At towns, they were nearly always waved on by stationmistresses who, Maia realized, must be part of the conspiracy. Bit by bit, the scope of this enterprise seemed to grow.
Are all the railroad clans involved? They’re not Perkies, but I’d have thought they’d at best stay neutral. It’s got to be pretty damn serious for a hard-nosed bunch like the Musseli to risk customer relations for a cause.
Maia pondered how, once again, she was probably missing the big picture. I used to think this was all about that drug which makes men summery in winter. But that’s just one part of it … not as important as Renna, for instance.
Could it be that he’s just one piece, too? Not a pawn like me, but no king, either. I could get killed without anyone ever taking the time to explain why.
Small surprise there. One advantage of a Lamatian education was that she and her sister hadn’t been raised to expect fairness from the world. “Roll with the blow!” Savant Claire had shouted, hitting Maia over and over with a padded stick during what was supposed to have been varling “combat practice,” a torture session that stretched on and on, until Maia finally learned to fall with the impact, not against it.
How I still hate you, Claire, Maia thought, remembering. But I’m starting to see your point.
The exodus across the plains had a syncopated cadence—long intervals of boredom punctuated by anxious, heart-stopping minutes passing through each town. Nevertheless, all seemed to be going well until just before noon. Then, at a town called Golden Cob, they were met by an unpleasant sight—a lowered customs gate, barring their path. In lieu of the Musseli station master, a squad of tall redheads waited on the platform, all armed and dressed in militia leathers, comparing the engine’s markings with numbers on a clipboard. Maia and the vars ducked out of sight, but despite the engineer’s complaints, the guards-women insisted on inspecting the loco. En masse, they grabbed the ladder frames and proceeded to
climb aboard from both sides.
There followed a stretched moment as two groups of women stared at each other in jittery silence. One guard spotted Renna, opened her mouth to shout.…
A shrill ululation pealed from above. The lead redhead looked up—too late to duck the dull end of Baltha’s crowbar, which caught her along the jaw. From the metal roof, where the lanky southern var had lain, Baltha threw herself upon the close-pressed mass of militia.
Instantly, a free-for-all burst in the close cabin confines. Women screamed and charged. There was no room for fancy action with trepp bills, so both sides forsook polished staves for flailing fists and makeshift cudgels.
At first, Maia and Renna stood frozen at the rear. For all her adventures, Maia’s first battle rocked her back. Her stomach flipped and she heard her heart pounding over the din. Glancing up, she saw Renna’s alien eyes widen impossibly. Sweat prickled and veins stood out. It wasn’t fear she read, but trouble of another sort.
The melee surged toward them. One redhead slugged Thalla’s friend, Kau, knocking the petite var down. When the militiawoman raised her foot to follow through, Renna cried out, “No!” He took a step, fists clenched. Suddenly it was Maia’s turn to yell.
“Get back!” she screamed, diving between Renna and the guard, managing to fling them in opposite directions. A fist rebounded off her right temple, setting both ears ringing. Another blow struck between two ribs, and she retaliated, hitting something soft with an elbow. Ignoring lancing pain, thrashing in the tight press of struggling women, Maia succeeded at last in dragging the fallen Kau out of the fray.
“Take care of her,” she shouted to Renna. “And don’t fight! A man mustn’t!”
While he absorbed that, Maia turned and dove back into the brawl. It was a torrid, grunting struggle, devoid of ritual or courtesy or elegance. Fortunately, it was easy to tell friend from foe, even in the stifling dimness. For one thing, the enemy had bathed today, and smelled much better than her comrades. It was a resentful comparison that lent her the strength to wrestle women much larger and stronger than herself.