Glory Season

but ordinary stone and wood and iron, yet it had been hard enough to stymie a pair of bright four-year-olds filled with curiosity and determination. What were the Lamai mothers hiding behind the carven cellar wall, inset with chiseled stars and twining snakes? Unlike the puzzle now before her, that one had been no massive work of unparalleled craftsmanship, but the principle was clearly the same. A combination lock. One in which the number of possible arrangements of objects far exceeded any chance of random guessing. One whose correct answer must remain unforgettable, intuitively obvious to the initiated, and forever obscure to outsiders.

Shared context. That was the key. Simple memory proved unreliable over generations. But one thing you could count on. If you established a clan—your distant great-great-granddaughters would think a lot like you, with similar upbringing and near-identical brains. What had been forgotten, they would recover by re-creating your thought processes.

That insight had opened the way, after Maia failed in her first attempts in the Lamatia Hold wine cellar, and Leie’s efforts with a small hydraulic jack threatened to break the mechanism, rather than persuade it. Even Leie had agreed that curiosity wasn’t worth the kind of punishment that would bring on. So Maia had reconsidered the problem, this time trying to think like a Lamai. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

She had grown up surrounded by Lamai mothers, aunts, half sisters, knowing the patterns they exhibited at each phase of life. The cautious enthusiasm of late three-year-olds, for instance, which quickly took cover behind a cynical mask by the time each towheaded girl turned four. A romantic outburst in adolescence, followed by withdrawal and withering contempt for anything or anyone non-Lamai—a disdain that intensified, the more worthy any outsider seemed. And finally, in late middle-age, a mellowing, a relaxation of the armor, just enough for the ruling age-group to make alliances and deal successfully with the outer world. The first young Lamai var, the founder, must have been lucky, or very clever, to reach that age of tact all by herself. From then on, matters grew easier as each generation fine-tuned the art of being that continuous single entity, Lamatia.

Pondering the problem, Maia had realized she knew nothing of how individual Lamais felt, deep within. Mentally squinting, she pictured a Lamai sister looking in the mirror and using words like integrity… honor… dignity. They did not see themselves as mean, capricious, or spiteful. Rather, they viewed others as inherently unreliable, dangerous.

Fear. That was the key! Maia had not been able to speak after that flash of intuition, on realizing what drove her mother clan.

It was more than fear. A type of dread that no amount of wealth or security could wipe out, because it was so woven into the personality matrix of the type. The genetic luck of the draw, reinforced by an upbringing in which self perpetually reinforced self, compounding and augmenting over and over again.

It was no crippling terror, or else the offshoots of that one var could never have turned themselves into a nation.

Rather, Lamatia rationalized it, used it as a motivator, as a driving force. Lamais weren’t happy people. But they were successful. They even raised more than their share of successful summer progeny.

There are worse, Maia recalled thinking on the day she had had that insight, while turning a crank to lower the dumbwaiter into that crypt below the kitchens. Who am I to judge what works?

Her mind afroth with possibilities, Maia had approached the wall with new concepts in mind. Lamais aren’t logical, though they pretend to be. I’ve been trying to solve the puzzle rationally, as a series of orderly symbols, but I’ll bet it’s a sequence based on emotion!

That day (it felt like ages ago), she had lifted her lantern to scan familiar patterns of stone figures. Stars and snakes, dragons and upturned bowls. The symbol for Man. The symbol for Woman. The emblem of Death.

Picture yourself standing here with an errand to perform, Maia thought. You’re a confident, busy, older Lamai. High-class daughter of a noble clan. Proud, dignified, impatient.

Now add one more ingredient, underneath it all. A hidden layer of jibbering, terror. …

One long year later, and a quarter of the way around the globe, Maia tried the same exercise, attempting to put herself in the shoes of another type of person. The kind who might have left a complex jigsaw of hexagonal plates upon a metal wall. An enigma standing between two desperate survivors and their only hope of escaping a death trap.

“This place is old,” she told Brod in a soft voice.

“Old?” He laughed. “It was a different world! You’ve seen the ruins. This whole archipelago was filled with sanctuaries, bigger than any known today. It must’ve been the focus, the very center of the Great Defense. It might even have been the one place in all of Stratos history where men had any real say in goings on … till those King fanatics got big heads and ruined it all.”

Maia nodded. “A whole region, run by men.”

“Partly. Until the banishment. I know, it’s hard to imagine. I guess that’s how the Church and Council were able to suppress even the memory.”

Brod was making sense. Even with the evidence all around her, Maia had trouble with the concept. Oh, there was no denying that males could be quite intelligent, but planning further than a single human lifespan was supposedly beyond even their brightest leaders. Yet, here in front of her lay a counterexample.

“In that case, this puzzle was designed to be solved by men, perhaps with the specific purpose of keeping women out.”

Brod rubbed his jaw. “Maybe so. Anyway, standing around staring won’t get us much. Let’s see what happens if I push one of these hexagon slabs.”

Maia had already stroked the metal surface, which was curiously cool and smooth to the touch, but she hadn’t yet tried moving anything, preferring to evaluate first. She almost spoke up, then stopped. Differences in personality… one providing what the other lacks. It’s a weakness in the clan system, where the same type just amplifies itself. Maia no longer felt a heretical thrill, pondering thoughts critical of Lysos, Mother of All.

Brod tried pushing one hexagonal plate with a circle design etched upon it, standing by itself on an open patch of metal wall. Direct pressure achieved nothing, but a shear force, along the plane of the wall, caused movement! The piece seemed to glide as if being slid edgewise through an incredibly viscous fluid. When Brod let go, Maia expected it to stop, but it kept going in the same direction for several more seconds before slowing and finally coming to rest. Then, as she watched in surprise, the hexagon began sliding backward, in the exact opposite direction, retracing its path unhurriedly until at last settling precisely where Brod had first found it.

“Huh!” the young man commented. “Hard to imagine accomplishing a lot that way.” He experimented with more plates, and found that about a third of them would move, but only directly along one of six directions perpendicular to the hexagonal plate-edges. There was no sign of any sort of rail system holding the slabs in track, so the queer behavior must be due to some mechanism behind the plane of the wall itself, utilizing, forces beyond anything Maia had been taught as physics.

It’s not magic, she told herself while Brod pushed away, trying variations. Maia experienced a shiver, and knew that it wasn’t due to awe or superstitious fear, but something akin to jealousy. The gliding interplay of matter and motion was achingly beautiful to behold. She hungered to grasp how and why it worked.

Renna says the savants in Caria still know about such powers, but won’t release anything that might “destabilize a pastoral culture.”

If this was a more benign use of the same power that had fried Grimké, and many other islands in this chain, Maia could well understand why Lysos and the Founders chose such a path. Perhaps they were right, on some grand, sociological scale. Maybe the hunger she felt within was immature, wrongheaded, a dangerous, flaming curiosity like the madness Renna had spoken of—the sort that drove what he had called a “scientific age.”

Maia recalled the wistful longing in Renna’s eyes as he recalled such times, which he had said were rare among human epochs. She experienced a pang deep inside, envying what she had missed and would never know.