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.
A second aspect worried Maia more.
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
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 freight-mistress. With an airy “g’bye-see-you-round!” the blonde traveler was gone. By the time Maia finished, she was telling herself
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.”
“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.”
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 store 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.”
