Glory Season

amorous than humans, casting glittering, ecstatic wavefronts to eerie rhythms. Whole swatches of forest came alight, then winked off in unison. I wonder if there’s a pattern, Maia thought, fascinated by the spectacle of countless individual insects, each reacting only to its nearest neighbors, combining in a life- show of tantalizing intricacy, like the constellations that had always drawn her, or a labyrinthine puzzle…

As she reached the corner of the house, an ebb in the breeze caused the quiet to deepen, abruptly revealing a low murmur of voices.

“… you don’t know what she said to the Pessies?”

“That’s what scares me! I got no clue what she was at them about. But they reversed charges, so it must’ve been more’n a nuisance call. We already heard from cousins on the coast about a police agent nosing around. This stinks. You people promised discretion, complete discretion!”

The fire bugs were forgotten. Maia slipped into shadows and peered toward the rear veranda. She could make out the second speaker. It was the mother Jopland, or one roughly the same age. The other person lay hidden, but when she laughed, Maia felt a shock of recognition.

“I doubt she was calling about our little secret. I know the wench, and I’ll bet tit-squirrels to lugars that she’s no agent. Couldn’t figure her way out of a gunnysack, that one.”

Thank you, Tizbe, Maia thought with a chill. All of a sudden things seemed to make sense. No wonder the Joplands had a successful wooing party, after such a dismal start! While she had been talking to authorities in Caria, Tizbe must have arrived carrying bottles brimming with distilled summer. What wouldn’t the Joplands pay to have their slow population decline turned around in a simple, efficient way? All the more so for devout Perkinites, who didn’t even like men.

They were planning to give up their summer-banishment rule. The valley councils were going to build sanctuaries, like along the coast. But with Tizbe’s powder there’d be no need to compromise their radical doctrine.

Maia had wondered if there was a practical side to the drug. Now she had her answer.

I was bothered by incidents in Lanargh, and the train collision in Clay Town. But those happened because people were fooling around with the stuff, because it’s new. If it’s used carefully, though, to help make winter sparking easier, where’s the harm? I didn’t hear any of the men tonight crying out in misery.

Naturally, the Perkinites’ long-range goal was unattainable. Perkies were crazy to dream, of making men as rare as jacar trees, drug or no drug. Meanwhile, though, if they found a short-term method for having their way in this valley, so what? Even conservative clans like Lamatia tried to stimulate their male guests during winter, with drink and light shows designed to mimic summer’s aurorae. Was this powder fundamentally different?

Maia was tempted to walk up and join the conversation, just to catch the look on Tizbe Beller’s face. Perhaps, after getting over her surprise, Tizbe would be willing to explain, woman to woman, why they were going to such lengths, or why Caria City should give a damn.

The temptation vanished when Maia’s former assistant spoke again.

“Don’t worry about our little var informer. I’ll see to things. It’ll all be taken care of long before she ever makes it back to Grange Head.”

A sinking sensation yawned in Maia’s gut. She backed around the corner of the house as it began dawning on her just how much trouble she was in.

Bleeders! I don’t know anybody. Leie’s gone. And I’m in it now, right up to my neck!

One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.

Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.

Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.

Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.

Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.

Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.

Until now, that is. With the tools of creation in our hands, shall we not give our descendants choice? Options? The best of both worlds?

Let us equip them to select their own path between predictability and opportunity. Let them be prepared to deal with both sameness and surprise.

8

Calma had been right. You could zero in on Lerner Hold by sense of smell alone.

That was fortunate. Maia could tell north by the positions of the stars, seen through a gathering overcast. But compass directions are useless when you have no map or knowledge of the territory. Only Iris, the smallest moon, lit Maia’s path as she followed a rutted trail over wavelike prairie knolls until one branch turned and dropped abruptly into a maze of water-cut ravines. A tangy, metallic odor seemed to come from that direction, so with a pounding heart she took the turn.

Plunging into the canyon, Maia had to feel her way at first, her fingers tracing a thick layer of living topsoil that soon gave way to hard laminations of clay. Maia found herself descending a series of hellish rents in the ground, as if the skin of Stratos lay raked open by gigantic claws.

Her pupils adapted, splitting slitwise to let in a maximum of light. Succeeding beds of clay and limestone alternately shone or glittered or simply drank whatever moonbeams reached this deep into the canyon. It all depended, Maia supposed, on what mix of tiny sea creatures had fallen to the ocean bottom during whatever long-ago sedimentary ages laid these beds. Soon even the sinuous bands gave way to hard native rock, twisted and tortured by continental movements that had taken place before protohumans walked on faraway Earth. Interchanging patterns of light and dark stone reminded her of those towering “castle” pillars she had seen in the distance from the railway—rocky remnants of once proud mountains that used to stand here, but had since been all but ground away by rainstorms and rivers and time.

Time was one thing Maia didn’t figure she had a wealth of. Did Tizbe intend to wait till morning to spring a trap on her? Or would the young Beller come during the night to the room Maia had been given, accompanied by a dozen well-muscled Jopland fems? After overhearing those sinister words in the farmyard, Maia had chosen not to stay and find out.

Escaping Jopland Hold was easy enough. Stepping quietly to avoid alerting the dogs, she had crept down to the nearby stream that ran beside the orchard, and then sloshed a kilometer or so through icy water with her shoes tied together, hanging from her neck, until the mansion was well out of sight. Next she had to spend several minutes rubbing sensation back into her half-frozen feet before lacing up again. Shivering, Maia then spent an hour trampling a path across successive wheat fields until at last finding the road.