special farms, like contented cows, she reached her limit. Maia threw the book across the room and went into a flurry of exercise, doing pushups and situps until pounding sounds of pulse and breath drowned out all remnants of the author’s hateful voice.
Dinner came and went. Darkness fell. This time, she tried to be ready just before midnight, lying on her back with eyes closed. When the clicking started, she listened carefully for the first ten seconds, and tried to note if there was a pattern. It followed a rhythm, all right, made of repeated snapping sounds interspersed with pauses one, two, or more beats in duration.
Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. It sounded like no code she had ever heard. There were no obvious spaces that might go between words, for example. Was there any reason for the clicking to happen at the same time each night?
It might just be a faulty timepiece in one of the great halls, or something equally mundane.
Sleep came without any resolution. She dreamed of brasswork clocks, ticking with the smooth, just rhythms of natural law.
The third book was even riper than the prior two—a romance about life in the old Homino-Stellar Phylum, before Lysos and the Founders set forth across the galaxy to forge a new destiny. Such accounts, dealing with an archaic, obsolete way of life, ought to be fascinating and instructive. But Maia had read widely in the genre as a four-year-old, and been disappointed.
Like so many others, this tale was set on Florentina, the only Phylum world familiar to most schoolgirls, since that was where the Founders’ expedition began. The story even featured a cameo appearance by Perseph, a chief aide to Lysos. But for the most part, the exodus was seen in glimpses, being planned offstage. Meanwhile, the poor heroine, a sort of everywoman of Florentina, suffered the trials of living in a patriarchal society, where men were so numerous and primitive that life could only have been a kind of hell.
“I did not mean to encourage him!” Rabaka cried, covering the left side of her face so that her husband would not see the bruises. “I only smiled because—”
“You SMILED at a strange man?” he roared at her. “Have you lost your mind? We men will seize any gesture, any imaginable cue as a sign of willingness! No wonder he followed you, and pushed you into the alley to have his way.”
“But I fought. … He did not succeed—”
“No matter. Now I shall have to kill him!”
“No, please …”
“Are you DEFENDING him, then?” Rath demanded, his eyes filling with flame. “Perhaps you would prefer him? Perhaps you feel trapped with me in this small house, bound together by our vows for eternity?”
“No, Rath,” Rabaka pleaded. “I just don’t want you to risk—”
But it was already too late to stem his rush of anger. Rath was already reaching for the punishment strap that hung upon the wall. …
Maia could only take it half a chapter at a time. The writing was execrable, but that wasn’t what made her stomach queasy. The incessant violence repulsed her.
If the point was to show how different another society could be, the book was successful, in a gut-churning way. On Stratos, it was virtually unheard-of for a man to lift his hand against a woman. The Founders had laid an aversion at the chromosome level, which was reinforced from one generation to the next. Summer matings were a man’s only chance to pass on his genes, and clan mothers had long memories when the time came to send out invitations during aurora season.
On Florentina, though, there had been a different arrangement.
Of course she had no way of knowing how accurate the depiction was, of Old Order life on a Phylum world. Maia suspected just a little authorial exaggeration. There might have been specific cases like the one described, but if things were this bad for all women, all the time, they surely would have poisoned their husbands and sons long before gene-molding came along with alternate solutions.
Still, it was enough to give a girl religion again.
There were no majestic zoor-floaters to watch as night fell, though several birds fluttered past, pausing on their way to roost long enough to taunt her, squawking at this silly, flightless human, crammed within her cleft of stone.
Maia felt too agitated to try using the sextant. She climbed back down, fell asleep early, and had strange dreams most of the night. Dreams of escape. Dreams of running. Dreams of ambivalence. Of wanting/not wanting the company of someone for the rest of her life. Leie? Clone-daughters? A
Later, when she clawed her way, moaning, out of a dream about being buried alive, Maia awakened to find herself tangled in the rough, heavy drapes she used for blankets, forced to struggle just to extricate herself.
The narrow window showed a sliver of the constellation Anvil, so the night was more than half over.
She had saved for last what seemed the best book of the four. It was printed on good paper and came with the imprint of a Horn City publishing company. “A literary classic,” proclaimed the flashing microadvert on its binding, when turned to the light. On the copyright page, Maia read that the novel was over a hundred years old. She had never heard of it, but that came as no surprise. Lamatia Hold was fanatic in preferring to teach its var- daughters practical skills over the arts.
Certainly the writing was better than any of the other books. Unlike the historical fantasy, or the var-trash romance, it was set in the Stratos of everyday life. The story opened with a young woman on a voyage, accompanied by a fellow cloneling her own age. They were carrying commercial contracts from town to town, arranging deals, making money for their faraway hold and clan. The writer delightfully conveyed many hassles of life on the road, dealing with bureaucrats and senior mothers who, as broad and amusing caricatures, brought to Maia’s lips her first faint smile in a long time. Below these picaresque encounters, the author laid a current of underlying tension. Things were not as they seemed with the two protagonists. Maia discovered their secret early in chapter three.
The pair weren’t clonelings at all. Their “clan” was a fiction. They were just a couple of vars. Twins…
Maia blinked, startled to the quick.
She stared at the page, outrage turning swiftly to embarrassment.
