Glory Season

everyone to guide their mounts into the shallow watercourse before she spoke.

“We split up here. Riss, Herri, Blene, an’ Kau will go on toward Demeterville, making tracks and confusing the trail. Maia, you’ll go too. The rest’ll wade upstream about two klicks before heading west, then south. We’ll meet sou’west of Clay Town on the seventh, if Lysos guides us.”

Maia stared at the strangers she had been told to accompany, and felt a frisson course her spine. “No,” she said emphatically. “I want to go with Kiel and Thalla.”

Baltha glowered. “You’ll go where you’re told.”

Panic welled and Maia’s chest was tight. It felt like a repetition of her separation from Leie, when they parted in Lanargh for the last time, on separate ships. A certainty overwhelmed her that once out of sight, she would never see her friends again.

“I won’t! Not after all that!” She jerked one hand in the direction of the prison tower that so recently held her in its grip. Maia turned to her friends for support, but they wouldn’t meet her eyes. “The upstream party ought to be small as possible…” Kiel tried to explain. But Maia learned more from the woman’s uneasy demeanor. This was arranged in advance, she realized. They don’t want me along while they escape with their precious alien! A heavy resignation swarmed into Maia’s heart, overwhelming even her burning resentment.

“Maia comes with us.”

It was Renna. Maneuvering his horse next to hers, he went on. “Your plan counts on our pursuers following an easy trail to the larger party, while we others make our getaway. That’s fine for me. Thanks. But not so good for Maia when they catch up.”

“The girl’s just a larva,” Baltha retorted. “They don’t care about her. Probably aren’t even looking for her.”

Renna shook his head. “You want to risk her freedom on a bet like that? Forget it. I won’t let her be taken back to that place.”

Through surging emotion, Maia saw a silent interplay among the women. They had thought of Renna as a commodity, but now he was asserting himself. Men might rank low on the Stratos social ladder, nevertheless they stood higher than most vars. Moreover, most of these vars must have served on ships, at one time or another. It surely influenced matters that Renna had a well-cultivated “captain’s voice.”

Kiel shrugged. Thalla turned and grinned at Maia. “Okay by me. Glad to have you with us, virgie.”

Baltha cursed lowly, accepting the swing of consensus, but not gracefully. The rangy blonde brought her mount over near her friends, who were taking the other route, and leaned over to clasp forearms with them. In a similar manner, Thalla and Kiel embraced Kau. The parties separated then, Baltha carefully swiveling her mount down the center of the current. Taking the rear, Maia and Renna called farewell to their benefactors, who had already begun climbing a thin trail up the next canyon wall. One of them—Maia couldn’t make out who—lifted a hand to wave back, then the four women disappeared around a bend.

“Thank you,” Maia said to Renna softly, as their mounts sloshed slowly along. Her voice still felt thick from that moment of surprise and upset.

“Hey,” the man said with a smile. “We castaways have to hang together, right? Anyway, you seem like a tough pal to have along, if trouble’s ahead.”

Of course he was jesting with her. But only partly, she realized with some surprise. He really did seem glad, even relieved, that she was coming with him.

Traveling single file, they fell into silence, letting the horses pick a careful path along the uneven streambed. Fortunately, they were out of the wind. But the surrounding winter-chilled rocks seemed to suck heat right out of the air. Maia put her hands under her armpits, squeezing the coat tight, exhaling breath that turned into visible fog. Anyway, it was reassuring knowing that each minute put more distance behind them. The escape plan was a risky one, counting on panic and excessive haste on the part of their pursuers. True professionals—like the Sheldon clan of hunters back in Port Sanger—wouldn’t be fooled by so simple a trick. Maia hadn’t heard of tracking skill being much famed among Long Valley’s farmers, but it was still an assumption.

Even if they slipped their immediate pursuers, they remained surrounded by enemies. Few places on Stratos were politically more homogeneous than this upland colony of extremists, with allied Perkinite clans stretching all the way to Grange Head. Once aroused by the news, there would be posses and mobs swarming after them from all directions.

Maia thought she could now see the big picture … how desperate the Perkinites must be. Much more was involved than their radical plan to use a drug to promote winter sparking. The hive matriarchies of Long Valley had become involved in a far more brazen scheme: kidnapping the Interstellar Visitor—Renna—right out of the hands of the council in Caria City. It was a risky endeavor. But how better to reduce, maybe eliminate, the chance of restored contact with the Hominid Phylum?

Nothing would make extreme Perkinites crazier than having the sky open up. Spaceships calling regularly from those old worlds of “animal rut and sexual tyranny.” Worlds where fully half of the inhabitants are men.

Half.

Despite having read those lurid novels, it was hard to picture. What, in the name of Lysos, did a world need with so many extra males? Even if they were quiet and well-behaved most of the time, which she doubted, there were only so many tasks a man could be trusted with! What was there for them to do?

Contact would change Stratos forever, polluting it with alien ideas, alien ways. Despite her hatred of those who had imprisoned her, Maia wondered if they might not have a point.

She found herself reacting tensely again, when Renna maneuvered his mount alongside. But all he had for her was a smile and a question about the name of a species of shrub that clung tenaciously to the canyon walls. Maia answered, guessing it related to a type found at the Orthodox temple in Grange Head. She couldn’t tell him whether it was a purely native life-form or descended from bio-engineered Earth varieties, released by the Founders.

“I’m trying to get an idea how introduced forms were designed to fit in, and how much adaptation took place afterward. You have some pretty sophisticated ecologists at the university, but figures are hardly a substitute for getting out and seeing for yourself.”

Although they were hard to make out in the dim starlight, his features seemed revived from the earlier moodiness. Maia found herself wondering if his eyes would shine strange colors by day, or if his skin, which she had only seen in lantern or moonlight, would turn out to be some weird, exotic shade.

Perhaps it was a mistake to interpret an alien’s facial expressions by past experience, but Renna seemed excited to be here, away from cities and savants and, especially, his prison cell, finally exploring the surface of Stratos itself. It was contagious.

“All told, it seems your Founders were pretty good designers, making clever changes in the humans, plants, and animals they set down here, before fitting them into the ecosystem. They made some mistakes of course. That’s hardly unusual. …”

It felt blasphemous, hearing an outsider say such things. Perkinites and other heretics, were known to criticize some of the choices made by Lysos and the other Founders, but never before had Maia heard anyone speak this way about their competence.

“…Time has erased most of the errors, by extinction or adaptation. It’s been long enough for things to settle down, at least among the lower life-forms.”

“Well, after all, it’s been hundreds of years,” Maia responded.

Renna tilted his head. “Is that how long you think humans have lived on Stratos?”

Maia frowned. “Um… sure. I mean, I don’t remember an exact figure. Does it matter?”

He looked at her in a way she found odd. “I suppose not. Still, that fits with the way your calendars…” Renna shook his head. “Never mind. Say, is that the sextant you told me about? The one you used to correct my latitude figures?”

Maia glanced at her wrist and the little instrument wrapped in its leather case. Renna was being kind again. Her improvements to his coordinates, back in jail, had been minimal. “Would you like to see it?” she asked, unstrapping the sextant and holding it toward him.

He handled it carefully, first using his fingertips to trace the engraved zep’lin design on the brass cover,