cars to weigh it down, the engine might reach Grange Head by midday tomorrow—assuming no roadblocks or search parties cut their path. Thalla, Kiel, and the others might be collecting their reward money by dinnertime. Maia figured they’d even provide a good meal and night’s lodging to their virgin mascot, before sending her on her way.
Renna grinned happily, and gave Maia’s shoulder a squeeze, but inwardly she felt herself already putting distance between them, protecting herself from another inevitable, painful goodbye.
Caria, the capital, surrounds and adorns a plateau overlooking where three rivers join the sea. Inhabitants call her “City of Gold,” for the yellow roof tiles of clanholds covering the famed thirteen hills. But I have seen from high orbit a sight more worthy of the name. At dawn, Caria’s walls of crystalline stone catch inclined sunlight, reemitting into space an off-spectrum luminance portrayed on Cy’s panels as an amber halo. It’s a marvel, even to one who has seen float-whales graze on clouds of frothy creill, above and between the metrotowers of Zaminin.
Often, over the last year, I have wished for someone to share such visions with.
Travelers enter Caria through a broad, granite portal, topped by a stately frieze—Athena Polias, ancient protectress of urban dwellers, bearing the sage visage of this colony’s chief founder. Alas, the sculptor failed to catch that sardonic smile I’ve come to know from studying shipboard files on Lysos, when she was a mere philosopher-professor on Florentina, speaking abstractly about things she would later put into practice.
As our procession arrived from the spaceport, all seemed peaceful and orderly, yet I felt sure those majestic city walls weren’t built just for decoration. They quite effectively demark outside from inside. They defend.
Traffic flowed beneath Athena’s outstretched caduceus—its twined snakes representing coiled DNA. To avoid attracting notice, our cavalry escort peeled off at that point while my guides and I went on by car. My landing isn’t secret, but has been downplayed. As on most deliberately pastoral worlds, competing news media are banned as unwholesome. The council’s carefully censored broadcasts somehow portray renewed contact with the Phylum as a minor event, yet one also tinged with dire threat.
Radio eavesdropping could never tell me what the average woman-on-the-street thinks. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to find out.
Envisioning life on a planet of clones, I couldn’t help picturing phalanx after phalanx of uniform faces… swarms of identical, blank-eyed bipeds moving in silent, coordinated lockstep. A caricature of humans-as-ants, or humans-as-bees.
I should have known better. Bustling crowds thronged the portals, sidewalks, and bridges of Caria, arguing, gawking, haggling, and laughing as on any hominid world. Only now and then did I make out an evident pair, or trio, or quintet of clones, and even within such groups the sisters varied by age and dress. Statistically, most of the women I glimpsed must have been members of some parthenogenetic clan. Still, people are not bees, and no human city will ever be a hive. My blurred first impression showed a jumble of types, tall and short, broad and thin, all colors… hardly a stereotype of homogeneity.
Except for the near absence of males, that is. I saw some young boys playing, and a scattering of old fellows wearing the green armbands of “retirees.” But, it being summer, mature men were scarcer than albinos at high noon, and twice as conspicuous. When I caught sight of one, he seemed out of place, self-conscious of his height, stepping aside to make way for surging clusters of bustling womankind. I sensed that, like me, he was here as a guest, and knew it.
This city was not built by, or for, our kind.
The classical lines of Caria’s public buildings hearken to ancient Earth, with broad stairways and sculpted fountains where travelers refresh themselves and water their beasts. The clear preference for foot and hoof over wheeled traffic reminds me of civic planning on Dido, where motorcars and lorries are funneled to their destinations out of sight, leaving the main avenues to more placid rhythms. Following one hidden guideway, our handmade auto swept by the squat apartment blocks and bustling markets of a crowded quarter Iolanthe called “Vartown,” then cruised upslope behind more elegant, castlelike structures with gardens and polished turrets, each flying the heraldic banner of some noble lineage.
My escorts paused briefly at the inner palisade which guards the acropolis. There, I got my first close look at lugars, white-furred creatures descended from Vegan Ur-Apes, hauling stone blocks under the guidance of a patient woman handler. Lysos supposedly designed lugars to overcome one argument for having sons—the occasional need for raw physical strength. Another solution, robots, would have required a perpetual industrial base, dangerous to the founders’ program. So, typically, they came up with something self-sustaining, instead.
Watching the lugars heft huge slabs, I couldn’t help feeling puny in comparison—which may have been another part of the plan.
I am not here to judge Stratoins for choosing a pastoral solution to the human equation. All paths have their costs. My order requires that a peripatetic appreciate all he or she sees, on any Phylum world. “Appreciate” in the formal sense of the word. The rules don’t say I must approve.
Caria’s builders used the central plateau’s natural contours to lay out temples and theaters, courts, schools, and athletic arenas—all described in proud detail by my ardent guides. Wooded lanes accompanied the central boulevard coast imposing compounds—the Equilibrium Authority, and the stately University—until at last we drew near a pair of marble citadels with high, columned porticos. The twin hearts of Caria. The Great Library on the left, and to the right, the main Temple dedicated to Stratos Mother.
…And Lysos is her prophet…
The drive had achieved its clear purpose. Their capital is a showpiece worthy of any world. I was impressed, and must be very sure to show it.
15
The Musseli engineer packed her passengers away from the controls, near the body-warm stacks of power cells that made the locomotive go. Maia’s nose twitched at a familiar scent of coal dust, rising from the reserve fuel bin, yet she felt too excited to let it perturb her. Freedom was a stronger redolence, affecting her like intoxication. Her heart sped as she leaned past the battery casing, prying open a narrow, dusty window to let rushing air play across her face.
The prairie raced by, illuminated by pearly, suffused light from newly-risen Durga. There were gullies and ravines, fenceposts and ragged battalions of haystacks, and occasional pocket forests where the porous terrain stored enough rainwater to sustain native trees. Maia had come to hate these high plains, yet now, with escape at last credible, the land seemed to whisper its own side of the story, reaching out to persuade her with stark beauty.
