Glory Season

Maia flushed and strode away. Leaning on the starboard rail, she stared across foam-flecked waves, unable to contain her roiling thoughts. The busybody had voiced a question Maia herself hadn’t admitted: I wonder what Renna likes in women? Shaking her head vigorously, she made a resolute effort to divert her thoughts. Troublesome maunderings like these were at best impractical, and she had vowed to be a practical person.

Think. Soon they’ll take Renna far away and you’ll be alone in a big city. When he’s long gone, you’ll he left to live off what you know.

What assets do you have? What skills can you sell? She tried to concentrate—to bring forth a catalog of resources—but found herself facing only disconcerting blankness.

The blankness was not neutral. Born in a tense moment of angst, it spread outward from her dark thoughts and seemed to color her view of her surroundings, saturating the seascape, washing it like a canvas painted from a savage palette, in primitive and brutal shades. The air felt charged, like before a lightning storm, and a sense of fell expectation set her heart pounding.

Maia tried closing her eyes to escape the distressing epiphany, but extracted impressions only pursued her. Squeezing her eyelids shut caused more than familiar, squidgy sensations. A coruscation of light and dark speckles flickered and whirled, changing too fast to be tracked. She had known the phenomenon all her life, but now it both frightened and fascinated her. Combining in overlapping waves, the speckles seemed to offer a fey kind of meaning, drawing her away from centered vision toward something both beautiful and terrible.

Breath escaped her lungs in a sigh. Maia found the will to rub her eyes and reopen them. Purple blotches throbbed concentrically before fading away, along with some eerie, unwelcome sense of formless form. Yet, for a stretch of time there lay within Maia a vague but lingering surety. Looking outward, she no longer saw, but continued imagining a vista of everchanging patterns, stretching into infinite recursion across the cloud-flecked sky. Momentarily, the heavens seemed made of ephemeral, quickly wavering, emblematic forms, overlapping and merging to have the illusion of solidity she had been taught to call reality.

Relief mixed with awed regret as the instant passed. It could only have lasted moments. The atmosphere resumed its character of heavy, moist air. The wood rail beneath her hands felt firm.

Now I know I’m going crazy, Maia thought sardonically. As if she didn’t have troubles enough already.

Breakfast was called. Tentatively, as if the deck might shift beneath her feet, Maia went to take her turn in line.

She watched the cook serve two portions—one for Renna and a double scooping for herself, by order of the ship’s doctor. She turned, looking for the Visitor, and found him deep in conversation with the captain, apparently oblivious to the fool he had made of himself last night. She approached from behind, and caught his attention just long enough to make sure he noticed his plate on the chart table, near his elbow. Renna smiled, and made as if to speak to her, but Maia pretended not to notice and moved away. She carried her own bowl of hot, pulpy wheatmeal forward, all the way to the bowsprit, where the ship’s cutting rise and fall met alternating bursts of salty spray. That made the place uncomfortable for standing, but ideal for being left alone, tucked under the protective shelter of the forward cowling.

The porridge nourished without pretense at good taste. It didn’t matter. She had mastered her thoughts now, and was able to contemplate what she might do when the ship reached port.

Ursulaborg—pearl of the Mediant Coast. Some ancient clans there are so big and powerful, they’ve got pyramids of lesser clans underneath them, who have client families of their own, and so on. Clones serving clones of the same women who first employed their ancestors, hundreds of years ago, with everybody knowing her place from the day she’s born, and all potential personality conflicts worked out ages ago.

Maia remembered having seen a cinematic video—a comedy—when she and Leie were three. Coincidentally, the film was set in the magnificent Ursulaborg palace of one such grand multiclan. The plot involved an evil outsider’s scheme to sow discord among families who had been getting along for generations. At first, the stratagem seemed to work. Suspicions and quarrels broke out, feeding on each other as women leaped to outrageously wrong conclusions. Communication shattered and the tide of misunderstandings, both incited and humorously accidental, seemed fated to cause an irreparable rift. Then, at a climactic moment, the high-strung momentum dissolved in an upswell of revelation, then reconciliation, and finally laughter.

“We were made to be partners,” said one wise old matriarch, at the moral denouement. “If we met as vars, as our first mothers had, we would become fast friends. Yet we know each other better than vars ever could. Is it possible we Blaine sisters could live without you Chens? Or you without us? Blaines, Chens, Hanleys, and Wedjets… ours is a greater family, immortal, as if molded by Lysos herself.”

It had been a warm, mushy ending, leaving Maia feeling terribly glad to have Leie in her life… even if her sister had muttered derisively, at the movie’s end, about its manic illogic and lack of character development.

Leie would have loved to see Ursulaborg.

There was no land in sight. Nevertheless, she looked past the bowsprit to the west, blinking against spray that hid a salty bitterness of tears.

Renna found her there. The dark-eyed man called her from the foremast. “Ah, Maia, there you are!”

She hurriedly wiped her eyes and turned to watch him clamber into the sheltered area. “How are you doing?” asked cheerfully. Dropping to sit across from her, he reached forward to squeeze her hand.

“I’ve been unhappier,” she answered with a shrug, somewhat befuddled by his warmth. It pierced the protective distance she had been working to build between them. Maia made sure not to yank her hand back, but withdrew it slowly. He appeared not to notice.

“Isn’t it a fine day?” Renna inhaled, taking in the broad expanse of sunny and cloud-shaded patches of sea, stretching to every horizon. “I was up at dawn, and for a little while I thought I saw a swarm of Great Pontoos, off to the south among the clouds. Someone said they were just common zoor-floaters… I’ve seen lots of those. But these looked so beautiful, so graceful and majestic, that I figured—”

“Pontoos are very rare now.”

“So I gather.” He sighed. “You know, this planet would seem perfect for flying. I’ve seen birds and gasbag creatures of so many types. But why so few aircraft? I know spaceflight might disrupt your stable pastoralism, but what harm would it do to have more zep’lins and wingplanes? Would it hurt to give people a chance to move around more freely?”

Maia wondered how a man could be so talkative, so early in the day? He would’ve gotten along better with Leie.

“They say long ago there were a lot more zep’lins,” she answered.

“They also say men used to fly them, like seaships, but then were banished from the sky. Do you know why?”

Maia shook her head. “Why don’t you ask them?”

“I tried.” Renna grimaced, looking across the ocean. “Seems to be a touchy subject. Maybe I’ll look it up when I get back to the Library, in Caria.” He turned back to her. “Listen, I think I’ve figured something out. Could you tell me if I’m wrong?”

Maia sighed. Renna seemed determined to wear down her carefully tailored apathy with sheer, overpowering enthusiasm. “Okay,” she said warily.

“Great! First, let’s verify the basics.” He held up one finger. “Summertime matings result in normal, genetically diverse variants, or vars. Is that word derogatory, by the way? I’ve heard it used insultingly, in Caria.”

“I’m a var,” Maia said tonelessly. “No point being insulted by a fact.”

“Mm. I guess you’d say I’m a var, too.”

Of course. All boys are vars. Only the name doesn’t cling to them like a parasite. But she knew Renna meant well, even when dredging clumsily through matters that hurt.

“All right, then. During autumn, winter, and spring, Stratoin women have parthenogenetic clones. In fact, they often can’t conceive in summer till they’ve already had a winter child.”

“You’re doing fine so far.”

“Good. Now, even cloning requires the involvement of men, as sparklers, since