Glory Season

13

Maia was soon disoriented in the stealthy dash through dark corridors and down unlit stairs. Kiel, who led the way, kept rushing ahead and then causing a bump and jostle each time she stopped abruptly to use a small penlight, consulting a hand-drawn map.

“Where did you get that?” Maia whispered at one point, pointing at the vellum diagram.

“A friend worked on the digging crew. Now be quiet.”

Maia took no offense. A few gruff words were nothing compared to what else Kiel and Thalla had done. Maia’s heart was full to bursting that her friends had come all this way, at untold risks, to rescue her.

And Renna, she reminded herself. As they hurried through the gloomy halls, she tried not to look at the person she had just seen for the first time, whom she had beforehand thought she knew so well. A creature from outer space. Perhaps sensing her discomfort, Renna hung a few paces behind. Maia felt irritated with him, and with herself, that her feelings were so obvious. “Is he telling the truth?” she whispered to Thalla, as Kiel consulted her map again near a meeting of two vast, unlit dormitory chambers. “About being… you know?”

Thalla shrugged. “Never know with males. Always goin’ on about their travels. Maybe this one’s been farther than most.”

Maia wanted to believe Thalia’s nonchalance. “You must have suspected something when you picked up the radio message.”

“What radio message?” Thalla asked. As Kiel motioned them forward again, Maia found her confusion redoubling. She pursued whispered questions as they walked.

“If you didn’t get a message, how did you find us?”

“Wasn’t easy, virgie. Day after they took you, we tried following the trail. Seemed to be takin’ you east, but then a big gang of sisters from Keally Clan rode up and drove us off. By the time we circled round, the tracks were cold. Turns out they pulled a switch over by Flake Rock, so it wasn’t east, after all.”

Maia shook her head. She had been unconscious or delirious during most of the ride out from Lerner Hold, so she had no idea how long it had taken.

Thalla grinned. The tall woman’s pale face was barely visible in the reflection of Kiel’s swaying beam off stone walls. “Finally, we got wind o’ this Beller creature, comin’ upland with an escort. Kiel had a hunch they might be headin’ for this abandoned site. We got some friends together an’ managed to tag along out o’ sight. An’ here we are.”

Thalla made it sound so simple. In fact, it must have involved a lot of sacrifice, not to mention risk. “Then you didn’t come just for … him?” Maia jerked her head backward, toward the one taking up the rear. Thalla grimaced.

“Ain’t a man a man? It’ll drive the Perkies crazy he’s gone, though. Reason enough to take him, at least till the coast. There he can join his own kind.”

In the dark, Maia could not read Thalia’s features. The woman’s tone was tense and perhaps she wasn’t telling the whole truth. But the message was sufficient. “You came for me, after all.”

Thalla reached over as they walked, giving Maia’s shoulder a squeeze. “What are var-buddies for? Us against a Lysos-less world, virgie.”

It was like a line from that adventure book Maia had read, about stalwart summer women forging a new world out of the ruins of a brittle, broken yesterday. Suddenly, Kiel interrupted with a sharp hiss. Their guide covered her light and motioned for quiet. Silently, almost on tiptoe, they joined her near an intersection, where their dim corridor crossed another one, more brightly lit. Kiel cautiously leaned out to peer left, then right. Her breath cut short.

“What is it?” the man asked, catching up from behind, his voice carrying startlingly. Thalia’s hand made a chopping sign and he said no more. Standing still, they could hear faint sounds—a clinking, a low rattle, voices rising briefly, then fading to a low murmur. Kiel moved her hands to pantomime that there were people in sight, some distance down the cross corridor.

What now? Maia worried, a tightness in her throat. Clearly Kiel’s map was incomplete. Would it offer an alternate route? Was there enough time?

To Maia’s surprise, Kiel did not motion for them to turn around. Instead, she took a deep breath, visibly braced herself, and stepped boldly into the light!

Maia knew it was only her dark-adapted eyes overreacting. Still, when Kiel entered the wan illumination of the hallway, it was as if she had briefly gone aflame. How could anyone not notice such a shining presence?

But no one did. The older var glided smoothly across the exposed area without a sound, reentering darkness in safety on the other side. There was no change in the mutter of conversation. Thalla took the next turn, trying to imitate Kiel’s liquid, silent stride. Sudden reflection off her pale skin seemed even more glaringly impossible to ignore, lasting two ponderously long seconds. Then she, too, was across.

Maia glanced at the man, Renna, who smiled and touched her elbow, urging her to go ahead. It was a friendly gesture, an expression of confidence, and Maia briefly hated him for it. She could just make out the two women, dim figures across the bright intersection, also waiting for her. To Maia, her own heartbeat sounded loud enough to echo off the rocky walls. She got a grip on herself, flaring her nostrils, and stepped forward.

Time seemed to telescope, fractional seconds stretching into subjective hours. Maia’s distant feet moved on their own, freeing her to glance right toward a searing image of bracketed flamelight … of broken furniture burning in a chiseled fireplace, while silhouetted figures drank from goblets, leaning over to watch the arcing fall of dice onto a wooden table. Their cries made Maia’s skin crawl.

The scene was so dazzling, she became disoriented and veered off course to collide with a sharp corner of the intersection. Thalla had to yank her the rest of the way into blessed darkness. Maia rubbed where her forehead had struck stone, blinking to reaccustom her eyes to obscurity.

She looked up quickly. “Renna?” she whispered, casting about.

“I’m here, Maia,” came a soft reply.

She turned to her left. The man stood with Kiel a little farther down the dim hallway. Maia hadn’t heard or sensed him cross. Embarrassed by her outburst, she looked away. This person was not at all like the sage, older woman she had envisioned. Though there had been no lies, she nonetheless felt betrayed, if by nothing else, then by her all-too-human tendency to make assumptions.

Unless it has to do with the ships or sparking, you just suppose a person is female till you learn otherwise. I guess that’s not very nice.

Still … he should have told me!

Now she and Thalla took up the rear while Renna and Kiel forged ahead. For the first time, Maia noticed that the man was carrying a small blue pouch at his belt and something much larger strapped across his back. A slim case of burnished metal.

A Game of Life set, she realized. Oh, he’s a man, all right!

I was such an idiot, picturing some noble savant who’d figured out how to send such clever messages out of pure resourcefulness. I don’t suppose those tricks were difficult for a man who’s spent his whole life playing the game.

It was obvious enough, now. But trapped in her cell with only clicks in the night for company, she had been looking more through wishes than reason. How strange, to feel a sense of mourning for a friend who stood just a few meters away, alive, healthy, and, for the moment, free. Yet the Renna Maia had imagined was dead, as surely as Leie. This new Renna was an unwelcome replacement.

Unfair? Maia knew it.

LIFE’S unfair. So? Find Lysos and sue her.

Minutes later, Kiel led them to a narrow door where she knocked twice. The wooden portal swung open, revealing a stocky blonde woman holding a crowbar like a weapon. The door showed signs of damage, its lock-hasp pried away, a broken padlock on the floor.

“Got ’em?” the gate guardian asked. She was tall, rangy, fair-haired, and tough-looking. Kiel only nodded. “Come on,” Thalla said, leading the way down another short flight of stairs. Maia smelled the night even before a chill wind touched her skin. It had a freshness she had never felt from the open window of her cell. Then they were outside, under the stars.

From the postern gate they stepped onto a broad stone porch, just one meter above the level of the plain. Kiel strode to the edge, brought her fingers to her mouth, and whistled the call of a gannen bird. From the darkness came a trilling reply, like an echo, followed by the sound of hoofbeats. The tall blonde pushed the door back into place as four women came riding up, each holding the reins of one or two spare mounts.

Unleashing bundles tied to the back of one animal, Thalla thrust into Maia’s hands a rough wool coat, which she gratefully slipped on. She was still buttoning when Kiel took her arm and motioned toward the edge of the platform, where a sash-horse had been brought alongside. Moonlight glistened along the beast’s striped flanks as it snorted, blew and stamped. Maia couldn’t help cringing a bit. Her riding experience had been confined to tame beasts guided by skilled Trevor wranglers, hired for springtime outings so Lamai summerlings could check one more item off their mothers’ “life-preparation” syllabus as quickly and cheaply as possible.

“He won’t bite, virgie,” the woman holding the bridle said, laughing.

Pride overcame apprehension, and Maia managed to grab the saddle horn without trembling. Slipping her left foot into the stirrup, she swung astride. The horse danced, testing her weight. She reached over to accept the reins, feeling elated when the creature did not bolt the next instant. Relieved, Maia bent to pat its neck.

“What the hell is that?”

They were gruff words of protest. Maia turned to see the man, Renna, pointing at the beast in front of him. Kiel came alongside and touched his arm, as if to ease his fears.

“It’s a horse. We use them here for riding and—”

Renna cocked his head. “I know what a horse is. I meant, what’s that thing on its back?”

“On its back? Why… that’s a saddle, where you ride.”

Perplexed, he shook his head. “That blocky thing’s a saddle? Why is it different than the others?”

All the women, even Maia, burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. The question was so incongruous, so unexpected. Maybe he was from outer space, after all! Renna’s look of confused consternation only made her giggle more, covering her mouth with her free hand.

Kiel, too, tried to conceal mirth. “Naturally, it’s a sidesaddle. I know you’d prefer a wagon or palanquin, but we just haven’t got…” The woman stopped in mid-sentence and stared. “What are you doing?”

Renna had jumped off the porch and was reaching underneath the mount selected for him. “Just… making a slight… adjustment,” he grunted. “There.”

To Maia’s astonishment, the bulky, cushioned saddle slid sideways and tumbled to the ground. Then, even more surprisingly, the man took the horse’s mane in his hands and, in a single bound, leaped aboard straddle-wise, like a woman! The others reacted with audible gasps. Maia winced at an involuntary twinge in her loins.

“How can you—” Thalla started to ask, dry-mouthed.

“Stirrups would be nice,” he interrupted. “But we can take turns riding bareback till we rig something up. Now, let’s get the hell out of here,”

Kiel blinked. “Are you sure you know what you’re—”

In answer, Renna flicked the reins and set his mount cantering, then trotting toward the place where the sun had set hours ago. The direction of the sea. As they stared after him, he let out a cry of such exultation that Maia felt a thrill. The man had given voice to what wanted out of her own lungs. Amazement gave way to pure joy as she, too, dug in her heels. Her mount complied willingly, hastening on the same bearing, kicking dust toward the memory of her imprisonment.

The escape party didn’t take the direct route to safety, toward the outlet of Long Valley. The Perkinites would surely look there first. Kiel and the others had a plan. After that initial exuberant trot, the caravan settled into a brisk but deliberate walk, roughly south by southwest.

About an hour after departure, there came a faint sound in the distance behind them. A low clanging. Turning around, Maia saw the thin, moonlit, rocky spire where she had been jailed, by now diminished with distance and beginning to sink into the horizon. High along its dark flank, several bright pinpoints told of windows coming alight.

“Bloody moonset!” Kiel cursed, clucking to her mount and setting a quicker pace. “I was hoping we’d have till morning. Let’s make tracks.”

Kiel didn’t speak figuratively, Maia soon realized. The band kept purposely to open ground, where speed was good but the horses’ hooves also left easily-followed impressions. “It’s part of our plan, so’s to make the Perkies lazy,” Thalla explained as they rode along. “We have a trick in mind. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not,” Maia replied. She was too happy to be concerned. After running the horses for a while, they halted, and the tall, rough-looking blonde rose high in her stirrups to aim a spyglass rearward. “No sign of anyone breathin’ down our necks,” she said, collapsing the tube again. The pace slowed then, to keep their mounts from tiring.

Prompted by a brief query from Thalla, asking how she had been treated in prison, Maia found herself spilling whole run-on paragraphs about her arrival at the stony citadel, about the terrible cooking of the Guel jailers, how awful it had been to spend Autumn End Day in a place like that, and how she never hoped to see the insides of a man sanctuary again. She knew she was jabbering, but if Thalla and the others seemed amused, she didn’t care. Anyone would jabber after such a sudden reversal of fortunes, from despair to excitement, with the fresh air of freedom filling her lungs like an intoxicant.

There followed another period of quick trotting and more brisk walking. Soon a lesser moon—Aglaia—rose to join Durga in the sky, and someone started humming a sailor’s chantey in greeting. Another woman pitched in with words, singing a rich, mellow contralto. Maia eagerly joined the chorus.

After listening a few rounds, Renna added his deeper tenor to the refrain, which sounded appropriate for a sailing ballad. He caught Maia’s eye at one point, winking, and she found herself smiling back shyly, not terribly displeased.

More songs followed. It soon grew clear to Maia that there was a division among the women. Kiel and Thalla and one other—a short brunette named Kau—were city-bred, sophisticated, with Kiel clearly the intellectual leader. At one point, all three of them joined in a rousing anthem whose verses were decidedly political.

Maia recalled the melody from those nights sharing a cottage at Lerner Hold, listening to the clandestine radio station. The lyrics conveyed an angry, forceful resolve to upset the present order, making a determined break with the past. The other four women knew this song, and lent support to the chorus. But there was a sense of restraint, as if they disagreed in some parts, while thinking the verses too soft in others. When their turn came again, the others once more chose songs Maia knew from school and creche. Traditional ballads of adventure. Songs of magic lamps and secret treasures. Of warm hearths left behind. Of revealed talents, and wishes coming true. The melodies were more comforting, even if the singers weren’t. From their accents and features, she guessed the two shorter, stockier ones must be from the Southern Isles, legendary home of reavers and sharp traders, while the other two, including the rangy blonde, spoke with the sharp twang typical of this part of Eastern Continent. Maia learned the blonde was named Baltha, and seemed to be the leader of the four.

All told, it seemed a tough, confident bunch of vars. They had no apparent fear, even if by some chance Tizbe Beller and her guards caught up with them.

The singing died down before their next break to adjust tack and trade mounts. After resuming, for a while everyone was quiet, allowing the metronome rhythm of the horses’ hooves to make low, percussive music of an earthier nature. No longer distracted, Maia took greater note of the cold. Her fingers were especially sensitive, and she wound up keeping her hands in the pockets of the thick coat, holding the reins through layers of cloth.

Renna trotted ahead to ride next to Kiel, causing some muttering among the other women. Baltha was openly disapproving.

“No business a man ridin’ like that,” she said, watching from behind as Renna jounced along, legs straddling his mount. “It’s kinda obscene.”

“Seems he knows what he’s doing,” Thalla said. “Gives me chills watchin’, though. Even now that he’s got a normal saddle. Can’t figure how he doesn’t cripple himself.”

Baltha spat on the ground. “Some things men just oughtn’t be let to do.”

“Right,” one of the stocky southerners added. “Horses were made for women. Obvious from how we’re built an’ men aren’t. Lysos meant it that way.”

Maia shook her head, unsure what to think. Later, when happenstance appeared to bring her alongside Renna’s mount, the man turned to her and said in a low voice, “Actually, these animals aren’t much different than ones I knew on Earth. A bit stockier, and this weird striping. I think the skull’s bigger, but it’s hard to recall.”

Maia blinked in surprise. “You’re… from Earth? The real…?”

He nodded, a wistful expression on his face. “Long ago and far away. I know, you thought maybe Florentina, or some other nearby system. No such luck, I’m afraid.

“What I meant, though, is that your friends back there are wrong. Half the worlds in the Human Phylum have horse variants, some much stranger than these. Women ride more often than men, it’s true. But this is the first time I’ve heard it said males aren’t built for it!” He laughed. “Now that you mention it, I guess it does seem strange we don’t hurt ourselves.”

“You heard all that?” Maia asked. At the time, she’d thought he was too far ahead.

He tapped one of his ears. “Thicker atmosphere than my birthworld, by far. Carries sound better. I can hear whispers quite some distance, though it also means I get splitting headaches when people shout. You won’t tell, will you?”

He winked for the second time that night, and Maia’s sense of alienation evaporated. In an instant he was just another harmless, friendly sailor, on winter leave after a long voyage. His confidential disclosure was natural, an expression of trust based on the fact that they had known each other and shared secrets before.

Maia looked up at the starry vault. “Point to Earth,” she asked.

Rising in his stirrups, Renna searched the sky. At last he settled back down. “Sorry. If we’re still awake near morning, I should be able to find the Triffid. Sol is near its left eye-stalk. Of course, most of the nearer stars of the Phylum are hidden behind the God’s Brow nebula—what you call the Claw—just east of the Triffid.”

“You know a lot about our sky, for someone who’s been here less than a year.”

Renna let out a sigh. His expression grew heavier. “You have long years, on Stratos.”

Maia sensed it might be better for the moment to refrain from further questions. Renna’s face, which had appeared youthful on first sight, now seemed troubled and weary. He’s older than he looks, she realized. How old would you have to be, to travel as far as he has? Even if they have freezers on starships, and move close to the speed of light.

She couldn’t put all the blame for her ignorance on Lamatia’s selective education. Such subjects had always seemed far removed from matters she had expected to concern her. Not for the first time, Maia wondered, Why did we virtually abandon space? Did Lysos plan it that way? Maybe to help make sure no one found us again?

If so, it must have only made for a worse shock to the savants and councillors and priestesses in Caria, when the Visitor Ship entered orbit, last winter. They must have been thrown into utter chaos.

This has to be what that old bird was talking about, on the tele in Lanargh! Maia realized. Renna must have already been kidnapped then. They were putting out feelers, trying to find him without disturbing the public.

Maia knew what Leie’s thought would be, at this point. The reward!

It must be what Thalla and Kiel and the others are after. Of course Thalla had been lying, back in the sanctuary corridors. They hadn’t come for her, after all. Or at least not her alone. Their main objective must have been Renna all along, which explained the sidesaddle. Why else bring such a thing all this way, unless to fetch a man?

Not that she blamed them. Maia was accustomed to being unimportant. That they had bothered to spring her, as well, was enough to win her gratitude. And Thalia’s attempt to lie about it had been sweet.

The open plain ended abruptly when they arrived at broken ravine country similar to the type Maia remembered, where Lerner Clan dug their ores and spilled slag from their foundry. She guessed this was much farther north and east, but the contours were similar—tortured eroded canyons crossing the prairie like scars of some ancient fight. Carefully, the party dropped into the first set of narrow washes, descending past nesting sites where burrower colonies made vain, threatening noises to drive the humans and horses away. The chirruping sounds grew triumphant as their efforts seemed to work, and the threat passed.

Baltha took over navigating the increasingly twisty maze where, at some points, only the topmost sixty degrees or so of sky were visible, making for slow going even after two oil lanterns were lit.

A halt was called by a shallow, gurgling stream and everyone dismounted, some gingerly. None more so than the man, who hissed and rubbed his legs, walking out stiffness. Baltha’s colleagues nodded knowingly. In fact, though, only embarrassment kept Maia from hobbling about just like him. Instead, she stretched surreptitiously, behind her horse. Nearby, the leaders gathered round a lantern.

“This must be the place,” Kiel said, jabbing a map sketched onto lambskin, so much tougher than paper. Baltha shook her head. “Another stream, a klick or so on. I’ll tell ya when.”

“You’re sure? We wouldn’t want to miss—”

“Won’t,” the tall blonde said, curtly. “Now let’s mount. Wastin’ time.”

Maia saw Thalla and Kiel look at each other dubiously after Baltha left. “Comes off knowin’ the place like her own back-hand.” Thalla muttered. “Now how would that be? Only Perkinites grow up ’round here.”

Kiel made a cautioning sign to her friend. “One thing for sure. That’s no damn Perkinite.”

Thalla shrugged as Kiel rolled up the map. “There’s worse,” she said under her breath. When the two of them walked past Maia, Thalla gave her a tousle on the top of her head. The gesture would have seemed patronizing if there hadn’t been something like genuine affection in it.

With the elation of escape starting to fade into physical fatigue, Maia realized, There’s more going on here than I thought. I’d better start paying closer attention.

Half an hour later, they reached another stream under looming canyon walls. This time, Baltha signaled for 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, then unfolding and delicately experimenting with the sighting arms. “Very nice tool,” he commented. “Handmade, you say? I’d love to see the workshop.”

Maia shivered at the thought. She had seen enough of male sanctuaries.

“Is this the dial you use for adjusting azimuth?” he asked.

“Azimuth? Oh, you mean star-height. Of course, you need a good horizon …”

Soon they were immersed in talk about the art of navigation, picking their way through a maze of terms inherited from altogether different traditions—his using complex machines to cross unimaginable emptiness, and hers from a heritage of countless lives spent refining rules learnt the hard way, battling the elements on Stratos’s capricious seas. Renna spoke respectfully of techniques that she knew had to seem primitive, in view of how far he had come—from those very lights Maia used as guideposts in the sky.

Sometimes, when a moon cleared the canyon walls to shine directly on his face, Maia was struck by a subtle difference which seemed suddenly enhanced. The long shadow of his cheekbone, or the way, in dim light, his pupils seemed to open wider than normal for Stratoin eyes. Would she have even noticed if she didn’t already know who, or what, he was?

They cut short the discussion when Baltha called a break. Their guide indicated a path to take their tired mounts onto a stony beach, where the party dismounted and spent some time rubbing and drying the horses’ feet and ankles, restoring circulation to parts numbed by cold water. It was hard labor, and Renna soon stripped off his coat. Maia could feel heat radiating from his body as he worked nearby. She remembered the sailors on the Wotan, whose powerful torsos always seemed so spendthrift of energy, wasting half of what they ate and drank in sweat and radiation. As cold as she was, especially in her fingers and toes, Renna’s nearby presence was rather pleasant. She felt tempted to draw closer, strictly to share the warmth he squandered so freely. Even the inevitable male odor wasn’t so bad.

Renna stood up, a puzzled expression on his face. Scanning the sky, his eyes narrowed and his brows came together in a furrow. Only as Maia rose to come alongside did she begin to notice something as well, a soft sound from overhead, like the distant buzzing of a swarm of bees.

“There!” he shouted, pointing to the west, just above the rim of the canyon.

Maia tried to sight along his arm. “Where? I can’t… Oh!”

She had seldom seen flying machines, even by daylight. Port Sanger’s small airfield was hidden beyond hills, with flight paths chosen not to disturb city dwellers. Not counting the weekly mail dirigible, true aircraft came only a few times a year. But what else could those lights be? Maia counted two… three pairs of winking pinpoints passing overhead as the delayed rumbling peaked and then followed the glitters eastward.

“Cy must’ve heard!” Renna shouted, as the canyon cut off sight of the moving stars. “She got through to Groves. They’ve come for us!”

For you, don’t you mean? Maia thought. Still, she was glad, intensely glad. This certainly verified Renna’s importance, for Caria to have sent such a force so far, impinging on the sovereignty of Long Valley Commonwealth, and even risking a fight.

Baltha, Thalla, and Kiel refused to even consider turning back.

“But it’s a rescue party! Surely they’ve come with enough force to—”

“That’s good,” Kiel agreed. “It’ll distract the bitches. Keep them off our trail. Maybe they’ll be so busy scrapping and arguing, we’ll have smooth sailing to the coast.”

Maia saw what was going on. Kiel and her friends had invested a lot in rescuing Renna. Apparently, they weren’t about to hand him over to a platoon of policewomen, who could claim they would have had him free tonight anyway. Far better from Kiel’s point of view to deliver him personally to a magistrate at Grange Head, where their success would be indisputable and the reward guaranteed.

Maia saw Renna consider. Would the women try to stop him if he turned around by himself? A male’s strength might not compensate much for the world-wise ferocity of Baltha, who looked like a born fighter and was never far from her effective-looking crowbar. The match was doubly dubious in winter, when male tempers ebbed toward nadir. Renna’s odds would improve with Maia by his side, but she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to fight Thalla and Kiel.

Anyway, suppose he did turn around. Tizbe wouldn’t have waited long to set out on their trail. Even if the prison-citadel was taken by Carian forces, Renna and Maia were likely to stumble into the Beller and her guards on the open prairie. They’d only be captured and taken to another hole, probably far worse than the one they had just left.

We really haven’t got much choice, Maia realized.

Still, in that moment her loyalties crystallized. She moved to stand next to Renna, ready to support whatever he decided. There was a long pause while the drone of engines faded gradually to a whisper, and then nothing. At last, the man shrugged.

“All right, let’s ride.”

14

Ocean surrounded her, threatening to engulf her. She clung to a splintered, oily timber, bobbing and jerking as contrary waves fought to possess it. Rain fell in blinding sheets, angled by gale-driven winds. In the distance, she watched a sailing vessel glide away, slicing through towering swells, ignoring her calls, her pleas to turn back.

On the deck of the departing ship, a girl stared in her direction, blindly, unseeing.

The girl had her own face. …

Dread welled up. Maia wanted to escape. But dreams had a way of trapping her by making her forget there was a “real” world to flee to. It took a whisper of true sound intruding on the dreamscape, to provide something to follow upward, outward, toward consciousness.

She wondered muzzily how she came to be lying here, wrapped in a scratchy woolen blanket, stretched upon gritty ground. Stone canyon walls felt like her jail cell, cold and enclosing, and the low clouds hung overhead like a dour ceiling. She propped up on one elbow, rubbing her eyes, looking at the leftover embers of a tiny campfire, then at the tethered horses, browsing shrubs down to bare twigs over by the stream. Two curled forms lay close enough to offer warmth on one side. From glimpses of unkempt hair poking from the blanket rolls, she recognized Thalla and Kiel and relaxed a bit, recalling she was among friends. Maia smiled, thinking once more about what they had done, rescuing her from the pit where Tizbe Beller and the Joplands and Lerners had consigned her.

Turning to her other side, Maia saw two empty blankets that had been thrown back, their occupants gone. The nearest bedroll was still slightly warm to touch. That person’s departure must have been what vexed her sleep, pulling her from disturbing dreams and memories of Leie.

Oh, yes. Renna. The Outsider had been a welcome heat source in the chill before dawn, when they had collapsed in exhaustion from their hard ride. Sight of his blue pouch and Game of Life set reassured her that he wasn’t gone for good.

The big blonde, Baltha, had been sleeping just beyond. Maia lay back, staring at the sky. Why would both of them get up at the same time? Did it matter? It wouldn’t be hard to slip back into slumber… and hopefully dream better dreams. …

A faint clatter—pebbles rolling down a slope—banished sleep and crystallized intent as she sat up. Slipping on her shoes, Maia crawled away from Thalia’s still form before standing and walking toward the source of the sound, somewhere upstream, where the surrounding bluffs had crumbled to give way to sloping ground. A flash of movement caught her eye, rounding the nearest hillock. She headed in that direction and was soon clambering over boulders, washed ice-smooth by successive summer floods.

The widening canyon offered less shelter from the cold. Maia exhaled fog and her fingertips grew numb from grabbing handholds lined with frost. A vaguely familiar scent made her nostrils flare, drawing her back to winters in Lamatia Hold, when Leie used to throw open the shutters on wintry mornings, thumping her chest, and inhaling the frigid air while Maia complained and burrowed in the covers. The unbeckoned memory brought a faint, sad smile as she climbed.

Maia stopped, listened. There was a scrape, a stone rattling downslope somewhere ahead and to her right. The way looked tricky. She paused, feeling torn between curiosity and a growing awareness of her replete bladder. Now that she was fully awake, it did seem a bit pointless, following people who were obviously out doing what she herself ought to find a place and do. Let’s just take care of business, eh? She began casting about for a convenient niche out of the wind.

The first spot she tried already had an occupant. Or occupants. A hissing squeal made Maia jump back in fright as a living rainbow flapped at her. She hurriedly retreated from the crevice where a mother zim-skimmer was tending its young—a cluster of tiny gasbags that inflated and deflated rapidly, wheezing in imitation of their belligerent dam. Smaller cousins of zoor-floaters, the skimmers had much worse temperaments, and poison quills that fended off Earth-descended birds seeking their tender flesh. The spines caused fierce allergic rashes, if a human was unlucky enough to brush one. Maia backed away, eyeing the deceptively diaphanous forms. Once safely out of sight, she turned and hurried along the half trail.

That was when, rounding a corner, she caught sight of someone just ahead.

Baltha.

The tall woman squatted, peering over a set of boulders at something downslope, out of Maia’s view. On the ground beside the var lay a small camp spade and a lidded wooden box, small enough to cover with one hand. While Baltha stared ahead intently, she idly reached out to brush a nearby rock, then brought her fingers to her face, sniffing.

Maia blinked. Of course. She scanned the ledges closest to her and saw, amid thin patches of normal white snow, streaks that shone with a diamondlike glitter. Glory frost. It’s winter, all right. The march of seasons had more effect on high, stratospheric winds than on the massive bulk of sea and land and air below. Varieties of turbulence unknown on other worlds recycled water vapor through ionic fluxes until an adenated ice formed. Occasionally, the crystals made their way to ground in soft, predawn hazes, as unique a sign of winter as Wengel Star’s flamboyant aurorae were to summer. Maia stretched toward the nearest sprinkling of glory frost. Static charge drew the shiny pseudogems to her fingertips, which tingled despite their morning numbness. Purple and golden highlights sparkled under innumerable facets as she turned them in the light. A visible vapor of sublimation rose from the points of contact.

In winters past, whenever glory had appeared on their sill, Maia and Leie used to giggle and try inhaling or tasting the fine, luminescent snow. The first time, she, not her sister, had been the bold one. “They say it’s just for grown-ups,” Leie had said nervously, parroting the mothers’ lessons. Of course that only made it more enticing.

The effects were disappointing. Other than a faint fizzing sensation that tickled the nose, the twins never felt anything abnormal or provocative.

But I’m older now, Maia reflected, watching her body heat turn fine powder into steam. There was something faintly different about the aroma, this time. At least, she could swear…

A sound sent her ducking for cover. It was a low whistling. A man—Renna, of course—could be heard tramping some distance away. Soon he came into sight, emerging from one of the countless side tributaries that would feed the river during the rainy season. He, too, carried a camp shovel and a bundle of takawq leaves, making the purpose of his errand obvious.

Why did he go so far from camp, then? Maia wondered. Is he that shy?

And why is Baltha spying on him?

Maybe the tall var feared the Outsider would run away, trying to contact the Caria City forces that flew over last night. If so, Baltha must be relieved to see Renna pass by, whistling odd melodies on his way back to camp. Don’t worry, your reward is safe, Maia thought, preparing to duck out of sight. She had a perfect right to be here, but no good would come of antagonizing the older woman, or being caught spying, herself.

But to Maia’s surprise, the blonde did not turn to follow Renna downhill. Rather, as soon as he was gone, Baltha picked up her box and shovel and slipped over the shielding rocks to clamber down the other side, hurrying in the direction from which the man had just come. Possessed by curiosity, Maia crept forward to use the same outcrop that had served as Baltha’s eyrie.

The rugged woman strode east about twenty meters to a niche just above the high-water line. There she used the camp spade to dig at a mound of freshly disturbed soil and begin filling the small box. What in atyp chaos is she doing? Maia wondered.

“Hey, everybody!” The shout, coming from downstream, caused Maia to leap half out of her skin. “Baltha! Maia! Breakfast!”

It was only Thalla, calling cheerily from the campsite. Another Lysos-cursed morning person. Maia backed out of sight before Baltha could look around. Remembering to give the mother zimmer a wide berth, she started scrambling back down the eroded slope.

The meal consisted of cheese and biscuits, stone-warmed on rocks taken from the fire. By now it was late morning, and since it was probably safe to travel by daylight in these deep canyons, all five travelers were back in the saddle before the sun rose much above the cavern’s southeast rim. They made good time, despite having to stop every half hour to warm the horses’ feet.

About an hour after noon, Maia realized something ill-smelling and foul-colored had entered the stream. “What is it?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

Thalla laughed. “She wonders what the bad smell is! How soon we forget pain when we’re young!”

Kiel, too, shook her head, grinning. Maia inhaled again, and suddenly recalled. “Lerners! Of course. They dump their slag into a side canyon, and we must be passing—”

“Just downstream. Helps navigation, don’t it? See, we’re doin’ all right without your fancy stars to guide us.”

Maia felt overwhelming resurgent resentment toward her former employers. “Damn them!” She swore. “Lysos curse the Lerners! I hope their whole place burns down!”

Renna, who had been riding to her right, frowned at her outburst. “Maia, listen to yourself. You can’t mean—”

“I don’t care!” She shook her head, afroth with pent-up anger. “Calma Lerner handed me over to Tizbe’s gang like I was a slab of pig iron on sale. I hope she rots!”

Thalla and Kiel looked at each other uncomfortably. Maia felt a delicious, if vile, thrill at having shocked them. Renna pressed his lips and kept silent. But Baltha responded more openly, reigning up and laughing sardonically. “From your mouth to Stratos Mother’s ear, virgie!” She reached into one of her saddlebags and drew forth a slender, leather-bound tube, her telescope. “Here you go.”

Puzzled, Maia overcame sudden reluctance in reaching for the instrument. She lifted it to peer where Baltha pointed. “Go on, up at that slope, yonder to the west an’ a bit north. Along the ridgeline. That’s right. See it?”

While she learned to compensate for the horse’s gentle breathing, the telescope showed little but jumbled images, shifting blurs. Finally, Maia caught a flash of color and steadied on a jittering swatch of bright fabric, snapping in the wind, yanking at a tall, swaying pole. She scanned and other flags came into view on each side.

“Prayer banners,” she identified at last. On most of Stratos they were used for holidays and ceremonies, but in Perkinite areas, she knew, they were also flown to signify new births—and deaths.

“There’s yer Calma Lerner up there, virgie. Rotting, just like you asked. Along with half her sisters. Gonna be short on steel in the valley, next year or two, I figure.”

Maia swallowed. “But… how?” She turned to Kiel and Thalla, who looked down at their traces. “What happened?” she demanded.

Thalla shrugged. “Just a flu bug, Maia. Was a rash of sneezing in town, a week or two before, no big deal. When it reached the hold, one of the var workers got laid up a few days, but …”

“But then, a whole bunch of Lerners went and popped off. Just like that!” Baltha exclaimed, snapping her fingers with relish.

Maia felt dreadful—a hollowness in her belly and thickness in her throat—even as she fought to show no reaction at all. She knew her expression must seem stony, cold. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Renna briefly shiver.

I can’t blame him. I’m terrible.

She recalled how, as a child, she used to be frightened by macabre stories the younger Lamai mothers loved telling summer brats on warm evenings, up on the parapets. Often, the moral of the gruesome tales seemed to be “Careful what you wish for. Sometime you might get it.” Rationally, Maia knew her outburst of anger had not caused death to strike the metallurgist clan. Yet, it was dismaying, the vengeful streak she’d shown. Moments ago, if she could have done anything to cast misfortune on her enemies, she would have shown no pity. Was that morally the same as if she’d killed the Lerners herself?

It’s not unheard-of for sickness to wipe out half a clan, she thought, trying to make sense of it all. There was a saying, “When one clone sneezes, her sisters go for handkerchiefs.” It drew on a fact of life Leie and Maia had learned well as twins—that susceptibility to illness was often in the genes. In this case, it hadn’t helped that Lerner Hold was far from what medical care existed in Long Valley. With all of them presumably laid up at the same time, who would care for the Lerners? Just var employees, who weren’t brimming with affection for their contract-holders.

What a way to go… all at once, broken by the thing you’re most proud of, your uniformity.

The group resumed riding silently, immersed in their own thoughts. A while later, when Maia turned to Renna in hope of distraction, the man from space just stared ahead as his mount slogged along, his eyebrows furrowed in what seemed a solid line of dark contemplation.

They slipped out of the maze of canyons after nightfall, climbing a narrow trail south and west of the dark, silent Lerner furnaces. Despite the lower temperatures out on the plain, emerging into the open came as a relief. Starlight spread across the prairie sky, and one of the smaller moons, good-luck Iris, shone cheerily, lifting their spirits. Thalla and Kiel jumped from their mounts on spotting a large patch of glory frost, protected by the northern shadow of a boulder. They rolled in the stuff, pushing it in each other’s faces, laughing. When they remounted, Maia saw a light in their eyes, and wasn’t sure she liked it. She approved even less when each of them started jockeying to ride near Renna, occasionally brushing his knee, engaging him in conversation and making interested sounds at whatever he said in reply.

Alone with her thoughts, Maia did not even look up to measure the constellations’ progress. She had the impression it would be many days yet before they would catch sight of the coastal range and begin seeking a pass to the sea. Assuming, of course, they weren’t spotted by Perkinites along the way.

And then? Even if we make it to Grange Head? Then what?

Freedom had its own penalties. In prison, Maia had known what to expect from one day to the next. Going back to being a poor young var, searching for a niche in an unwelcoming world, was more frightening than jail in some ways. Maia was only now coming to realize how she had been crippled by being a twin. Rather than the advantage she had imagined it to be, that accident of biology had let her live in fantasies, assuming there would always be someone to put her back against. Other summer girls left home knowing the truth, that no plan, no friendship, no talent, would ever by itself make your dreams come true. For the rest, you needed luck.

After having ridden most of the day and half the night, they made camp once more in the shelter of a gully. Kiel managed to start a fire with sticks gathered near the bone-dry watercourse. Except for cups of hot tea, they ate supper cold from the dwindling larder in their saddlebags.

As the others made ready for bed, Renna gathered several small items from his blue pouch. One was a slender brush of a kind Maia had never seen before. He also picked up a camp spade, a canteen, and takawq leaves before turning to leave. Baltha seemed uninterested, and Maia wondered, was it because there was no place he could escape to in this vast plain? Or had Baltha already gotten what she wanted from him? Maia had intended to pull Renna aside and tell him about the southerner’s strange actions, the morning before, but it had slipped her mind. Now, her feelings toward him were ambivalent again, especially with Thalla and Kiel still acting decidedly wintry.

“Don’t get lost out there!” Thalla called to Renna. “Want me to come along and hold your hand?”

“That may not be what needs holding,” Kiel commented, and the other vars laughed. All except Maia. She was bothered by Renna’s reaction to the kidding. He blushed, and was obviously embarrassed. He also seemed to enjoy the attention.

“Here,” Kiel said, tossing her penlight. “Don’t confuse it with anything else!”

Maia winced at the crude humor, but the others thought it terribly funny. Renna peered at the cylindrical wooden case with the switch and lens at one end. He shook his head. “I don’t think I’ll have any trouble telling the difference.” The three older women laughed again.

Doesn’t he realize he’s encouraging them? Maia thought irritably. With no aurorae or other summer cues to launch male rut, none of this was likely to go anywhere, and right now the mood was light. But if he feigned interest just to tease the women, it could lead to trouble.

As Renna passed by her, carrying the camp shovel awkwardly in front of him, Maia blinked in surprise and fought not to stare. For the briefest instant, until he vanished from the light, she thought she’d caught sight of a distension, a bulge which, thank Lysos, none of the others appeared to have noticed!

The fire faded and the big moon, Durga, rose. Thalla snored beside Kiel, and Baltha stretched out next to the horses. Maia was drifting off with her eyes closed, envisioning the tall spires of Port Sanger above the glassy waters of the bay, when a thump yanked her awake again. She looked left, where a blocky object had fallen onto Renna’s blanket. The man sat down next to it and began pulling off his shoes. “Found something interesting out there,” he whispered.

She raised herself to one arm, touching the crumbled block. “What is it?”

“Oh, just a brick. I found a wall… and old basement. Not the first I’ve seen. We’ve been passing them all day.”

Maia watched as he pulled off his shirt. Unshaven and unwashed for several days, he exuded maleness like nothing she had seen or smelled since those sailors aboard the Wotan, and that, after all, had been at sea. Were a man to show up at any civilized town in such condition, he would be arrested for causing a public nuisance. That would go doubly in summer, and fourfold in high winter! Being an alien, perhaps Renna didn’t know the rules of modesty boys were taught at an early age, rules that held especially when glory had fallen. Attractiveness, at the wrong times, can be a kind of annoyance.

“I never saw any walls,” she answered absently. “You mean people lived near here?”

“Mm. From the weathering, I’d say about five hundred years ago.”

Maia gaped. “But I thought—”

“You thought this valley was settled for only a century or so, I know. And the planet just a few hundred years before that.” Renna lay back against the saddle he was using for a pillow, and sighed. Apparently untroubled by the cold, he picked up the decomposing brick and turned it over. The muscles of his arms and chest knotted and shifted. Now that she was used to it, his male aroma did not seem as pungent as that of the Wotan sailors. Or was winter affecting her, as well?

“Um,” she said, trying to keep up her end of the conversation. “You mean I’m wrong about that?”

He smiled with an affectionate light in his eyes, and Maia felt a mild thrill. “Not your fault. The savants purposely muddy the histories made available outside Caria City. Not by lying, exactly, but giving wrong impressions, and implying that precise dates don’t matter.

“It’s true that Long Valley was pioneered a century ago, by foremothers of the Perkinite clans living here today. Almost no one had lived here for a long time, but several hundred years before that, this plain used to support a large population. I figure waves of settlement and recession must have crossed this area at least five or six times…”

Maia waved a hand in front of her face. “Wait. Wait a minute!” Her voice rose above a whisper, and she paused to bring it down again. “What’re you saying? That humans have been on Stratos for … a thousand years?”

Renna still smiled, but his brow furrowed as it did whenever he had something serious to say. “Maia, from what I’ve been able to determine by talking to your savants, Lysos and her collaborators planted hominid life on this world more than three thousand years ago. That’s compatible with their date of departure from Florentina, though much would depend on the mode of transport they used.”

Maia could only blink, as if the man had come right out and told her that womankind was descended from rock-salamanders.

“They intended their design to last,” he went on, looking at the sky. “And I’ve got to hand it to them. They did one hell of an impressive job.” With that, Renna put aside the ancient brick and opened his blanket to slip inside. “Goodsleep, Maia.”

She answered, “Goodsleep,” automatically, and lay back with her eyes closed, but it took a while for her thoughts to settle down. When at last she did drift off, Maia dreamed of puzzle shapes, carved in ancient stone. Blocks and elongated incised forms that shifted and moved over each other like twined snakes coiling across a wall of mysteries.

Maia had wondered if the escape would change rhythm, now that they were in the open. Would the group hole up by day, keeping out of sight until nightfall? After hectic, almost-continuous flight, she wouldn’t mind the rest.

That, apparently, was not, the plan. The sun was still low when Baltha shook her awake. “Come on, virgie. Get your tea and biscuits. We’re off in a sneeze and a shake.”

Thalla was already tending the rekindled fire while Kiel prepared the mounts. Standing and rubbing her eyes, Maia searched for Renna, finding him at last downstream, sitting in a semicircle of objects. When Maia drew near, she recognized the brick from last night, and several bent aluminum fixtures—a hinge and what must have been a large screw—plus several more lumps impossible to identify. The man had the Game of Life set on his lap. After examining one of his samples for a while, he would use a stylus to write an array of dots on the broad tablet, then press a button to make the pattern vanish. Into memory, she presumed.

“Hi!” he greeted cheerfully as she walked up, carrying two cups of tea. “One of those for me?”

“Yeah. Here. What’re you doing?”

Renna shrugged. “My job. Found a way to use this game set as a kind of notepad, to store observations. Awkward, but anything’s better than nothing at all.”

“Your job,” she mused. “I never got to ask. What is your job?”

“I’m called a peripatetic, Maia. That means I go from one hominid world to another, negotiating the Great Compact. It sounds grand. But really, that’s just to keep me busy. My real job is … well, to keep moving and stay alive.”

Maia thought she understood a little of what he had said. “Sounds a lot like my job. Moving. Staying alive.”

The man who had been her fellow prisoner laughed appreciatively. “When you put it that way, I guess it’s the same for everybody. The only game in town.”

Maia recalled the night before, the way shifting winds would bring his aroma as she slept fitfully, waking once to find that she was using his chest as a pillow, and he asleep with one arm over her shoulders. This morning, he seemed a different person. Somehow he had found a way to clean up. His stubble had been scraped away, in places, transforming it into the beginnings of a neat beard. Right now she could smell herself more than him.

Moving to place herself downwind, she asked, “Then you aren’t here to invade us?”

She had meant it as a joke, to make fun of the rumors spread by fearmongers ever since his ship appeared in the sky, one long year ago. But Renna smiled thinly, answering, “In a manner of speaking, that’s exactly what I’m here for … to prepare you for an invasion.”

Maia swallowed. It wasn’t the answer she’d expected. “But you—”

She didn’t finish. Thalla called, leading a pair of horses, “Off your bottoms, you two! Daylight riding’s hard and fast, so let’s get at it!”

“Yes, ma’am!” Renna replied with a friendly, only-slightly-mocking salute. He left his archaeological samples where they lay and stood up, folding the game board. Maia hurried to tie her bedroll to her saddlebag, and glanced back to see Renna bending over to check the cinch buckle of his mount. I wonder what he meant by that remark. Could the Enemy be coming back? Did he come across the stars to warn us?

While Maia was looking at the man, Kiel crossed between them and smoothly, blithely, reached out to pinch him as she passed by! “Hey!” Renna shouted, straightening and rubbing his bottom, but clearly more surprised than offended. Indeed, his rueful smile betrayed a hint of enjoyment, causing Kiel to chuckle.

Lysos, what a shameless tease, Maia grumbled to herself, irritation pushing aside her earlier train of thought. Miffed without quite knowing why, she ignored the man’s glances after that and rode ahead with Baltha for most of that afternoon. Her annoyance only grew as Renna took small detours several times with Kiel and Thalla, showing them ruins he spotted and explaining which structure might have been a house and which a craftworks. The two women were embarrassingly effusive in their show of interest.

Baltha snorted. “Silly rads,” she muttered. “Making a fuss like that, trying to talk to a man, even when it won’t get ’em anywhere. As if those two could handle a sparking if they got one now.”

“You don’t think they’re trying to—”

“Naw. Just flirting, prob’ly. Pretty damn pointless. You know the saying—

“Still makes plenty sense to me,” she finished.

“Mm,” Maia answered noncommittally. “What’s a … rad?”

Baltha glanced at her, sidelong. “Pretty innocent, ain’t you, virgie? Do you know anything at all?”

Maia felt her face flush. I know what you’ve got hidden in your saddlebag, she thought of saying, but refrained.

“Rad stands for ‘radical’—which means a bunch of overeducated young city varlings with dimwitted ideas about changing the world. Think they’re all smarter than Lysos. Idiots.”

Maia recalled now, listening to the tinny radio in the cottage at Lerner Hold. The clandestine station used the word to represent women calling for a rethinking of Stratoin society, from the ground up. In many ways, rads were polar opposites to Perkinites, pushing for empowerment of the var underclass through restructuring all of the rules, political and biological.

“You’re talking about my friends,” Maia told Baltha, in what she hoped was a severe tone.

Baltha returned a sarcastic moue. “Am I? Now there’s a thought. Yer friends. Thanks for setting me straight.” She laughed, making Maia feel foolish without knowing why. She turned straight ahead, ignoring the other woman, and for several minutes they rode in silence. Eventually, though, curiosity overcame her resentment. Maia turned and spoke a question in carefully neutral tones. “So, from what you say, I figure you don’t want to change the world?”

“Not a whole lot. Just shake it up a little. Knock down some deadwood to make room in the forest, so t’speak. Let in enough light for a new tree or two.”

“With you being a founding root, I suppose.” “Why not? Don’t I look like a foundin’ mother to you? Can’t you jus’ picture this mug on a big painting, hangin’ over th’ fireplace of some fancy hall, someday?” She held her head high, chin outthrust.

Trouble was, Maia could picture it. The founding mothers of a lot of clans must have been just as piratically tough and ruthless as this rugged var. “Fine. Let’s say you knock down a clearing and set your own seed there. Say your family tree grows into a giant in the forest; with hundreds of clone twigs spreading in all directions. What’ll be your clan policy toward some new sapling, that tries to set root nearby someday?”

“Policy? That’ll be simple.” Baltha laughed. “Spread our branches an’ cut off th’ light!”

“Don’t others also deserve a place in the sun?”

Baltha squinted at Maia, as if amazed by such naivete. “Let ’em fight for it, like I’m fight’n right now. It’s the only fair way. Lysos was wise.” The last was intoned solemnly, and Baltha drew the circle sign over her breast. Maia recognized a look of true religion in the other woman’s eyes. A version and interpretation that conveniently justified what had already been decided.

Lasting silence settled after that. They rode on and the afternoon waned. Baltha consulted her compass, correcting their southwestward path several times. At intervals, she would rise in the stirrups and play her telescope across the horizon, searching for signs of pursuit, but only twisted shrubs with gnarled limbs broke the monotony, reminding Maia of legendary women, frozen in place after encountering the Medusa-man.

When the party of fugitives stopped, it was only to stretch the kinks out of their legs and to eat standing up. There were no more jokes about Renna’s wincing accommodation to his saddle. By now they were all hobbling. Dusk fell and Maia expected a call to set camp, but apparently the plan was to keep riding. No one tells me anything, she thought with a sigh. At least Renna looked as tired and ignorant as she felt.

Two hours after nightfall, with tiny, silvery Aglaia just rising in the constellation Ladle, Baltha called a sudden halt, motioning for silence. She peered ahead into the darkness, then cupped her hands around her mouth and trilled a soft birdcall.

Seconds passed.

A reply hooted from the gloom, then a pause, and another hoot. A spark flashed, followed by a lantern’s gleam, barely revealing a bulky form, like a rounded hillock, several hundred meters ahead. As they rode forward, shadows coalesced and separated. The object appeared to be squared off at one end, bulbous at the other. Hissing softly, it stood where a pair of straight lines crossed from the far left horizon on an arrow-straight journey to the right. The blurry form resolved, and Maia abruptly recognized a small maintenance engine for the solar railway, sitting on a spur track, surrounded by tethered horses and murmuring women.

There were cries of joyful reunion as Baltha galloped to greet her friends. Thalla and Kiel embraced Kau. Renna dismounted and held Maia’s gelding while she descended, heavy with fatigue. Leading their tired beasts around the dark engine they handed the reins to a stocky woman wearing Musseli Clan livery. Another Musseli gave Renna a folded bundle that proved to be a uniform of one of the male rail-runner guilds.

So, the Musseli weren’t in cahoots with the Perkinite farmer clans. It figured, given their close relationships with guildsmen, some of whom were their own brothers and sons. Too bad I never got a chance to see what life is like in a clan like that. It must be curious, knowing some men so well.

Apparently, the cabal were going to try getting Renna out the fast way, in one quick dash by rail. Without 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.

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.

Summer storms have their way with me. Wind and blazing sun desiccate my sodden soil. In winter, ice splits the scattered pebbles down to dust. The poor loam leaks and seeps. I bleed.

And what the wind and sun and ice leave, humans break with steel plows, or bake into bricks, or turn into golden grain which they ship across the sea.

Where are my prancing lingaroos? The grazing pantotheres, or nimble coil-boks, who used to roam my plain in numbers vast? They could not compete with cattle and mice. Or, if they could, humans intervened, improving strains they chose to use. New hooves mark my trails, while the old vanish into zoos.

No matter. Let invaders displace native creatures, who displaced others before them. Let my soil turn to rock, to sand, to soil once again. What difference do changes make, sifted by the sieve of time?

I wait, I abide, with the patience of stone.

Renna, and then Kiel, urged Maia to stretch out where a half-dozen other women lay together like swaddled cord-wood, all facing the same way for lack of room to turn. Not that discomfort kept any of them awake. In Thalia’s words, these weren’t pampered clonelings, to be irked by a mattress-covered pea. Their synchronized r-r-ronn of breathing soon drowned the gentle whine of the electric motors.

“No, thanks,” Maia told her friends. “I couldn’t sleep. Not now. Not yet.”

Kiel only nodded, settling into a niche near the brake box to doze sitting up. Renna, too, reached his limit. After badgering the poor, confused engineer with questions for just half an hour, he uncharacteristically let that suffice, and collapsed onto the blankets that had been thrown for his benefit over the widest space—a deck plate covering the thrumming engine gearbox. Its lullaby soon had him snoring with the best of them.

Maia unbuckled her sextant and sighted a few familiar stars. Although fatigue and the car’s vibration made it a rough fix, she was able to verify they were heading in the right direction. That didn’t entirely preclude the possibility of treachery—Am I growing cynical with age? she pondered dryly—but it felt reassuring to know that each passing second brought them closer to the sea. Maia quashed her misgivings. Kiel and the others know more than I do, and they seem confident enough.

Maia wasn’t the only insomniac keeping the engineer silent company. Baltha stood watch by the portside window, caressing her crowbar like a short-style trepp bill, as if eager to have just one whack at an enemy before making good their escape. Once, the rugged woman exchanged a long, enigmatic look with Maia. For the most part, each kept territorially to her own pane of cool glass, Baltha peering ahead and sniffing for danger, while Maia pretended to do her part, keeping lookout on the starboard side.

Not that bare eyes would do much good in the dark. At this speed, we’d barely see a thing before we hit it.

Moon-glint reflections off the arrow-straight rails diffracted hypnotically past her heavy, drooping eyelids. Maia let them close—just for a minute or two. There was no arresting of images, however. She continued picturing the locomotive, rushing across a chimeric rendition of the steppe, at first just like the moonlit plain outside, then increasingly the landscape of a dream. The gentle, frozen, prairie undulations began to move, to roll like ocean waves lapping either side of the steel-steady rails.

Fey certainty struck Maia. Something lay ahead, just out of sight. Premonition manifested as a vivid, prescient image, of this hurtling engine bound unalterably toward collision with a towering pile of rocks, recently lain across the tracks by a grinning Tizbe Beller.

“Run if you like,” her former tormentor crooned menacingly, like a storybook witch. “Did you honestly think you could escape the power of great clans, if they really want to stop you?”

Maia moaned, unable to move or waken. The phantom barricade loomed, graphic and frightening. Then, moments before impact, the stones making up the wall transformed. In a stretched instant, they metamorphosed into glistening eggs, which cracked open, releasing giant, pale birds. The birds spread vast wings and bound free of their dissolving shards, exhaling fire, sailing unconstrained to join their brethren, the glittering stars.

In her dream, Maia felt no relief to have them go. Rather, waves of desolate loneliness hit her, like a pang.

How come? she wondered. A reproving plaint from childhood. How come they get to fly… while I must stay behind?

Morning broke while Maia slept, curled in a blanket that steamed when struck by the newly risen sun. Renna gently shook her shoulder, and put a hot cup of tcha between her hands. Squinting at his open, unguarded face, Maia smiled gratefully.

“I think we’re going to make it!” the man commented with a tense confidence Maia found endearing. She would have been hurt if he said it to humor her. But rather, it felt as if she were the adult, charmed and indulgently warmed by his naive optimism. Maia had no idea how old Renna was, but she doubted the man would ever outgrow his sunny, mad enthusiasm for new things.

Breakfast consisted of millet meal and brown sugar, mixed with hot water from the engine’s auxiliary boiler. The fugitive train did not stop, or even slow, while they ate. Grasslands dotted with grazing herds swept by. Now and then, an unknowing cowhand lifted her arm to wave at the passing locomotive.

Between checks on her instruments, the Musseli driver told Maia and the others what she had heard yesterday, before coming to the rendezvous. There had indeed been fighting at the prison-sanctuary, the same night Maia and Renna saw aircraft cross the sky. Planetary Authority agents, using surprise to redress their small numbers, landed on the stony tower, seizing the erstwhile jail. Too late to do us much good, Maia thought sardonically. Except by distracting the Perkies. That could improve our chances a bit.

The next day, local militias had been called up throughout Long Valley. Matriarchs of the senior farming clans vowed “to defend local sovereignty and our sacred rights against meddling by federal authorities…” Accusations flew in both directions while neither side mentioned anything at all about the Visitor from the stars. In practical terms, there could still be plenty of trouble for the fugitive band, and no likelihood of more help from Caria City forces until they reached the sea.

To make matters worse, the population of the valley grew denser as they neared the coastal range. The locomotive streaked past hamlets and sleepy farming towns, then larger commercial centers and clusters of light manufacturing. Several times they had to slow to gingerly maneuver by heavy-laden hopper cars filled with wheat or yellow corn.

More often, the path seemed to open up like magic before them. At towns, they were nearly always waved on by stationmistresses who, Maia realized, must be part of the conspiracy. Bit by bit, the scope of this enterprise seemed to grow.

Are all the railroad clans involved? They’re not Perkies, but I’d have thought they’d at best stay neutral. It’s got to be pretty damn serious for a hard-nosed bunch like the Musseli to risk customer relations for a cause.

Maia pondered how, once again, she was probably missing the big picture. I used to think this was all about that drug which makes men summery in winter. But that’s just one part of it … not as important as Renna, for instance.

Could it be that he’s just one piece, too? Not a pawn like me, but no king, either. I could get killed without anyone ever taking the time to explain why.

Small surprise there. One advantage of a Lamatian education was that she and her sister hadn’t been raised to expect fairness from the world. “Roll with the blow!” Savant Claire had shouted, hitting Maia over and over with a padded stick during what was supposed to have been varling “combat practice,” a torture session that stretched on and on, until Maia finally learned to fall with the impact, not against it.

How I still hate you, Claire, Maia thought, remembering. But I’m starting to see your point.

The exodus across the plains had a syncopated cadence—long intervals of boredom punctuated by anxious, heart-stopping minutes passing through each town. Nevertheless, all seemed to be going well until just before noon. Then, at a town called Golden Cob, they were met by an unpleasant sight—a lowered customs gate, barring their path. In lieu of the Musseli station master, a squad of tall redheads waited on the platform, all armed and dressed in militia leathers, comparing the engine’s markings with numbers on a clipboard. Maia and the vars ducked out of sight, but despite the engineer’s complaints, the guards-women insisted on inspecting the loco. En masse, they grabbed the ladder frames and proceeded to climb aboard from both sides.

There followed a stretched moment as two groups of women stared at each other in jittery silence. One guard spotted Renna, opened her mouth to shout…

A shrill ululation pealed from above. The lead redhead looked up—too late to duck the dull end of Baltha’s crowbar, which caught her along the jaw. From the metal roof, where the lanky southern var had lain, Baltha threw herself upon the close-pressed mass of militia.

Instantly, a free-for-all burst in the close cabin confines. Women screamed and charged. There was no room for fancy action with trepp bills, so both sides forsook polished staves for flailing fists and makeshift cudgels.

At first, Maia and Renna stood frozen at the rear. For all her adventures, Maia’s first battle rocked her back. Her stomach flipped and she heard her heart pounding over the din. Glancing up, she saw Renna’s alien eyes widen impossibly. Sweat prickled and veins stood out. It wasn’t fear she read, but trouble of another sort.

The melee surged toward them. One redhead slugged Thalia’s friend, Kau, knocking the petite var down. When the militiawoman raised her foot to follow through, Renna cried out, “No!” He took a step, fists clenched. Suddenly it was Maia’s turn to yell.

“Get back!” she screamed, diving between Renna and the guard, managing to fling them in opposite directions. A fist rebounded off her right temple, setting both ears ringing. Another blow struck between two ribs, and she retaliated, hitting something soft with an elbow. Ignoring lancing pain, thrashing in the tight press of struggling women, Maia succeeded at last in dragging the fallen Kau out of the fray.

“Take care of her,” she shouted to Renna. “And don’t fight! A man mustn’t!”

While he absorbed that, Maia turned and dove back into the brawl. It was a torrid, grunting struggle, devoid of ritual or courtesy or elegance. Fortunately, it was easy to tell friend from foe, even in the stifling dimness. For one thing, the enemy had bathed today, and smelled much better than her comrades. It was a resentful comparison that lent her the strength to wrestle women much larger and stronger than herself.

Terrifying while in doubt, the battle grew exhilarating when she realized her side was winning. Maia helped pin one thrashing redhead so Thalla could truss her with loops of preknotted cord. Getting up, Maia saw Baltha holding two clonelings in necklocks, banging their heads together. No assistance needed there, so she hurried past to help a southern var who was preventing one last militiawoman from diving out the door.

With an opening clear, Kiel leapt like a dark blur from the slowly crawling train, and ran ahead to raise the customs gate just in time. Hands reached down to haul her in as the driver poured on amps.

At the outskirts of town, the victorious refugees slowed down long enough to dump the squad of bruised and bound redheads beside the tracks. Then the Musseli opened her throttle again. The engine whined, accelerating westward at high speed.

Maia and the others were too keyed up to relax, talking loudly and pacing until their hearts began to settle. The sole exception was Renna, whose demeanor remained icy-deliberate while performing first aid on various cuts, bruises, and one broken wrist. He was a soothing presence, so long as there was work to do. When that was done, however, he began shivering and broke into a sweat. Maia watched his fists clench as he walked stiffly to the open door by the engineer and rinsed his head in the rushing breeze.

“What’s wrong?” Maia asked, coming alongside, watching his tendons tauten like bowstrings.

“I…” He shook his head. “I’d rather not say.”

But Maia thought she understood. On other worlds, men used to do most of the fighting. Bloody, terrible fighting, by accounts. For all she knew, it was still like that, out there. During the battle, Maia had briefly read his eyes. Something had been evoked that he did not much like.

“I guess Lysos knew what she was talking about, sometimes,” Maia said in a low voice.

Renna shot her a look under furrowed brows. Then, slowly, there spread across his face a smile. An ironic smile that this time conveyed respect, along with affection.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I guess maybe now and then she did.”

Fortunately, that was the last substantial town before the coastal range. Their engine had to decelerate to climb the steepening grade. But then, so would any pursuit sent after the commotion at Golden Cob. Watching Kiel and Baltha pore over a map, Maia saw they were more worried about what lay ahead. Looking over their shoulders, Maia guessed the Perkinites had one more chance to stop them, near a village named Overlook, where a narrow defile seemed perfect for a hastily organized roadblock.

Too perfect, she later discovered. An ambush had, indeed, been ordered. Nearby clans dispatched squads in response to warnings from Golden Cob, and began throwing up barricades. Yet, by the time the locomotive reached Overlook, the danger was passed. Local vars had surprised the gathering militia with mob force, driving them away before the train arrived.

The counterstroke turned out not to be as spontaneous as it looked, Maia learned. Several of the mob leaders crammed in among the escapees, joining the final leg of the exodus as soon as the last barriers were cleared away. Maia soon realized they were friends of Thalla and Kiel.

I get it. Kiel and her pals can read a map as well as Perkies can. If one place is perfect for an ambush, it can also be just right for ambushing the ambushers. Maia learned that the newcomers had recently taken jobs in the village, just in case of an eventuality like this.

How could a bunch of vars be so well organized? Such long-range thinking was supposedly limited to clone families, with generations of experience and a view of life that stretched beyond the individual’s.

Never mind, she told herself. What matters is, it worked!

With shouted cheers, the refugees at last waved goodbye to Long Valley. The locomotive was more crowded than ever during the final stretch over the pass, but no one minded. First sight of the blue ocean triggered an outbreak of singing that lasted all the way down to Grange Head.

Two more of Kiel’s friends were waiting in town, so that a fair contingent bid thankful farewell to the engineer, then trooped together from the railyard to the Founders’ Gospel Inn, a hostel overlooking the harbor. The new women wore garb of sailing hands—small surprise in a trading port. No doubt most of Kiel’s bunch, and Baltha’s, had worked their way over on freighters like those moored in the bay.

Maybe someone’ll put in a word … get me a job on one of the ships.

Thinking seriously about the future wasn’t something she had done in a long time. One compensation of helplessness, of living like a leaf, blown by winds far stronger than yourself. Soon, the downside of freedom would present itself—the curse of decision-making.

Kiel installed the elated adventurers on the hotel veranda, arranged for rooms, and set off with Baltha “to do business.” Presumably that meant dickering with the local magistrate, and probably making comm calls to officials halfway round the world. The rest of the party was to stick together, watching out for any last-minute move by the Long Valley clans. They weren’t out of Perkinite reach, yet. Safety still lay in numbers.

Which suited Maia fine. For the first time, it really seemed likely she wasn’t going back to prison. Her worries had started evaporating on first sight of the beautiful sea.

Even the drab stucco and brick warehouses of the trading port seemed more gay than the last time she had been here, an innocent fiver, immersed in mourning and despair.

With its view overlooking the harbor, but some distance from dockside fish smells, the hotel was far superior to the cheap transients’ lodge where she had lain wracked with fever, months ago. When Maia learned she would have her own small room, with a real mattress, she hurried to look it over, finding herself barely able to conceive of such luxury. You could even walk alongside the bed and spread your arms without touching a wall!

The impression of spaciousness was enhanced by her lack of worldly possessions. I’d hang something on the clothes-hooks, if I owned anything but what I’m wearing.

Back on the veranda, her compatriots had settled in with bottles of beer, watching the shadows lengthen. A few had chipped in for a newspaper, a luxury since in most towns the press was ran by subscription only, for the richest clans. The rads sourly disparaged the Grange Head Clipper, which featured mostly commodities prices, along with bickering among candidates in upcoming elections, to be held in a month, on Farsun Day.

“Perkies runnin’ against Ortho-doxies,” sniffed Kau. “Some choice! An’ look, barely any mention of planetwide issues. Nothin’ to tempt a var or man to think about votin’. And not a hint about any missin’ Visitor from space!” She and Thalla spoke longingly of the two-page weekly put out by their own organization, back in Ursulaborg. “Now there’s a newspaper!” Kau commented.

Maia paid scant attention. Freedom was too fresh and pristine to complicate with politics. Everyone knew such matters were worked out long in advance, by ancient mothers living in golden castles, in Caria City. Instead, she scanned the hills rimming the bay. Perched above all other structures, the Orthodox temple of Stratos Mother was a white sanctuary, shimmering in the afternoon sunshine. Maia recalled the refuge with gratitude, and made a note to visit the reverend mother. Partly to pay respects, and partly … to ask if any messages had come for her.

There wouldn’t be any, of course. Despite all that had taken place, all she had done to insulate her grief, Maia knew what would happen when the priestess shook her head and compassionately spread her hands. Maia would experience all over again her sister’s loss, the sense of hopelessness, that yawning pit, threatening to swallow her whole.

That visit could wait another day or two. For now it would do to lean back with the others on the hotel’s long porch, have a glass of tepid beer, share a tall tale or two, and keep her mind diverted with simple things.

All I really want from life right now is a hot shower and a soft place to sleep for days.

By consensus and natural gallantry, everyone agreed that Renna should take his turn with the bath first. The man started to protest, then chuckled, and said something mysterious about what one does when in a place called “Rome.” Two women accompanied him to stand watch outside the bathroom door, guarding his privacy.

After Renna left, several vars began pounding the table in earnest, shouting gaily for more ale. Except for Thalla, Maia hardly knew any of them. Kiel’s friend, Kau, passed the time polishing a wooden truncheon with a barely legal edge and point, wincing on occasion when she gingerly touched Renna’s bandage over her right ear. One of Baltha’s companions, a woman with a strong South Isles accent, kept pacing, looking toward the mountains and then out to sea again, muttering impatiently.

Maia found herself unable to stop scratching. The mere idea of a bath had infected her mind, causing her to notice itches that, till now, she had pushed to the background.

Fortunately Renna didn’t take long, for a man. He emerged wearing a smallish hotel robe, transformed with a trimmed beard, combed hair that curled as it dried in the breeze, and a rosy tone to his fresh-scrubbed skin. He bowed to the approving whistles of the southlanders, and accepted from Kau a stein of the local, watery brew. “It’s a wonder what a scrub can do for a boy,” he commented. Toweling his hair one-handed, he took a long swallow. “So, who’s next? Maia?”

She started to protest. She was lowest in status. But the others agreed by acclamation. “After all, it’s been as long for you as it was for him!” Thalla said kindly. “That Perkie jail must’ve been awful.”

“You’re sure…?”

“Of course we’re sure. Don’t worry about th’ hot water, sweets. Soon, we’ll be able to afford a lakeful. Shower good an’ sit in the tub long as you like.”

“Yeah, we’ll be busy, anyway,” Kau added, sitting next to Renna.

“Busy getting drunk as die-pigs, you mean,” Maia jested, and felt warmed when they all laughed in a comradely way. Renna winked. “Go on, Maia. I’ll make sure everyone behaves.”

That brought more hooting. Maia gave in with a smile of gratitude. Before-hurrying toward the luring smell of steam and soap, she unstrapped the little sextant from her wrist and handed it to Renna. “Maybe you can stop the sun filter from wobbling. Give you something to do with your hands.” Thalla sputtered in her beer and several others guffawed. “Shouldn’t be too hard for a hotshot star traveler to do,” Maia finished.

“You kidding?” he protested. “I barely make it to the can and back without a computer!”

“Would he be here with us, if he didn’t have a knack for getting lost?” Thalla agreed, shouting after Maia, then added, louder still, “Innkeeper! More ale!”

The bathroom lay up a double flight of plank stairs. Closing the door behind her, Maia could still hear the women below, joking and laughing, and Renna’s deeper voice joining in occasionally. Mostly, his contributions sounded like questions, though Maia could not make out words. Often, his queries brought on gales of laughter, which he seemed to take in good grace.

It felt strange undressing in the richly tiled bathroom, equipped with amenities she had to remind herself how to use. Maia kicked her soiled garments into a corner and went first to the shower, adjusting the knobs until hot water from the rooftop heater flowed steadily. They probably use good ol’ Port Sanger coal, she thought incongruously. Stepping under the stream, she proceeded to lather her body. The soap was harsh and doubtless homemade, but less expensive than importing the real thing from some specialist clan, far away. Nevertheless, it felt luxurious. Turning off the water between rinsings, Maia proceeded to scrape off layer after layer of grime, until her skin squeaked when rubbed. Then she started on her hair, scrubbing her scalp and working out tangles.

Don’t know why I bother, she wondered. It’s in such a state, I’ll probably have to hack it all off anyway.

Rinsing carefully one last time, Maia turned off the tap and tiptoed over to the broad wooden tub, by a small window overlooking the wharfs of Grange Head. She flipped back the hinged cover, exposing the steaming surface. To her relief, the water was pristine. There were stories about male sailors who forgot—or had never been taught—the proper procedure, and who actually used the bath for cleaning themselves, leaving the tub coated with soap and scum for the next person. With men, one just never knew what to expect, and as an alien, Renna might have been doubly confused.

Then again, perhaps there was only one civilized way. However barbaric their unmodified sexual patterns, cultured people on other worlds probably bathed the same way as on Stratos.

Alas, there would be no time to ask about that, or countless other quandaries, before escorted aircraft came from the west to whisk Renna away. At odd moments during their escape, she had pictured going with him all the way to Caria and seeing the city’s wonders. But in more lucid reflection Maia knew—she might as well ask to be taken along when he departed for the stars.

I wonder if he’ll remember me when he’s hobnobbing with savants and council members… or flying between planets long after I’m food for worms. It was a tough, wry contemplation, appropriate for the type of hard, worldly person she decided to become—ready for anything, shocked by nothing. And, especially, vulnerable to nobody.

The shower had been tepid, but the bath was so hot that it stung her innumerable cuts and scratches. Maia slipped lower by stages, until water sloshed over the sides into a waiting drain.

Heaven! Heat seemed to melt every part that was tense or callused, uncoiling muscles that had been taut without her noting. Troubles and worries she still had, but they went limp for the time being, along with her body. The sensuousness of lying completely motionless matched any active pleasure she knew.

Languidly, Maia lifted one arm to look at it from all sides, let it drop, and did the same thing with the other, regarding where recent months had left their marks. Next she examined each leg. A small scar on this shin, a healing scratch on that ankle, a couple of tender spots saddle-rubbed during that long ride on horseback… and one small battle wound that she made a mental note to keep clean over the days ahead, lest it get infected. Even here, in “civilization,” medical care was catch-as-catch-can, and she hardly had the resources to pay.

There was a knock, and the door started swinging. Thalla stuck her head in. “Everything all right?” the stocky woman asked.

“Oh! Fine, great… I’ll get out.” With a sigh, Maia reached for the rim.

“Don’t be silly. You just got in!” Thalla chided. “I just heard the innkeeper’s got a washload goin’. We’re tossing in our grungies. Want yours done, too?” She nodded toward the filthy garments in the corner.

Maia winced at the thought of ever wearing them again, but they were all she had. “Yeah, please. Kind of you.”

Thalla swept up the clothes. “Don’t mention it. Enjoy your bath. An’ have all the luck in the world.”

She closed the door and Maia sank back into the tub, relishing how the heat swarmed in again. It had been disappointing, thinking it was over so soon. Now she felt happier than if she had been left undisturbed! Not that everything melted in the hot water. The sound of the locomotive, its electric thrum along the rails, was still in her head. Nor, try as she might, could Maia push aside all her worries.

Staying ashore was out of the question. Tizbe and the Joplands would surely catch up with her. The sea was her only option. With what Maia had learned about navigation—and the Game of Life—perhaps some captain could be persuaded to give her a trial billet on crew, not just as passenger, second class. Ideally a slot to last through late spring, when rut season forced women ashore. By that time, she ought to have saved a credit or two.

In all justice, she should get a small portion of the reward Kiel and Baltha were collecting. Maia trusted Renna to stick up for her, though from the size of the getaway cabal, her share still wasn’t likely to be large.

There was also the matter of her appointment with the PES investigator, now long overdue because of circumstances beyond her control. Was it too late to make good her promise? Would testimony before a local magistrate suffice? Part of her determination was personal. Tizbe Beller locked me up to keep me from talking. So that’s exactly what I’ll do! Of all the sensations warming her—freedom, cleanliness, the physical luxury of the bath—she dwelled for a few minutes on revenge. The Bellers and Joplands will be sorry they ever made me their enemy, she vowed grandly.

It wasn’t a sound that tickled Maia’s attention. Rather, she grew gradually, uncomfortably aware of a certain lack of sound. Frowning, it began to dawn on her that it had been a while since she’d heard the murmur of conversation on the porch below. Or the pacing of the var on watch, or the clinking of bottles, or Renna’s persistent, naive questions.

Suddenly, the bath no longer felt luxurious, but confining. I’m probably turning into a prune, anyway, she thought. Her relaxed muscles had to be coaxed into lifting her weight out of the tub. While toweling herself, Maia could not suppress a rising sense of foreboding. Something was wrong.

Maia lowered the cover of the bathtub and climbed on top to reach the solitary window, wiping the foggy pane and pressing close to peer down, onto the veranda. Rows of empty bottles lay along the balcony railing, but where the women had been sitting, no one remained in sight.

Probably Kiel and Baltha came back with news, she thought. But nobody was visible near the main entrance, either. Did they go in to eat? she wondered.

Maia shoved upward against the window until it slid along wooden tracks, sash weights rattling on both sides. Fresh, chill air streamed in, sowing goose bumps as moisture evaporated from her skin. She stuck her head out and called, “Hey! Where is everybody?”

A few locals were in view near a warehouse, loading a horse-drawn wagon. When she stretched a little farther and turned left, she saw a crowd down at the embankment, far below, moving toward one of the piers. Maia’s heart surged when she recognized Thalia’s stocky form and Baltha’s shock of blonde hair.

No. They wouldn’t do that to me!

But there was Renna. Taller than Baltha, walking awkwardly with his arms around two of the women, rocking from side to side.

“Lysos!” Maia cried, hopping back onto the tiles. Her clothes were gone—no doubt to help strand her here. With a curse, she now recalled Thalia’s parting words, which had seemed odd for someone you expected to see again!

Clutching a towel, Maia dashed from the room and swept downstairs, only to be blocked momentarily by the innkeeper, holding a cloth bag and a paper envelope.

“Oh, it’s you, miss. Your friends told me to give you—”

Her words cut off as Maia pushed her aside and streaked out the front door, leaping down the steps onto the gravel road. Shopkeepers stared and a trio of three-year-old clones giggled, but Maia dug in, kicking pebbles as she ran, ignoring the bite of cold sea air. Turning fast at the embankment, she skidded and sprawled hard onto hands and knees, but was up again in an instant, not bothering to check for bleeding or to pick up the spilled towel. Maia ran naked past loading cranes and moored ships, to amazed looks from sailors and townswomen alike.

Two longboats had already set out from the pier, oars-women pulling with steady, even strokes. When Maia reached the end of the wharf, she screamed at Kiel, who was near the helmsman in the second boat.

“Liar! Damn you! You can’t just—” Stamping, she sought the words to express her fury. Kiel’s jaw dropped in surprise, while several of the vars Maia had fought next to, now laughed at the sight of her standing there, unclothed and quaking with anger.

The dark woman cupped her hands and called back. “We can’t take you along, Maia. You’re too young and it’s dangerous! The letter explains—”

“Julp on your damn letter!” Maia screamed in anger and disappointment. “What does Renna have to say about…”

Then she saw what she had not noticed before. The man from space had a glazed, unhappy look on his face, and was not focusing on anything or anybody in particular. “You’re kidnapping him!” she cried, hoarsely. “No, Maia. It’s not what you—”

Kiel’s voice cut off as Maia dove headfirst into the frigid water and came up sputtering. She inhaled a painful, salty rasp, then set out after the boat, swimming with all her might.

16

Incised figures on a granite wall… geometric forms… nested, twining-rope patterns … a puzzle, carved in ancient rock…

“We can’t stay down here much longer. I told you! Your code’s no better’n a Lamai’s spit!”

I Focus on an image… of a child’s hand… reaching upward toward a star-shaped knot of stone…

“Shut up, Leie. Lemme think. Was it this one? Um—I can’t ’member.”

…yes, this one. The star-shaped knob. She must touch the stone. Twist it a quarter turn. A quarter turn to the right.

It was hard to do, though. Something was making her sluggish. A force of will was needed just to make her arm extend, and motion felt like pushing through a jar of bee honey. The dank air of the cellar felt humid, smothering. The stone outcrop receded, even as she stretched out for it.

… a star-shaped stone… key to the sequence of opening.

The image wavered. Her own hand warped, growing indistinct behind swells of dizzying distortion. The surrounding, twining-rope carvings began to slither, twisting and writhing like awakening snakes.

“Too late,” Leie’s voice warbled from somewhere out of sight, mixing sadness with recrimination. A grinding sound told of the walls closing in, converging to crush them, to immure them in granite, leaving no escape.

“You’re always so damn late …”

What hurt most was a vague sense of betrayal. Not by her sister, but the patterns. She had felt so certain of them. The figures on the wall. She had put her faith in them, and now they wouldn’t play.

Blurry patterns. Fickle, blurry forms, carved in living, moving stone…

“… is … she… doin’… any… better?”

It was a woman’s distant tenor that surged and faded so … as if each word came floating out of a mist, packaged in its own quavering bubble.

The reply, when it came, was much deeper, like a sea god intoning from the depths.

“…think … so. … doctor said… hour ago… ought to … soon.”

At first, the voices were welcome intrusions, stirring and dissipating the clinging terror-strands of a bad dream. Soon, however, the words became irritants, luring her with hints of meaning, only to jerk away all sense, teasing her, thwarting an easy slide to quiet sleep.

The tenor returned, wavering less with each passing moment.

“Good thing … or those… heads would be … same as … ing murderers.”

A pause. The sea god intoned, “I … never forgive myself.”

“…had nothin’… with it! Damn fools, tryin’ to … her behind, like some kid. Could’ve told ’em she… stand for it. … Spunky little var.”

At least they were friendly voices, she realized. Soothing. Unthreatening. It was good knowing she was being cared for. No need to worry yet over things like how, or why. Natural wisdom counseled her to leave it for now. Let well enough alone.

Wisdom. No match for the troublemaker Curiosity.

Where am I? she wondered despite herself. Who are these people?

From that moment, each word arrived defined. Freighted with meaning, context.

“So you’ve told me,” the deeper voice resumed. “We had some chance to exchange life stories in prison, but she never mentioned the details you told me. Poor girl I had no idea what she’s been through.”

The man’s voice… was Renna’s. A small knot of worry unraveled. I haven’t lost him yet.

“Yeah, well, if I’d kept my ears an’ eyes open, I’d have connected her with those rumors goin’ around, an’ gone ashore to check for myself instead of sittin’ on the ship like a dorit.”

The higher voice was also familiar, tugging at Maia’s recollection from what seemed ages ago, in a different life.

“And how about me? Swallowing a Mickey Finn, and letting those women carry me off like a partridge on a pole?”

“Swallowing a Mick…? Ah, you mean a Summer Soother.”

Maia’s breath caught in surprise. Naroin! What is she doing here?

Where is here?

“Yeah. Pretty dumb, all right. I thought spacemen were supposed to be smartguys.”

Renna chuckled ruefully. “Smart? Not especially. Not by the enhanced standards of some places I’ve visited. The main trait they seem to want in peripatetics is patience. We—Say, did you hear that? I think she’s stirring.”

Maia felt a small cool hand along the side of her face.

“Hello, Maia? Can you hear me, younger? It’s me, your old master-at-arms from the Wotan. Eia! Up an’ at ’em.”

The hand was callused, not smooth. Yet it felt good just having someone touch her again. Someone who meant her well. Maia almost feigned sleep, to prolong it.

“I …” Her first word came out more a croak than decipherable speech. “C-can’t… open my eyes…” The lids felt locked shut by crusty dryness. A damp cloth passed gently over her brow, moistening them. When it pulled away, the world entered as brightness. Maia blinked and could not stop. Without conscious will, her leaden hands lifted to rub her eyes clumsily.

Two familiar faces swam into focus, framed against wood paneling and a ship’s porthole.

“Where …” Maia licked her lips and found her mouth too dry to salivate. “Where bound?”

Both Naroin and Renna smiled, expressing relief.

“You gave us a scare,” Renna answered. “But you’re all right, now. We’re heading due west across the Mother Ocean, so our destination seems likely to be Landing Continent. One of the big port cities, I figure. Better for their plans than where they found us, out in the boondocks.”

“They?” Bleariness kept intruding, causing the pale man and dark-haired woman to split into four overlapping figures. “You mean Kiel? And Thalla and Baltha?”

Naroin shook her head. “Baltha’s just a hired stick, like me. We aren’t part of the Big Scheme. Those other two are the paymasters. Seems a secret league of Rads has got plans for your starman, here.”

“No end to excitement on wonderful Stratos,” Renna added sardonically.

“Maybe … you could write a travel guide book,” Maia suggested, concentrating to control her dizziness. Renna laughed, especially when Naroin looked at them both quizzically and asked what in Lysos’s name a “travel guide” was.

“What are you doing here?” Maia asked the woman sailor. “This can’t be Wotan.”

That much was obvious. Every surface wasn’t coated with a film of black, anthracite dust. Naroin grimaced. “Nah. Wotan banged into a lighter in Artemesia Bay. Captain Pegyul an’ I had words over it, so I took my wages an’ papers an’ got another berth. Just my luck to land one haulin’ the weirdest atyp contraband I ever saw—no offense, Starman.”

“None taken.” Renna appeared unbothered. “Think we’ll have any chance to jump ship along the way?”

“Wouldn’t bet on it, Shoulders. That’s one crowd o’ dogged vars escortin’ you. B’sides, I’m not sure I wouldn’t let things ride, if I was you. There’s a lot worse lookin’ for your handsy alien tors than’s got you right now, if you follow. Even worse than crazy Perkie farmers.”

Renna wore a guarded expression. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know?” Naroin shrugged and changed the subject. “I’ll go tell the customers our drowned wharf mouse has come around. Just you two remember the first rule o’ summerling survival.” She tapped the side of her head. “Small mouth. Big ears.”

Naroin gave Maia a parting wink and left, sliding the cabin door shut along its rails. Renna watched her go, shaking his head slowly, then turned back to Maia. “Want some water?”

She nodded. “Please.”

He cradled her head while holding a brown earthenware cup to her mouth. Renna’s hands felt so much larger than Naroin’s, if not noticeably stronger. He laid Maia’s head back on the folded blanket she had been given for a pillow.

Or rather, lent. I don’t own a thing in the world, Maia thought, recalling the betrayal of Thalla and Kiel, that naked sprint through the streets of Grange Head, and her plummet into the icy bay. And my best, maybe only, friend on Stratos is a stranger who knows even less than I do.

The thought would have made her laugh bitterly, if she had energy to spare. Maia fought a losing battle just to keep her eyes open.

“That’s all right,” Renna commented. “Sleep. I’ll stay right here.”

She shook her head. “How long …”

“You were out most of three days. Had to drain half a liter of water out of you, when they dragged you aboard.”

So much for those swimming lessons the mothers paid for, she thought. Laps in the Port Sanger municipal pool had prepared her for real-life trials about as well as the rest of Lamatia’s much-vaunted summerling education.

“You’ve been here all the time?” Maia questioned Renna through an enveloping languor. He dismissed it with an offhand wave. “Had to go to the can once or twice, and… oh! I held onto something for you. Thought you might want it when you woke.”

Maia could barely focus on the glitter of brass as he slipped a small object, cool and rounded, between her hand and the coverlet. My sextant! she realized happily. It was just a silly, half-broken tool, of little utility. Yet it meant so much to have something familiar. Something allied to memories. Something that was hers. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Hey, hey,” Renna soothed. “Just rest now. I’ll be here.”

Maia wanted to protest that no one had to keep watch over her, but she lacked the will to speak. Part of her felt it was untrue.

Renna gently placed his hand over the one holding the sextant. His touch was warm, his calluses more evenly spread than Naroin’s coarse ridges. They must have come from more subtle labors, or perhaps even deliberate exercise; though, as she drifted off, Maia found herself wondering why anyone would ever lift a finger she or he didn’t have to. Better, it seemed, simply to lie in bed forever.

“What are you going to do, make me lie in bed forever?” Maia pounded the covers with both fists, causing the doctor to pull away the stethoscope. “Now, don’t get all worked up. I just said you should take it easy awhile. You’re young an’ strong, though. Get up whenever you like.”

“Eia!” Maia shouted, throwing the covers aside and bounding onto the wooden deck. Too quickly. She felt a rush of dizziness, but refused to let it show. “Anybody have some clothes to lend me? I’ll work off the debt first thing.”

“You don’t owe anybody,” Kiel said from the foot of the bed. “We’ll make up what was in the package we left for you, at the hotel. Clothes and some money. It’s yours, free and clear.”

“I don’t want your charity,” Maia snapped.

Standing across the small cabin, by the door, Thalla frowned unhappily. “Now don’t be mad, Maia. We only—”

“Who’s mad?” Maia interrupted, clenching a fist. “I understand why you did it. You’ve got big-time, political uses for Renna, and figured I’d just get in the way. Even though I’m a var like you.”

Thalla and Kiel looked pained, and relieved that Renna had stepped outside during the examination. “We’re engaged in dangerous business,” Kiel tried to explain.

“Too dangerous for me, but okay for Renna?”

“It’s probably a lot safer for the alien to come with us, than simply handing him over to the PES in Grange Head. There are … factions in Caria City. Factions that don’t have sweet plans for our Outsider.”

Maia found that believable. “And you rads don’t have plans, I take it?”

“Of course we do. We want to make a better world. But the peripatetic’s goals aren’t incompatible with our—”

The physician closed his bag with, a loud snap. His authoritative glare must have been learned at Health Scholarium. “S’cuse me for interruptin’, ladies, but did you say something about gettin’ this poor girl some clothes?”

Medicine was one rare track of higher education in which gender hardly mattered. Some excellent practitioners were men, who seldom let the innate mood swings of their sex interfere with professionalism. Thalla nodded quickly, at once the attentive and compliant var. “Yes, Doctor. I’ll get ’em now.”

At the door she turned back. “Meanwhile, don’t you run around naked on deck, Maia! Not a good habit in the big cities we’re headed to!” She giggled at her own wit and departed. Maia briefly glimpsed Renna pacing outside. He looked relieved when Thalla gave thumbs-up while closing the door.

“The youngster is undernourished,” the physician went on telling Kiel, while regarding Maia over the rims of his glasses. Maia crossed her arms and lifted her chin while he clucked disapprovingly over her thinness. “I’ll tell Cook double rations for a week. You make sure she eats every bite.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Kiel nodded obediently, waiting till he left before mimicking his stern look with knitted eyebrows and pursed, smacking lips. Under other circumstances, Maia might have found the lampoon hilarious. Now she succeeded in remaining grim, sending the dark var what she hoped was a fierce glower.

Kiel answered with a shrug. “All right. Crawl back under the covers. I’ll answer your questions.”

Maia chose to take the maternalistic tone as patronizing. She remained standing and held up one finger. “First, what are you planning to do with him?”

“Who, Renna? Why, nothing much. There are some areas of technology we want to ask about. He may not know the answers in detail, but he can give us a general idea what’s possible and what isn’t. The solutions may lie in his ship’s computer.

“Mostly, though, we want to take him somewhere safe and comfortable, while we dicker with certain people in Caria.”

“Dicker? About what?”

“About how to get him back to the State Guest House without an accident happening along the way, and from there safely to his ship. He won’t really be out of danger till then.”

“Danger,” Maia repeated, rubbing her shoulders. “From whom?”

“From people who’ve convinced themselves they can forestall the inevitable. Who think contact would mean the end of the world. Who would fight it by killing the messenger.”

Maia had figured as much. Still, it was chilling to hear it confirmed.

“Oh, it’s not the whole government,” Kiel went on. “I’d say the majority of savants, and a good many council members, realize change is coming. They argue over ways of slowing it down as much as possible …”

“And you don’t want it slowed,” Maia guessed.

Kiel nodded. “We want to speed it up! Lots of us aren’t willing to wait two or three generations till the next starship comes, and then through more delays, and more. The old order’s finished. Well past time to turn it on its head.”

“So Renna’s a bargaining chip.”

Kiel frowned. “If you want to put it that way. In the short term. Over the long run, our goals are compatible. If he does have a legitimate complaint or two about our methods, can he honestly say he’s not among friends? We want him to live and accomplish his mission. The rest is just details.”

Against her own wishes, Maia found herself believing Kiel. Am I being gullible? Why should I even listen, after what she tried to do?

“You could help him call his starship, to come and get him.”

Maia didn’t like Kiel’s indulgent smile, as if the suggestion were naive. “The ship had but one lander. Anyway, it can only be sent back into space from the launching facility at Caria.”

“Convenient.” Maia sat on the edge of the bed. “So Renna’s stuck down here, where he just happens to be useful against your enemies.”

Kiel accepted the point with a nod. “You met some of them in Long Valley. Mighty old clans, holding place in a static social order not by competing in an open market, the way Lysian logic says they should, but by conniving together, suppressing anything that might bring change.

“Take that drug plot you uncovered. Suppose they have their way and alter the balance of reproduction on Stratos. There’d be almost no summerlings born! Nothing but clones and a few tame males, raised as drones to be milked dry each winter.”

“I already figured that out,” Maia grumbled uncomfortably.

Kiel’s eyebrows arched. “Did you also figure out why the Perkinites didn’t eliminate our visitor from the stars, just as soon as they got their hands on him? They plan to squeeze data out of him, like juice from a doped-up slor.”

“So? You want information, too.”

“But with different goals. They want to learn how to shoot down hominid starships”—Maia gasped; Kiel went on without a pause—“and much more. They think Renna can help solve a problem that stumped even Lysos: how to spark clonal pregnancies entirely without sperm.”

“But…” Maia stammered. “The placenta…”

“Yes, I know. Basic facts of life we’re taught as babes. You need sperm to trigger placental development, even if the egg’s chromosomes come from the mother. It’s the basis for our whole system. Meant they had to arrange things so a few ‘normal,’ sexually induced pregnancies occur each summer, in order to get boys to spark the following generation. Vars like you and me are mere side effects, virgie.”

Maia shook her head. Kiel was oversimplifying by leagues, especially about the motivations of Lysos and her aides. Still, if the great clans ever found out how to reproduce at will, without even brief participation by males, it would make Tizbe Beller’s rutting drug look like a glass of warm tea.

“Did Renna mention anything like this, when he was in Caria?”

“He did. The big dummy doesn’t comprehend that there are some things people simply oughtn’t to know.”

Maia agreed on that point. Sometimes Renna seemed too innocent to live.

“You see what we’re up against,” Kiel concluded, forming a fist. Her dark complexion flushed. “Sure, we Rads are also proposing big changes, but in the opposite direction! We’d redirect life on Stratos toward more normal modes for a human species… toward a world right for people, not beehives from pole to pole.”

“You’d take us back to when men were… fifty percent?”

Laughter broke Kiel’s earnest scowl. “Oh, we’re not that crazy! For now, our near-term goal is only to unfreeze the political process. Get some debate going. Put more than a few token summerling reps on the High Council. Surely that’s worth supporting, whatever you think of our long-range dreams?”

“Well…”

“Maia, I’d love to be able to tell the others you’re with us.”

Kiel was trying to meet her eyes. Maia preferred looking away. She paused for a long moment, then gave a quick half-nod.

“Not yet. But I’ll… listen to the rest.”

“That’s all we can ask.” Kiel clapped her on the shoulder. “In time, I hope you’ll find it in your heart to forgive us for stupidly underestimating you. That’ll be the last time, I promise.

“And meanwhile, since you’ve shown yourself to be such a woman of action, who better to choose as our guest’s bodyguard, eh? You’d keep a special eye on him. Prevent anyone from slipping things into his feed, as we did at Grange Head! What better way to make sure we stay honest? Does that sound acceptable to you?”

Kiel was being wry, but the offer appeared genuine. Maia answered with grudging respect. “Acceptable,” she I said in a low voice. It was irritating to know that Kiel could read her like a book.

Game tokens lay scattered across the cover of the cargo hold—small black and white tiles with whiskerlike sensors protruding from their sides and corners. At first, Renna had marveled how each piece was built to meticulous precision. But, after spending all morning winding one after another of the watchspring mechanisms, some of the romance went out of contemplating them. Fortunately, the efficient gadgets needed just a few twists with a winding key. Nevertheless, Renna and Maia had only finished prepping half of the sixteen hundred game pieces by the time lunch was called.

How do I keep getting talked into weird stuff like this? Maia wondered as she got up and stretched her throbbing arms. I’ll be a wreck by evening. Still, it beat peeling vegetables, or the other “light work” tasks she’d been assigned since being let out. And the prospect of her first formal Life match had Maia intrigued, if not exactly breathless.

Maia dutifully supervised the dishing out of Renna’s food, making sure it came from the common pot and that the utensils were clean. Not that anyone expected an assassination attempt way out here on the Mother Ocean. More likely, someone on the crew might try to dope him, just to stanch the endless flow of alien questions. It was always easy to find Renna on board. Just look for a disturbance in the sailors’ routine. On the quarterdeck, for instance, where Captain Poulandres and his officers took on harried looks after long sessions of amiable inquiry. Or teetering precariously, high in the rigging, peering over sailors’ shoulders as they worked, thoroughly upsetting the protective pair, Thalla and Kiel, who watched anxiously below.

When Renna mentioned his curiosity how the Game of Life was played at sea, Poulandres seized a chance to divert the strange passenger’s attention. A challenge match would take place that very evening. Renna and Maia against the senior cabin boy and junior cook.

Hey, Maia thought at the time. Did anyone hear me volunteer?

Not that she really minded, even when her wrists ached from the endless, repetitive twisting. A fresh east wind filled Manitou’s electric generator and stretched its billowing sails, causing the masts to creak gently under the strain. It also filled Maia’s lungs with growing hope. Maybe things are going to work out, this time.

I’m going to see Landing Continent.

If only Leie were here, so we could see it together.

Unlike the creaky, old Wotan, this was a fast vessel, built to carry light cargoes and passengers. Its sailors were well-accoutered, befitting members of a prestigious guild. Cabin boys, newly chosen from their mother clans, ran errands with enthusiastic dash. Maia found the officers’ uniformed splendor both impressive and more than a little pompous.

After her spell in Long Valley, where men had been scarcer than red lugars, it seemed strange now, living with so many around. Her experience with, the Beller drug undermined Maia’s confidence in winter’s sure promise of male docility. What was it like before Lysos? she wondered. You never knew which men were dangerous, or when.

Surreptitiously, she watched the sailors, comparing them to Renna, the alien. Even the obvious things were startling. For instance, his eyes were of a dark brown hue seldom seen on Stratos, set anomalously far apart. And his long nose gave the impression of an ever-curious bird. Mild differences, really. But if Renna’s not from outer space, Maia thought, then he’s from someplace equally strange.

Other differences ran deeper, Renna was always peering. His visual acuity was fine; he simply hungered for more light, as if daytime on Stratos was dimmer than he was used to. This counterbalanced an uncanny sensitivity to sound. Maia knew he overheard the jokes people made about him.

No one made fun of his beard, now lustrous and curly dark. A summer beard few Stratoin men could match this time of year. But there was some teasing concerning his diet. Normal ship’s fare was all right—grain and legume porridge, supplemented by fish stew. But he politely refused red meat from the ship’s cooler, citing “protein allergies,” and would not drink seawater under any circumstances. The cook, grumbling about “finicky land-boys,” tapped a freshwater cask just for him. Kiel shrugged and paid for it.

Maia felt she was well over the hearth-pangs that had filled her lonely solitude at the prison-sanctuary. Except in his intelligence and essential goodness, Renna bore no resemblance to the person she had pictured while exchanging coded messages in the dark. It was just another loss, and no one’s fault, in particular.

Still, why did she find herself occasionally washed by illogical feelings of jealousy when Renna spent time talking to Naroin, or Kiel, or other young vars? Am I attracted to him in a … sexual way? It seemed unlikely, given her youth.

Even if I were, what would jealousy have to do with it?

Maia sought within. Some thoughts seemed to make her feel all wound-up inside. Others provoked disconcerting waves of warmth, or desolation.

Then again, maybe I’m making a big deal out of nothing.

It might have helped to talk out her confusion, but Maia wasn’t comfortable confiding in strangers. For that, there had always been Leie.

The sea had Leie, now. Although an endless reach of ocean surrounded her, Maia didn’t like to look upon it.

After lunch, Renna excused himself to the curtained platform that extended from the poop deck over open water. He always took longer than others with his postprandial toilet, and there were wagers concerning what he did in there. Passersby reported strange sounds coming from behind the screen.

“Sounds like a lot o’ scrubbin’ an’ spittin’,” one sailor reported.

Maia made sure nobody intruded. Whatever his alien needs, Renna deserved privacy. At least he kept himself cleaner than most men!

The women on board, all vars, fell into three types Maia could discern. Half a dozen, including Naroin, were experienced winter sailors, comfortable working side by side with the more numerous male crew. Worldly and capable, they appeared more amused than interested in the political obsessions of the paying passengers.

Next were twenty-one rads, partners in the bold scheme to hustle Renna from captivity. Thalla and Kiel must have taken jobs at Lerner Forge to cover their real mission, ferreting out where the Perkinite clans held their prisoner. Maia wondered, had her ex-housemates cleverly followed the alien’s trail halfway around the world? More likely, their team was one of many sent to scour the globe. Either way, the Radical cabal appeared large, resolute, and well organized.

In high spirits after their successful foray, the rads were talkative, excited, and clearly better educated than the average var. Their soft-voweled city accents hardly impressed the third group—eight rough-looking women, most of whom spoke the low, drawling dialect of the Southern Isles. As Naroin put it, Baltha and her friends were along as “hired sticks.” Mercenary guards to fill out the expedition’s complement. The southlanders scarcely concealed their contempt for the idealistic rads, but seemed happy to take their pay.

Renna emerged from the toilet platform, zipping his blue pouch. He stretched, inhaling deeply. “Never thought I’d get used to this air. Felt like breathing syrup. But it kind of grows on you after a while. Maybe it’s the symbiont at work.”

“The what?” Maia asked.

Renna blinked and was thoughtful for a moment. “Mm—something I took before landing, to help me adjust to walking around on a different planet. Did you know only three other hominid populations are known to live at such atmospheric pressures? It’s because of the thick air that Stratos is habitable. Keeps the heat in. Normally, no one would look for real estate near such a small sun. Lysos made a brilliant gamble here, and won.”

Almost as brilliantly as you changed the subject, Maia thought. But that was all right. It pleased her to see Renna learning to control what he revealed. At this rate, in a few seasons he might be able to play poker with a four-year-old.

“We have more pieces to wind,” she reminded him. They went back to the cargo hatch where he sighed, lifting a squarish game token. “And to imagine, I called these little devils ingenious. I still don’t see why they refuse to use the game board we brought from the citadel.”

“It’s tradition,” Maia explained, gingerly turning one of the tiles, careful of the protruding antenna-feelers. Those mass-produced game boards are powerful … I never knew how powerful till getting to play with one. But I do know they’re lower in status than handmade ones. They’re meant for summer, when most men are cooped up in sanctuaries. Unable to travel.”

“Because of the weather?”

“And restrictions by local clans. It’s a rough time for men. Especially if you’re unlucky, and get no invitation to town. When it’s not raining, there’s the aurorae and Wengel in the sky, setting off frustrating feelings. A lot of men must close the shutters and distract themselves with crafts and tournaments. My guess is that right now a computer game board reminds them too much of a time they’d rather not think about.”

Renna nodded. “I guess that makes sense. Still, it occurs to me perhaps there’s another reason sailors prefer mechanicals. I get a feeling you aren’t considered a real man unless you can build all your own tools, with your own hands.”

Maia reached for another game piece to wind. “It has to be that way, Renna. Sailors can’t afford to specialize, like women in clans do.” She motioned at the complex rigging, the radar mast, the humming wind-generator., “You’re never sure you’ll have the right mix of skills on a voyage, so every boy expects to learn most of them, in time.”

“Uh-huh. Sacrificing perfection of the particular in favor of competence in the general.” Renna pondered for a moment, then shook his head. “But I’m convinced it goes deeper. Take that miniature sextant on your wrist, so much more ornate and clever than needed for the task.”

Maia put down the winding key and turned her arm to regard the sextant’s brass cover, with its ornate, almost mythological rendition of a huge airship. Renna motioned for her to open it. Next to the folded sighting arms and finely knurled wheels, there were sockets for electronic hookups, now plugged and apparently unused for ages. Renna reached over to touch a tiny, dark display screen. “Don’t let the vestiges of high tech fool you, Maia. There’s nothing that couldn’t be handmade in a private works, using techniques passed on from teacher to pupil for generation after generation. It’s that passing on of skill that interests me.”

Maia felt for a moment as if she were listening to Renna rehearse a report he planned to give at some future time and place, describing the customs of an obscure tribe, located at the fringes of civilization. Which is what we are, I guess. She inhaled, suddenly acutely conscious of the weight of air in her lungs. Was it really heavy, compared to other worlds? Despite Renna’s remarks, the round, red sun didn’t look feeble. It was so fierce, she could only look straight at it for a few seconds without her eyes watering.

Renna went on. “I find it interesting that such elaborate skills get passed on so attentively, far beyond what officers need to teach in order to get good crew.”

Maia folded the sextant away. “I hadn’t thought of it that way before. We’re taught that men don’t have…” she searched for the right word. “They don’t have continuity. The middies adopted by sailing masters are rarely their own sons, so there’s no long-range stake in the boys’ access. Yet, you make it sound almost like the way it is in kins. Personal teaching. Close attention over time. Passing on more than a trade.”

“Mm. You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it was designed this way. Sure a family of clones does it more efficiently, one generation training the next. But at base, it’s just a variation on an old theme. The Master-apprentice system. For most of human history, such systems were the rule. Progress came through incremental improvements on tried-and-true designs.”

Maia recalled how, as children, she and Leie used to peer into the workshop of the Yeo leatherworkers, or ximesin clockmakers, watching older sisters and mothers instruct younger clones, as they themselves had been taught. It was how young Lamais learned the export-import business. You wouldn’t imagine such a process to be possible among men, no two of whom ever shared the same exact talents or interests. But Renna implied there was less difference than similarity. “It’s a traditional system, perfect for maintaining stability,” the star voyager said, putting a wound-up game piece aside and lifting another. “There is a price. Knowledge accumulates additavely, almost never geometrically.”

“And sometimes not at all?” Maia asked, feeling suddenly uneasy.

“Indeed. That’s a danger in craft societies. Sometimes the trend is negative.”

She looked down, suddenly feeling something like shame. “We’ve forgotten so much.”

“Mm,” Renna’s dark eyebrows came together. “Not so much, perhaps. I’ve seen your Great Library, and spoken with your savants. This isn’t a dark age, Maia. What you see around you is the result of deliberate planning. Lysos and the Founders carefully considered costs and alternatives. As products of a scientific era, they were determined to prevent another one happening here.”

“But—” Maia blinked. “Why would scientists want to stop science?”

His smile was warm, but something in Renna’s eyes told Maia this was a topic fraught with personal pain.

“Their aim wasn’t to stop science as such, but to prevent a certain kind of scientific fever. A cultural madness, if you will. The sort of epoch in which questioning becomes almost a devotional act. In which all of life’s certainties melt, and folk compulsively doubt old ways, heedless of whatever validity those ways once had. Ego and ‘personal fulfillment’ take precedence over values based on community and tradition. Such times bring terrible ferment, Maia. Along with increased knowledge and power comes ecological danger, from expanding populations and misuse of technology.”

No pictures formed in Maia’s head to accompany his words. The content was entirely abstract, without reference to anything she knew. Yet, she felt appalled. “You make it sound… terrible.”

His exhalation was heavy. “Oh, there are benefits. Art and culture flourish. Old repressions and superstitions shatter. New insights illuminate and become part of our permanent heritage. A renaissance is the most romantic and exciting of times, but none lasts very long. Way back, before the Phylum Diaspora, the first scientific age barely got us off the homeworld before collapsing in exhaustion. It came as close to killing as liberating us.”

Maia watched Renna and felt positive he spoke from more than historical erudition. She saw an ache in his dark face. He was remembering, with both regret and deep longing. It was a kind of homesickness, one more final and irredeemable than her own.

Renna cleared his throat, briefly looking away.

“It was during another such age—the Florentina Revival—that your famous Lysos grew convinced that stable societies are happier ones. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they’ll understand their children, and their children will understand them. Lysos wanted to create such a world. One with net contentment maximized not for a brilliant few, but over time for the maximum number.”

“That’s what we’re taught.” Maia nodded. Though once again, it was a different way of phrasing familiar things. Different and disturbing.

“What you aren’t taught, and my private theory, is that Lysos only adopted sexual separatism because Perkinite secessionists were the strongest group of malcontents willing to follow her into exile. They provided the raw material Lysos used to make her stable world, isolated and protected from the ferment of the hominid realm.”

Never had Maia heard the Founder spoken of like this. With respect, but of an almost-collegial sort, almost as if Renna had known Lysos personally. Anyone hearing this would have to believe one basic truth—the man was, indeed, from another star.

For a long time, Renna looked out across the sea, contemplating vistas Maia couldn’t begin to picture. Then he shrugged. “I ramble too much. We started talking about how sailors are taught to scorn a man who relies on tools he doesn’t understand. It’s the major reason they despise me.

“You? But you crossed interstellar space! Wouldn’t sailors res—”

“Respect that?” Renna chuckled. “Alas, they also know my ship is the product of vast factories, built mostly by robots, and that I couldn’t control the least part of it without machines almost smarter than I am, whose workings I barely comprehend. You know what that makes me? The savants have spread mocking fairy tales. Ever hear of the Wissy-Man?”

Maia nodded. It was a name boys called each other when they wanted to be cruel.

“That’s me,” Renna finished. “Helpless Wissy-Man. Dispatched by fools, slave to his tools. Rescued by vars after crossing the stars.”

Renna gave a short laugh, almost a snort. It did not sound amused.

That evening’s Life match was a disaster.

Sixteen hundred game pieces, fully wound, had been divided into two sets of stacks on each side of a cargo hatch grooved with forty vertical lines crossed by forty horizontal. Maia and Renna joined the other passengers for dinner, eating from chipped porcelain bowls, looking out over choppy seas. Then, with an hour of daylight remaining, they went back to await their opponents. The junior cook and a cabin boy arrived a few minutes later, the former still wiping his hands on his apron. They don’t take us very seriously, Maia guessed. Not that she blamed them.

As the visiting team, she and Renna were invited to make the first move. Maia swallowed nervously, almost dropping the pieces she carried, but Renna grinned and whispered, “Remember, it’s just a game.”

She smiled back tentatively, and handed him the first tightly-wound piece. He put it in the extreme lower right corner of the board, white side up.

They had talked over strategy earlier. “We’ll keep it simple,” Renna had said. “I learned a few tricks while sitting around in jail. But I was mostly trying to write messages or paint pictures. I’ll bet it’s lots different with someone opposing you, trying to wreck what you create.” Renna had sketched on a notepad what he called a “very conservative” pattern. Maia recognized some of the primitive forms. One cluster of black tokens in the left tier would sit and “live” forever if left untouched by other moving pattern of black dots. Their strategy would be to try to defend this oasis of life until the time limit, concentrating on defense and making only minimal forays into enemy territory with gliders, wedges, or slicers. He would do nicely.

While Renna laid down that first row, the boys nudged each other, pointing and laughing. Whether they actually saw naivete in the design, or were just trying to rib the neophytes, it was unnerving. Worse, from Maia’s perspective, were the jibes of women spectators. Especially the and the southlanders, who clearly thought this exercise profoundly male-silly. A female crew member named Inanna whispered in a comrade’s ear, and they both laughed. Maia felt sure the joke was about her. She was doing herself no good, nor was it clear what Renna was going to learn.

Then why are we doing it?

The first row was finished. At once, the cook and cabin boy began laying down forty pieces of their own.

They used no notes, although Maia saw them confer once. A few seamen observed idly from the quarterdeck stairs, whittling sticks of soft wood into lacy, finely curled sculptures of sea animals.

When the boys signaled their turn finished, Renna took a long look and then shrugged. “Looks just like our first row. Maybe it’s coincidence. Might as well continue with our plan.”

So they laid another forty, mostly white side up, seeding enough strategically located black pieces so that when the game commenced and all the wound-up springs were released, a set of pulsing geometric patterns would embark on self-sustaining lifespans, setting forth to take part in the game’s brief ecology.

At least, we hope so.

It went on that way for some time as the sun set beyond the billowing, straining jib. Each side took turns laying forty disks, then watching and trying to guess what the other team was up to. There came one interruption when the wind shifted and the chief bosun called all hands to the rigging. Dashing to their tasks, sailors hauled lanyards and turned cranks in a whirl of straining muscles. The tack maneuver was accomplished with brisk efficiency, and all was calm again before Maia finished forty breaths. Naroin leaped down from the sheets, landing in a crouch. She grinned at Maia and gave thumbs-up before sauntering back to a spot along the port rail favored by the female crew members, who smoked pipes and gossiped quietly as game preparations resumed.

“Those devils,” Renna said after eight rows had been laid. Maia looked where he pointed, and momentarily saw what he meant. Apparently, their opponents had copied the same static “oasis” formation to sit in their most protected corner. In fact, she realized. They’re mimicking us right along! Only slight variations could be seen along the left-hand side. What’s the purpose of that? Are they making fun of us?

Differences began to creep in after the tenth row. Suddenly, the cook and cabin boy began laying down a completely different pattern. Maia recognized a glider gun, which was designed to fire gliders across the board. She also saw what could only be a cyclone—a configuration with the attribute of sucking to its doom any moving life pattern that came nearby. She pointed out the incipient design to Renna, who concentrated, and finally nodded.

“You’re right. That’d put our guardian in danger, wouldn’t it? Maybe we should move him to one side. To the right, do you think?”

“That would interfere with our short fence,” she pointed out. “We’ve already laid two rows for that pattern.”

“Mm. Okay, we’ll shift the guardian leftward, then.”

Maia tried to visualize what the game board would look like when completed. Already she could see how entities now in place would evolve during the first two, three, even five or six rounds. This particular area of hatch cover would be crossed by a newly launched mother ship. That area over there would writhe in alternating black and white swirls as a mustard seed turned round and round… a pretty but deceptively potent form. When she tried to follow the path of projectiles from the other side, Maia came to a horrified realization—one set of gliders would carom off the mirror-edge and come back spearing obliquely toward the very corner they had worked and planned so hard to protect!

Renna scratched his head when she pointed out the incipient disaster. “Looks like we’re cooked,” he said with a frown. Then he winced as Maia’s fingernails bit his arm.

“No, look!” she said, urgently. “What if we build our own glider gun… over there! We could set it to fire back into our own territory, intercepting their—”

“What?” Renna cut in, and Maia was briefly afraid she’d overstepped, injecting her own ideas into what was essentially his design. But he nodded in growing excitement. “Ye-e-s, I think it might… work.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulders, leaving them tingling. “That’d do it if we got the timing right. Of course, there’s the problem of debris, after the gliders collide…”

There was hardly enough room in the last few rows to lay down the improvised modifications. Fortunately, their opponents didn’t place another cyclone near the boundary. Maia’s new glider gun lay right along the border, with no room to spare. She was exhausted by the time the last piece had been set. And I thought this was a lazy man’s game. I guess spectators never know until they try a sport for themselves.

It was long past sunset. Lanterns were lit. Thalla arrived with a pair of coats. Slipping hers on, Maia realized everyone else had already dressed for the chill of evening. She must have been putting out too much nervous energy to notice.

Captain Poulandres approached, dressed in a cowled robe and carrying a crooked staff in his role as master and referee. Behind him, all the ship’s company save the helmsman, lookout, and sailmaster found perches from which to watch. They lounged casually, many wearing amused expressions. Maia saw none of the usual laying of bets.

Probably no takers for our side, whatever the odds.

Silence fell as the captain stepped forward to the edge of the game board, where the timing square was ready to send synchronized pulses to all pieces. At a set time, each of the sixteen hundred tiny units would either flip its louvers or rest quiet, depending on what its sensors told it about the state of its neighbors. The same decision would be made a few seconds later, when the next pulse arrived. And so on.

“Life is the continuation of existence,” the captain intoned. Perhaps it was the cowl that lent his voice a deep, vatic tone. Or maybe it was part of being captain.

“Life is the continuation of existence,” the ship’s company responded, echoing his words, accompanied by a background of creaking masts and flapping sails.

“Life is the continuation of existence, yet no thing endures. We are all patterns, seeking to propagate. Patterns which bring other patterns into being, then vanish, as if we’ve never been.”

Maia had heard the invocation so many times, recited in countless accents at dockside arenas in Port Sanger and elsewhere. She knew it by heart. Yet this was her first time standing as a contestant. Maia wondered how many other women had. No more than thousands, she felt sure. Maybe only hundreds.

Renna listened to the ancient words, clearly entranced.

“…We cannot control our progeny. Nor rule our inventions. Nor govern far consequences, save by the foresight to act well, then let go.

“All is in the preparation, and the moment of the act.

“What follows is posterity.”

The captain held out his staff, hovering above the winking timing square.

“Two teams have prepared. Let the act be done. Now… observe posterity.”

The staff struck down. The timing square began chiming its familiar eight-count. Even though she was prepared, Maia jumped when the flat array of sixteen hundred black and white pieces seemed all at once to explode.

Not all at once: In fact, fewer than half flipped their louvers, changing state because of what they sensed around them. But the impression of sudden, frantic clattering set Maia’s heart racing before a second wave of sound and motion suddenly crossed the board. And another.

Fortunately, she did not have to think. Any Game of Life match was already over the moment it began. From now on, they could only stand and watch the consequences unfold.

17

There was glory on deck the next morning. Freshly fallen from high, stratospheric clouds, the delicate frost coated every surface, from spars and rails to rigging, making the Manitou into a fairy ship of crystal dust, glowing in a profusion of pink sunrise refractions.

Maia stood atop a narrow flight of stairs leading up to the small cabin she shared with nine other women. She rubbed her eyes and stared at the sweetly painful dawnlight glitter outside. How pretty, she thought, watching countless pinpoints of rose-colored brilliance change, moment by moment.

She recalled occasions when Port Sanger received such a coating, causing shops and businesses to close while women hurried outside to sweep puffballs from their windowsills into vacuum jars, for preservation. A sprinkle of glory disrupted daily life far more than thicker falls of normal snow, which simply entailed boots and shovels and some seasonal grumbling.

Certainly men preferred dense drifts of the regular wind. Even slippery ice, making the streets slick and treacherous, seemed to perturb the rough sailors nowhere near as much as a thin scattering of lacy glory. Most males fled to their ships, or beyond the city gates, until sunlight cleansed the town, and its women citizens were in a less festive mood.

That was on shore, Maia remembered. Here, there’s no place for the poor fellows to run.

From the narrow doorway at the head of the stairs, Maia inhaled a cool, faintly cinnamon odor. This was no minor dusting, like in Long Valley. The air felt bracing, and provoked a tingling in her spine. Sensations vaguely familiar from prior winters, yet enhanced this time.

Of course, she hadn’t been a grown woman before. Maia felt combined eagerness and reluctance, waiting to see if the aroma would have a deeper effect, now that she was five.

There was movement on deck, male sailors shuffling with the desultory slowness of dawn-shift workers. They were physically unaffected by the icy encrustation, yet the captain’s expression seemed unhappy, irritated. He snapped at his officers and frowned, contemplating the fine, crystal dusting.

The unhappiest person in sight was the only female—the youngest of Kiel’s company of Rads, a girl about Maia’s age. She was using a broom to sweep glory frost into a square-mouthed bucket, which she proceeded to empty over the side before going back for another load.

Maia sensed a stirring behind her—another woman rising with the sun. She glanced back and nodded a silent good-morning as Naroin climbed the short, steep steps to squeeze alongside. “Well, look at that,” the older var commented, sniffing the soft, chill breeze. “Quite a sight, eh? Too bad it’s all got to go.”

The petite sailor redescended, plunging momentarily into the dimness of the narrow cabin. She reached onto the bunk Maia had just vacated, and returned bearing Maia’s coat. “There you go,” Naroin said with a kindly tone, and pointed at the girl outside, sweeping the deck rejectedly. “Your job, too. Law of th’ sea. Women stay below till the frost goes. Except virgies.”

Maia blushed. “How do you know I’m a—”

Naroin held up a hand placatingly. “Just an expression. Half o’ these vars”—she jerked her thumb at those still sleeping below—“never had a man, an’ never will. Eia, it’s a matter of age. Youngsters sweep up. Go on, child. Eia.”

“Eia,” Maia responded automatically, slipping on the coat. She trusted Naroin not to lie about something like this. Still, it seemed unfair. Her feet shuffled reluctantly as the bosun gently pushed her outside and shut the door behind her. Chill air condensed her breath in steamy plumes. Rubbing already-numb hands, Maia sighed and went to the utility locker to fetch a broom.

The other girl gave her a look that seemed to say, Where have you been? Maia lifted her shoulders in the same silent language.

I didn’t know anything about it. Do I ever?

It was logical, when she thought about it. Glory didn’t affect women as strongly as summer’s aurorae did men, thank Lysos. Still, it drew those of fertile age toward ideas of sex at exactly the time of year when most men preferred a good book. What males found irksome but avoidable on land could not be escaped so easily at sea. Fivers and sixers, who were less affected by the seasons, and unattractive to males anyway, naturally got the job of sweeping up, so other women might be permitted to emerge before noon.

The chore soon lost whatever attraction lay in novelty, and Maia found the faintly pleasant tingling in her nose less fixating than advertised. Carrying bucketsful to the rail, she could not escape the sensation of being watched. Maia felt certain some of the sailors were pointing at her, sniggering.

The reason had nothing to do with the glory fall, and everything to do with last night’s fiasco of a “competition.” It was bad enough being a lowly young var, on a voyage not of her choosing. But the Life match had left her a laughingstock.

Sure enough, one of her opponents, the cook’s assistant, was firing up his stove under the eaves of the poop deck. The boy grinned when Maia’s sweeping brought her nearby. He lisped through a gap left by two missing teeth, “Ready for another game? Whenever you an’ the Starman want, me an’ Kari are ready.”

Maia made as if she hadn’t heard. The youth was clearly no intellect, yet he and the cabin boy had made quick hash of Renna’s carefully-thought-out Game of Life plan. The rout became obvious within a few rounds.

With each pulse, ripples of change had swept the board. Black pieces, representing “living” locations, turned white and died, unless conditions were right to go on living. White pieces flipped over, coming alive when the number of black neighbors allowed it. Patterns took shape, wriggling and writhing like organisms of many cells.

The forty-by-forty grid was by no means the largest Maia had seen. There were rumors of boards vastly larger in some of the towns and ancient sanctuaries of the Mediant Coast. Yet, she and Renna had worked hard to fill their side with a starting pattern that might thrive, all to no avail. Their labors began unraveling from almost the very start.

One of their opponents’ designs began firing self-contained gliders across the board, configurations that banked and flapped at an oblique angle toward the edge, where they caromed toward the oasis Renna and Maia had to preserve. Maia watched with a lump in her throat as the other glider gun on this side—her own contribution to Renna’s plan—launched interceptors that skimmed past their short fence barrier just in time to…

Yes! She had felt elation as their antimissiles collided with the enemy’s projectiles right on schedule, creating explosions of simulated debris.

“Eia!” she had cried in excitement.

Intent as she had been on that threat, Maia was rudely yanked back by an abrupt roar of laughter. She turned to Renna. “What is it?”

Ruefully, her partner pointed toward the synthetic figure they had counted on to hold the center of the board. Their “guardian,” with its flailing arms and legs, had seemed guaranteed to ward off anything that dared approach. But now Maia saw that a bar-shaped entity had emerged from the other side of the board, approaching inexorably. At that instant, she experienced a queer sense of recognition, perhaps dredged out of childhood memory, from watching countless games at dockside in Port Sanger. In a strange instant, the new shape suddenly struck her as … obvious.

Of course. That shape will absorb …

The flickering intruder made contact with the branching patterns that were the guardian’s arms, and proceeded to suck them in! To the eye, it seemed as if their opponents’ creature was devouring game pieces, one by one, incorporating organs from the guardian into its growing self.

It’s actually a simple shape, she recalled thinking numbly. Boys probably memorize it before they’re four.

As if that weren’t enough, the invader pattern began displacing the guardian’s undamaged core. Beat by beat, the pseudobeast she and Renna had built was pushed backward, rending and flailing helplessly, smashing through all their fences. Helplessly, they watched the destructive retreat grind all the way to the near left corner, where their vulnerable oasis was promptly and decisively crushed. From that moment on, life quickly dissipated from their half of the game board. Laughter and amused booing had sent Maia fleeing in shame to her cabin.

It was only a game, she tried convincing herself the next morning, as she swept. At least, that’s what women think, and they’re the ones who count.

Still, memory of the humiliation lingered unpleasantly as glory frost evaporated under the rising sun. Those thin patches she and the other young var had missed soon sublimed. With visible reluctance, Captain Poulandres went to the railing and rang a small bell.

At once, the deck thronged with women passengers and crew, inhaling the last aromas and looking about with liveliness in their eyes. Maia saw one broadly built var come up behind a middle-aged sailor and pinch him, causing the man to jump with a low yelp. The husky-victim whirled around, wearing a harassed expression. He responded after an instant with a wary laugh, shaking a finger in admonishment, and quickly retreated to the nearest mast. An unusual number of sailors seemed to have found duties to perform aloft, this morning.

It wasn’t a universal reaction. The assistant cook seemed pleased by the attentions of women gathered round the porridge pot. And why not? Aroused fems were seldom dangerous, and it was doubtful the poor fellow got much notice during summertime. He would likely store a memory of brief flirtation to carry him through lonely months in sanctuary.

Two nearby vars, a short blonde and a slender redhead, were giggling and pointing. Maia turned to see what had them going.

Renna, she thought with a sigh. The Visitor had approached one last, half-full bucket she had neglected to dump overboard. He bent to scoop a handful of glory frost, bringing it up to sniff, delicately, curiously. Renna looked perplexed for a moment, then his head jerked back and his eyes widened. Carefully, he dusted off his hands and thrust them into his pockets.

The two rads laughed. Maia didn’t like the way they were looking at him.

“I guess if one were desperate enough…” one said to the other.

“Oh, I don’t know,” came the reply. “I think he’s kind of exotic-looking. Maybe, after we reach Ursulaborg.”

“You got hopes! The committee’s already picked those who’ll get first crack. You’ll wait your turn, and chew a Kilo of ovop if you’re lucky.”

“Yuck,” the second one grimaced. Yet a covetous gleam did not leave her eye as she watched the man from space depart for the quarterdeck.

Maia’s thoughts whirled. Apparently, the rads had designs to keep Renna busy while they sheltered him and dickered with the Reigning Council. Her first reaction was outrage. How dare they assume he’d go along, just like that?

Then she bit back her initial wrath and tried hard to see it calmly. I guess he’s in their debt, Maia admitted reluctantly. It would be churlish to refuse his rescuers at least an effort, even in the dead of winter. The Radical organization had no doubt promised members of the rescue party rewards if they succeeded—perhaps sponsorship of a winter sparking, with an apartment and trust fund to see a first cloneling child through primary schooling. The leaders, Kiel and Thalla, will be first, Maia realized. Given her education and talents, Kiel would then be in a good position to become a founding mother of a growing clan.

So politics is just part of it, Maia thought, considering the motives of her former cottage-mates. None of my damn business, she told herself, knowing that she cared intensely, anyway. The first rad glanced at Maia standing nearby, listening. “Of course, there’s an element of choice on his part, too,” she said. “Equal rights, y’know. And there’s no accounting for alien tastes…” The var turned to Maia, and winked.

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 sperm induces placental—”

“That’s sparkers,” Maia corrected in a low voice.

“Yeah, right. Okay, here’s the part I’ve been having trouble with.” Renna paused. “It’s about how Lysos meddled with sexual attraction. You see, on most hominid worlds, sex is an eternal distraction. People dwell on it from puberty to senility, spend vast measures of time and money, and sometimes act incredibly disagreeably, all because of a gene-driven, built-in obsession.”

“You make it sound awful.”

“Mm. It has compensations. But, arrangements on Stratos seem intended to cut down the amount of energy centered on sex. All in keeping with good Herlandist ideology.”

“Go on,” she said, growing interested despite herself. Do people on other planets really think about sex more than I do? How do they get anything done?

Renna continued. “Stratoin men are stimulated by visual cues in the summer sky, when women are least aroused. Today, on the other hand, I got to witness this peculiar ice-frost you get in winter—”

“Glory.”

“Yeah. A natural product of some pretty amazing stratospheric processing that I plan looking into. And it stimulates women!”

“So I’m told.” Maia felt warm. “According to legend, Lysos took the Old Craziness out of men and women, and poked around for someplace to put it. Up in the sky seemed safe enough. But one summer Wengel Star came along. He stole some of the madness and made a flag to wave and shine and put the old rut back into men, through their eyes.”

“And during high winter it sneaks back down as Glory?”

“Right, seizing women through their noses.”

“Mm. Nice fable. Still, doesn’t it seem queer that women and men should be so perfectly off-sync in desire?”

“Not perfectly. If it were, nobody’d get born at all.”

“Oh sure, I’m oversimplifying. Men can enjoy sex in winter and women in summer. But how odd that males are aggressive suitors during one season, only to grow demure half a year later, when women seek them out.”

Maia shrugged. “Man and woman are opposites. Maybe all we can hope for is compromise.”

Renna nodded in a manner reminiscent of an absent-minded but eager savant from Burbidge Clan, whom the Lamai mothers used to hire to teach varlings trigonometry. “But however carefully Lysos designed your ancestors’ genes, time and evolution would erase any setup that’s not naturally stable. Those few males who escaped the program just a little would pass on their genes more often, and so on for their offspring. The same holds for women. Over time, male and female urges would come into rough synchrony again, with lots of tension and two-way negotiating, just like on other worlds.

“But here’s the brilliant part. On Stratos there’s greater payoff, in strict biological terms, for a woman to have clone children than normal sons and daughters, who carry only half her genes. So the trait of women seeking winter matings would reinforce.”

Maia blinked. “And the same logic applies to men?”

“Exactly! A Stratoin male gets no genetic benefit from sex in winter! No reason to get all worked up, since any child spawned won’t be his in the most basic sense. The cycle tends to bolster the cues Lysos established.” He shook his head. “I’d need a good computer model to see if it’s as stable as it looks. There are some inherent problems, like inbreeding. Over time, each clone family acts like a single individual, flooding Stratos with…”

Renna’s enthusiasm was infectious. Maia had never known anyone so uninhibited, so unrestrained by conventional ideas. Still, a part of her wondered. Is he always like this? Was everybody like this, where he came from?

“I don’t know,” she cut in when he paused for breath. “What you’re saying makes sense… but what about that happy, stable world Lysos wanted? Are we happy? Happier than people on other planets?”

Renna smiled, meeting her eyes once more. “You get right to the heart of the matter, don’t you, Maia? How can I answer that? Who am I to judge?” He looked up at low, white cumulus clouds, whose flat bottoms rode an invisible pressure layer not far above the Manitou’s topmast. “I’ve been to worlds which might seem like paradise to you. All your terrible experiences, this year, would have been next to impossible on Passion or New Terra. Law, technology, and a universal maternal state would have prevented them, or instantly stepped in with remedies.

“On the other hand, those worlds have problems rarely or never seen here. Economic and social upheavals. Suicide. Sex crimes. Fashion slavery. Pseudowar, and sometimes the real thing. Solipsism plagues. Cyberdysomism and demimortalism. Ennui. …”

Maia looked at him, wondering if he even noticed his lapse into alien dialect. Most of the words had no meaning to her. It reinforced her impression that the universe was vast, unfathomably strange, and forever beyond her reach.

“All I can do is speak for myself.” Renna continued in a low voice. He paused, looking across the sun- and shadow-splashed sea, then turned back and squeezed her hand again, briefly. His face crinkled in a startling manner at the edges of the eyes, and he smiled.

“Right now I’m happy, Maia. To be here, alive, and breathing air from an endless sky.”

Maia cheered up considerably once the talk moved on to other things. Answering Renna’s questions, she tried to explain some of the mysterious activities of Manitou’s sailors—climbing the rigging, unfurling sails, scraping salt crust, oiling winches, tying lanyards and untying them, performing all the endless tasks required to-keep a vessel in good running trim. Renna marveled at myriad details and spoke admiringly of “lost arts, preserved and wonderfully improved.”

They told more of their personal stories. Maia related some of the amusing misadventures she and Leie used to have, as young hellions in Port Sanger, and found that a poignant warmth of recollection now overcame much of the pain. In return, Renna told her briefly of his capture while visiting a House of Ease in Caria, at the behest of a venerable state councillor he had trusted.

“Was her name Odo?” she asked, and Renna blinked. “How did you know?”

Maia grinned. “Remember the message you sent from your prison cell? The one I intercepted? You spoke of not trusting someone called Odo. Am I right?”

Renna sighed. “Yeah. Let it be a lesson. Never let your gonads get ahead of clear thinking.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Maia said dryly. Renna nodded, then looked at her, caught her expression, and they both broke down, laughing.

They continued telling stories. His concerned fascinating, faraway worlds of the Great Phylum of Humanity, while Maia lingered over the tale of her ultimate conquest, with Leie’s help, of the most secret, hidden part of Lamatia Hold, solving the riddle of a very strange combination lock. Renna seemed impressed with the feat, and claimed to feel honored when she said it was the first time she had ever told anyone about it.

“You know, with your talent for pattern recog—”

A shout interrupted from the radar shed. Two boys went scrambling up the mainmast, clinging to an upper spar while peering in the distance. One cried out and pointed. Soon, the entire ship’s complement stood at the port rail, shading their eyes and staring expectantly.

“What is it?” Renna asked. Maia could only shake her head, as perplexed as he. A murmur coursed the crowd, followed by a sudden hush. Squinting against reflections, Maia finally saw an object hove into view, ahead and to the south.

She gasped. “I think… it’s a greatflower tree!”

It had all the outward appearances of a small island. One covered by flagpoles draped with tattered banners, as if legions had fought to claim and hold a tiny patch of dry land in the middle of the sea. Only this isle drifted, floating at an angle to the steady progress of the ship. As they approached, Maia saw the flagpoles were like spindly tree trunks. The ragged pennants weren’t ensigns at all, but the remnants of glowing, iridescent petals.

“I saw a clip on these, long ago,” Maia explained. “The greatflower lives off tiny sea creatures. You know, the kind with just one cell? Below the surface, it spreads out filmy sheets to catch them. That’s why Poulandres ordered us to move away, instead of going closer for a better look. Wouldn’t be right to hurt it, just out of curiosity.”

“The thing looks pretty badly damaged already,” Renna commented, noting the frayed flowers. Yet he seemed as enthralled as Maia by those remaining fragments, whose blue and yellow and crimson luminance seemed independent of reflected sunlight, shimmering across the waters. “What are those? Birds, picking away at the plant? Is it dead?”

Indeed, flocks of winged creatures—some with filmy wingspans wider than the Manitou’s spars—swarmed the floating island like midges on a dying beast, attacking the brightly hued portions. Maia replied, “I remember now. They’re helping it. That’s how the greatflower breeds. The birds carry its pollen in their wings to the next tree, and the next.”

As they watched, a small detachment of dark shapes swirled off the cloud of birds and came swooping toward the Manitou. At the captain’s sharp command, crewmen dove belowdecks, emerging with slingshots and wrist catapults, which they fired to drive the graceful, soaring beasts away from the straining sails. The fliers inflicted only a little damage with narrow jaws filled with jagged teeth, before losing their appetite for canvas and flying away… though not before one tried nipping at the bright red hair of one of the boys aloft. An event that everyone but the poor victim seemed to find hilarious.

The greatflower flowed past only a hundred meters away. Its maze of color could now be seen extending beneath the water’s surface, in tendrils that floated far behind. Schools of bright fish darted among the drifting fronds, in counterpoint to the frenetic feeding of the birds. Maia snapped her fingers. “Too bad we missed seeing one in late summer, when the flowers are in full bloom. Believe it or not, the trees use them as sails, to keep from being blown ashore during storm season. Now I guess the currents are enough, so the sails fall apart.”

She turned to Renna. “Is that an example of what you mean by … adaptation? It must be an original Stratoin life-form, or you’d have seen things like it before, wouldn’t you?”

Renna had been staring at the colorful, floating isle with its retinue of scavengers, as it drifted behind Manitou’s wake. “It’s too wonderful for me to have missed, in any of the sectors I’ve been. It’s native, all right. Even Lysos wasn’t clever enough to design that.”

Soon another greatflower hove into view, this time with fuller petals, diffracting sunlight in ways Renna excitedly described as “holographic.” In turn, Maia told him about a tribe of savage sea people who had cast their lot forever with the greatflowers, sailing them like ships, collecting nectar and plankton, netting birds and fish, and snaring an occasional, castaway sailor to spark their daughters for another generation. Living wild and unfettered, the runaway society had lasted until planetary authorities and seafaring guilds joined forces to round them up as “ecological irresponsibles.”

“Is that story true?” Renna asked, both dubious and entranced at the same time.

In fact, Maia had based it on very real tales from the Southern Isles. But the connection with greatflowers was her own invention, made up on the spur of the moment. “What do you think?” she asked, with an arched eyebrow.

Renna shook his head. “I think you’re quite recovered from your near-drowning. Better have the doctor take you off whatever he’s been giving you.”

The last greatflower fell astern, and both crew and passengers soon returned to the tedium of routine. To pass the time, Renna and Maia used her sextant to take sights on the sun and horizon, comparing calculations and betting to guess the time without looking at Renna’s watch. They also gossiped. Maia laughed aloud and clapped when Renna puffed his cheeks in a caricature of the chief cook, announcing in anomalously squeaky tones that lunch would be delayed because glory frost had gotten in the pudding, and he’d be cursed before he fed it to “a bunch o’ unruly vars, too hepped t’ken a man from a lugar!”

“That reminds me of a story,” she responded, and went on to relate the tale of a sea captain who let his passengers frolic in a late-evening glory-fall, then fell asleep, “…only to waken hours later when the women had set fire to his sails!”

Renna looked perplexed, so she explained. “See, some people think flames overhead can simulate the effects of aurorae, get it? The glory-doped women ignited the ship…”

“Hoping to get the men excited, too?” He looked apalled. “But… would it work?”

Maia stifled a giggle. “It’s a joke, silly!”

She watched him picture the ludicrous scene, and then laughed aloud. At that moment Maia felt more relaxed than she had in—who knew how long? There was even a hint of what she had experienced back in her prison cell … of something more than acquaintanceship. It was good having a friend.

But Renna’s next question took her aback.

“So,” he said. “Do you want to help me get ready for another Life match? Captain Poulandres has agreed to let us try again. This time the other side has to wind the pieces, so we can concentrate on coming up with a new strategy.”

Maia blinked at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Y’know, I never imagined the competition version involved so many tricky permutations. It’s more complicated than painting pretty pictures with a reversible Life variant, as I did with my set in jail. It’ll be a challenge holding our own against even junior players.”

Maia could not believe his penchant for understatement. Just when she thought she was starting to understand Renna, he surprised her again. “All they want to do is laugh at us. I won’t be embarrassed like that again.”

Renna seemed puzzled. “It’s only a game, Maia,” he chided lightly.

“If you think that, then you don’t know much about men on Stratos!”

Her hot response gave Renna pause. He pondered for a moment. “Well … all the more reason to explore the matter further, then. Are you sure you won’t…?” When Maia shook her head firmly, he sighed. “In that case, I’d better get to work if I’m to have a game plan ready by this evening.” He stood up. “We’ll talk later?”

“Mm,” she replied noncommittally, finding a way to occupy her hands and eyes, folding the sighting rods of her sextant with meticulous care as he departed with a cheery goodbye. Maia felt irked and confused as his footsteps receded—as much by his obstinacy in continuing to play the stupid game as by the way he took her refusal so well.

I guess I should be grateful to have a friend at all. She sighed. Nobody’s ever going to find me indispensable, that’s for sure.

It turned out he needed her even less than she had thought. When lunch was called, Maia took Renna his plate as usual, only to find him sitting near the fantail with the electronic Life Set on his lap, surrounded by a cluster of extremely attentive young rads.

“So you see,” he explained, gesturing from one corner the board to the other. “If you want to create a simulated ecology that’ll do both things—resist invasion from outside while persisting in a self-sustaining manner—you have to make sure all elements interact in such a way that—Ah, Maia!” Renna looked up with unmistakable pleasure. “Glad you’ve changed your mind. I had an idea. You can tell me if I’m being an idiot.”

Don’t tempt me, she thought in a flash of jealous temper. Which was silly, of course. Renna appeared oblivious, so caught up in his enthusiasm for concepts to notice that these vars weren’t swarming over him out of any love of abstractions.

“Brought you the chef’s special,” she said, trying to maintain a light tone. “Of course, if anyone else is hungry…”

The other women shot her daggers. By unspoken agreement, two of them got up to fetch, so the rest could keep Renna attended.

They’re the idiots, Maia thought, noting that other clusters of women could be seen following any ship’s officer who stepped off the sacrosanct quarterdeck. All this had been provoked by the morning’s glory fall. She doubted any of the vars actually wanted to get pregnant here and now. Not without a niche and bankroll to raise a child securely. Maia had seen women putting pinches of ovop leaf in their cheeks, as a safeguard against conception.

Even if pleasure was the sole objective, however, their hopes were ill-fated. Great clans spent fortunes entertaining men in winter, getting them in the mood. Without incentives, most of Manitou’s sailors would choose whittling and games over providing exertive services free of charge. Well… I’ve seen exceptions, Maia admitted. But Tizbe Beller’s drug was doubtless far too dear for rads to afford, even if they had the right contacts.

“Go on,” one of the young women urged Renna. It was the slim blonde Maia had overheard earlier, now leaning against Renna’s shoulder to look at the game board, hoping to distract his attention back from Maia. “You were talking about ecology,” the rad said in a low voice. “Explain again what that has to do with the patterns of dots.”

She’s acting stupid on purpose. Maia watched Renna shift uncomfortably. And it’s going to backfire on her.

Sure enough, Renna lifted his eyes in a silent sigh, and gave Maia an apologetic glance before answering. “What I meant was that each individual organism in an ecosystem interacts primarily with its neighbors, just like in the game, though, of course, the rules are vastly more complex …”

Maia felt a moment of triumph. His look meant he preferred her conversation to the others’ close-pressed attentions, no matter that they were older, physically more mature. Naturally, his reaction would have been different in summer, when rut turned all men into—

Wait a minute. Maia stopped short suddenly. We talked about seasonal sexuality on Stratos. Deep-down, though, I kept assuming that it applied to him.

Does it, though? Would summer and winter have anything to do with what Renna feels?

Maia backed away, watching as the Earthman patiently described how the array of black or white cells crudely simulated a kind of “life.” Despite the simple level of his explanation, he seemed intent to look only at the game board, avoiding direct contact with his audience. For the first time, Maia noticed a sheen of perspiration on his brow.

“They got plans for him, you know.”

Maia whirled. A tall, fair-haired woman had come up from behind. The rugged easterner, Baltha, picked her teeth with a wood sliver and leaned against the aft capstan. She grinned at Maia. “Your Earthman is worth a lot more to these rads than they’re lettin’ on, y’know.”

Maia felt torn between curiosity and her dislike of the woman. “I know they need information, and advice from his ship’s library. They want to know if something in it can help make Stratos more like other worlds.”

Baltha raised an eyebrow. Perhaps the acknowledgment was mocking. “Information’s nice. But I bet they seek help of a quicker sort.”

“What do you mean?”

Baltha tossed the toothpick in an arc that carried it overboard. “Think about it, virgie. You see how they’re already workin’ on him. He’ll be asked to earn his keep, in Ursulaborg. An’ I just bet he’s able.”

Maia’s face felt warm. “So? So he sparks a few—”

Baltha interrupted. “Sparks, hell! You just can’t see, can you? Think, girlie. He’s an alien! Now that may mean he’s too different even to spark Strato-fems like us. Can’t tell unless they try. But what about th’ other extreme? What if his seed works, all right? What if it works the old-fashioned way, even in winter?”

Maia blinked as she worked out what Baltha meant. “You mean, his sperm might not spark clones … but instead go all the way and make vars?” She looked up. “No matter what time of year it is?”

Baltha nodded. “Then, what if his var-sons inherited that knack? An’ their sons? An’ so on? Now wouldn’t that throw a spanner in Lysos’s plan?” She spat over the side.

Maia shook her head. “Something sounds wrong about that—”

“You bet it’s wrong!” the big var cut in again. “Meddlin’ with the design set down by our foremothers an’ betters. Arrogant rad bitches.”

Actually, Maia hadn’t meant “wrong” in that sense. Although she couldn’t spot the flaw at that moment, she felt certain there was something cockeyed with Baltha’s reasoning. It struck Maia intuitively that the design of human life on Stratos wouldn’t be so easily diverted, not even by seed taken from a man from the stars.

“I thought you hated the way things are, as much as the rads do,” she asked, curious about the venom in Baltha’s voice. “You helped them get Renna away from the Perkinites.”

“Alliance of convenience, virgie. Sure, my mates an’ me hate Perkies. Stuck-up clans that want a lock on everything without keepin’ on earnin’ it. Lysos never meant that to happen. But from there on, we an’ the rads part. Bleedin’ heretics. We just want to shake things up, not change the laws o’ nature!”

Why is she telling me this? Maia wondered, seeing a gleam in Baltha’s eyes as she regarded Renna. “You have ideas about using him, too,” Maia surmised.

The blonde var turned to look at her. “Don’t know what you mean.”

“I saw what you collected in your little box,” Maia blurted, eager to see how Baltha would react when confronted. “Back in the canyon, while we were escaping.”

“Why, you little sneak…” the woman growled. Then she stopped and a slow grin spread across her rugged features. “Well, good for you. Spyin’s one of th’ true arts. Might even be your niche, sweetums, if you ever learn to tell enemies from friends.”

“I know the difference, thanks.”

“Do you?”

“Like I can tell you’d use Renna for your own ends, at least as much as the rads want to.”

Baltha sighed. “Everybody uses everybody else. Take your friends, Kiel an’ Thalla. They used you, kiddo. Sold you to th’ Bellers, in hopes of trackin’ you to jail, an’ maybe findin’ their Starman wherever you were stashed.”

Maia stared. “But … I thought Calma Lerner…”

“Think what you like, citizen,” Baltha answered sarcastically. “I know better than tryin’ to tell nothin’ to a upstart fiver, who’s so sure she knows who’s her good pals, who ain’t.”

The eastlander turned and sauntered away, wandering the railing that overlooked the cargo deck, where she began a low conversation with a large blonde woman, one of the female deckhands serving aboard the Manitou. Below, on the main deck, Naroin’s voice could be heard, pulling a small band of women away from bothering sailors to take their turn at obligatory combat practice. Baltha grinned back at Maia, then picked up her own polished short-trepp, and slid down the gangway to join the session. Soon there came a staccato clicking of sticks, and a thump as somebody hit the ground.

Maia’s thoughts rolled. She saw Thalla, about to take her turn in the practice ring, pluck a bill from the weapons rack. Glancing up, Thalla smiled at her, and in a rush, Maia was filled with an outraged sense of confirmation. Baltha’s right, damn her! Kiel and Thalla must have used me.

A tidal surge of hurt and betrayal caused each breath to catch painfully in her throat. She had been angry with her former cottage-mates for trying to leave her behind in Grange Head, but this was worse. Far worse. I … can’t trust anybody.

The sense of perfidy hurt terribly. Yet, what strangely came to mind most strongly right then was the memory of cursing Calma Lerner and her doomed clan. I’m sorry, she thought. Even if Baltha turned out to be wrong, or lying, Maia felt ashamed of what she’d said in wrath, invoking maledictions on the hapless smithy family, whose members had never done her any real harm.

In the background, contrasting to her dark brooding, Renna’s voice continued blithely, describing his strategy for the evening’s match. “…so I was thinking, I could put a pinwheel at each end of the board, near the boundary…”

The voice was an irritation, scraping away at Maia’s guilt-wallow. Even if Baltha lied, I’ll never be able to trust Thalla and Kiel again. I’m as alone now as ever I was in my prison cell.

She closed her eyes. The rhythmic clicking of battle sticks was punctuated by Naroin’s shouted instructions. Renna droned on. “…Naturally, they’ll be struck by simulated objects coming from my opponents’ side of the board. Most of those will be deflected by the pinwheel’s arms. But there are certain basic shapes that worry me…”

Vagaries of wind caused the steersman to order a slight turn, bringing the sun around from behind a sail to shine on Maia’s closed eyelids. She had to tighten them to sever innumerable stabbing, diffracted rays. In her sadness, Maia felt a return of that odd, displaced feeling she had experienced that morning. Sunlight enhanced those omnipresent speckles in their ceaseless dance before covered retinas … a dance without end, the dance that accompanied all her dreams. Void of will, her awareness drew toward their flicker and swirl, seeming to laugh at her troubles, as if all worries were ephemera.

The speckled pavane was the only lasting thing that mattered.

“…You see how even a simple glider, striking at an angle, will cause my pinwheel to break up…”

Unasked-for memories of those long days and nights in prison swarmed over her. Maia recalled how she had been entranced by the Life game, the patterns wonderfully mysterious as Renna’s artistry unfolded in front of her. That had been a far more subtle exercise than playing a simple set match, throwing simulated figures against those devised by an opponent. But it was a cheat, since he had been able to use a form of the game that was reversible. The machine did all the work. No wonder he was having so much trouble dealing with the most trivial concepts of the competitive version.

She did not have to be looking at the board to envision the shapes he was describing. In her current state of consciousness, she could not prevent envisioning them.

The rads sitting around him must be bored out of their mind, one part of her contemplated with some satisfaction. Yet it was a small part. The rest of her had fled from unbearable unhappiness into abstraction, only to be brought in a swirl of cavorting forms.

“…So I was thinking of placing an array of simple beacon patterns around the pinwheel, like this… you see? That ought to protect it from at least the first onslaught—”

“Wrong!” Maia cried out loud, opening her eyes and turning around. Renna and the women stared in surprise. She strode toward them, brusquely shooing aside one of surprised vars to get at the game board. She took the stylus out of Renna’s hand and quickly erased the array he has been building at one end of the boundary zone.

“Can’t you see? Even I can. If you want to protect against gliders, you don’t let your shapes just sit there, waiting to be hit. Your barrier’s got to go out to meet them. Here, try—” She bit her lip, hesitating a moment, then drew a hurried swirl of dots on the display. Maia reached over to flick on the timing clock, and the configuration began throbbing, sending out concentric ovals of black dots that dissipated upon reaching a distance of eight squares from the center. It was reminiscent of the persistent, cyclic pattern of waves emanating from where drips from a faucet strike a pool of water. Left alone, the little array would keep sending out waves forever.

Renna looked up in surprise. “I’ve never seen that one before. What’s it called?”

“I…” Maia shook her head. “I don’t know. Must’ve seen it when I was a kid. It’s obvious enough, though. Isn’t it?”

“Mm. Indeed.” Shaking his head, Renna took back the stylus and drew a glider gun on the other side of the board, aimed at the figure she had just drawn. He restarted the game clock, causing a series of flapping missiles to be fired straight toward with the pattern of concentric waves. They collided…

…and each one was swallowed with scarcely a ripple!

“I’ll be damned.” He shook his head admiringly. “But how would you defend this pattern against something larger, like was thrown against us last night?”

Maia snapped. “How should I know? Do you think I’m a boy?”

Several of the rads chuckled, uncertainly, and Maia didn’t care if they were laughing with, or at her. One of the young women got up with a sniff and walked away. Maia rubbed her chin, looking at the game board. “Now that you mention it, though, I can suggest one way to fend off that bulldozer contraption the cook and cabin boy used against us.”

“Yes?” Renna made room on the bench and another var reluctantly gave way as Maia sat down. “Look, I don’t know the terminology,” she said, with some of her accustomed uncertainty returning. “But it’s obvious the thing’s crossbar doohickey reflects certain patterns which…”

She drew as she spoke, with Renna occasionally interjecting a comment, or more often a question. Maia hardly noticed as the other vars drifted away, one by one. Their opinions didn’t matter anymore, nor was she any longer embarrassed being seen interested in the male-silly game. Renna took her seriously, which none of her fellow womenfolk ever had. He paid close attention, contributing insights, sharing a growing pleasure in an abstract exercise.

By suppertime, they thought they had a plan.

18

Their opponents offered to waive the rules. It was done quite often, Maia knew. About one Life match in five that she had witnessed featured some agreed-on variation. These ranged from using odd boundaries to altering the fundamental canons of the game—including more than two colors, or changing the way pieces responded to the status of their neighbors.

In this case, nothing complicated was involved. To save time—and perhaps rub home the helplessness of their adversaries—the junior cook and cabin boy suggested that each side lay down four rows at a turn, instead of just one. Since their own round came first this time, it was a generous concession, like spotting a chess opponent one rook. Maia and Renna would get to see large swaths of the other side of the board, and discuss possible changes before placing each layer of their own.

Maia watched tensely as the two youths positioned their game pieces. Seconds passed, and she felt a knot slowly unwind in her belly. They aren’t very imaginative, after all, she thought. Or they’re being lazy. The boys’ oasis zone was already apparent, protected by a spiky variety of a standard pattern called “long fence.”

Maia found it bemusing, standing here reading a game board this way. Last night, during their first match, she had experienced one or two moments of inspiration, but had been too confused and worried to enjoy the process, or let go and watch the game as a whole. That had changed with this afternoon’s epiphany and during the subsequent session exploring possibilities with Renna. Now she felt strangely detached, yet eager, as if a barrier had broken, releasing something serenely beyond mere curiosity.

Almost certainly, it had been triggered by that cruel conversation with Baltha, causing her to despair at last of comradeship from womankind. But that didn’t go all the way toward explaining her sudden passion for this game.

Face it. I’m abnormal.

It hadn’t begun with this voyage, or on meeting Renna, or even studying navigation with old Bennett. At age three, she used to love going down by the piers, watching sailors scratch their beards and mull over arrays of clicking game pieces. Many women enjoyed the dance of shapes and forms, yet there had always been something implicit in the townsfolk’s indulgent appreciation. No one came right out and said it wasn’t for girls. The tenor of complaisant scorn sufficed, especially when shared by Leie. Eager to fit in, young Maia had mimicked words of affectionate contempt, suppressing, she now saw in retrospect, that early fascination.

I’ve always loved patterns, puzzles. Maybe it’s all a mistake. I should have been a boy.

That passing, sardonic thought she did not take seriously. Maia felt profoundly female. No doubt what she’d stumbled on was simply a wild talent manifesting itself. One lacking much use in real life, alas. She knew of no lucrative niche in Stratoin society for a woman navigator who was also able to play man-games.

No niche. No golden road to matriarchy. But perhaps a life. Naroin seems to do all right, spending most of each year at sea.

It was funny, contemplating a career as a woman-sailor. There were attractions to the rough camaraderie Naroin and the other var hands shared with the seamen. On the other hand, a life of hauling ropes and yanking winches…? Maia shook her head.

Spectators gathered. The boys laid down their pieces, hurrying along for a stretch, then stopping to point and argue before reaching consensus and resuming. Maia stifled a yawn, shoved her hands back into her coat pockets, and shifted her feet to keep up circulation. The midwinter evening was mild. Tiered banks of low, dark clouds served to keep in some of the day’s warmth. While a range of ocher, sunset shades still tinted those along the western fringe, lanterns overlooking the cargo game area were switched on.

Up on the quarterdeck, the helmsman sniffed the air and exchanged a look with the captain, who returned a brief nod. The tiller turned a few degrees. Soon, a gentle shift in the ship’s swaying accompanied an altered rhythm from the creaking masts. Without being told, two sailors sauntered to a set of cranks by the starboard side, ratcheting them just enough to tauten a sail.

Maia wondered. Was it something intrinsic to males, that made them sensitive to cues of wind and wave? Was that why no woman officer served on oceangoing ships? She had always assumed it was something genetic. But then, I thought men couldn’t ride horses, till Renna did it, and men also sailed the sky in zep’lins, long ago, before they were banned.

Maybe it’s just another self-fulfilling myth.

The point was moot. Even if a woman like her were as innately able, five was much too old to start learning sea craft. Just because you know how to sight stars, that doesn’t qualify you to buck a thousand-year tradition. Besides, sailors would raise hell if a woman rose above bosun. There weren’t many niches in Stratoin society that males could call their own. They would not willingly open this bastion to the overpowering female majority.

Listen to yourself. A minute ago you were modestly willing to settle for a quiet, comfortable life, like Naroin. Now you’re grumbling ’cause they won’t put officer’s rings on your arms! Maia chuckled silently. More proof of bad upbringing. A Lamatia education leads to a Lamai-sized ego.

“Right. Now it’s our turn.”

At Renna’s word, Maia looked over to the other side of the game board, where their opponents had finished laying down four rows. Even from limited experience, she saw it as a completely pedestrian pattern. Not that it mattered, given the strategy she and Renna had agreed upon. Maia returned her partner’s smile of encouragement. Then they split up, he to start laying in the left corner, and she on the right.

Naroin had volunteered to carry prewound game pieces for Maia, deftly passing one over each time Maia lifted her hand. Maia paused frequently to consult the plan she and Renna had worked out. A sketch she kept rolled up to prevent peeking by spectators in the rigging.

Got to be careful not to miss a row or column, she reminded herself. This close, you risked losing that sense of overall structure which seemed to leap out of a game board when viewed whole. Just one piece, laid in the wrong place, often doomed a “living” design—as if a person’s kidneys had been attached incorrectly from the start, or your cells produced a wrong-shaped protein. Maia chewed her lip nervously as she neared the middle, where her work would meet Renna’s. On finishing, she could only wait, worrying a cuticle as he placed his final tokens on the board. At last, he straightened from his stoop, and stretched. Maia stood alongside as they checked.

The two portions meshed, and by rushing through the first turn, they had given their opponents little time to ponder. Sure enough, the two youths frowned, obviously perplexed by the sequence she and her partner had created.

Good! I feared my idea was obvious… one they taught boys their first year at sea.

That didn’t mean it was going to work, only that she and Renna had surprise going for them. The cook and cabin boy seemed rattled as they commenced laying four more rows on their side. Naroin nudged Maia. With a smile, the petite bosun pointed to the quarterdeck, where last night the ship’s officers had leaned on the rail, casually watching the amateurs’ humiliation. Tonight, a similar crowd had gathered, but this time their expressions were hardly idle. A cluster of ensigns and midshipmen flipped the pages of tall, gilt-edged books, alternately pointing toward the game board and arguing. To the left, three older men seemed to need no reference volumes. The ship’s navigator and doctor exchanged a mere glance and smile, while Captain Poulandres puffed his pipe, resting his elbows on the finely carved banister, showing no expression save a glitter in his eye.

The boys finished their turn and appeared taken aback when Maia and Renna did not linger, analyzing what they’d done, but immediately proceeded to create four more rows of their own. Maia found it easier to envision the patterns, this time. Still, she kept glancing at the sailor who lounged by the port rail, holding a timer.

When she and her partner checked their work again, Maia looked across the cargo hatch and had the satisfaction of seeing the cook clench his fists nervously. The cabin boy seemed agitated. Commencing their turn, the boys quickly botched one of their figures, eliciting laughter from men watching overhead. The captain cleared his throat sharply, warning against audience interference. Blushing, the boys fixed the error and hurried on. They had built an elaborate array of defenses, consisting of powerful, unsubtle figures intended to block or absorb any attack. Next, they would presumably start on offense.

At last, the two youths stood back and signaled that it was Maia’s and Renna’s turn. Renna motioned her forward. “No!” she whispered. “I can’t. You do it.” But Renna just smiled and winked. “It was your idea,” he said.

With a sigh, swallowing a lump in her throat, Maia took a step forward and she spoke a single word.

“Pass.”

There followed a stunned silence, punctuated by the sharp sound of a junior officer slapping his palm decisively onto an open book. His neighbor nodded, but down on deck confusion reigned. “What d’yer mean?” the cook asked, looking left and right for guidance. This broke the tension as other men abruptly laughed. For the first time, Maia felt sorry for her opponent. Even she had seen games in which one side or the other skipped a row, leaving every space blank. What she was doing here, skipping four rows at once—that was the daring part.

Patiently, Poulandres explained while Naroin and other volunteers helped spread one hundred and sixty tokens, all white face up. In moments the boys were told to proceed, which they did with much nervous fumbling, piecing together a formidable array of aggressive-looking artillery patterns. When they looked up at last, Maia stepped forward again and repeated, “Pass!”

Again, volunteers quickly spread four rows of white pieces, while the audience murmured. Even if our pattern won’t function as planned, this was worth it. On the other side, the boys went back to work, perspiring for lack of a break. For her part, Maia was starting to shiver from inactivity. Looking aft, she saw several common seamen drift over to ask questions of an ensign who, pointing at the board, made motions with his hands and whispered, trying to explain.

So what we’re attempting is in the books, after all. Probably part of game lore, but rarely seen, like fool’s mate in Chess. Easy to counter, providing you know what to do.

Renna and I have to hope we’re playing against fools.

It didn’t matter in one sense. Maia was pleased simply to have stirred their calm complacency. Maybe now they’d lend her some of those gilt-edged books, instead of patronizingly assuming they’d make no sense to her.

The other side of the board filled with a crowd of gaudy, extravagant figures, many of which Maia now saw were excessive and mutually contradictory, lacking the elegance of a classic Life match. On their own side, meanwhile, eight rows of enigmatic black and white dots terminated in a broad expanse of simple white.

I can’t wait to ask the name of our pattern. Maia hungered to consult those volumes. It’s simple enough in concept, even if it turns out flawed.

What she had realized this afternoon, in a flash of insight, was that the boundary was truly part of the game. By reflecting most patterns that struck it, the edge participated crucially.

So why not alter it?

Maia had first imagined simply creating a copy of the boundary, a little further up their side of the board, to screw up any carom shots attempted by their foes. But that wouldn’t work. Inside the board, all persistent patterns had to be self-renewing. The boundary pattern wasn’t a stable one. If re-created elsewhere, it quickly dissolved.

But what about creating a pattern that acted like a boundary part of the time, while turning transparent to most types of missiles and gliders much of the rest? One example of such a structure had popped into mind this afternoon. It would reflect simple gliders eight beats out of ten, and so long as the anchor points at both ends were left alone, it would keep renewing. Given what they had faced last night, their opponents clearly planned shooting a lot of stuff at them. Overkill, nearly all of which would now come right back in their faces! With luck, their opponents would wreak more havoc on themselves than on the resilient, simple pattern Renna and Maia had created.

From the enclosed cabin behind the helm, a sailor wearing a duty armband hurried to the captain’s side and whispered in his ear. The commander frowned, knotting his caterpillar eyebrows. He gestured for the doctor to take over as referee, and crooked a finger for the navigator to follow.

Meanwhile, tired and haggard, the boys finished their terminal swath and resignedly listened to Maia declare “pass” for the final time. While the last white pieces were laid, the doctor could be seen shrugging into formal, pleated robes, topped by a peaked hood. With poised dignity, the old man sauntered downstairs amid a susurration of talk. Men followed to crowd around the board, pointing, excitedly consulting sage texts. Many, like the cook and cabin boy, just looked confused.

The referee took his traditional pose near the timing square.

Silence reigned. “Life is continuation—” he began.

A cracking sound, like a sliding door hitting its stops, interrupted the invocation. Hurried footsteps thumped across the quarterdeck. The Manitou’s captain appeared, gripping the banister while a sailor came alongside and blew a brass horn—two short peals and a long note that tapered slowly into utter quiet. No one seemed to breathe.

“For some time we’ve been picking up a radar trace,” Poulandres told his crew and passengers. “Their bearing intersects ours, and they appear fast enough to overhaul. I’ve tried raising them, but they will not answer.

“I can only assume we are targets of reavers. Therefore I must ask the paying passengers. Will you resist, and defend your cargo?”

Still blinking in surprise, Maia watched Kiel step forward. “Hell, yes. We’ll resist.”

The officer nodded. “Very well. I shall maneuver accordingly. You may consult our female crew, who will assist you under the Code of the Sea. Everyone to action stations.”

The horn blew again, this time a rapid tattoo as sailors ran to the rigging and women hurried to assemble by the forecastle. Maia looked numbly at the game board. But … we were about to find out…

A hand took Maia’s arm. It was Thalla, guiding her to where someone had already unlocked the weapons cabinet and was passing out trepp bills. Maia glanced back at Renna, his mouth slightly agape, staring at the commotion. He’s even more confused than I am, she realized, feeling sorry for her friend from the stars.

Renna started to follow, but a sailor put a hand out. “Men don’t fight,” Maia saw him say, repeating the lesson she had taught him during the escape from Long Valley. The sailor led Renna off, and Maia turned to find her place along a row of vars, gathering with weapons in hand.

“Will you follow my tactical orders?” Naroin asked Kiel and Thalla, who represented the rad company. They nodded.

“All right, then. Inanna, Lullin, Charl, stand ready to receive squads.” Naroin assigned passengers to follow each of three experienced female sailors to positions along the ship’s gunwales. Maia was among those in the bosun’s own group, stationed toward the bow, where the rise and fall of Manitou’s cutting prow felt most pronounced. She sensed a change in the breeze as the ship altered course, presumably to try evading confrontation.

“Better relax,” Naroin told her squad. “They may be faster, but a stern chase is a long chase. Could be daybreak ’fore they catch us.” With that, she sent two vars below for blankets. “We’ll get hot soup soon,” she assured the nervous women. “Might as well stay rested. Ever’body get down, out of th’ wind.”

They settled onto the deck with their bills at hand. Naroin reached over to tap Maia on the knee. “Lucky break for someone, the horn blowin’ when it did. Judgin’ by what I seen, those dappy rim shots were the lucky ones!”

Maia shrugged. “I guess we’ll never know.” A clattering aft told of game pieces being swept into their storage boxes, at captain’s orders.

“They prob’ly arranged all this to keep you from humiliatin’ two o’ their boys,” Naroin said, causing Maia to stare back at her. But the woman sailor grinned and Maia knew she was joking. Sea captains took honor in the games almost as seriously as the safety of their ship and crew.

Women made tentlike shrouds of their blankets, covering their heads and shoulders, settling in for a long wait. True to the bosun’s word, a crewman soon arrived, carrying a kettle. Bowls clattered at his waist. The junior cook did not look at Maia when he reached her, but the cup sloshed when she took it from his hand, scalding her fingers. Wincing within, she managed to show no outward reaction. At least the thick broth was tasty and its warmth welcome, especially as gaps appeared between the clouds and the night chilled. One woman blew a flute, unmelodiously. There were attempts at gossip. None got very far.

“Say,” Naroin offered. “I found out somethin’ you might be interested in.”

Maia looked up. She had been stroking the smooth wooden stave, wordlessly contemplating what might come in a few hours. “What’s that?” she asked blankly.

Naroin brought up a hand to shield her mouth, and lowered her voice. “I found out what he does, spendin’ that extra time behind the curtain… You know? After meals?”

It took a moment to grasp that Naroin was referring to Renna. “After…?”

“He’s cleanin’ his mouth!”

Curiosity battled anger that the woman had spied on Maia’s friend. “Cleaning … his mouth?”

“Yup.” Naroin nodded. “You’ve seen that little brush of his? Well, he sticks it in seawater—even though he won’t drink the stuff—then pops it in an’ carries away like a deckhand tryin’ to finish KP in time for a party! Scours those white gnashers good, with lots o’ swishin’ an’ spittin’. Beats anythin’ I’ve seen.”

“Um,” Maia replied, trying to come up with an explanation. “Some people would smell better if they did that, now and then.”

“Good point.” Naroin laughed. “But after every meal?”

Maia shook her head. “He is an alien. Maybe he’s worried about… catching diseases?”

“But he eats our food. Kind o’ hard to see what good mouth-cleanin’ does, after the fact.”

Maia shrugged. It might otherwise be a topic worth further speculation. But right now it seemed petty and pointless. Good intentions or no, she preferred that Naroin leave her alone. Fortunately the bosun seemed to sense this, and conversation lapsed.

Durga rose, backlighting the clouds and casting shafts of pearly radiance through gaps in the overcast, onto patches of choppy sea. Those patches, and the star-filled openings above them, corresponded like pieces of a child’s puzzle and the holes they were meant to occupy. Maia glimpsed bits of constellations, and could tell the ship was fleeing southward before the wind. The bow’s steady rise and fall felt like a slow, steady heartbeat, carrying them not just through dark seas, but through time. Each moment drew new patterns out of old configurations of wood, water, and flesh. Each novel, fleeting rearrangement set conditions for yet more patterns to follow.

It wasn’t just an abstraction. Somewhere in the darkness, a fast, radar-equipped vessel prowled, ever closer. “Don’t think about it,” Naroin told the nervous women in her squad. “Try to get some sleep.”

The idea was ludicrous, but Maia pretended to obey. She curled underneath her blanket as the bow rose and fell, rose and fell, reminding her of the horse’s rhythmic motion while fleeing across the plains of Long Valley. Maia closed her eyes for just a minute…

…and woke to a sharp pain, jabbing her thigh. She sat up, blinking. “I… what…?”

Women were milling around the forecastle, muttering in a dim, gray light. There was a smoky quality to the air, and a faint smell of soot. Something poked her leg again, and Maia turned to follow the impertinent curve of a deck shoe, up a scar-worn leg to a face belonging to Baltha. The tall easterling var had stripped to the waist, her breasts restrained with a tightly wrapped leather halter. Baltha’s blonde hair was tied back with a pink ribbon that seemed anomalously gay, given the glitter of feral combativeness in her eye. She grinned at Maia, stroking her trepp bill. “This is it, virgie. Ready for some fun?”

“Get back to your post,” Naroin snapped at the tall blonde. Baltha shrugged and sauntered away, rejoining her friends near where the cook tended a steaming cauldron. The rough-looking mercenaries from the Southern Isles stretched and toyed with their bills, poking one another playfully, showing no outward sign of nerves.

A cabin boy handed Maia a hot cup of tcha, which seemed to course through her, opening veins and briefly intensifying the dawn chill. There had been dreams, she recalled. Their last shreds were already dissipating, leaving only vague feelings of dire jeopardy.

Unlike the night before, there was no wind save a faint, intermittent zephyr, but a chugging vibration told that auxiliary engines were running, pushing the ship in clumsy flight. Holding her cup in one hand, Maia clutched the corners of her blanket and looked out to sea.

The first thing she noticed was an archipelago of jutting islets—resembling upended splinters of stone that had been wave-washed smooth over epochs far longer than humanity had been on Stratos. Erupting from abyssal water, the precipitous spires stretched like a sinuous chain of blunt needles, ranging from northwest to southeast. Rather than meeting a distinct horizon, they faded with distance into a soft, mysterious haze. Some of the nearer isles were large enough for their moss-encrusted flanks to converge on forest-topped ridges, from which spilled slender, spring-fed waterfalls.

“Poulandres was trying to reach those,” explained the young rad, Kau, when Maia wandered near the portside rail. A scar near her ear showed where Renna had tended her wound, after the fight aboard the Musseli locomotive. “Captain hoped to slip the reavers’ radar among ’em. But the wind let us down, and sunrise came too soon, alas. Now it’s going to be stand and fight.”

The dark-haired var gave Maia an amiable nudge. “Want to see the enemy?”

Do I have any choice? Maia reluctantly turned away from the entrancing isles to look where Kau gestured, toward a misleadingly rosy dawn. When she saw their pursuer, she gasped.

It’s so close!

A grimy-looking vessel cleaved the ocean, flinging spray from its bows. Only two sails were unfurled, but oily black fumes spilled from a pair of dark smokestacks. Agitated figures could be made out, milling on deck. The Manitou’s engines, generally reserved for harbor maneuvers, were no match for that power.

Kau commented. “Reavers often hide big motors inside normal-looking clippers. No getting away from this bunch, I’m afraid.”

The two girls heard a sigh. Standing nearby, looking at the foe-ship, Naroin recited:

There was sincere regret in the bosun’s sigh, yet Maia watched the rippling of slim, taut muscles under Naroin’s arms. Regret was not unstained by anticipation.

“Come on,” the older woman said, nodding toward Baltha’s squad. “Those southlanders have it right. Let’s get ready.”

Naroin gathered the foremost detachment of passengers, and started by inspecting their trepps, then passed out lengths of noosed rope which each woman hung from her belt. Soon she had them running through stretching routines. Maia threw herself into the exercises. The combination of hot tcha and exertion in minutes had her blood flowing, pounding in her ears. She smelled everything with unwonted intensity, from burning coal to the separate salt tangs of sea and perspiration. Colors came to her with an almost-painful vividness.

“Yah!” Naroin cried, swinging her bill. The women imitated. “Yah!” As they practiced, Maia sensed the pervading mood of fear evaporate. What replaced it wasn’t eagerness. Only a fool could not see that pain and defeated humiliation might lay ahead. Even one or more deaths, if full battle could not be avoided. Facing professionals would be more fearsome than skirmishing with part-time clone militiawomen had been, back in Long Valley.

Still, being a var meant knowing you might spend time as a warrior. Nor were these just any vars. Those who helped Thalla and Kiel had known it would be a risky enterprise. For the first time since Grange Head, Maia felt a sense of linkage to these rads. The one to her left grinned and clapped Maia on the back when Naroin called a break. Maia returned the smile, feeling limber, though far from happy.

“Hailing Manitou!” An amplified male voice caused heads to turn. Maia hurried back to the rail and choked when she saw how close the reaver was. Its bowsprit came abeam with their own ship’s fantail. “Hailing Manitou. This, is the Reckless, calling for you to heave over!”

Manitou’s captain lifted a bullhorn and shouted back. “By what right do you accost us?”

“By the Law of Lysos, and the Code of Ships! Will you split your cargo, sir?”

Maia watched Poulandres turn to consult Kiel, standing by his side, who shook her head emphatically. He accepted her answer with a passive shrug and lifted the bullhorn once more.

“My employers will fight for what is theirs. The cargo cannot be divided!”

Maia shook her head. I should think not. She saw Renna, standing near the cockpit, swiveling back and forth, staring in amazement. Does he realize they’re talking about him? She gripped her bill tightly, glad that her alien friend would be safe on the neutral territory of the quarterdeck during the coming fray.

The Reckless drew closer. It was a smaller ship than the Manitou. That, plus its powerful engines, made defense by maneuver useless. Neither captain would risk damaging his beloved ship in a collision. Not without insurance that neither reavers nor rads could afford.

A crowd of women had gathered at the approaching ship’s starboard rail, clutching bills, truncheons, and loops of coiled cord. More clambered the masts, edging onto the swaying spars. All wore the infamous red bandanna. A chill coursed Maia’s shoulder blades.

“Understood, sir,” one of the bearded men at the tiller of the reaver answered through his own megaphone. “Will you accept trial by champion, then?”

Again, a consultation with Kiel, followed by another headshake. Most reaver bands employed special champions, professional fighters among professionals. The rads knew their odds were better in a melee, though at inevitable cost. This wasn’t about sharing a hold full of cotton, coal, or dry goods. Theirs was a cargo worth fighting for.

Captain Poulandres passed on Kiel’s refusal.

“Very good,” the master of the other ship replied. “Then my passengers instruct me to say, Prepare for boarding!”

No further conversation was required. While the smaller vessel moved in, Maia saw Kiel shake hands with the captain, then leap to the cargo deck, taking up her bill and yelling to her comrades. Poulandres immediately called all male crew members aft. The seamen hurried, shouting encouragement to their female colleagues.

Maia looked beyond the lower deck, with its crowd of nervously waiting vars, and saw Renna in earnest conversation with the ship’s doctor. The old man, with an expression of someone explaining the obvious to a child or fool, motioned with his hands, pointing to the men on both ships and shaking his head. Except for women sailors, it’s strictly a battle between passengers, Maia internally voiced the doctor’s explanation.

Lysos had said it first, according to texts read aloud in temple services. “Who can banish all strife? Fools who try only turn routine avarice, aggression, into outright murder. As we act to minimize conflict, let us see that what remains is balanced and restrained by law.”

Renna met Maia’s eyes. His fists were clenched and he shook his head. Maia answered with a brief, thin smile, appreciating his message but also recalling the next line of verse, chanted so often in the chapel of Lamatia Hold.

“Above all, never lightly unleash wrath in men. For it is a wild thing, not easy to contain.”

Maia glanced across the narrowing gap of open sea. There were men on that side, too, watching from their sanctuary zone with dark, brooding eyes.

Perhaps it really was better this way, she realized.

Renna crossed his arms and tugged both earlobes. The Stratoin signal for good luck made Maia smile, hoping that her friend had remembered to plug his sensitive ears. This was going to be a noisy affair. She nodded back at him, then turned to face the enemy.

“Eia!” Came a roar of female voices from the other vessel. Kiel raised her bill over her head and the rads replied as one. “Eia!”

Suddenly, the air whistled with grappling hooks and a profusion of snaking ropes. Defenders ran to cut the tautening lines, but could not reach enough cables before the hulls met with a dull boom. More hooks flew. Shouting raiders leaped, climbing hanging strands. Naroin called to her squad, “Steady, girls… steady… Now!”

Reflexes rescued Maia from fear’s rigor. Practice told her arms and legs what to do, but their force flowed not from faith, reason, courage, or any other abstraction. Her will to move came from a need not to be left behind. Not to let the others down.

Yelling at the top of her lungs, although her cries were lost amid the rising clamor, she marched forward with her trepp locked at one hip, guarding Naroin’s flank as the battle joined.

There seemed no end to them. The reaver ship must have been packed to the bulkheads, and warriors kept on coming.

Not that the first wave had it easy. Professionals or no, they found it hard clambering from a low deck to a higher one, while those above rained down nets, cold oil, and blocks of wood. Naroin set an example, dealing out snaring blows, hooking raiders under the armpits like gaffed fish and prying them loose to fall onto their comrades. When one snarling attacker made it over the Manitou’s rail, Naroin seized the woman by her hair and halter. Pivoting on her pelvis, she hurled the invader to the deck, there to be pounced on by waiting teams, trussed by the arms and legs, and carried aft. Inspired by Naroin’s example, Kiel and a tall rad from Caria also made captures, while Maia and the others fought to rap knuckles, unhook hands, and generally knock senseless those swelling up from below. Maia experienced elation each time an enemy fell. When a savage trepp strike just missed her face, the whistle of wood splitting air fed a hormone-level sense of invincibility.

On another plane, she knew it was illusion. More raiders swarmed upward from the Reckless like members of an insect horde, unflinching at all efforts to deflect it. Soon Maia was busy parrying buffets from a corsair who managed to straddle the railing—a tall, rangy woman with jagged teeth and several fierce scars. There was no help, Naroin being occupied with another thrashing foe. Alone, Maia tried to ignore the sweat-sting in her eyes as she traded clattering blows with her growling opponent. In a sudden, twisting swipe, the corsair landed a glancing clout to Maia’s left hand, drawing a startled, anguished cry. Maia nearly lost hold of her weapon. Her next parry came almost too late, the next later still…

The end of a trepp bill appeared out of nowhere, snaking beneath Maia’s arm to meet the reaver’s leather-bound chest with a loud thump, throwing her off balance.

A distant part of Maia actually winced in sympathy, for the blow must have hurt something awful. But her opponent just yelled an oath of defiance as her arms flung out and she fell backward, striking the hull with her upper body. Astonishingly, the woman hung onto the railing by one scarred leg, a knotted cord of striated muscle.

Another red-clothed head immediately popped over—a new arrival using her comrade as a scaling ladder. Not without a twinge, Maia brought her bill around to hook the ankle of her earlier foe, yanking the leg from its mooring. Both invaders fell … to the deck of the other ship, she hoped. Though, if they splashed between the creaking, banging hulls, she shouldn’t care. The code of battle said as much. “Honest risk in honest struggle.”

You’re not getting Renna! That voiceless cry lent Maia strength. Adrenaline overwhelmed pain as she whirled her stave to assist the woman to her left, who had helped her the moment before. Now Thalla was corps à corps with a grim-faced reaver several centimeters taller and much heavier. Seeing no other way, Maia cut a sharp blow to the raider’s thigh. The woman buckled. Taking advantage, Thalla used the yoke portion of her bill to pin her foe to the ground. An eye-flick of thanks was all she could spare.

“Virgie, watch out!”

The yell accompanied a flash overhead. Swiveling barely in time, Maia ducked a noose cast by an attacker riding one of the foe-vessel’s mast spars. It was a nasty tactic that risked strangling the victim. Maia seized the dangling cord and gave a savage yank with all her might. The screaming invader fell a long time before crashing into a tangle of fellow red-bandannas.

Something changed in the roar of combat, palpably spreading from that event. The rising tide, till now fed by pressure below, seemed to lose momentum. For an instant, the rail near Maia was clear for meters in both directions. “Well done!” Naroin cried, offering Maia a grin.

There was just time for a moment’s thrill before another voice—Renna’s, she realized—screamed one chilling word: “Treason!”

The starman’s cry made Maia glance back just in time to flinch as Thalla collided with her, backpedaling before a fierce assault. Maia’s former cottage-mate desperately fended blows from an unexpected quarter, behind the defensive line. Struggling to keep her footing, Maia gasped, recognizing the assailant …

Baltha! The hireling’s trepp bill whirled like the vanes of a wind generator, slapping and toying with Thalia’s frenetic efforts to parry. Nor was Baltha alone in her betrayal. With a pang, Maia saw the entire squad of Southern Isles mercenaries had donned scarlet bandannas, falling on the defenders from behind. Several headed straight toward where Naroin and most of the other rads went on, blithely unaware, confidently dealing with more groping hands at the rail.

“Watch out!” Maia yelled. But her voice was overwhelmed by the roar of confused battle. Trapped behind Thalla, she knew there was nothing she could do for either of her comrades. Fractions of seconds seemed to stretch endlessly as she worked her way around writhing, struggling forms, trying to bring her own weapon up, watching helplessly as Naroin was struck from behind with an unsporting head shot that toppled the small woman like a poleaxed steer.

Maia yelled in rage. She found her opening and launched herself at the bosun’s assailants in a fury, catching one with a belly blow that sent her to the deck, gasping. The other southerling parried Maia’s strike and fought back with an expression that shifted from grimness to amusement as she recognized the young fiver who liked playing men’s games.

The ironic smile faded as Maia attacked in a blur of energetic, if inexpert blows, driving the traitor away from Naroin’s crumpled form, step by step, right up to the port-side rail.

More red bandannas appeared. Maia managed to slash one pair of hands a glancing stroke while still pressing her attack on the turncoat. The hands fell away, to be replaced by others. This time a younger face, soot-stained, flushed with heat and adrenaline, hove into view.

Maia blocked a heavy buffet from her chief opponent’s bill, and caught it in the yoke-hook of her own. Twisting with all her strength, she managed to yank her foe’s trepp away.

That face …

To evade Maia’s followup, the panicked southerling flung herself over the railing. Maia wasted no time swiveling to divert her strike at the newcomer now struggling to bring her own weapon up.

Maia froze, halting as if she had been quick-frozen. Sweat-blinded, save through a crimson-rimmed tunnel of terror and wrath, she peered at the face—a mirror to her own.

“Le … Le …” she goggled.

Recognition also lit the young reaver’s eyes. “I’ll be a bleedin’ clan-mother,” she said with a wry, familiar smile. “It’s my atyp twin.”

Too stunned to move, Maia heard Renna’s voice shouting through her muzzy shock. But Leie’s presence filled every space, engulfing her brain. Glancing past Maia’s shoulder, her sister said, “You better duck, honey.”

Slowly, glacially, Maia tried to turn.

There was a distant crumping tumult of polished wood striking somebody’s skull. She had come to know the nuances of such sounds, and pitied the poor victim.

Dimly perceived movement followed, as if viewed through an inverted telescope. Perplexed by the suddenly approaching deck, Maia wondered why her muscles weren’t responding, why her senses all seemed to be shutting down. She tried speaking, but a faint gurgle was all that came out.

Too bad, she thought, just before thinking nothing at all. I wanted to ask Leie… We have so much… catching up to do…

19

“That thing’d break up in the first good squall. Or even sooner, when you drop it over th’ cliff. How d’you plan on steerin’ the smuggy thing?”

With a bang that made Maia wince, the big sailor, Inanna, slammed down the rock she had been using for a hammer. “Bosun, you just shut up. You’re no shipcrafter, an’ you sure ain’t givin’ orders no more.”

Maia watched Naroin consider this, then reply with a shrug. “It’s your necks.”

“Ours to risk,” Inanna assented, gesturing at the other women, hard at work cutting saplings and dragging them toward an area laid out with chalk lines on the rocky bluff. “You two are free to come along. We can use good fighters. But all the arguin’ and votin’ are over. Either put up or take your samish asses to ’tarkal hell.”

Preparing to give a hot reply, Naroin cut short when Maia grabbed her arm. “We’ll think about it,” Maia told Inanna, trying to pull Naroin away. The last thing anybody needed, right now, was to have a shouting match come to blows.

For a long moment, Naroin seemed rooted in stone, unmovable until she abruptly decided to let it go. “Huh!” she said, and swiveled to march up the narrow, forested trail toward the campsite. Despite being taller, Maia had to hurry to keep up. All this noise and shouting wasn’t easing the headache she had nursed since awakening, days ago, with a concussion, a captive of reavers.

“They may have the wrong plan,” Maia suggested, trying to calm Naroin. “But it keeps them busy. There’d be fights and craziness without something to do.”

Naroin slowed to look at Maia, and then nodded. “Basic command principle. Shouldn’t need you to remind me.” She glanced back at where the women sailors of the Manitou labored alongside a half-dozen of Kiel’s younger rads, cutting and trimming saplings with primitive tools, laying out the beginnings of a rude craft. “I just hate to see ’em try something so dumb.”

Maia agreed, but what to do? It had all been decided at a meeting, three days after the reavers dumped them on this spirelike isle whose name, if any, must be lost to another age. Naroin had argued for a different scheme—the building of one or two small boats, which a few selected volunteers might sail swiftly westward in search of help. That proposal was voted down in favor of the raft. “Everyone goes, or nobody!” Inanna declared, carrying the day.

Left out was how they proposed to make such a big contraption seaworthy, then get it down the sheer fifty-meter drop, and away from the spuming interface of wave and rock. Only one place along the forested rim of the jagged promontory featured a way down. There a winch had lifted the prisoners and their provisions, just before the Reckless and the captured Manitou sailed off. Inanna and her friends still schemed to use the lifting machine, despite its metal casing, locks, and earlier warnings of booby traps. In the long run, however, they might have to resort to building a primitive crane of timbers and vines.

“Idiots,” Naroin muttered. She thrashed at the low foliage by the trail, using a short stave she had trimmed just after landfall. It was no trepp bill, but the small, wiry seawoman seemed more comfortable with it in her hands. “They’ll never make it, an’ I’m not drownin’ with ’em.”

Maia was getting fatigued with Naroin’s impatient temper. Yet, she did not want to be alone. Too many dark thoughts plagued her when solitude pressed close. “How can you be sure? I agree your plan would have been better, but—”

“Bleeders!” Naroin slashed with her staff, and leaves flew. “Even a bunch o’ frosty jorts oughta see that raft’s all wrong. Say they do get it down, an’ the sea don’t smash it right up. They’ll just get plucked again, like floatin’ melons. If the pirates don’t grab the chance to send ’em straight to Sally Jones on the spot.”

“But we haven’t seen a sail since we were marooned. How would the reavers know when and where to find them unless…” Maia stopped. She stared at Naroin. “You don’t mean…?”

The bosun’s lips were thin. “Won’t say it.”

“You don’t have to. It’s vile!”

Naroin shrugged. “You’d do the same, if you was them. Trouble is, there’s no way to tell which one it is. Or maybe two. Didn’t know any o’ them var hands before I hired on, at Artemesia Bay. Can’t be sure of any of ’em.”

“Or even me?”

Naroin turned and regarded Maia straight on. Her inspection was long and unsettlingly sharp. After five seconds, a slow smile spread. “You keep surprisin’ me, lass. But I’d bet my sweet departed berry on you, despite you bein’ no var.”

Maia winced. “I told you before. That was my twin.”

“Mm. So I recall from th’ old Wotan days. At least, it’s what you two said then. I admit, that wasn’t clone-sister sweetness I saw, when she dumped you here.”

Maia managed not to flinch a second time. The reminder was like stretching new scar tissue. The memory was still intense, of Leie’s soot-streaked face, peering at her through that concussion haze, murmuring in a low, urgent voice of the necessity of what she was about to do.

“I’m happy you’re alive, Maia. Truly, it’s a miracle. But right now you’re a smuggy nuisance to have around. My associates have a thing about people who look too much alike, if you know what I mean. Even if they believed me, there’d be suspicions. My plans would be set back. I can’t afford to have you screw things up, right now.”

There had been a wet, sticky sensation. Something tingling slathered across Maia’s face, and a burning sensation crossed her scalp. At the time, Maia had been semidelirious, frantic to speak to her unexpectedly living sister, unable to comprehend why her mouth was gagged. Only much later, when she had a chance to scrub at one of the island’s tiny freshwater springs, did she figure out what Leie had done. Using coal tar and other chemicals from the Reckless engine room, Leie had darkened Maia’s skin and hair, altering her appearance in a makeshift but effective way.

“This won’t fool anyone for long,” Leie had murmured, examining her handiwork. “Maia, be still! As I was saying, it’s a lucky break your captain chose to flee right toward our base. No one’ll have a chance to look at you closely before we dump off the first group of prisoners.”

From Leie’s remarks, Maia later gathered that the reaver base lay amid this very archipelago of devil-fang peaks. Apparently, the pirates planned to divide their captives, interning some on isolated isles. First to be marooned would be those least dangerous to the raiders’ plans—Manitou’s women crew members. While sorting through the wounded, Leie had managed to put Maia with that group.

“You’d never believe what I’ve been through since the storm split us up, Maia. While you were following your bosun friend around, leading the peaceful life of a deckhand, I’ve seen and done things …” Leie had shaken her head, as if at a loss to explain. “You wouldn’t like where we’re taking the rads and their space-pervert creature, so I’ve arranged for you to be dropped off where you’ll be more comfortable. Just sit tight till I figure things out, you hear me? By summer I’ll get you to some town. We’ll think up a way for you to help me with my plan.”

Leie’s eyes had been filled with that old enthusiasm, now enhanced by a new, fierce determination. Through a fog of injury, pain, and confusion, Maia wondered what adventures had so changed her sister.

Then the import of Leie’s words sank in. Leie and the reavers were going to put her ashore, and sail off with Renna! Kiel and Thalla and the men of the Manitou, as well. That was when Maia started straggling against her bonds, grunting to tell Leie she had to speak!

“There there. It’ll be all right. Now, Maia, if you don’t settle down, I’m going to have to … Aw, hell, I should’ve expected this. You always were a wengel-headed pain.”

Maia caught a scent of strong herbs and alcohol as Leie pushed a soaked cloth over her nose. A cloying, choking sensation spread through the nasal passages and sinuses, making her want to cough and gag. Events got even more vague after that, but still, she had a distinct image of her sister leaning forward, kissing her on the forehead.

“Nighty-night,” Leie murmured. Darkness followed.

The memory of pain and betrayal still hurt Maia, darkening and confusing her natural joy to find that Leie lived. But there was another matter. Burning foremost in her mind was one fact she focused on. An innocent, helpless man was being held captive somewhere on one of those other isles, without a friend in the world.

Except me. I must get to Renna!

Through the blue funk of her thoughts, she followed Naroin along a trail overlooking the bright sea, walking in silence back to where the reavers had dumped enough food and supplies to last until the next promised shipment. Lean-tos and makeshift tents made a ragged circle, offset from the trees. A cook fire was tended by one crew-woman whose ankle had been broken in the failed battle. She looked up desultorily and nodded without a word, going back to stirring lentils in a slowly simmering pot.

Naroin returned to her own chief pastime, using sharpened pieces of chert to shave a tree limb into a primitive bow. Not a legal weapon. But then, it wasn’t legal, either, for the reavers to have dumped them here. Seizing the Manitou should have been followed by “dividing the cargo,” then letting its crew and passengers go.

The special nature of this “cargo” made that unlikely, especially when it was one eagerly sought by every political force on the planet. When Maia last saw Captain Poulandres, hands bound on the quarterdeck of his own ship, the red-faced man had been threatening to raise hell, building toward a full summer rage by sheer anger. The reavers ignored him. Clearly, Poulandres had no idea what trouble he was in.

“It’s for huntin’,” Naroin said about the bow and slim arrow shafts. No one had seen anything larger than a bush shrew on the isle, but nobody complained. Anyway, the authorities were far away.

Maia threw herself on the blanket she had spread under a rough lean-to, atop a bed of shredded grass and leaves. Of her three possessions, her clothes and Captain Pegyul’s sextant she kept with her always. The last item, a slim book of poems, she had found on her person as a ship’s boat rowed the captive sailors to internment. During the ride up the creaky winch-lift, she had managed to focus on one randomly chosen page.

A gift from Leie, she realized. Ever the more verbal of the two, while Maia had been the one attracted to things visual—patterns and puzzles. It could be taken as a peace offering, or a promise, or just an impulsive thing, with no more meaning than a friendly pat on the head.

She flipped through a few more poems, trying to appreciate them. But the gift, however well intended, was spoiled by a lingering sick-sweet odor left by the knockout drug. In her own eyes, Leie might have had good reasons for the act. Nevertheless, it mixed in Maia’s heart with Tizbe Beller’s ambush, the pragmatic betrayals of Kiel and Thalla, and the awful treachery of Baltha’s southerlings. The list invited despair, if contemplated, so she refused.

Instead, Maia turned to the back flyleaf of the book, made of a slick, synthetic material meant to protect the paper pages from moisture during long voyages. She had discovered another use for the wrapping sheet. By spreading it open and weighting the corners with stones, she acquired a flat surface that she’d scribed with thin, perpendicular lines. Between these, with a stick of charcoal taken from the fire, Maia marked arrays of tiny dots, separated by many empty spaces. Wetting a rag with spit, she wiped away the old pattern and redrew a different version.

It’s more than just a matter of shapes, she thought, trying to recapture insights from last night’s fireside contemplation. It had all seemed so clear, then.

There’s another level than just thinking about how an individual group of dots mutates, and moves across the board. There’s a relationship of some sort between the number of living dots per area—the density—and whatever next-neighbor rule you’re using. If you change the number of neighbors needed for survival, you also change…

It was a struggle. Sometimes concepts came at her, like glowing baubles winking at the boundaries of vision, of comprehension. But crippling her was lack of vocabulary. The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she’d been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.

It gets even more beautiful if you let the rules include cells farther than next-neighbors, she thought, trying to concentrate. Experimenting in her head was a wild process, hard to keep up for long. Yet, she had briefly succeeded in picturing a Game of Life set in three dimensions, whose products had been lattice structures of enticing, complex splendor, not merely marching crystalline rows, but forms that curled into smoky, twisting patterns, impossible to visualize save for bare instants at a time.

Maia closed the book and sank back, laying a forearm across her eyes, drifting in a tidal flux somewhere between pure abstraction and memories of hopelessness. The nearby scraping sounds of Naroin, grinding stone against wood, reminded her of something long ago. Of Leie, grunting and levering a device against a huge, ornate door. Then, too, there had been the sounds of wood and metal rubbing rock.

“It’s my turn to try,” Leie had said, a long year ago and far away, deep under the cellars of Lamatia Hold. “Your subtle stuff didn’t work, so now we’ll try getting in my way!”

Maia recalled the twined snake figures. Rows of mysterious symbols. A star-shaped knob of stone that ought to have turned, clockwise, if the puzzle made any sense at all…

There was a rustle of footsteps. Real noise, not recollection. A shadow occulted the sun. Maia lifted her arm and looked up to see a trim figure blocking one quarter of the sky. “I found something up there in the ruins,” said a voice, reedy and young. It might have been that of a girl, except that every now and then, it cracked, briefly shooting down a whole octave to a lower register. “You ought to come, Maia. I have never seen anything like it.”

She sat up, shading her eyes. A gangling boy stood looking down at her. “The reavers’ practical joke,” Naroin had called him, and others agreed. Young Brod was a nice enough kid. He was nearly her age, although at five, boys fresh from their mother-clans were childish, almost unformed. This one shouldn’t be here at all.

Officially, Brod was a hostage, taken by the women reavers to ensure cooperation by the sailors of the ship they had hired, the Reckless. But Naroin surely had it right. The young midshipman had been left partly in jest, showing someone’s warped sense of humor. “Enjoy yer next glory fall!” one raider in a red bandanna had taunted as the last winch-load lifted away, leaving the “low threat” prisoners stranded together on this lonely spire.

Maia slowly stood up, sighing because the boy had chosen her to befriend, when she would have preferred solitude. I do need the exercise, she told herself. Aloud, she said, “Lead on.”

The youth’s puppy-eager smile was sweet and winter-harmless. She felt sorry for the kid when spectral frost next coated the grass and trees, when the rough sailor women would surely take their frustrations out on him. Even if by chance he was able, that wouldn’t relieve the tension. There wasn’t a scrap of ovop leaf among the supplies.

“This way. Come on!” Brod said impatiently, hurrying ahead of her into the trees. Maia took a deep breath, sighed, and followed.

The sheer island prominence had once been settled. That much had been clear as soon as the last load of internees arrived atop the plateau, hearing the black winch box shut down with an electronic buzz and booby-trapped clank. Early exploration uncovered tumbled, vine-encrusted ruins, remnants of ancient walls. The fringes of extensive edifices could be seen before the summit of the ridgetop was obscured by dense forest.

Brod had taken it upon himself to continue surveying the interior, especially since Maia and Naroin lost the raft dispute. He had tried to cast his vote along with them, only to learn that a boy’s opinion wasn’t solicited or welcome. The women crewfolk figured they knew enough about sailing to dispense with the advice of a raw, city-bred midshipman. At the time, Maia had thought it a needless slight.

“It’s some distance up this way, into the thicket,” Brod told her, pushing and occasionally hacking a path with a stick. “I wanted to find the center of all this devastation. Did it happen all at once, or was this settlement abandoned slowly, to let nature do the work?”

Walking just behind him, Maia felt free to smile. When they had first met, he had introduced himself as “Brod Starkland,” carelessly still appending the name of his motherclan. Naroin knew of the house, prominent in the city of Enheduanna, near Ursulaborg. Still, it was a kid’s mistake to let it slip.. The boy was going to have to shuck his posh, Mediant Coast accent and learn man-dialect, real quick.

On further thought, perhaps Brod had been left here with the full agreement and approval of his crewmates, to take some starch out of him, or simply to get him out of their hair. Somehow, Maia doubted he was prime pirate material. Maybe he and I are alike in that way. Nobody particularly wants or needs us around.

The trail continued past tall, gnarly trees and tangled roots, mixed with broken stonework. Brod spoke over his shoulder. “We’re almost there, Maia. Get ready for an eye-opener.”

Still smiling indulgently, Maia noted that a clearing was about to open a short distance ahead. Probably a very big ruin, filled with stones so large that trees could not grow. She had seen some like that, during the horseback flight across Long Valley. Perhaps Lamatia Hold would look that way, centuries from now. It was something to contemplate.

Just as the trees ended, Brod stepped to the right, making room for Maia. At the same time, he thrust out a protective arm. “You don’t want to get too close …”

At that moment, Maia stopped listening. Stopped hearing much of anything. A soundless roar of vertigo swelled as she halted, staring over a sudden, sheer precipice.

Steepness, all by itself, wouldn’t have stunned her. The cliffs surrounding this island-prison were as abrupt, and higher still. But they lacked the texture of this deep bowl in front of her, which had been gouged with violence out of the peak’s very center. The surface of the cavity was glassy smooth, as if rock had flowed until abruptly freezing in place, like cooling molasses.

What happened? Was it a volcano? Might it still be active?

The material was darkly translucent, reminding her of northern Glacier’s ancient ice, back in the remote northlands.

There and there, Maia thought she could perceive blocky fautlines, as if the rock just behind the fused layer was rendered by levels or strata, subdivided into partitions, catacombs, parallel geologic features from the planet’s ancient crust.

Such surfacial contemplations were just how her foremind kept busy while the rest jibbered. “Ah… ah…” she commented succinctly.

“Exactly what I said at first sight,” Brod nodded, agreeing solemnly. “That sums it in a kedger’s egg.”

Maia wasn’t sure why neither she nor Brod mentioned his discovery to the others. Perhaps the unspoken consensus came from their being the two youngest, least-influential castaways, both recently jettisoned by those they were supposed to think of as “family.” Anyway, it seemed doubtful any of the castaways would be able to shed light on the origins of the startling crater. The women seemed intimidated by the thicket, and avoided going any deeper than necessary to cut wood.

Naroin delved some distance during hunting forays, but the older woman gave no sign of having seen anything unusual. Either the former bosun had lousy eyesight, which seemed unlikely, or she, too, knew how to keep a good poker face.

Since last talking with Naroin, Maia had begun dwelling on dark, suspicious thoughts. Even her refuge in the chaste, ornate world of game abstractions grew unsettled. It was hard paying attention to mental patterns of shifting dots, when she kept remembering that Renna languished somewhere among those scattered isles, perhaps one visible from the southern bluffs. And then there was a long-delayed talk to be had with Leie.

One day followed another. By snaring and shooting small game to supplement the dry-tack larder, Naroin eased some of the tension that had followed the raft-building vote. That project surged and stalled, then plunged forward again with each difficulty met and overcome. Several solidly built platforms of trimmed logs now lay drying in the sunshine, their bark-strip bindings well lashed and growing tauter by the hour. Maia had begun wondering if Inanna, Lullin, and the others might know what they were doing, after all.

Charl, a stout, somewhat hirsute sailor from the far northwest, managed to use a long pole to snag the cable hanging below the locked winch mechanism. Believing the reavers’ warnings of booby traps, the var delicately managed to loop the heavy cord through a crude block and tackle of her own devising. In theory, they could now lower things halfway down before having to switch to handmade vine ropes. It was a clever and impressive feat.

None of the escape team’s competence at construction seemed to impress Naroin. But Maia, despite her doubts, tried to help. When asked by Inanna to prepare a rutter—a rough navigational guide—Maia tried her best. Ideally, the escapees had only to get out of the narrow archipelago of narrow islets and then head northwest. The prevailing currents weren’t perfect, this season. But the winds were good, so if they kept their sail-made-of-blankets properly filled, and a good hand on the tiller, it should be possible to reach Landing Continent in less than two weeks. Maia spent one evening, assisted by Brod, reviewing for the others how to sight certain stars by night, and judge sun angle by day. The women paid close attention, knowing that Maia herself had no intention of leaving the island chain. Not while both Leie and Renna were presumably just a few leagues away.

There was one more thing Maia could do to help.

Brod found her one day, as she walked the latest of a long series of circuits of the island, dropping pieces of wood into the water at different times and watching them drift. The boy caught on quickly. “I get it! They’ll have to know the local currents, especially near the cliffs, so they won’t crash up against them.”

“That’s right,” Maia answered. “The winch isn’t located in the best place for launching such a fragile craft. I guess the site was chosen more for its convenient rock overhang. They’ll have to pick the right moment, or wind up swimming among a lot of broken bits of wood.”

It was a chilling image. Brod nodded seriously. “I should’ve figured that out first.” There was a hard edge of resignation in his voice. “Guess you can tell I’m not much of a seaman.”

“But you’re an officer.”

“Midshipman, big deal.” He shrugged. “Test scores and family influence. I’m lousy at anything practical, from knots to fishing.”

Maia imagined it must be hard for him to say. For a boy to be no good at seamanship was almost the same as being no man at all. There just weren’t that many other employment opportunities for a male, even one as well educated as Brod.

They sat together on the edge of the bluff, watching and timing the movement of wood chips far below. Between measurements, Maia toyed with her sextant, taking angles between various other islands to the southwest.

“I really liked it at Starkland Hold,” Brod confided at one point, then hurriedly assured her, “I’m no momma’s boy. It’s just that it was a happy place. The mothers and sisters were… are nice people. I miss ’em.” He laughed, a little sharply. “Famous problem for the vars of my clan.”

“I wish Lamatia had been like that.”

“Don’t.” He looked across the sea at nowhere in particular. “From what you’ve said, they kept an honorable distance. There’s advantages to that.”

Watching his sad eyes, Maia found herself able to believe it. A tendency runs strong in human nature to feel sentiment toward the children of your womb, even if they are but half yours. Maia knew of clans in Port Sanger, too, that bonded closely to their summer kids, finding it hard to let go. In those cases, parting was helped by the natural, adolescent urge to leave a backwater port. She imagined the combination of a loving home, plus growing up in an exciting city, made it much harder to forsake and forget.

That did not ease a pang of envy. I wouldn’t have minded a taste of his problem.

“That’s not what bothers me so much, though,” Brod went on. “I know I’ve got to get over that, and I will. At least Starkland throws reunions, now and then. Lots of clans don’t. Funny what you wind up missing, though. I wish I never had to give up that library.”

“The one at Starkland Hold? But there are libraries in sanctuaries, too.”

He nodded. “You should see some of them. Miles of shelves, stuffed with printed volumes, hand-cut leather covers, gold lettering. Incredible. And yet, you could cram the whole library at Trentinger Beacon into just five of the datastore boxes they have at the Enheduanna College. The Old Net still creaks along there, you know.”

Brod shook his head. “Starkland had a hookup. We’re a librarian family. I was good at it. Mother Cil said I must’ve been born in the wrong season. Would’ve done the clan proud, if I’d been a full clone.”

Maia sighed in sympathy, relating to the story. She, too, had talents inappropriate for any life path open to her. There passed several long minutes in which neither spoke. They moved on to another site, tossing a leafy branch into the spuming water and counting their pulses to time its departure.

“Can you keep a secret?” Brod said a little later. Maia turned, meeting his pale eyes.

“I suppose. But—”

“There’s another reason they keep me mostly ashore… the captain and mates, I mean.”

“Yes?”

He looked left and right, then leaned toward her.

“I … get seasick. Almost half the time. Never even saw any of the big fight when you were captured, ’cause I was bent over the fantail the whole time. Not encouraging for a guy s’posed to be an officer, I guess.”

She stared at the lad, guessing what it had cost him to say this. Still, she could not help herself. Maia fought to hold it in, to keep a straight face, but finally had to cover her mouth, stifling a choking sound. Brod shook his head. He pursed his lips, tightening them hard, but could not keep them from spreading. He snorted. Maia rocked back and forth, holding her sides, then burst forth with peals of laughter. In a second, the youth replied in kind, guffawing with short brays between inhalations that sounded much better than sobs.

The next day, a vast squadron of zoor passed to the north, like gaily painted parasols, or flattish balloons that had escaped a party for festive giants. Morning sunlight refracted through their bulbous, translucent gasbags and dangling tendrils, casting multicolored shadows on the pale waters The convoy stretched from horizon to horizon.

Maia watched from the precipice, along with Brod and several women, remembering the last time she had seen big floaters like these, though nowhere near this many. It had been from the narrow window of her prison cell, in Long Valley, when she had thought Leie dead, had yet to meet Renna, and seemed entirely alone in the world. By rights, she should be less desolate now. Leie was alive, and had vowed to come back for her. Maia worried over Renna constantly, but the reavers weren’t likely to harm him, and rescue was still possible. She even had friends, after a fashion, in Naroin and Brod.

So why do I feel worse than ever?

Misery is relative, she knew. And present pain is always worse than its memory. This softer captivity didn’t ease her bitterness thinking of Leie’s actions, her angst for Renna, or her feelings of helplessness.

“Look!” Brod cried, pointing to the west, the source of the zoor migration. Women shaded their eyes and, one by one; gasped.

There, in the midst of the floating armada, emerging out of brightness, cruised three stately, cylindrical behemoths, gliding placidly like whales among jellyfish.

“Pontoos,” Maia breathed. The cigar-shaped beasts stretched hundreds of meters, more closely resembling the fanciful zep’lin on her sextant cover than the surrounding zoor, or, for that matter, the small dirigibles used nowadays to carry mail. Their flanks shimmered with facets like iridescent fish scales, and they trailed long, slender appendages which, at intervals, dipped to the waves, snatching edible bits, or siphoning water to split, with sunlight, into hydrogen and oxygen.

Despite protective laws passed by council and church, the majestic creatures were slowly vanishing from the face of Stratos. It was rare to sight one anywhere near habitable regions. The things I’ve seen, Maia thought, noting the one, great compensation for her adventures. If I ever had grandchildren, the things I could have told them.

Then she recalled some of Renna’s stories of other worlds and vistas, strange beyond imagining. It brought on a pang of loss and envy. Maia had never thought, before meeting the Earthling, of coveting the stars. Now she did, and knew she would never have them.

“I just remembered …” young Brod said contemplatively. “Something I read about zoor and such. You know, they’re attracted to the smell of burning sugar? We have some we could put on the fire.”

Women turned to look at him. “So?” Naroin asked. “You want to invite ’em over for supper, maybe?”

He shrugged. “Actually, I was thinking that flying out of here might be better than trying to sail that raft. Anyway, it’s an idea.”

There was a long stretch of silence, then women on both sides laughed aloud, or groaned, at the sheer inanity of the idea. Maia sadly agreed. Of all the boys who tried hitching rides on zoors each year, only a small number were ever seen again. Still, the notion had a vivid, fanciful charm, and she might have given it a thought if the prevailing winds blew toward safe haven … or even dry land. While terribly bright, Brod clearly did not have practical instincts.

His longing expression, followed by sheepish blushing, finished off one lingering doubt Maia had nursed—that Brod might just possibly be a spy, left here by the reavers to watch over the prisoners. She had grown suspicious after all that had happened, the last few months. But no one could fake that sudden shift from wistfulness to embarrassment! His open thoughts seemed more like her own than old Bennett’s had ever been. Or, when you got right down to it, most of the women she had known. He was much less romantically mysterious than her hearth-friend, the Earthling stranger, but that was okay, too.

You’re turning into a real man-liker, Maia pondered, patting Brod on the back and turning to go back to work. Perkinites, who only use ’em for sex and sparking, just don’t know what they’re missing.

The raft had been prepared in four parts, to be linked quickly by hand as each was lowered at high tide. The vars practiced all the necessary movements over and over again, on a clearing by the converted winch. While it would doubtless be many times harder on bobbing seas, they finally felt ready. The first window for a launch would, come early the next morning.

There were reasons for haste. Provisions would run out in eight to ten days. A lighter from the reaver colony was due about then. Inanna and the others wanted to leave well before that.

And if the lighter never came? All the more reason to depart soon. Either way, they’d be hungry but not starved by the time they reached the Mediant Coast.

No one tried very hard to persuade Maia and Naroin to change their minds and come along. Someone ought to stay and put up a pretense, when and if the supply ship came, thus giving the raft crew more time to get away. “We’ll send help,” Inanna assured.

Maia had no intention of waiting around for the promise to be kept. Those left behind would set to work at once on Naroin’s alternate plan. Maia had motives all her own. If a crude dinghy did get built, she would not sail with Naroin and Brod to Landing Continent, but ask to be dropped off along the way. It had to be possible to find out which neighboring island held Renna and the rads—the secret reaver base where Maia planned on snaring Leie, pinning her down, and getting a word in for a change.

The night before launching day, eighteen women and one boy sat up late around the fire, telling stories, joking, singing sea chanteys. The vars kidded young Brod about what a pity it was that glory had been so sparse, and was he sure he didn’t want to come along, after all? Though relieved in a way, by the kindness of the weather, Brod also seemed ambivalently wistful at his narrow escape. Maia guessed with a smile that something within him had been curious and willing to take up the challenge, if it came.

Don’t worry. A man as smart as you will get other chances, under better circumstances.

The mood of anticipation had everyone keyed up. Two of the younger sailors, a lithe, blonde sixer from Quinnland and an exotic-looking sevener from Hypatia, started banging spoons against their cups to a quick, celebratory rhythm, then launched a session of round-singing.

It was a famous drinking song, and it hardly mattered that no one had anything to drink. The singers alternately leaned toward Brod, then shied off again, to his embarrassment and the amusement of everyone else. Taking turns one by one, going around the circle, each woman added another verse, more bawdy than the last. At her turn, Maia waved off with a smile. But when the round seemed about to skip past Brod, the young man leaped instead to his feet. Singing, his voice was strong, and did not crack.

Most of the sailors laughed and clapped, nodding at the fairness of his comeback. A few seemed to resent his jumping in, however. The same ones who, days back, had argued against counting the vote of a mere boy.

More songs followed. After a lighthearted beginning, Maia noticed the mood grow steadily less gay, more somber and reflective. At one point, the girl from Hypatia looked down, letting her hair fall around her face as she chanted a soft, lovely melody, a cappella. An old, sad song about the loss of a longtime hearth-mate who had won a niche, started a clan, and then died, leaving clone-daughters who cared nothing of their var founder’s callow loves.

The wind picked up, lifting sparks from the ebbing fire. After that song, silence reigned until two older vars, Charl and Trotula, began beating a makeshift drum, taking up a quicker beat. Their choice was a ballad Maia used to hear on Port Sanger’s avenues from time to time, chanted by Perkinite missionaries. An epic of days long ago, when heretic tyrannies called “the Kingdoms” fluxed through these tropic island chains. The period wasn’t covered much in school, nor even in the lurid romances Leie used to read.. But each springtime the chant was sung on street-corners, conveying both danger and tragic mystique.

Sometime between the Great Defense and the Era of Repose—perhaps more than a thousand years ago—rebellion had raged across the Mother Ocean. Emboldened by their recent high renown, after the repulsion of terrible alien invaders, a conspiracy of males had vowed to reestablish patriarchy. Seizing sea-lanes far from Caria, they burned ships and drowned men who would not join their flag. In the towns they captured, all restraints of law and tradition vanished. Aurora season was a time, at best, of unbridled license. At worst, horror.

When Maia had once asked a teacher about the episode, Savant Claire had smirked in distaste. “People oversimplify. Perkies never talk in public about the Kings’ allies. They had plenty of help.”

“From whom?” Maia asked, aghast.

“Women, of course. Whole groups of them. Opportunists who knew how it had to end.” Claire had refused to give more detail, however, and the public library posessed but scanty entries. So curious had it made Maia, that she and Leie tried using their twin trick to feign clone status, briefly gaining entrance to a Perkinite meeting—until some locals fingered them as vars, and tossed them out.

During the lengthy ballad, Maia watched attitudes chill toward Brod. Women seated near him found excuses to get up—for another cup of stew, or to seek the latrine—and returned to sit farther away. Even the Quinnish sixer, who had flirted awkwardly with Brod for days, avoided his eyes and kept to her mates. Soon only Maia and Naroin remained nearby. Bravely, the youth showed no sign of noticing.

It was so unfair. He had had no part in crimes of long ago. All might have remained pleasant if Charl and Tortula. hadn’t chosen this damned song. Anyway, none of these vars could possibly be Perkinite. Maia contemplated how prejudice can be a complex thing.

No one said much after that. The fire died down. One by one, tomorrow’s adventurers sought their beds. On her way back from the toilet area, Maia made sure to pass Brod’s shelter, separate from all the others, and wished him goodnight. Afterward, she sat down again by the coals, lingering after everyone else had turned in, watching the depleted logs brighten and fade when fanned by gusts of wind.

Some distance away, toward the forest, Naroin lifted her head. “Can’t sleep, snowflake?”

Maia answered with a shrug, implicitly bidding the other woman to mind her own business. With briefly raised eyebrows, Naroin took a hint and turned away. Soon, soft snoring sounds rose from scattered shadows on all sides, lumps indiscernible except as vague outlines. The coals faded further and darkness settled in, permitting constellations to grow lustrous, where they could be seen between low clouds. The holes in the overdeck grew narrower as time passed.

Without stars to distract her, Maia watched as sporadic breezes toyed with the banked campfire. Stirred by a gust, one patch would bloom suddenly, giving off red sprays of sparks before fading again, just as abruptly. She came to see the patterns of bright and dark as quite un-random. Depending on supplies of fuel, air, and heat, there were continual ebbing and flowing tradeoffs. One zone might grow dim because surrounding areas were lit, consuming all the oxygen, or vice versa. Maia contemplated yet another example of something resembling, in a way, ecology. Or a game. A finely textured game, with complex rules all its own.

The patterns were lovely. Another geometry trance beckoned, ready to draw her in. Tempted, this time she refused. Her attention was needed elsewhere.

Quietly, without making sudden moves, Maia took a stick and rolled one of the stronger embers into her dinner cup. She covered it with a small, chipped plate from the supplies left by the reavers, and waited. An hour passed, during which she thought about Leie, and Renna, and the ballad of the Kings… and most of all, about whether she was being stupid, getting all worked up over a suspicion based on nothing but pure logic, bereft of any supporting evidence at all.

Eventually, someone came to sit by her.

“Well, tomorrow’s the big day.”

It was a low voice, almost a whisper, to avoid waking the others. But Maia recognized it without looking up. Thought so, she told herself as Inanna squatted to her left.

“Wouldn’t of expected you being too excited to sleep, seeing as how you’re staying behind,” the big sailor said in casual, friendly tones. “Will you miss the rest of us so much?”

Maia glanced at the woman, who seemed overly relaxed. “I always miss friends.”

Inanna nodded vigorously. “Yah, we got to choose a mail drop, maybe in some coast city. One time or another, we’ll all get together again, hoist brews, amaze the locals with our tale.” She leaned toward Maia, conspiratorially. “Speaking of which, I got a little something, if you want a nip.” She pulled out a slim flask that swished and gurgled. “The Lysodamn reavers missed this, bless ’em. Care to lift a couple? For no hard feelings?”

Maia shook her head. “I shouldn’t. Alky goes to my head: I’d be no good when you need help launching.”

“You’ll be no good if you’re up restless all night, neither.” Inanna removed the cap and Maia watched her take a long pull, swallowing. The sailor wiped her mouth and held out the flask. “Ah! Good stuff, believe it. Puts hair where it belongs, an’ takes it off where it don’t.”

With a show of reluctance, Maia reached for the flask, sniffing an aroma of strong mash. “Well… just one.” She tipped the pewter bottle, letting a bare trickle of liquor down her throat. The ensuing fit of coughs was not faked.

“There now, don’t that warm yer innards? Frost for the nose and flamejuice for the gut. No matching the combination, I always say.”

Indeed, Maia felt a spreading heat from even that small amount. When Inanna insisted she have another, it was easy to show ambivalence, both attraction and reluctance at the same time. Despite her best efforts, some more got by her tongue. It felt fiery. The third time the bottle went back and forth, she did a better job blocking the liquor, but heady fumes Went up her nose, making her feel dizzy.

“Thanks. It seems to … work,” Maia’ said slowly, not trying to fake a slur. Rather, she spoke primly, as a tipsy woman does, who wants not to show it. “Right now, how-ever, I … think I had better go and lie down.” With deliberate care, she picked up her plate and cup and shuffled toward her bedroll, at the campsite’s periphery. Behind her, the woman said, “Sleep well and soundly, virgie.” There was no mistaking a note of satisfaction in her voice.

Maia kept the appearance of a tired fiver, gladly collapsing for the night. But within, she growled, now almost certain her suspicions were true. Surreptitiously, while climbing under the blanket, she watched Inanna move from the fire ring toward her own bedroll at the far quadrant of the camp. A dimly perceived shadow, the woman did not lie down, but squatted or sat, waiting.

I never would have figured all this out before, Maia thought. Not until Tizbe and Kiele and Baltha—and Leie—taught me how sneaky people can be. Now it’s like I knew it all along, a pattern I can see unfolding.

It had started with the debate, soon after their internment, over whether to build one big raft or a couple of small boats. Naroin had been right. In this archipelago, a dinghy with a sail and centerboard might weave in and out past shoals and islets with a good chance of getting away, even if spotted. A raft, if seen, would be easy prey.

But that assumed reaver ships were just hanging around, patrolling frequently. In fact, lookouts had seen only two distant sails in all the days since their maroonment. It would take a major coincidence for pirates to show just when the raft set forth.

Unless they were warned, somehow.

Maia found the whole situation ridiculous on the face of it.

Why would they intern a bunch of experienced sailors on an island without supervision? They’d have to know we’d try escaping. Try to get help. Alert the police.

Naroin’s sullen mutterings after the crucial vote had set Maia on the path. There had to be a spy among them! Someone who would guide the inevitable escape attempt in ways that made it more vulnerable, easier to thwart. And, especially, someone well positioned to warn the pirates in time to prepare an ambush.

What’s their plan? I wonder. To capture those on the raft and bring them back? The failure would surely cause morale to plummet, and hamper subsequent attempts.

But that won’t guarantee against other tries. They must mean to transfer any escapees to a more secure prison, like where they took Renna and the rads.

But no. If that were the case, why not put the sailors there in the first place?

Coldly, Maia knew but one logical answer. As ruthless as they seemed after the fight, breaking the Code of Combat and all, they couldn’t go so far as deliberately killing captives. Not with so many witnesses. The men of the Reckless. Renna. Not even all of the reavers’ own crew could be trusted with a secret like that.

But to take care of things later on? Use a small ship, manned by only the most trusted. Come upon a raft, wallowing and helpless. No need even to fight. Just fling some rocks. Gone without a trace. Too bad …

Maia’s anger seethed, evaporating all lingering traces of alky high. Lying as if asleep, she watched through slitted eyes the dark lump that was Inanna, waiting for the lump to move.

It might have been better, safer, to check out her suspicions in a subtler way, by going to bed when everyone else did, and then crawling off behind a tree to keep watch. But that could have taken half the night. Maia had no great faith in her attention span, or ability to be certain of not drifting off. What if it was hours and hours? What if she was wrong?

Better to flush the spy out early. Maia had decided to make it seem as if she intended to stay up all night long. An irksome inconvenience, perhaps causing the reaver agent to feel panicky. Speed up the spy’s subjective clock. Make her act before she might have otherwise.

And it worked. Now Maia had a target to watch. Her concentration was helped no end by knowing she was right.

The dark blur didn’t move, though. Time seemed to pass with geologic slowness. More seconds, minutes, crawled by. Her eyes grew scratchy from staring at barely perceivable contrasts in blackness. She took to closing them one at a time. The patch of shadow remained rock-still.

Smoke from the smoldering coals drifted toward her. Maia was forced to shut her eyelids longer, to keep them from drying out.

Panic touched her when they reopened. Sometime in the last… who knew how long… she might have strayed—even dozed! She stared, trying to detect any change on the far side of the camp, and felt a growing uncertainty. Perhaps it wasn’t that faint blob she was supposed to be watching, after all. Maybe it was another one. She had drifted and now her target was gone. Oh, if only there were a moon, tonight!

If only I’d found whatever she plans to signal with. That had been Maia’s ulterior reason for performing circuit after circuit of the island, ostensibly studying the hourly tides. She had poked her head under logs and into rocky crannies all over the perimeter. Unfortunately, whatever lay hidden had stayed that way, and now she must decide. To wait a little longer? Or try moving into the woods and begin searching for someone who might already have a growing head start?

Damn. No one could be this patient. She has to be gone by now.

Well, here goes …

Maia was about to push aside the blanket, but then abruptly stopped when the shadow moved! There was a faint sound, much softer than young Brod’s stentorian snoring. Maia stared raptly as a blurred form unfolded vertically, then slowly began moving off. At one point, a patch of stars were occulted by something with the general outline of a stocky woman.

Now. As silently as possible, Maia threw off the blanket and rolled over. She took from beneath her bedroll the things she had prepared earlier. A stave thickly wrapped at one end with bone-dry vines. A stone knife. The cup containing a warm, barely glowing ember. Following a carefully memorized path, she hurried quietly into the forest, to a chosen station, where she stopped and listened.

Over there, to the east! Pebbles crunched and twigs broke, faintly at first, but with growing carelessness as distance fell between the spy and the campsite. Maia forced herself to pause a little longer, verifying that the woman didn’t stop at intervals, listening for pursuit.

There were no lapses. Excellent. Cautious to make as little noise as possible, with eyes peeled for dry sticks on the forest floor, Maia started to follow. The trail led deeper into the woods, explaining why her surveys on the bluffs had found nothing. It had been reasonable to hope the signaling device was kept where a flasher or lantern might be seen from another island. But Inanna was clearly too cagey to leave things where they might be discovered by chance.

Maia’s foot came down on something parched and crackly, whose plaint at being crushed seemed loud enough to wake Persephone, in Hades. She stopped dead still, trying to listen, but was hampered by the adrenaline pounding of her heart. After a long pause, at last Maia heard the soft sound of footsteps resume, moving off ahead of her. Something lit only by starlight briefly cut across a lattice of trees, disturbing their symmetry. She resumed the pursuit, wariness redoubled.

That was fortunate. As clouds thickened and darkness fell even deeper, it was a faint odor that stopped her short again. A change in the flow of air, of wind. Her quarry’s footsteps took a sudden veer leftward, and Maia abruptly realized why.

Straight ahead, in the direction she had just been moving, a thick cluster of stars briefly emerged, casting a thousand gleaming reflections from a face of sheer concavity. The crater—far more intimidating than it had seemed by day. The glass-lined precipice yawned not meters away, like the jaws of some mighty, ancient thing, hungry for a midnight snack. Maia swallowed hard. She turned to the left and continued, watching the ground more closely than ever. Fortunately, the trail soon receded from the terrible pit. Some distance onward, there came a faint sound, like a scraping of stone against stone. Maia paused, heard it repeat. Then she waited some more.

Nothing. Silence. Just the wind and forest. Grimly, in case it was a trap, Maia extended her frozen stillness for another count of sixty. At last, she resumed her forward stalk, concentrating to keep a bearing toward that final, grating sound. A break in the cloud cover, near the horizon, showed a corner of the constellation Cyclist. She used it for reference while skirting trees and other obstacles, until finally concluding that something had to be wrong.

I must’ve gone too far. Or have I?

She could not see or hear anyone. The idea of an ambush was not to be dismissed.

Two more steps forward and her feet left loam. They seemed to scuff a flat, sandy surface, scored at regular intervals by fine grooves. Peering about, Maia realized she stood amid massive, blocky forms, in a clearing where not even saplings grew. She reached out to the nearest pile of weathered stone. Worked stone with eroded, right angles. It was one of many ruins peppering the island plateau. Few places were better suited for springing a trap.

Quietly, she felt her way along the wall till it ended. Passing to the other side, she verified that no one waited behind. Not there, at least. Maia knelt and laid her burdens on the ground. She closed one eye, to protect its dark-adaptation—a habit taught her long ago, during astronomy nights, by Old Coot Bennett—and raised the cup holding the ember. Shielding it with one hand, she blew until it glimmered in spots, then laid it down with the tinder-wrapped end of her stave on top. Maia took the chert knife in her left hand, and grabbed the stave’s haft in her right. A smoldering rose.

Abruptly, the torch flared with an audible whoosh. Maia quickly stood, holding it above and behind her head to shine everywhere but in her eyes. Stark shadows fled the garish-bright stone walls and tree trunks. Hurrying to exploit surprise, she rushed to circumnavigate the ruins, peering in all corners while Inanna would be blinking away spots.

Nothing. Maia hurried through another circuit, this time checking places where someone might have hidden, even the lower branches. At any moment, if necessary, she was ready to use the flaming brand as a weapon.

Damn. Inanna must’ve been just far enough to duck out when I lit the torch. Too bad. Thought I’d finally figured out how to do something right. I guess people don’t change.

Feeling deflated, disappointed, Maia sought the nearest flat area amid the rains and sat down.

The stone jiggled beneath her.

She stood up and turned around, holding the torch toward the slab. It looked like just another chiseled chunk of wall, atop a pile of others. Come on. You’re jumping to conclusions.

A breeze caused the flames to flicker upward.

Upward? Maia held out her hand, and felt a thin stream of air. With her foot she gave the slab a tentative shove. Stone grated stone, a familiar sound. The slab moved much too easily.

“Well I’m an atyp bleeder.” Maia blinked at a sudden mental vision of the glass-rimmed crater, as it had looked by daylight. She had briefly pictured a network of regular shapes behind the slag coating, then dismissed it as an artifact of her overactive pattern-recognition system. Now though, the mental conception loomed … of layers that she had rationalized as sedimentary, but which imagination shaped into rooms, corridors.

“Of course.”

Someone had dug some sort of mine or tunnel system here. Perhaps they had delved for safety, to no avail against whatever had melted that awful hole.

Bending to examine the stone, Maia sought its secret. Tip it back? No, I see. Push to the left… then up!

The slab rotated, revealing a stout makeshift hinge arrangement of slots and pins. A set of rubble stairs, quite rough in the upper portion, dropped into darkness. Carefully, Maia lifted one leg and stepped over the sill, lowering herself gingerly below the forest roots.

My torch is already half used up. Better make this quick, girl.

The steps ended about five meters down, followed by a low tunnel under primitive archworks. Maia had to duck as flames licked the ceiling, igniting cobwebs in fleeting, sparkling pyres. Finally, the coarse passage spilled into an underground room.

Dust and stone chips covered every surface, save a wooden table and chair, surrounded by scrape marks and foot tracks. In one corner lay a trash midden, the freshest layer consisting of still aromatic orange peels and chicfruit rinds. Someone’s been eating better than the rest of us, she thought, wryly. A wooden box revealed a bag of stale sesame crackers and one orange, on its last legs. No wonder it’s so urgent to launch the raft soon. You were running out of goodies, Inanna.

A blanket hung tacked over the sole exit. Maia tore it down. A few meters beyond, fresh stairs plunged anew. She proceeded to rip the blanket into strips, wrapping half of them around the torch, just below the burning part. One strip lit early and she dropped it, dancing away and cursing in whispers. Maia jammed the remainder under her belt, along with the knife, and set forth.

The dusty sense of age only increased as she descended, spiraling down the cylindrical shaft. These stairs were original equipment, finely carved and worn down several centimeters in the middle, by countless footsteps. Each one was shaped as the sector of a circle, resting one radial edge atop the one below it. In the middle, disklike projections from each wedge lay stacked, one above the next, all the way down, forming a round, vertical banister that she used to steady herself while dropping lower and lower, round and around.

After perhaps ten meters, Maia paused where a door and landing gave into dark rooms. Torchlight revealed arched ceilings, some collapsed, trailing off toward utter blackness. There were no sounds. Undisturbed dust showed that no one had walked these quarters in years. Feeling eerily chilled, she continued downward, passing a second landing… and a third… and yet another, until at last she sensed distinct sound rising up the shaft. Faint, as yet indistinct, its source lay below.

Oh, for a dumbwaiter, Maia recalled sardonically, contemplating climbing all this on the way back. Even the Lysodamned Lamai wine cellar wasn’t like this. Hateful place, but at least they had a winch-lift. And a string of two-watt bulbs. It wasn’t clear what she’d do if she was caught down here with the torch gone out. It should be simple, in theory, to get back. Just follow the stairs upward, then grope her way toward fresh air. In practice, it would probably be scary as hell. I wonder what kind of lamp Inanna’s got.

Now the walls of the stairwell were cracked, as if tortured by some ancient blow or tremor. Worse, the steps themselves were splintered, chipped. Their undersides had given way, here and there, raining stone debris onto the stairs below. Some teetered in a fashion Maia found unnerving. There were gaps in places.

Maia was pretty sure, now. The huge, slag-rimmed crater wasn’t volcanic, or natural at all, but an artifact of war. Some folk had once delved here, deeply, seeking protection. And someone else had come down after them, shaking the deepest levels. The scale of these ancient events frightened Maia, and right now the last thing she needed was more fear.

The sounds grew closer—distant, occasional plinkings. And a breeze. Fresh and decidedly cool.

Maia almost staggered when the stairs ran out. The tight spiral gave no warning, halting abruptly where a room opened ahead, featuring doors leading in three directions. At first she had to just walk the chamber’s perimeter, trying to straighten the unconscious crouch she had assumed during the descent. Finally, Maia wet a finger to feel the breeze, watched the flickering of the dying torch, and peered for footprints.

That door.

Beyond lay a passage hewn from island rock, extending past room after dead-black room, as far as the dim pool of torchlight stretched. Maia extended the brand inside the first chamber, and found it stripped, save for one huge, polished stone bench that had a regular array of uniform holes drilled in its upper surface, as if someone had arranged it to hold dowel pegs for some strange game. Yet, Maia felt instinctively that “games” were never played in this cryptlike place. It gave her chills.

The plinking grew louder as she resumed walking. A low susurration also waxed and waned rhythmically. The torch began to sputter. It was time to decide whether to wind on more strips or let the thing go out. It took all her courage to make the logical choice.

Maia strode forward with her left hand touching the wall on that side, eyes trying to memorize the lay of the hallway before—Then it happened. The last flicker died. Plunged in sudden, total darkness, she slowed but grimly kept moving, fighting an urge to shuffle. Instead, Maia lifted her feet high to avoid making unnecessary sound.

Abruptly, her fingertips lost contact with the left wall, setting off a wave of vertigo. Don’t panic. It’s just the next doorway, remember? Move ahead, keep your arm out, you’ll meet the other jamb.

It took ages … or a few seconds. She must have turned to overcompensate, for the next physical contact came when she banged the far side of the entrance with her elbow. It hurt, yet restored touch felt reassuring. So did getting beyond the doorway. In pure blackness, it was even easier than before to fantasize monsters. Creatures that had no need for light.

The true Stratoins, she thought, trying to tease herself out of a panicky spin. There were silly tales that older siblings told their sisters, about mythical, primal inhabitants of Stratos, driven long ago from sight by the hominid invasion. Once shy, innocent, they now dwelled below-ground, far from the open sky. Bitter, vengeful… hungry. It was a fairy tale, of course. No evidence existed, to her knowledge, for anything like it.

But then, I never heard of hundred-meter craters gouging out the middle of mountains, either.

Another doorway swallowed Maia’s hand, making her jump higher than the last time, convincing her susceptible imagination that vindictive jaws were about to close, all the way up to her shoulder. When the wall resumed, this time striking her wrist, she let out a physical sigh.

Stop it. Think about something else. Life, the game.

She tried. There was plenty to work with. The speckles that her visual cortex produced, for lack of input from the eyes, created a panorama of ephemeral dots, flickering like Renna’s game board, set to high speed. It was alluring to think there might be meaning there. Some great secret or principle, found among the random, background firings taking place inside her own skull.

Then again, maybe not.

Maia grimly picked up the pace, passing another door, and another. Before long, she felt certain the sounds had grown louder, more distinct. Soon she knew her first suspicions were right. It could only be the surge and flood of tide-driven water. I must be all the way down, near the sea.

She caught a scent of fresh air. More important, Maia could almost swear that up ahead the awful darkness was relieved by a faint glimmer. A dim source of light. Even before she consciously made out the floor, it became easier to walk. Faint distinctions in the murky dim gave her more faith in her footing.

Soon they were more than hints. Up ahead, she saw what could only be a reflection. A wall, faintly illuminated by some soft source, out of direct view.

Maia approached cautiously. It was the face of a T-bar intersection, lit from one side. She edged along the right-hand wall, sidled to the corner, and poked around just one eye.

It was another hallway, terminating after about twenty meters in a large chamber. The source of light lay within, though not in view. As she began stalking closer, Maia saw that strange, rippling reflections wavered across the ceiling of the deep room. The plinking sounds were louder, an unmistakable dripping of liquid onto liquid. In the distance, a rolling growl of waves pounded against rock.

So that’s it. Maia paused at the entrance, whose once proud double doors now sagged toward the walls, reduced to mold-covered boards bound by rusty hinges. Within, there stood another table, on which lay an oil lantern with a poorly adjusted wick. Beyond, half of the broad alcove descended to a wide pool of seawater. After ten meters, the placid surface passed under a rocky shelf, part of a low tunnel that led toward darkness and finally—judging from the muffled sounds—the open sea. A small boat lay tethered to a dock, mast down, sail furled but ready.

Maia gripped her wooden stave in both hands, ready to swing it, if necessary. She looked left and right, but no one was in view. Nor were there any other exits. The emptiness was more unnerving than any direct confrontation.

Where is she?

Maia approached the table. Next to the lantern lay a boxy case, open to reveal buttons and a small screen. She recognized a comm console, attached to a thin cable that led into the sea-tunnel. An antenna, presumably. Or perhaps a direct fiber link to another island? That sounded extravagant. But over time, it might prove worthwhile, if this prison-trap was used frequently.

The screen was illuminated with one line of tiny print. Perhaps the message would reveal something. Maia put the stave on the table and leaned forward to read.

Oh, bleeders …

Maia snatched her weapon as a shattering din exploded behind her. Swiveling with the dead torch in hand, she glimpsed the ancient, moldy door strike its frame and shatter as a woman-shaped fury charged. Inanna’s howl shook the stone walls, making Maia flinch, cleaving air and missing the reaver, who agilely dodged the wild swing, seized Maia’s shirt and belt, and used raw strength plus momentum to fling her through the air.

Maia’s arc lasted long enough for her to know where she was headed. Releasing the useless stave, she inhaled deeply before bitter water snatched her in an icy fist. Shock spewed half the air back out of her lungs, a force-uneven spray. Still, Maia kept from spluttering at once to the surface. By willpower, she ducked down and kicked, swimming as deep as she could manage and to the right. If it was possible to put in some distance without Inanna knowing, she might be able to clamber out quickly, setting the stage for an even fight—youthful desperation against experience.

An even fight? Don’t you wish.

Maia felt her limit nearing. At the last second, she aimed for the sharp, black pool-edge and surfaced. Gasping, she threw her arms over the side, followed by an ankle, straining to lift. But almost at once a lancing pain struck her leg, knocking it back in. Blinking saltwater, Maia saw her foe already standing over her, foot raised for another blow.

Stoked by urgency, she focused on that object and lunged, seizing and twisting. Inanna teetered with a cry and came down hard, loudly striking the stone floor with her pelvis.

Again, Maia struggled to get out. This time she had one knee on the shelf and pushed …

The other woman recovered too quickly. She rolled over, knocking Maia back, throwing her into the water once more. Then Inanna’s arms and fists were windmills, landing blows around the girl’s head. One hand seized Maia’s scalp, pushing her below the surface. Maia pulled hard to get away, to swim elsewhere, even the middle of the pool. The tunnel might offer shelter, of sorts, though beyond that lay the open sea and death.

She got some distance, then stopped with a sudden, jarring yank. Inanna had her hair!

Maia burst out, sucking air, and felt herself hauled back toward the edge. She kicked against the stone jetty, hoping to drag Inanna in with her. But the big woman held fast, pulling Maia near then, once again, resumed pressing Maia’s head, forcing her under.

Bubbles escaping her mouth, Maia clutched at her belt. The blanket strips got in the way, but at last she found the sliver of stone. Working it free from folds of belt and trousers brought her almost to her limit before success rewarded her. Desperately, without much effort to aim. she flung her arm around and slashed.

A scream resonated, even underwater. The pressure gave way and Maia emerged, grabbing air with shattered sobs. Then, almost without respite, the hands returned. Maia stabbed at them, connecting another time. Suddenly, her wrist was seized in a solid grip.

“Good move, virgie,” the reaver snarled through gritted teeth, biting back pain. “Now we’ll do it slowly.”

Still holding Maia’s wrist, Inanna used her other hand to resume pushing Maia’s head deeper… then yanked her up again to gasp a reedy wheeze. The blurred expression on the woman’s face showed pure enjoyment. Then the moment’s surcease ended and Maia plunged down again. Still struggling, she tried to leverage against the wall, straining with her thrashing legs. But Inanna was well braced, and weighed too much to drag by force.

Numbness from the cold enveloped Maia, swathing and softening the ache of bruises and her burning lungs. Distantly, she noticed that the water around her was turning colors, partly from encroaching unconsciousness, but also with a growing red stain. Blood ran in rivulets from Inanna’s cuts, down Maia’s arms and hair. Inanna would be weakened badly. Good news if the fight had much future.

But it was over. Maia felt her strength ebb away. The stone sliver fell from her limp hand. The next time Inanna hauled her head out, she barely had the power to gasp. Blearily, she saw the reaver look down upon her, a quizzical look crossing her face. Inanna started to bend forward, pushing for what Maia knew would be the final time.

Yet, Maia found herself dimly wondering. Why is there so much blood?

The woman kept coming forward, leaning farther than necessary just to murder Maia. Was it to gloat? To whisper parting words? A kiss goodbye? Her face loomed until, with a crash, all of her weight fell into the water atop Maia, carrying them both toward the bottom.

Astonished surprise turned into galvanized action.

From somewhere, Maia found the strength to push away from her foe’s fading grip. Her last image of the reaver, seared into her brain, was the shock of seeing an arrowhead protruding through the base of Inanna’s neck.

Breaking surface, Maia emerged too weak for anything but a thin, whistling, inadequate, inward sigh. Even that faded as she sank again… only to feel distantly another hand close around her floating hair.

It was the last she thought of anything for a while.

“I suppose I could of conked her, or done somethin’ else. I had one knocked, though, ready to fly. Anyway, it seemed a good idea at th’ time.”

Maia couldn’t figure out why Naroin was, apologizing. “I am grateful for my life,” she said, shivering on the chair, wrapped in what seemed a hectare of sailcloth, while the former bosun went over Inanna’s body, searching for clues.

“That makes us even. You saved me from bein’ a dolt. I figured on followin’ the bitch, too, but lost her. Would of fell into that crater, too, if you hadn’t lit the torch when you did. As it was, I had th’ devil of a time, findin’ those stairs after you’d gone in.”

Naroin stood up. “Lugar steaks an’ taters! Nothiri. Not a damn thing. She was a pro, all right.” Naroin left the body and stepped over to the table, where she peered at the comm console. “Jort an’ double jort!” she cursed again.

“What is it?”

Naroin shook her head. “What it isn’t is a radio. Thing must be a cable link. Maybe to a infrared flasher, set up on the rocks, outside.”

“Oh. I … hadn’t th-thought of that possibility.” There was nothing to do about the shivering except stay here, enveloped in the sail taken from the tiny skiff. No dry clothes were to be had from the dead, and Naroin was much too small to share. “So we can’t call the police?”

With a sigh, Naroin sat on the edge of the table. “Snowflake, you’re talkin’ to ’em.”

Maia blinked. “Of course.”

“You know enough now to figure it out, almost any time. I figure, better tell you now than have you yell ‘Eureka’ all of a sudden, outside.”

“The drug… you investigated—”

“In Lanargh, yeah. For a while. Then I got reassigned to somethin’ more important.”

“Renna.”

“Mm. Should’ve stuck with you, it seems. Never imagined a case like this, though. Seems there’s all sorts that don’t care what it takes to make use of your starman.”

“Including your bosses?” Maia asked archly.

Naroin frowned. “There’s some in Caria that’re worried about invasion, or other threats to Stratos. By now I’m almost sure he’s harmless, personally. But that don’t guarantee he represents no danger—”

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it,” Maia cut in.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Naroin looked troubled. “All I can speak for is my direct chief. She’s okay. As for the politicos above her? I dunno. Wish th’ Lysodamn I did,” She paused in silence, then bent to peer at the console again.

“Question is, did Inanna have time to send word o’ the escape attempt tomorrow? Have to assume she did. Kind of sinks any plan to take advantage of our uncovering her. With a reaver comin’, there’s no way to even use this little dinghy.” Naroin gestured toward the boat moored nearby. “Sure, you saved a bunch o’ lives, Maia. The others upstairs won’t sail into a trap now. But that still eaves us stuck here to rot.”

Maia pushed aside the folds of rough cloth and stood up Rubbing her shoulders, she began pacing toward the water and back again. Through the tunnel came sounds of an outgoing tide.

“Maybe not,” she said after a long, thoughtful pause. “Perhaps there is a way, after all.”

20

“The bitchies are gettin’ impatient,” Naroin commented, peering at the tiny screen. “I caught sight o’ their prow a second time, an’ a glint o’ binocs. They’re just holdin’ back till the right moment.”

Maia acknowledged with a grunt. It was all she had breath for, while pulling at her oars. Powerful, intermittent currents kept trying to seize their little boat and smash it against the nearby cliff face. Along with Brod and the sailors, Charl and Tress, she frequently had to row hard just to keep the skiff in place. Occasionally, they had to lean out and use poles to stave off jagged, deadly rocks. Meanwhile, with one hand on the tiller, Naroin used Inanna’s spy device to keep track of events taking place beyond the island’s far side.

This wouldn’t be so difficult, if only we could stand off where the water’s calm, Maia thought, while fighting the merciless tide. Unfortunately, the fibers leading to Inanna’s farflung microcameras were of finite length. The skiff must stay near the mouth of the underground cave, battling contrary swells, or risk losing this slim advantage. Their plan was unlikely enough—a desperate and dangerous scheme to ambush professional ambushers.

I only wish someone else had come up with a better idea.

Naroin switched channels. “Trot an’ her crew are almost done. The last raft parts have been lowered to the sea. They’re lashin’ the provisions boxes now. Should be any minute.”

Maia glanced back at the display again, catching a blurred picture of women laboring across platforms of cut logs, straggling to tie sections together and erect a makeshift mast. As predicted by Maia’s research, the tides were gentle on that side, at this hour. Unfortunately, that was far from true right now at the mouth of the spy tunnel.

At last, the sea calmed down for a spell. No wall of rock seemed about to swat them. With sighs, Maia and the others rested their oars. They had passed a busy, sleepless night since the fatal encounter with Inanna, the reaver provocateur.

First had come the unpleasant duty of rousing all the other marooned sailors, and telling them that one of their comrades had been a spy. Any initial suspicions toward Maia and Naroin quieted during a torchlit tour into the island’s hidden grottoes, and were finished off by showing recorded messages on Inanna’s comm unit. But that was not the end to arguing. There followed interminable wrangling over Maia’s plan, for which, unfortunately, no one came up with any useful alternative.

Finally, hours of frantic preparations led to this early-morning flurry of activity. The more Maia thought, the more absurd it all seemed.

Should we have waited, instead? Simply avoided springing Inanna’s trap? Let the reavers go away disappointed, and then try to slip away in the skiff at night?

Except, all eighteen could not fit in the little boat. And by nightfall the pirates would be querying their spy. When Inanna failed to answer with correct codes, they would assume the worst and try other measures. Not even the little skiff would be able to slip through a determined blockade by ships equipped with radar. As for those left behind, starvation would solve the reavers’ prisoner problem, more slowly, but just as fully as an armed assault.

No, it has to be now, before they expect to hear from Inanna again.

“Eia!” Naroin shouted. “Here they come! Sails spread and breaking lather.” She peered closer. “Patarkal jorts!”

“What is it?” young Brod asked.

“Nothin’.” Naroin shrugged. “I thought for a minute it was a big bugger, a two-master. But it’s a ketch. That’s bad enough. Fast as blazes, with a crew of twelve or more. This ain’t gonna be easy as mixin’ beer an’ frost.”

Charl spat over the side. “Tell me somethin’ I don’t know,” the tall Medianter growled. Tress, a younger sailor from Ursulaborg, asked nervously, “Shall we turn back?”

Naroin pursed her lips. “Wait an’ see. They’ve turned the headland and gone out o’ view of the first camera. Gonna be a while till the next one picks ’em up.” She switched channels. “Lullin’s crew has spotted ’em, though.”

The tiny screen showed the gang of raft-builders, hurrying futilely to finish before the reaver boat could cross the strait between neighboring isles. It was patently useless, for the most recent image of the sleek pirate craft had shown it slashing the choppy water, sending wild jets of spray to port and starboard as it sprinted to attack.

“Will they board?” Tress asked.

“Wish they would. But my guess is takin’ prisoners ain’t today’s goal.”

The current kicked up again. Maia and the others resumed rowing, while Naroin turned switches until she shouted. “Got ’em! About three kilometers out. Gettin’ closer fast.”

Keep coming… Maia thought each time she glanced at the display, until a looming expanse of white sailcloth filled the tiny screen. Keep coming closer.

At last, the raft crew cast loose their moorings of twisted vines. Some of them began poling with long branches, while two attempted to raise a crude mast covered with stitched blankets. For all the world, it looked as if they really were trying to get away. Either Lullin, Trot and the others were good actors, or fear lent verisimilitude to their ploy.

Naroin kept counting estimates of the reaver ship’s approach. The ketch was under a thousand meters from the raft. Then eight hundred, and closing.

The situation on the raft grew more desperate. One agitated figure began pushing boxes of provisions off the deck, as if to lighten the load. They bobbed along behind the raft, very little distance growing between them.

“Six hundred meters,” Naroin told them.

“Shouldn’t we get closer now?” Brod asked. He seemed oddly relaxed. Not exactly eager, but remarkably cool, considering his earlier confessions to Maia. In fact, Brod had insisted on coming along.

“Lysos never said males can’t ever fight,” he had argued passionately, last night. “We’re taught that all men are reserve militia members, liable for call-up in case of really big trouble. I’d say that describes these bandits!”

Maia had never heard reasoning like that before. Was it true? Naroin, a policewoman, ought to know. The former bosun had blinked twice at Brod’s assertion, and finally nodded. “There are… precedents. Also, they won’t be expecting a male. There’s an element of surprise.”

In the end, despite gallant protests by some of the others, he was allowed to come along. Anyway, Brod would be safer here than on the raft.

“Be patient an’ clam up,” Naroin told the boy, as they fought choppy currents. “Four hundred meters. I want to see how the bitchies plan on doin’ it. … Three hundred meters.”

Brod took the rebuke mildly. Looking at him a second time, Maia saw another reason for his relative quiet. Brod’s complexion seemed greenish. He was clamping down on nausea. If the youth was trying to show his guts, Maia hoped he wouldn’t do so literally.

It was getting near decision time. Plan A called for battle. But if that looked hopeless, those on the skiff were to try fleeing downwind, keeping the bulk of the island between them and the raiders. Only in that way might those sacrificing themselves on the raft get revenge. But, given the enemy’s possession of radar, Maia knew the unlikeliness of a clean getaway. For all its flaws, the ambush scheme still seemed the best chance they had.

“Three hundred meters,” Naroin said. “Two hundred an’eight… Bleedin’ jorts!”

Her fist set the rail vibrating. This sound was followed almost instantly by a roll of pealing thunder, anomalous beneath clear skies.

“What is it?” Maia asked, turning in time to glimpse, on the viewer screen, a sudden spout of rising water that just missed the little raft, splashing its frantic crew.

“Cannon. They’re usin’ a cannon!” Naroin shouted. “The Lyso-dammed, lugar-faced, man-headed jorts. We never figured on this.”

Guilt-panged because the plan had been her idea, Maia craned to watch, fascinated as Naroin switched camera views of the approaching reaver boat. At its prow, a flash erupted through smoke lingering from the first shot. Another tower of seawater almost swamped the wallowing raft. “They’ve got ’em straddled,” Naroin snarled, then snapped at Maia. “What’re you lookin’ at? Mind yer oars! I’ll tell what’s happenin’.”

Maia swiveled just as a tidal surge washed their tiny craft toward a jutting rock. “Pull!” Brod cried, rowing hard. Heaving with all their might, they managed to stop short of the jagged, menacing spire. Then, as quickly as it came, the bulging sea-crest ran back out again, dragging them along. “Naroin! Turn!” Maia cried. But the preoccupied bosun was cursing at what she saw in the screen, taking notice only when a mesh of fiber cables suddenly stitched across the water, stretched to their utter limit, and abruptly snatched the electronic display out of her hands. The spy device flew some distance, then met the waves and sank from sight.

The policewoman stood up and shouted colorfully, setting the boat rocking, then quickly and forcibly calmed herself as more echoes of discrete thunder rounded the cliffs. Naroin sat down, resting hand and arm on the tiller once more. “No matter, it won’t be long now,” she said.

“We can’t just sit here!” Tress cried. “Lullin and the others will be blown to bits!”

“They knew it’d be rough. Showin’ up now would just get us killed, too.”

“Should we try running away, then?” Charl asked.

“They’d spot us soon as they circuit the island. That boat’s faster, an’ a cannon makes any head start useless.” Naroin shook her head. “Besides, I want to get even. We’ll get closer, but wait till the last shot before settin’ sail.”

Now that they were away from the rock face, the swells were smoother. Maia and the others let the current carry them northward. More booms shook the thick air, louder and louder. Maia felt concussions in her ears and across her face. As they approached, an accompanying sound chilled her heart, the faint, shrill screaming of desperate women.

“We’ve got to—”

“Shut up!” Naroin snapped at Tress.

Then came a noise like no other. The closest thing Maia remembered was the breaking of bulkheads aboard the collier Wotan. It was an explosion not of water, but wood and bone. Of savagely cloven air and flesh. Echoes dissipated into a long, stunned silence, moderated by the nearby crash of surf on rock. Maia needed to swallow, but her mouth and throat were so dry, it was agony to even try.

Naroin spoke through powerfully controlled anger. “They’ll stand off an’ look for a while, before movin’ in. Charl, get ready. The rest o’ you, set sail and then duck outta sight!”

Maia and Brod stood up, together releasing the clamps holding the furled sail, and drew it to the clew outhaul. The fabric flapped like a liberated bird, suddenly catching the wind and throwing the boom hard to port, catching Brod and knocking him into Maia. Together, they fell toward the bow coaming, atop one another.

“Uh, sorry,” the youth said, rolling off and blushing. “Uh, it’s all right,” she answered, gently mimicking his abashed tone. It might have been funny, Maia thought, if things weren’t so damn serious.

Tress joined them in the bilge, below the level of the gunwales. As the skiff rounded the northern verge of their prison isle, Charl took over the tiller, letting Naroin crouch down as well. Only Charl remained in view, now attired in a white smock that was stained around the neckline. She had put on a ragged, handmade wig that made her look vaguely blonde.

“Steady,” Naroin said, peering over the rail. “I see the raft, or what’s left of it … Keep yer heads down!”

Maia and Brod ducked again, having caught sight of an expanse of floating bits and flinders, logs and loosely tethered boxes, along with one drifting, grotesquely ruined body. It had been a nauseating sight. Maia was content to let Naroin describe the rest.

“No sign o’ the reaver, yet. I see one, two survivors, hidin’ behind logs. Hoped there’d be more, since they knew it was comin’… Eia! There’s her prow. Get ’eady, Maia!”

They had argued long and hard over this part of the plan. Naroin had thought she should be the one taking on the most dangerous job. Maia had responded that the policewoman was just too small to make it believable. Besides, Naroin had more important tasks to perform.

You asked for this, Maia told herself. Brod squeezed her hand for luck, and she returned a quick smile before crawling aft.

From the moment the reaver vessel entered view, Charl began waving, shouting and grinning. We’re counting on certain assumptions, Maia thought. Foremost, the reavers mustn’t instantly see through the ruse.

It makes sense, though. Inanna wouldn’t stay on the island after the raft was destroyed. She’d come to ferry a cleanup squad of killers through the secret passage, to finish off any survivors remaining above.

It was brutal logic, borne out by recent events. But was it true? Were the pirates expecting to see a blonde woman in a little sailboat? Maia ached to peer over the side.

Charl described events through gritted teeth. “They’re maybe a hundred fifty meters out… sails luffed… still too damn far. Now someone’s pointin’ at me … waving. There’s somebody else lifting binoculars. Let’s do it, quick!”

With a heavy intake of breath, Maia stood up suddenly, and pretended to launch an attack on Charl; throwing an exaggerated punch the older woman evaded at the last moment. Charl shoved her back, and the boat rocked. Then they closed and began grappling, hands clasping for each other’s throats. In the process, they managed so that Charl’s back was to the reaver. All the enemy would be able to make out now, even through binoculars, would be a big blonde woman wrestling an adversary who must have climbed out from the wreckage of the raft.

Shouts of excited dismay carried across the water. They’ll finish us with the cannon if they suspect, Maia knew. Or if they’re bloody-minded about the value of their spies.

Even feign-fighting with Charl was a grunting, intense effort. Bobbing movements of the boat kept forcing them to clutch each other for real. Minutes into the contest, Charl’s grip tightened on Maia’s windpipe, setting off waves of authentic pain.

“Maia!” Naroin hissed from below and aft, her hand on the tiller. “Where are they?”

Maia pushed Charl back and affected to punch just past the woman’s ear. Looking over Charl’s shoulder, she saw the reaver turn and fill its jib enough to gain some headway. “Under…” Maia gasped for breath as Charl shoved her against the skiff’s mast. “Under a hundred meters. They’re coming…”

The next thing Maia knew, Charl had picked up an oar and aimed an awfully realistic swipe. Ducking, Maia had no chance to mention what else she had seen. Among the crowd of rough women gathered at the bow of the ketch, two had brandished slender objects that looked chillingly like hunting rifles. The only thing saving Maia right now was her close proximity to a figure the reavers thought to be their accomplice.

“Eighty meters…” Maia said, elbowing Charl in the ribs, knocking aside the oar and lifting her locked hands as if to deliver an overhand blow. Charl staved this off by ducking and grabbing Maia’s midriff.

“Uh! … Not so hard!… Sixty meters…”

The ketch was a beautiful thing, lovely in its sleek, terrible rapacity. Even with jib alone, it prowled rapidly, s’triking aside flotsam of its victim, the ill-fated raft. Logs and boxes rebounded off its hull, wallowing in its wake. The sheer island face now lay behind the skiff. There was no escape.

“Fifty meters …”

In their wrestling struggle, Charl’s makeshift wig suddenly slipped. Both women hurried to replace it, but one of the reavers at the bow could be heard reacting with tones of sudden outrage. The jig is up, Maia realized, looking across the narrowing gap to see a pirate lift her rifle.

There was no sound, no warning at all, only a brief shadow that flowed down the stony cliff and a patch of sun-drenched sea. One of the corsairs on the ketch glanced up, and started to shout. Then the sky itself seemed to plummet onto the graceful ship. A cloud of dark, heavy tangles splashed across the mast and sails and surrounding water, followed by a lumpy box of metal that struck the starboard gunwales, glanced off … and exploded.

Flame brightness filled Maia’s universe. A near-solid fist of compressed air blew Charl against her, throwing the two of them toward the mast, sandwiching Maia in abrupt pain. Sound seized the flapping sail, causing it to billow instantaneously, knocking both women to the keel where they lay stunned. The skiff rocked amid rhythmic, heaving aftershocks.

Still conscious, Maia felt herself being dragged out from under Charl’s groaning weight, toward the bow. Through a pounding ringing in her ears, time seemed to stretch and snap, stretch and snap, in uneven intervals. From some distant place, she heard Brod’s reassuring voice uttering strange words.

“You’re all right, Maia. No bleeding. You’ll be okay… Got to get ready now, though. Snap out of it, Maia! Here, take your trepp. Naroin’s bringing us along the aft end…”

Maia tried to focus. Unwelcome but frequent experience with situations like this told her it would take at least a few minutes for critical faculties to return. She needed more time, but there was none. Climbing to her knees, she felt a pole of smooth wood pushed into her hands, which closed by pure habit in the correct grip. Inanna’s trepp bill, she dimly recognized, which had been among the dead spy’s possessions. Now, if only she recalled how to use it.

Brod helped her face the right way, toward a looming, soot-shrouded object that had only recently been white and proud and exquisite. Now the ship lay in a tangle of fallen cables and wires. Its sails were half torn away by the makeshift bomb, which had been catapulted at the last moment by two captives who had remained high on the bluff, hoping to do this very thing.

“Get ready!”

Maia’s ears were still filled with horrific reverberations. Nevertheless, she recognized Naroin’s shout. Glancing right, she saw the bosun already using her bow and arrows, shooting while Tress guided the skiff across the last few meters…

Wood crumped against wood. Brod shouted, leaping to seize the bigger ship’s rail, a rope-end between his teeth. The youth scrambled up and quickly tied a knot, securing the skiff.

“Look out!” Maia cried. She commanded urgent action from her muscles, ordering them to strike out toward a snarling woman who ran aft toward Brod, an illegally sharpened trepp in hand. Alas, Maia’s uncoordinated flail only glanced off the railing.

Brod turned barely in time to fend off the attacker’s blows. One smashed flat along his left shoulder. Another met the beefy part of his forearm, slashing his shirt and cutting a bloody runnel. There was an audible crack as part of the impact carried through, striking his head.

The young man and the reaver stared at each other for an instant, both apparently surprised to find him still standing. Then, with a sigh, Brod pushed the pirate’s weapon aside, took her halter straps, and flung her overboard. The reaver screamed indignant fury until she crashed into the sea, where other figures could be seen swimming amid the wreckage of the raft.

Tress and Naroin were already scrambling to join Brod, followed by a groggy Charl. Maia grabbed the rail and concentrated, trying twice before finally managing to throw one leg over, and then rolling onto the upper deck. In doing so, however, her grip on Inanna’s bill loosened and it slipped from her hands, clattering back into the skiff.

Bleeders. Do I go back for it now?

Maia shook her head dizzily. No. Go forward. Fight.

Dimly, she was aware of other figures clambering aboard, presumably raft survivors, joining the attack while enemy reinforcements also hurried aft. There were sharp cracks as firearms went off. Feet scuffed all around her as grunting combat swayed back and forth. Looking up, Maia saw two women attack Brod while another swung a huge knife at Naroin, armed only with her bow and no arrows. The scene stunned Maia, its ferocity going far beyond the fights in Long Valley, or even the Manitou. She had never seen faces so filled with hatred and rage. During those earlier episodes, there had at least been a background of rules. Death had been a possible, but unsought, side effect. Here, it was the central goal. Matters had come down to abominations—blades and arrows, guns and fighting men.

Maia’s hand fell on a piece of debris from the explosion, a split tackle block. Without contemplating what she was doing, she lifted it in both hands and swiftly brought it around with all her might, smashing one of Brod’s opponents in the back of the knee. The woman screeched, dropping a crimson knife that Maia prayed was innocent of boy’s blood. Without pause, she struck the other knee. The reaver collapsed, howling and writhing.

Maia was about to repeat the trick with Brod’s other foe, when that enemy simply vanished! Nor was Brod himself in view anymore. In an instant, the fight must have carried him off to starboard.

Maia turned. Naroin was backed against the rail, using her bow as a makeshift staff, flailing against two reavers. The first kept the policewoman occupied with a flashing, darting knife-sword, while the second struggled with a bolt-action rifle, slapping at the mechanism, trying to clear a jammed cartridge. Before Maia could react, the reluctant bolt came free. An expended shell popped out and the reaver quickly slipped a new bullet inside. Slamming the bolt home again, she lifted her weapon …

With a scream, Maia leaped. The riflewoman had but a moment to see her coming. Eyes widening, the reaver swung the slender barrel around.

Another explosive concussion rocked by Maia’s right ear as she tackled the pirate, carrying them both into the rail. The lightly framed wood splintered, giving way and spilling them overboard.

But I only just got here, Maia complained—and the ocean slapped her, swallowed her whole, squeezed her lungs and clung to her arms as she clawed through syrupy darkness, like coal.

Lamatia and Long Valley hated me, the damn ocean hates me. Maybe the world’s trying to tell me something.

Maia surfaced at last with an explosive, ragged gasp, thrashing through a kick turn while peering through a salty blur in hopes of finding her foe before she was found. But no one else emerged from the sea. Perhaps the raider so loathed losing her precious weapon, she had accompanied the rifle to the bottom. Despite everything she’d been through, it was the first time Maia had ever knowingly killed anybody, and the thought was troubling.

Worry about that later. Got to get back and help now.

Maia sought and found the reaver ship, awash in smoke and debris. Fighting a strong undertow, exhausted and unable to hear much more than an awful roar, she struck out for the damaged ketch. At least her thoughts were starting to clear. Alas, that only let her realize how many places hurt.

She swam hard.

Hurry! It may already be too late!

By the time she managed to climb back aboard; however, the fight was already over.

There were strands of cable everywhere. The tangled mass, remnants of the broken winch mechanism, had been the centerpiece of their intended trap. A net wide enough to snare a large, fast-moving boat, even using an inaccurate, makeshift catapult. It had been Brod’s suggestion that the booby-trapped gearbox might also make a good weapon. Naroin had said not to count on it, but in the end, that had provided the crucial bit of luck.

Well, we were due a little, Maia thought. Despite all the damage wrought by blast, collision, and battle, the ketch showed no sign of taking water. Just as fortunately, the fickle currents now swept it away from the rocky cliffs.

Still, the rigging was a mess. The masthead and fore-stay were gone, as well as the portside spreader. It would take hours just to clear away most of the wreckage, let alone patch together enough sail to get under way. Heaven help them if another reaver ship came along during that time.

Barring that unpleasant eventuality, a head start and favorable winds were what the surviving castaways most wanted now. Even the wounded seemed braced by the thought of imminent escape westward, and a chance to avenge the dead.

Although, the reavers had been stunned and wounded by the ambuscade, it would have been madness for four women and a boy to try attacking all alone. But Maia and the rest of the skiff crew had counted on hidden reinforcements, which came from a source the pirates never suspected. Only a few of those who had been aboard the raft when the reaver ship was first spotted had remained aboard to face the brunt of the cannon’s shells. The rest had by then gone overboard, taking shelter under empty crates and boxes already jettisoned—apparently to lighten the raft’s load. In fact, they were tethered to float some distance behind, where the enemy would not think to shoot at them.

Only the strongest swimmers had been chosen for that dangerous role. Once the skiff crew began boarding, drawing all the reavers aft, five waterlogged Manitou sailors managed to swim around to the bow and clamber aboard, using loops of dangling, cable. Shivering and mostly unarmed, they did have surprise on their side. Even so, it was a close and chancy thing.

Small-scale battles can turn on minor differences, as Maia learned when she pieced together what had happened at the end. The last two Manitou sailors, those responsible for springing the catapult trap, had been perhaps the bravest of all. With their job done, each took a running start, then leaped feetfirst off the high bluff to plunge all the way down to the deep blue water. Surviving that was an exploit to tell of. To follow it up with swimming for the crippled ketch, and joining the attack in the nick of time… the notion alone put Maia in awe. These were, indeed, tough women.

Before Maia made it back from her own watery excursion, that last wave of reinforcements turned the tide, converting bloody stalemate into victory. Now ten of the original band of internees, plus several well-watched prisoners, labored to prepare the captive prize for travel. Young Brod, despite bandages on his face and arms, climbed high upon the broken mast, parsing debris from useful lines and shrouds, eliminating the former with a hatchet.

Maia was hauling lengths of cable overboard when Naroin tapped her on the shoulder. The policewoman carried a rolled-up chart, which she unfurled with both hands. “You ever get a good latitude fix with that toy Pegyul gave you?” she asked.

Maia nodded. After two dips in the ocean, she hadn’t yet inspected the minisextant, and feared the worst. Before yesterday, however, she had taken several good sightings from their prison pinnacle. “Let’s see … we must’ve been dumped on…” She bent to peer at the chart, which showed a long archipelago of narrow, jagged prominences, crisscrossed by perpendicular coordinate lines. Maia saw a slanted row of cursive lettering, and rocked back. “Well I’ll be damned. We’re in the Dragons’ Teeth!”

“Yeah. How about that.” Naroin replied. These were islands of legend. “I’ll tell you some interestin’ things about ’em, later. But now—the latitude, Maia?”

“Oh, yes.” Maia reached out and tapped with one finger. “There. They must have left us on, um, Grimké Island.”

“Mm. Thought so from the outline. Then that one over there”—Naroin pointed westward at a mist-shrouded mass—“must be De Gournay. And just past it to the north, that’s the best course toward deep water. Two good days and we’re in shipping lanes.”

Maia nodded. “Right. From there, all you need is a compass heading. I hope you make it.”

Naroin looked up. “What? You’re not coming along?”

“No. I’ll take the skiff, if it’s all right with you. I have unfinished business around here.”

“Renna an’ your sister.” Naroin nodded. “But you don’t even know where to look!”

Maia shrugged. “Brod will come. He knows where the man sanctuary is, at Halsey Beacon. From there, we may spot some clue. Find the hideout where Renna’s being kept.” Maia did not mention the uncomfortable fact that Leie was one of the keepers. She shifted her feet. “Actually, that chart would be more useful to us, since you’ll be off the edge just a few hours after…”

Naroin sniffed. “There are others below, anyway. Sure, take it.” She rolled the vellum sheet and slapped it gruffly into Maia’s hands. Clearly she was masking feelings like the ones erupting in Maia’s own breast. It was hard giving up a friend, now that she had one. Maia felt warmed that the woman sailor shared the sentiment.

. “O’ course, Renna might not even be in the archipelago anymore,” Naroin pointed out.

“True. But if so, why would they have gone to such lengths to get rid of us? Even as witnesses, we’d not be much threat if they’d fled in some unknown direction. No, I’m convinced he and Leie are nearby. They’ve got to be.”

There followed a long silence between the two women, punctuated only by the sounds of nearby raucous chopping, hammering and scraping. Then Naroin said, “If you ever finally reach a big town, get to a comm unit an’ dial PES five-four-niner-six. Call collect. Give ’em my name.

“But what if you aren’t … if you never … I mean—” Maia stopped, unable to tactfully say it. But Naroin only laughed, as if relieved to have something to make light of.

“What if I never make it? Then if you please, tell my boss where you saw me last. All the things you’ve done an’ seen. Tell ’em I said you got a favor or two comin’. At least they might help get you a decent job.”

“Mm. Thanks. So long as it has nothing to do with coal—”

“Or saltwater!” Naroin laughed again,, and spread her small, strong arms for an embrace.

“Good luck, virgie. Keep outta jail. Don’t get hit on the head so much. An’ stop tryin’ to drown, will ya? Do that an’ I’m sure you’ll be just fine.”