For the first time in weeks Maia felt a sense of relish, of anticipation. Leie would have loved this.
“Your pardon, Revered Mother, but the barn won’t do. In the morning, after a good breakfast, I’ll be happy to discuss your, um, lending me transportation back to town.”
The Jopland elder blanched, then flushed crimson in a reversal that was surprising, given her dark complexion. She pushed Maia aside and hurriedly read the screen, gargling in rage. “How did you do this! I warn you, if this is some city trick—”
“Lysos, I don’t think so. You’re welcome to call Planetary Equilibrium Security, if you want to verify it.”
Maia did not even know what the words meant, but they had dramatic effect. The old woman swayed as if she had been struck. Only after visible effort did she manage to speak in a harsh whisper. “I’ll take you to your room.”
Out in the hallway, Maia heard distant sounds of music and laughter. Apparently, a decent party had gotten under way, after all. As a var, she was used to not being invited to such affairs, and was unsurprised when the crone led her in the other direction. It was a bit disturbing, though, when they descended steps into the farmyard. Two dogs came to growl briefly at Maia before sidling away at a sharp command from her host.
“It’s not the barn I’m taking you to, don’t worry. But we’re goin’ around the house. I don’t want you disturbing our guests.”
Through front-facing windows, Maia heard hearty male laughter. Farther along, they passed before several dimly lit rooms from which came breathy, hoarse sounds unmistakable as anything but passion. Well, she thought, feeling her ears grow warm, the Joplands ought to be happy. Seems they’re getting their money’s worth tonight. Odds-on, at least one winter clone would be ignited by the labor of these hardworking men.
At the far end of the southern wing stood several small apartments, each with its own door and plank porch. There were no keys or locks. The matriarch pushed into the last one and stood on tiptoe in order to tighten a bare bulb. Only wan illumination spilled forth, explaining why there was no switch. That bulb would never get too hot to touch. Over in one corner, a pair of folded, blankets lay atop a packed-straw mattress. Maia shrugged. She had slept worse.
“Cockcrow for breakfast, or none,” her reluctant host said, departing without another word. Maia closed the door, then set to laying out the bedclothes. Finding a pitcher of water on a rickety table, she washed her face, took a long drink from the spout, and reached up to turn out the light.
Elsewhere in the rambling farm complex, people were vigorously occupied making strong, atonal harmonies. The music of joy, poets sometimes called it. To Maia it sounded much more serious.
Of course, there were different rhythms for each time of year. In summer it was men who eagerly sought, while skeptical women sometimes let themselves be convinced. These were patterns Maia had known all her life. Nature’s way.
Well, the way chosen for us by Lysos and the Founders, Maia pondered, listening in the dark. It’s hard to imagine any other.
Maia had thought about sex—two willing partners coming together, whether by wooing or after being wooingly pursued. It seemed an act partly sublime, but also filled with all the frenetic, damp, clasping after life that came from certain knowledge of it slipping away. A fusion aimed at immortality, some called it.
As a young virgin, Maia would not feel that hormonal rush of desire, if at all, until winter’s deepest nadir. Still, for as much as a year before departing Port Sanger she had begun experiencing sensations she felt must surely be related. A faint longing, a void. She vaguely suspected sex might have a role in filling it. A partial role.
Sighs and murmured cries. The sounds were fascinating, yet again Maia wondered if there wasn’t something more to it than a mere rubbing, release, and a mixing of fluids. A union that enhanced and magnified what each party brought separately.
Or am I just naïve? It was a private suspicion she had never dared share, even with Leie. “You want to keep a smelly, scratchy man as a pet?” her twin might have taunted. Even now, Maia had no idea what it was she really desired, as if her desires had any relevance to the world.
It took an hour or two. Then matters settled down, allowing the prairie wind to win by default, rustling the tall cane fields beyond the house and yard. Still, Maia couldn’t sleep. Her feelings were achurn from all that had occurred today. Finally, with a sigh, she threw off the thin blankets, went to the door, and stepped out to inhale the night.
The scents were heavier than she was used to, growing up in the icy north. Yet one musty-pleasant aroma she identified quickly. It accompanied a low, humming rumble, emanating from the open-sided lugar barracks, where those shaggy, obsessively gentle creatures huddled at night, whatever the temperature. Their piquant scent, she had once read, was one of countless features programmed by the founders, who gave the beasts great physical strength to serve womankind, breaking one link of dependency that used to bind females to males.
Certainly the aroma was less pungent than the sweat tang given off by sailors back on Wotan, whenever hard labor brought on that glistening, other-species sheen. Did men also perspire so while making love? The thought added to Maia’s heavy ambivalence of attraction-revulsion.
Walking under the stars, she greeted with a smile her friends Eagle and Hammer. The familiar constellations winked at her. On impulse, Maia snapped two leather catches, opening the brass sextant at her wrist. Unfolding the alignment arms, she took angle sightings on the horizon, on Ophir, the polestar, and the planet Amaterasu. Now, if only she had a decent chronometer …
Dogs barked at some neighboring clanstead. Something winged and swift fluttered a few meters overhead. Wind rustled the trees by the river, where glow beetles were still busy at their mating display, more persistently amorous than humans, casting glittering, ecstatic wavefronts to eerie rhythms. Whole swatches of forest came alight, then winked off in unison. I wonder if there’s a pattern, Maia thought, fascinated by the spectacle of countless individual insects, each reacting only to its nearest neighbors, combining in a life-show of tantalizing intricacy, like the constellations that had always drawn her, or a labyrinthine puzzle.…
As she reached the corner of the house, an ebb in the breeze caused the quiet to deepen, abruptly revealing a low murmur of voices.
“… you don’t know what she said to the Pessies?”
“That’s what scares me! I got no clue what she was at them about. But they reversed charges, so it must’ve been more’n a nuisance call. We already heard from cousins on the coast about a police agent nosing around. This stinks. You people promised discretion, complete discretion!”
The fire bugs were forgotten. Maia slipped into shadows and peered toward the rear veranda. She could make out the second speaker. It was the mother Jopland, or one roughly the same age. The other person lay hidden, but when she laughed, Maia felt a shock of recognition.
“I doubt she was calling about our little secret. I know the wench, and I’ll bet tit-squirrels to lugars that she’s no agent. Couldn’t figure her way out of a gunnysack, that one.”
Thank you, Tizbe, Maia thought with a chill. All of a sudden things seemed to make sense. No wonder the Joplands had a successful wooing party, after such a dismal start! While she had been talking to authorities in Caria, Tizbe must have arrived carrying bottles brimming with distilled summer. What wouldn’t the Joplands pay to have their slow population decline turned around in a simple, efficient way? All the more so for devout Perkinites, who didn’t even like men.
They were planning to give up their summer-banishment rule. The valley councils were going to build sanctuaries, like along the coast. But with Tizbe’s powder there’d be no need to compromise their radical doctrine.
Maia had wondered if there was a practical side to the drug. Now she had her answer.
I was bothered by incidents in Lanargh, and the train collision in Clay Town. But those happened because people were fooling around with
the stuff, because it’s new. If it’s used carefully, though, to help make winter sparking easier, where’s the harm? I didn’t hear any of the men tonight crying out in misery.
Naturally, the Perkinites’ long-range goal was unattainable. Perkies were crazy to dream of making men as rare as jacar trees, drug or no drug. Meanwhile, though, if they found a short-term method for having their way in this valley, so what? Even conservative clans like Lamatia tried to stimulate their male guests during winter, with drink and light shows designed to mimic summer’s aurorae. Was this powder fundamentally different?
Maia was tempted to walk up and join the conversation, just to catch the look on Tizbe Beller’s face. Perhaps, after getting over her surprise, Tizbe would be willing to explain, woman to woman, why they were going to such lengths, or why Caria City should give a damn.
The temptation vanished when Maia’s former assistant spoke again.
“Don’t worry about our little var informer. I’ll see to things. It’ll all be taken care of long before she ever makes it back to Grange Head.”
A sinking sensation yawned in Maia’s gut. She backed around the corner of the house as it began dawning on her just how much trouble she was in.
Bleeders! I don’t know anybody. Leie’s gone. And I’m in it now, right up to my neck!
One great mystery is why sexual reproduction became dominant for higher life-forms. Optimization theory says it should be otherwise.
Take a fish or lizard, ideally suited to her environment, with just the right internal chemistry, agility, camouflage—whatever it takes to be healthy, fecund, and successful in her world. Despite all this, she cannot pass on her perfect characteristics. After sex, her offspring will be jumbles, getting only half of their program from her and half their re-sorted genes somewhere else.
Sex inevitably ruins perfection. Parthenogenesis would seem to work better—at least theoretically. In simple, static environments, well-adapted lizards who produce duplicate daughters are known to have advantages over those using sex.
Yet, few complex animals are known to perform self-cloning. And those species exist in ancient, stable deserts, always in close company with a related sexual species.
Sex has flourished because environments are seldom static. Climate, competition, parasites—all make for shifting conditions. What was ideal in one generation may be fatal the next. With variability, your offspring get a fighting chance. Even in desperate times, one or more of them may have what it takes to meet new challenges and thrive.
Each style has its advantages, then. Cloning offers stability and preservation of excellence. Sex gives adaptability to changing times. In nature it is usually one or the other. Only lowly creatures such as aphids have the option of switching back and forth.
Until now, that is. With the tools of creation in our hands, shall we not give our descendants choice? Options? The best of both worlds?
Let us equip them to select their own path between predictability and opportunity. Let them be prepared to deal with both sameness and surprise.
8
Calma had been right. You could zero in on Lerner Hold by sense of smell alone.
That was fortunate. Maia could tell north by the positions of the stars, seen through a gathering overcast. But compass directions are useless when you have no map or knowledge of the territory. Only Iris, the smallest moon, lit Maia’s path as she followed a rutted trail over wavelike prairie knolls until one branch turned and dropped abruptly into a maze of water-cut ravines. A tangy, metallic odor seemed to come from that direction, so with a pounding heart she took the turn.
Plunging into the canyon, Maia had to feel her way at first, her fingers tracing a thick layer of living topsoil that soon gave way to hard laminations of clay. Maia found herself descending a series of hellish rents in the ground, as if the skin of Stratos lay raked open by gigantic claws.
Her pupils adapted, splitting slitwise to let in a maximum of light. Succeeding beds of clay and limestone alternately shone or glittered or simply drank whatever moonbeams reached this deep into the canyon. It all depended, Maia supposed, on what mix of tiny sea creatures had fallen to the ocean bottom during whatever long-ago sedimentary ages laid these beds. Soon even the sinuous bands gave way to hard native rock, twisted and tortured by continental movements that had taken place before protohumans walked on faraway Earth. Interchanging patterns of light and dark stone reminded her of those towering “castle” pillars she had seen in the distance from the railway—rocky remnants of once proud mountains that used to stand here, but had since been all but ground away by rainstorms and rivers and time.
Time was one thing Maia didn’t figure she had a wealth of. Did Tizbe intend to wait till morning to spring a trap on her? Or would the young Beller come during the night to the room Maia had been given, accompanied by a dozen well-muscled Jopland fems? After overhearing those sinister words in the farmyard, Maia had chosen not to stay and find out.
Escaping Jopland Hold was easy enough. Stepping quietly to avoid alerting the dogs, she had crept down to the nearby stream that ran beside the orchard, and then sloshed a kilometer or so through icy water with her shoes tied together, hanging from her neck, until the mansion was well out of sight. Next she had to spend several minutes rubbing sensation back into her half-frozen feet before lacing up again. Shivering, Maia then spent an hour trampling a path across successive wheat fields until at last finding the road.
So far, so good. Thinking through her predicament was much harder. After weeks of depressed numbness, the abrupt effect of all this adrenaline was both dizzying and exhilarating. She couldn’t help comparing her situation to those adventure reels Lamatia let summerlings watch during the high seasons, when the mothers were too busy to be bothered. Or illicit books Leie used to borrow off young vars from more lenient holds. In such tales, the heroine, usually a beautiful, winter-born sixer from an up-and-coming clan, found herself thrown against the dread schemes of some decadent house whose wealth and power was maintained by subversion rather than honest competition. Usually there was a token man, or a shipload of decent, clear-eyed sailors, in danger of being gulled by the evil hive. The ending was always the same. After being saved by the heroine’s insight and courage, the men promised to visit the small virtuous clan each winter for as long as the heroine’s mothers and sisters wanted them.
Virtue prevailing over venality. It seemed exciting and romantic on page or screen. But in real life, Maia had no mothers or sisters to turn to. She was a lone summerling fiver without a friend in the world. Clearly, Tizbe and her Jopland clients could do whatever they pleased to her.
That’s if they catch me, Maia thought, biting her lip to stop a quiver. Clenching her fists also helped. Defiance was a heady anodyne against fear.
Uh oh.
Coming to a dead stop, she swallowed hard. The trail had been meandering along a lip halfway down the canyon wall, but on turning a corner she found it suddenly plunging straight for a precipice. A rickety suspension bridge lay ahead, half of it in shadows and half reflecting painful moonlight to her dark-adapted eyes.
I must’ve taken a wrong turn. Calma could never have taken her wagon across that!
Tracing its spidery outline, Maia saw that the bridge hung over a gulch strewn with heaping mounds of ash and slag, trailing from a row of towering beehive structures on the opposite ridge. Here and there, Maia glimpsed red flickers from coal fires that were banked for the night, but never allowed to go out.
Iron foundries, she recognized with some relief. So this was Lerner Hold after all. Calma must have taken a slower freight route across the canyon floor. This was the more direct way.
Setting foot on the creaky, swaying bridge would have been frightening even by daylight. But what choice had she? I was never very good at this, she thought, remembering camping trips with other summerlings on the steppe near Port Sanger. She and Leie had loved the expeditions, putting up cheerfully with biting bugs and bitter cold. But neither of them ha
d much love for crossing streams on teetering logs or skittish stones.
The bridge was definitely worse. Stepping forward cautiously, Maia took hold of the guide rope, which stretched across the ravine at waist level. She worked her way from handhold to handhold and plank to groaning plank, fearing at any moment to hear a shout of pursuit behind her, or the snap of some cable giving way. Eerie silence added further discomfort, driving home her loneliness.
Finally, on reaching the other side, she leaned against one of the anchor pillars and let out a ragged sigh. From the promontory, Maia surveyed the trail down which she had come: There was no sign of any full-scale search party, whose lights would be visible for kilometers. You’re probably making more of this than it deserves, she thought. To them you’re just a stupid var who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. Lay low for a while and they’ll forget all about you.
It made sense. But then, maybe she was too stupid to know how much trouble she was in. Standing there, Maia felt the wind grow colder. Her fingers were numb, almost paralyzed, even when she blew on them. Shivering, she rubbed her hands and began peering among the furnaces and cliffside warehouses for the mansion where this branch of Lerner Clan dwelled and raised its daughters.
The house was a disappointment when she found it. She had envisioned the industrial Lerners constructing an imposing structure of steel arches, lined with stone or glass. What she came upon was a one-story warren, made of sod bricks, that rambled over half an acre. Just a few windows faced a front courtyard strewn with scrap and reclaimed junk of every description.
The windows were dark. If not for the soft hissing of the idle furnaces—and the odors—Maia might have thought the place deserted.
There was another sound, she realized. A faint one. Maia turned. She stepped carefully through the scrapyard until, rounding a corner of the house, she came in sight of a jumble of low structures, even more ramshackle than the “mansion.” Each had a small chimney from which trailed thin columns of smoke. Housing for the employees, she guessed.