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 Thalla’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 grownups,” 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.

Peripatetic’s Log: Stratos Mission: Arrival + 40.177 Ms

Caria, the capital, surrounds and adorns a plateau overlooking where three rivers join the sea. Inhabitants call her “City of Gold,” for the yellow roof tiles of clanhold covering the famed thirteen hills. But I have seen from high orbit a sight more worthy of the name. At dawn, Caria’s walls of crystalline stone catch inclined sunlight, reemitting into space an off-spectrum luminance portrayed on Cy’s panels as an amber halo. It’s a marvel, even to one who has seen float-whales graze on clouds of frothy creill, above and between the metrotowers of Zaminin.

Often, over the last year, I have wished for someone to share such visions with.

Travelers enter Caria through a broad, granite portal, topped by a stately frieze—Athena Polias, ancient protectress of urban dwellers, bearing the sage visage of this colony’s chief founder. Alas, the sculptor failed to catch that sardonic smile I’ve come to know from studying shipboard files on Lysos, when she was a mere philosoph-professor on Florentina, speaking abstractly about things she would later put into practice.

As our procession arrived from the spaceport, all seemed peaceful and orderly, yet I felt sure those majestic city walls weren’t built just for decoration. They quite effectively demark outside from inside. They defend.

Traffic flowed beneath Athena’s outstretched caduceus—its twined snakes representing coiled DNA. To avoid attracting notice, our cavalry escort peeled off at that point while my guides and I went on by car. My landing isn’t secret, but has been downplayed. As on most deliberately pastoral worlds, competing news media are banned as unwholesome. The council’s carefully censored broadcasts somehow portray renewed contact with the Phylum as a minor event, yet one also tinged with dire threat.

Radio eavesdropping could never tell me what the average woman-on-the-street thinks. I wonder if I’ll get a chance to find out.

Envisioning life on a planet of clones, I couldn’t help picturing phalanx after phalanx of uniform faces … swarms of identical, blank-eyed bipeds moving in silent, coordinated lockstep. A caricature of humans-as-ants, or humans-as-bees.

I should have known better. Bustling crowds thronged the portals, sidewalks, and bridges of Caria, arguing, gawking, haggling, and laughing as on any hominid world. Only now and then did I make out an evident pair, or trio, or quintet of clones, and even within such groups the sisters varied by age and dress. Statistically, most of the women I glimpsed must have been members of some parthenogenetic clan. Still, people are not bees, and no human city will ever be a hive. My blurred first impression showed a jumble of types, tall and short, broad and thin, all colors … hardly a stereotype of homogeneity.

Except for the near absence of males, that is. I saw some young boys playing, and a scattering of old fellows wearing the green armbands of “retirees.” But, it being summer, mature men were scarcer than albinos at high noon, and twice as conspicuous. When I caught sight of one, he seemed out of place, self-conscious of his height, stepping aside to make way for surging clusters of bustling womankind. I sensed that, like me, he was here as a guest, and knew it.

This city was not built by, or for, our kind.

The classical lines of Caria’s public buildings hearken to ancient Earth, with broad stairways and sculpted fountains where travelers refresh themselves and water their beasts. The clear preference for foot and hoof over wheeled traffic reminds me of civic planning on Dido, where motorcars and lorries are funneled to their destinations out of sight, leaving the main avenues to more placid rhythms. Following one hidden guideway, our handmade auto swept by the squat apartment blocks and bustling markets of a crowded quarter Iolanthe called “Vartown,” then cruised upslope behind more elegant, castlelike structures with gardens and polished turrets, each flying the heraldic banner of some noble lineage.

My escorts paused briefly at the inner palisade which guards the acropolis. There, I got my first close look at lugars, white-furred creatures descended from Vegan Ur-Apes, hauling stone blocks under the guidance of a patient woman handler. Lysos supposedly designed lugars to overcome one argument for having sons—the occasional need for raw physical strength. Another solution, robots, would have required a perpetual industrial base, dangerous to the founders’ program. So, typically, they came up with something self-sustaining, instead.

Watching the lugars heft huge slabs, I couldn’t help feeling puny in comparison—which may have been another part of the plan.

I am not here to judge Stratoins for choosing a pastoral solution to the human equation. All paths have their costs. My order requires that a peripatetic appreciate all he or she sees, on any Phylum world. “Appreciate” in the formal sense of the word. The rules don’t say I must approve.

Caria’s builders used the central plateau’s natural contours to lay out temples and theaters, courts, schools, and athletic arenas—all described in proud detail by my ardent guides. Wooded lanes accompanied the central boulevard past imposing compounds—the Equilibrium Authority, and the stately University—until at last we drew near a pair of marble citadels with high, columned porticos. The twin hearts of Caria. The Great Library on the left, and to the right, the main Temple dedicated to Stratos Mother.

 … And Lysos is her prophet …

The drive had achieved its clear purpose. Their capital is a showpiece worthy of any world. I was impressed, and must be very sure to show it.