Glory Season

"The Enemy. We used this stuff during the Defense."

"That's my guess. Lysos respected Momma Nature. If you want to push a trait into the background, fine, but that's not the same as throwin' it away. Thriftier to put it on a shelf, where it might come in handy, someday."

Maia's thoughts had already plunged ahead. The Council rulers must have flooded Stratos with the stuff, during the battle to fight off the Enemy foeship.

Imagine every male a warrior. Almost overnight, it would have multiplied the colony's strength, complementing female skill and planning with a wrath like none other in the universe.

Only, what happened after victory?

The good men — those who might have been trustworthy on any Phylum world, even before Lysos — would have voluntarily given up the powder. Or at least kept their heads until it ran out. But men come in all types. It's not hard to picture a plague like the Kings' Revolt erupting during the chaos after a war. Especially with tons of Tizbe's drug floating around.

Was that enough cause to betray the Guardians of Jellicoe?

Maia knew that the Council didn't do things without reasons.

"I guess your assignment changed, by the time we met again," she prompted Naroin.

The petite brunette shrugged. "I heard some odd things. Known mercenaries were gettin' offers, down the coast. Radical agents were reported drifting into parts around Grange Head. Wasn't hard to figure where I might get a billet close to things going on."

Maia frowned. "You didn't suspect Baltha . . ."

"Her treason, going over to the reavers? No! I knew there was tension, of course. Lookin' back, maybe I should have surmised. . . ." Naroin stopped, shook her head. "Take it from an experienced hand, child. It's no good blamin' yourself for what you couldn't prevent. Not so long as you tried."

Maia's lips pressed together. That was exactly what she had been telling herself. From the look in Naroin's eyes, it didn't get much more believable as you got older.

That evening she learned who had lived, and who had died.

Thalia, Captain Poulandres, Baltha, Kau, most of the rads, most of the reavers, nearly all of the Manitou crew, including the young navigator who had helped Maia and her twin find their way through the dazzling complexity of the world-wall. The tally was appalling. Even hard-crusted Naroin, who had seen many formal and informal battles, could scarcely believe the prodigious manufacturing of bodies that had taken place at and near Jellicoe. Is this what war is like? Maia thought. For the first time she felt she understood, not just in abstract, but in her gut, what had driven the Founders to such drastic choices. Nevertheless, she felt determined not to let Perkinite propagandists seize on this episode. If I keep any freedom of action at all, I'm going to make sure it's known. Poulandres and his men were forced to fight. This was more than a simple case of males going berserk.

What was it, then? There would surely be those who pictured Renna as the culprit, a blight carrier whose mere presence, and threat to bring more of his kind, inflamed the worst in several branches of Stratoin society. To Maia, that seemed cruelly like blaming the victim. Yet, the point could be made.

After dinner, while Hullin wheeled her along the promenade deck, Maia encountered Kiel a second time. On this occasion, she saw the other woman more clearly, not through a curtain of resentment over things that were already ancient history. The rad agent had lost everything, her closest friends, her freedom, the best hope for her cause. Maia was gentler with her former cottage-mate. Commiserating, she reached out to console and forgive. In gratitude, the forceful, indomitable Kiel broke down and wept.

Later, as dusk fell, the western horizon began to glitter. Maia counted five, six … and finally ten slowly turning beacons whose rhythmic flashes cut across the miles of ocean with reassuring constancy. From maps studied in her youth, she recognized the tempos and colors and knew their names — Conway, Ulam, Turing, Gardner . , . famed lighthouse sanctuaries of the Mediant Coast. And, beyond far Rucker Beacon, a vast dusting of soft, glimmering diamonds covering a harbor and surrounding hills. The night spectacle of great Ursulaborg.

She was taken to a temple. Not the grand, marble-lined monument dominating the city from its northern bluffs, but a modest, one-story retreat that rambled over a fenced hectare of neatly coppiced woods, several kilometers upriver from the heart of the busy metropolis. The semirural ambience was an artifact, Maia could tell, carefully nurtured by the small but prosperous clanholds that shared the neighborhood. Clear streams flowed past gardens and mulch piles, windmills and light industrial workshops. It was a place where generations of children, and their daughters' daughters, might play, grow up, and tend family business at an unhurried pace, confident of a future in which change would, at most, arrive slowly.