Glory Season

"An uplink, sure. Richest mothers in these parts. Got full console an' everything. But maybe you won't have to use it. What you're really needing, I figure, is some good motherly advice. Could save you the cost of a consult."

Motherly advice was what she had been taught to seek, if ever in trouble out in the world. Ideally, the mothers of the largest, best-respected local clan were available not just to their own daughters, but anyone, even man or var, who was righteous and in need. In fact, Maia didn't have much appetite for a band of elderly clones, accustomed to holding feudal court out in the sticks, pouring platitudes and assigning her verses from the Book of the Founders.

But she says they have a console.

"All right," she said, and turned to the stationmaster. "I'm afraid that means—"

"Don't tell me. You may not make it back in time to catch the 6:02. Oh, shoot." The Musseli yawned to show how upset she was. "I guess there's always another var waitin' in the pool. Come back and we'll put you in queue for another run, sometime."

Great. Lost seniority and maybe a week waiting around for another train. This is already costing me plenty.

Maia had a gnawing feeling it was going to add up to a lot more, before she was done.

We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason — because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.

It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. "Good" or "evil" had little to do with it.

That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is "natural" does not oblige us to keep it.

While Herlandia's radicals went too far, we can surely do better than those timorous compromisers back on New Terra or Florentina, making timid, minuscule changes by consensus only. For instance, without eliminating male feistiness entirely, we can channel it to certain narrow seasons, as in rutting animals like deer and elk. Other inconvenient or dangerous traits can be quarantined, isolated, so our daughters need no longer face them year-round, day in, day out.

Boldness and insight are needed for this endeavor, as well as compassion for the inevitable struggles our descendants shall have to endure.

7

The sun was low when Maia finished helping the big woman load her buckboard. On their way out of town, they paused at the transients' hostel, where Maia ran inside to store her duffel. Not that it held much of value. Just clothes and a few mementos, including a book of ephemerides Leie had given her as a birthday present. There was also a small, blackened lump of stone. A gift from Old Coot Bennett — before the light left his rheumy eyes — which he had sworn was a true meteorite. Maia didn't want to leave her possessions, but it made no sense to haul them to Jopland Hold and back for just one night. Stuffing a few items into her jacket pockets, she took a receipt from the Musseli attendant and hurried to catch her ride.

Heavily laden, the horse-drawn wagon moved slowly along the narrow dirt road north of town, jostling over ruts and bumps left untended since the storms of summer. Floating dust tickled the membranes under Maia's eyelids, causing them to flutter intermittently, dimming vision. "Valley council keeps puttin' off fixin' these paths," the wagon's owner complained. "The biddies say there's no money, but always seem to find it b'fore harvest time! Farmers run everything here, virgie. Remember that, an' you'll get by."

Perforate farmers, Maia added silently. The sect appealed to smaller clans, not long risen above the status of lowly vars. Even the wealthiest clans in Long Valley were modest by coastal standards, unless they were cadet branches of more-extended hives elsewhere.

Maia's benefactor came from such a branch. She was a Lerner. Maia knew the family, whose scattered offshoots had wedged holdings throughout Eastern Continent, wherever there were ore deposits too meager to attract big mining concerns, and communities with needs a smalltime forging operation could fill. Hard experience had taught Lerner Clan the limits of their talents. Whenever one of their operations grew large enough to draw competition, they would always sell out and move on.

It's a niche, though, Maia supposed. Few vars established a nameline of their own, let alone one so numerous. She was in no position to judge.