Glory Season

They were grumbling unhappily when they took the dishes away. Later, over dinner, she switched names on them, confusing them further still. Why not? Maia pondered. It was only fair to share the discomfort.

Sunset, day number two, she thought, using a nail she found to scrape a second mark on the inside of the wooden door. The sun's spot on the wall climbed higher, dimmed, and went out. Shadows of crates and stacked bundles grew progressively more eerie and intimidating as dusk fell. Last night, she had been too stupefied to notice, but with the arrival of full darkness, the shapes around her seemed to take on frightening gremlin forms. Outlines of unsympathetic monsters.

Don't be a baby. Maia chided herself for reacting like a bedwetting two-year-old. With a pounding heart, she forced herself to stand and approach the most fearsome of the silhouettes, the teetering pyramid of boxes and carpets she herself had stacked below the little window. See? she thought, touching the scratchy side of a crate. You can't let this drive you crazy.

Nervously, she fondled her sole possession, the little sextant. A glitter of stars could be seen through the stone opening, tempting her. But to climb up there in the dark . . . ?

Maia screwed up her courage. Piss on the world, or it'll piss on you. That was how Naroin, her old bosun, would have put it. She had to do this.

Moving carefully from foothold to handhold, Maia climbed the artificial hill, sometimes stopping to hold on tightly as a creak or abrupt teetering set her pulse racing. The ascent took several times as long as it would have in daylight, but Maia persevered until at last she was able to peer through the slit opening. A breeze chilled her face, bringing scents of wild grass and rain. Between patches of glowering cloud, Maia could just make out the familiar contours of the constellation Sappho glittering above the dark prairie.

Okay. We go back down now? her body seemed to ask.

Trembling, Maia forced herself to stay long enough to take a sighting, although the horizon was vague and she could not read the dial of the sextant. I'll do better tomorrow night, she promised herself. Gratefully, but with a sense of having won a victory over her fears, she carefully clambered down again.

As she lay upon her makeshift bed, exhausted but stronger in spirit, the clicking sound resumed. The one from last night, which she had associated with a dripping faucet. It was real, apparently, not a figment of her dreams. Another irritant among many.

Maia shrugged aside the distant noise and the looming figures her imagination manufactured out of shadows. Oh, shut up, she told them all, and rolled over to go to sleep.

"I'm going to lose my mind without something to do!" she shouted at her jailers the next morning. When they blinked at her in confusion, she demanded. "Haven't they got books here? Anything to read?"

The jailers stared, as if uncertain what she was talking about. They're probably illiterate, she realized. Besides, even if the sanctuary architects designed in a library, shelves and all, it still would have been up to the men themselves to bring books and disks and tapes.

So she was surprised when Blim (or was it Grim?) returned after a while and laid four dog-eared paper-paged books on the table. In the stocky woman's eyes Maia saw a flicker of entreaty. Don't be hard on us, and we won't be hard on you. Maia picked up the volumes, probably abandoned here by the construction workers. She nodded thanks and played no name games with her warders when they carried off her tray.

Rationing herself to a book a day, she decided to start with the one bearing the most lurid cover. It depicted a young woman, armed with bow and arrows, leading a band of compatriots and a few protected men through the vine-encrusted ruins of a demolished city. Maia recognized the genre — var-trash — printed on cheap stock to sell for the delectation of poor summerlings like herself. A fair number of nonclone women loved reading fantasies about civilization's collapse, when all of society's well-ordered niches would be overturned and a young woman might win her way to founder status by quick thinking and simple heroics alone.

In this book, the premise was a sudden, unexplained shift in the planet's orbit. Not only did this cause melting of the great ice sheets of Stratos, toppling all the stolid clans and opening the way for newer, hardier types, but in a stroke the inconvenient behavior patterns of men were solved, since now, by a miracle of the author's pen, the aurorae appeared in winter!