Glory Season

Maia felt too agitated to try using the sextant. She climbed back down, fell asleep early, and had strange dreams most of the night. Dreams of escape. Dreams of running. Dreams of ambivalence. Of wanting/not wanting the company of someone for the rest of her life. Leie? Clone-daughters? A man? Images of a fictional but still vivid Florentina World confused her with combined revulsion and fascination.

Later, when she clawed her way, moaning, out of a dream about being buried alive, Maia awakened to find herself tangled in the rough, heavy drapes she used for blankets, forced to struggle just to extricate herself. I don't like this place, she thought, when at last she was breathing freely again. She sagged back. I wonder how you go about unweaving a carpet.

The narrow window showed a sliver of the constellation Anvil, so the night was more than half over. Missed the clicking, this time, one part of her commented. The rest didn't give a damn. When sleep reclaimed her, there were no more nightmares.

She had saved for last what seemed the best book of the four. It was printed on good paper and came with the imprint of a Horn City publishing company. "A literary classic," proclaimed the flashing microadvert on its binding, when turned to the light. On the copyright page, Maia read that the novel was over a hundred years old. She had never heard of it, but that came as no surprise. Lamatia Hold was fanatic in preferring to teach its var-daughters practical skills over the arts.

Certainly the writing was better than any of the other books. Unlike the historical fantasy, or the var-trash romance, it was set in the Stratos of everyday life. The story opened with a young woman on a voyage, accompanied by a fellow cloneling her own age. They were carrying commercial contracts from town to town, arranging deals, making money for their faraway hold and clan. The writer delightfully conveyed many hassles of life on the road, dealing with bureaucrats and senior mothers who, as broad and amusing caricatures, brought to Maia's lips her first faint smile in a long time. Below these picaresque encounters, the author laid a current of underlying tension. Things were not as they seemed with the two protagonists. Maia discovered their secret early in chapter three.

The pair weren't clonelings at all. Their "clan" was a fiction. They were just a couple of vars. Twins . . .

Maia blinked, startled to the quick. But . . . that was our idea! It's what Leie and I planned to do.

She stared at the page, outrage turning swiftly to embarrassment. How many people must have read this book by now? Flipping to the title page, she saw that paper printings alone were in the hundreds of thousands. And that left out versions on disk, or floating access . . .

We would 've been laughingstock, the first place we tried it, Maia realized with horrified chagrin. In retrospect, she saw with abrupt clarity how the idea must have occurred to others, countless times, even before this novel was written. Probably lots of var twins fantasized about it. At least some of the Lamai mothers should have known, and been able to warn us!

Maia paused. Wait a minute! She flipped pages and looked again at the names of the protagonists. . . . Reie and Naia? No wonder they had sounded familiar. She shook her head in numb disbelief. We … were NAMED after characters in this Lysos-damned storybook?

Maia saw purple, thinking about the petty joke Mother Claire and the others had pulled on the two of them. At least Leie had been spared ever knowing what fools they'd been.

She hurled the book across the room and flung herself onto her dusty bed, crying out of loneliness and a sense of utter abandonment.

For two days she was listless, spending most of her time sleeping. The late night clicking was no longer of interest. Not much of anything was.

Still, after a while boredom began penetrating even the self-pitying bleakness Maia had crafted for herself. When she could stand it no longer, she asked her jailers once more for something to help pass the time. They looked at each other, and responded that they were sorry, but there were no more books.

Maia sighed and went back to picking at her meal. Her warders watched morosely, clearly affected by her mood. She did not care.

At first, Maia used to fantasize about rescue by some authority, like the Planetary Equilibrium officer she had spoken to, or the priestess of the temple at Grange Head, or even a squadron of Lamai militia, wearing bright-plumed helmets. But she nursed no illusions about her importance in the grand scheme of things. Nor did any word arrive from Tizbe. Maia now saw that there was no need for the drug messenger or anyone else to come visit or interrogate her.

Hope had no place in her developing picture of the world. Even the Lerners are so high above you, they have to bend over to spit.