Glory Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

Leie’s jibe, and Maia could not hide a smile. Perkinites took themselves and their cause so seriously, and hated the diminutive of their name. The speaker glared at Leie, but then caught sight of Maia standing by her side. To the twins’ delight, she instantly drew the wrong conclusion and held out her hands to them earnestly, imploringly.
    “The truth that small clans like yours and mine are routinely shoved aside, not just here but everywhere, especially in Caria City, where the great houses are even nowselling our very planet to the Outsiders and their masculinist Phylum …”
    Maia’s ears perked at mention of the alien ship. Alas, it soon grew clear that the speaker wasn’t offering news, only a tirade. The harangue quickly sank into platitudes and clichés Maia and her sister had heard countless times over the years. About the flood of cheap var labor ruining so many smaller clans. About laxity enforcing the Codes of Lysos and the regulation of “dangerous males.” Such hackneyed accusations joined this year’s fashionable paranoid theme—playing to popular unease that the space visitors might be precursors to an invasion worse even than the long-ago horror of the Enemy.
    There had been brief pleasure in being mistaken for a “clan,” just because Maia and Leie looked alike, but that quickly faded. Autumn meant elections were coming, and fringe groups kept trying to chivvy a minority seat or two in the face of
en masse
bloc-voting by holds like Lamatia. Perkinism appealed to small matriarchies who felt obstructed by established lines. The movement got little support from vars, who had no power and even less inclination to vote.
    As for men, they had no illusions should Perkinism take hold in a big way on Stratos. If that ever seemed close to happening again, Maia might witness something unique in her lifetime, the sight of
males
lining up at polling booths, exercising a right enshrined in law, but practiced about as often as glory frost fell in summer.
    Though Leie was still chuckling over the Perkinites’ political tract, Maia nudged her sister. “Come on. There are better things to do with our last morning in town.”
    The rising sun had sublimed away a shore-hugging fog by the time the twins reached the harbor proper. Midmorning heat had also carried off most of the gaudy zoor-floatersthat Maia had glimpsed earlier. A few of the luminous creatures were still visible as bright, ovoid flowers, or garish gasbags, drifting in a ragged chain across the eastern sky.
    One laggard remained over the docks, resembling a filmy, bloated jellyfish with dangling, iridescent feelers a mere twenty meters long. A baby, then. It clutched the main mast of a sleek freighter, caressing the cloth-draped yards, groping for treats laid on the upper spars by nimble sailors. The agile seamen laughed, dodging the waving, sticky suckers, then dashed in to stroke the knotty backs of the beast’s tentacles, or tie on bright ribbons or paper notes. Once a year or so, someone actually recovered a ragged message that had been carried in such a fashion, all the way across the Mother Ocean.
    There were also stories of young cabin boys who actually tried hitching rides upon a zoor, floating off to Lysos-knew-where, perhaps inspired by legends of days long ago, when zep’lins and airplanes swarmed the sky, and men were allowed to fly.
    As if proving that it was a day of fate and synchrony, Leie nudged Maia and pointed in the opposite direction, southwest, beyond the golden dome of the city temple. Maia blinked at a silvery shape that glinted briefly as it settled groundward, and recognized the weekly dirigible, delivering mail and packages too dear to entrust to sea transport, along with rare passengers whose clans had to be nearly as rich as the planet goddess in order to afford the fare. Both Maia and Leie sighed, for once sharing exactly the same thought. It would take a miracle for either of them ever to journey like that, amid the