Glory Season Read Online Free PDF

clouds. Perhaps their clone descendants might, if luck’s fickle winds blew that way. The thought offered some slight consolation.
    Perhaps it also explained why boys sometimes gave up everything just to ride a zoor. Males, by their very natures, could not bear clones. They could not copy themselves.At best, they achieved the lesser immortality of fatherhood. Whatever they most desired had to be accomplished in one lifetime, or not at all.
    The twins resumed their stroll. Down here near the wharves, where fishing boats gave off a humid, pungent miasma, they began seeing a lot more summer folk like themselves. Women of diverse shapes, colors, sizes, often bearing a family resemblance to some well-known clan—a Sheldon’s hair or a Wylee’s distinctive jaw—sharing half or a quarter of their genes with a renowned mother-line, just as the twins carried in their faces much that was Lamai.
    Alas, half resemblance counted for little. Dressed in monocolor kilts or leather breeches, each summer person went about life as a solitary unit, unique in all the world. Most held their heads high despite that. Summer folk worked the piers, scraped the drydocked sailing ships, and performed most of the grunt labor supporting seaborne trade, often with a cheerfulness that was inspirational to behold.
    Before Lysos, on Phylum worlds, vars like us were normal and clones rare. Everyone had a father … sometimes one you even grew up knowing.
    Maia used to ponder images of a teeming planet, filled with wild, unpredictable variety. The Lamai mothers called it “an unwholesome fixation,” yet such thoughts came more frequently since news of the Outsider Ship began filtering down, through rumors and then terse, censored reports on the tele.
    Do people still live in old-fashioned chaos, on other worlds?
She wondered. As if life would ever offer any opportunity to find out.
    With storm season over and the getta fence wide open, the harbor was a lively, colorful precinct. A season’s pent-up commerce was getting under way. People bustled among the loading docks and slate-roofed warehouses, the chapels and recurtained Houses of Ease. And ship chandleries—afavorite haunt while the twins were growing up, crammed with every tool or oddment a crew might need at sea. From an early age, Maia and her sister had been drawn by the bright brasswork and smell of polishing oil, browsing for hours to the exasperation of the shopkeepers. For her part, Leie had been fascinated by mechanical devices, while Maia focused on charts and sextants and slender telescopes with their clicking, finely beveled housings. And timepieces, some so old they carried an outer ring dividing the Stratoin calendar into a little more than three “Standard Earth Years.” Not even hazing by fiver boys—itinerant midshipmen who often knew less about shooting a latitude than spitting into the wind—ever kept the twins away for long.
    Peering into the biggest chandlery, Maia caught the eye of the manager, a bluff-faced Felic. The clone noticed Maia’s haircut and duffel, and her habitual grimace slowly lightened into a smile. She made a brief hand gesture wishing Maia good luck and safe passage.
    And good riddance, I’ll bet.
Recalling what nuisances she and her sister had been, Maia returned an exaggerated bow, which the shopkeeper dismissed with laughter and a wave.
    Maia turned around to find Leie over by a nearby pier, conversing with a dockworker whose high cheekbones were reminiscent of Western Continent. “Naw, naw,” the woman said as Maia approached, not pausing in her rapid knotting of the sail she was mending. “So far ain’t heard nary judgment by the Council in Caria. Nary t’all.”
    “Judgment about what?” Maia asked.
    “The Outsiders,” Leie explained. “Those Perkie missionaries got me wondering if there’s been news. This var works on a boat with full access.” Leie pointed toward a nearby fishing craft, sporting a steerable antenna. It wasn’t