Glory Season Read Online Free PDF Page B

farfetched that someone spinning dials with a rig like that might pick up a tidbit or two.
    “As if th’ owners invite
me
to tea an’ tele!” The sailmaker spat through a gap in her teeth toward the scummy water glistening with floating fish scales.
    “But have you overheard anything? Say, on an unofficial channel? Do they still claim only
one
Outsider has landed?”
    Maia sighed. Caria City was remote and its savants only broadcast sparse accounts. Worse, the Lamai mothers often forbade summer kids to watch tele at all, lest their volatile minds find programs “disturbing.” Naturally, this only piqued the twins’ curiosity. But Leie was taking inquisitiveness too far, grilling simple laborers. Apparently the sailmaker agreed. “Why ask me, you silly hots? Why should I listen to lies hissing outta the owners’ box?”
    “But you’re from Landing Continent.…”
    “My province was ninety
gi
from Caria! Ain’t seen it in ten year, nor will again, never. Now go way!”
    When they were out of earshot, Maia chided, “Leie, you’ve got to go easy on that stuff. You can’t make a pest of yourself—”
    “Like
you
did, when we were four? Who tried stowing away on that schooner, just to find out how the captain got a fix on a rolling horizon? I recall we
both
got punished for that one!”
    Reluctantly, Maia smiled. She hadn’t always been the more cautious sister. One long Stratos year ago, it had been Leie who always took careful gauge before acting, and Maia who kept coming up with schemes that got them in trouble.
We’re alike, all right. We just keep getting out of phase. And maybe that’s good. Someone has to take turns being the sensible one.
    “This is different,” she replied, trying to keep to the point. “It’s real life now.”
    Leie shrugged. “Want to talk about
life
? Look at those cretins, over there.” She nodded toward a paved area onthe quay, laid out in a geometric grid, where a number of seamen stood idly, pondering an array of small black or white disks. “They call their game Life, and take it damn seriously. Does that make it real, too?”
    Maia refused to acknowledge the pun. Whenever ships were in port, clusters of men could be found here, playing the ancient game with a passion matched only during auroral months by their seasonal interest in sex. The men, deckhands off some freighter, wore rough, sleeveless shirts and metal ringlets on their biceps denoting rank. A few of the onlookers glanced up as the sisters passed by. Two of the younger ones smiled.
    If it had still been summertime, Maia would have demurely looked away and even Leie would have shown caution. But as the aurorae faded and Wengel Star waned, so too ebbed the hot blood in males. They became calmer creatures, more companionable. Autumn was the best season for shipping out, then. Maia and Leie could spend up to twenty standard months at sea before being forced ashore by next year’s rut. By then, they had better have found a niche, something they were good at, and started their nest egg.
    Leie boldly met the sailors’ amiable, lazy leers, hands on hips and eye to eye, as if daring them to back up their bluster. One towheaded youth seemed to consider it. But of course, if he had any libido to spare this time of year, he wouldn’t go wasting it on a pair of dirt-poor virgins! The young men laughed, and so did Leie.
    “Come on,” she told Maia as the men turned back to regard their game pieces. Leie readjusted her duffel. “It’s nearing tide. Let’s get aboard and shake this town off our feet.”
    “What do you mean, you’re not sailing? For how long?”
    Maia couldn’t believe this. The old fart of a purserchewed a toothpick as he rocked back on his stool by the gangplank. Unshaven in rumbled fatigues, he nudged the nearby barreltop where their refund lay … plus a little more thrown in for “compensation.”
    “Dunno, li’l liss. Prob’ly a month. Mebbe two.”
    “A month!” Leie’s voice