David Brin - Glory Season

“Do you think it’s an infirmary? Or some sort of factory?” Maia asked. She cautiously approached one of several broad, tiled cubicles, each with a glass door that gaped ajar. “What are all these nozzles for?”

Leaning inside to look at a dozen ceramic orifices, she yelped when they suddenly came alive, jetting fierce sprays of scorching steam. “Ow, ow!” Maia cried, leaping back and waving a reddened arm. “It’s a machine for stripping paint!”

Brod shook his head. “I know it seems absurd, Maia, but this place can only be—”

“Never!”

“It is. That really is a shower stall.”

“For searing hair off lugars?” She found it doubtful. “Were the ancients giants, to need all that room? Did they have skins of leather?”

Brod chewed his lip. Experimentally, he leaned against the doorjamb and began inserting his arm. “Those little, thumb-size windows—I saw a few in the oldest building of Kanto Library, back in the city. They sense when someone’s near. That’s how the faucets knew to turn on for us.”

More steam jetted forth, which Brod carefully avoided as he waved in front of one sensor, then another. Quickly, the stream transformed from hot to icy cold. “There you are, Maia. Just what we needed. All the comforts of home.”

Maybe your home, she thought, recalling her last, tepid shower in Grange Head, carefully rationed from clay pipes and a narrow tin sprinkler head. At the time, she had thought it salaciously luxurious. Back in Port Sanger, Lamatia Hold had been proud of its modern plumbing. But this place, with its gleaming surfaces, bright lights, and odd smells, was downright alarming. Even Brod, who had grown up in aristocratic surroundings on Landing Continent, claimed never to have imagined such expanses of mirrored glass and ceramic, all apparently designed to service simple bodily needs.

“Laddies first,” Maia told her friend, citing tradition and motioning for him to go ahead of her. “Guest-man gets first privileges.”

Brod dissented. “Uh, we’re in a sanctuary—or what must’ve been one, long ago—so strictly speaking, you’re the guest. Go on, Maia. I’ll see if I can find something to patch my feet.”

Maia frowned at being outmaneuvered, but there was no point in further argument. They both badly needed to clean their many wounds, lest infection set in. Later, they could worry other matters, such as how to feed themselves.

“Well, stay in shouting range, will you?” she asked, tentatively moving her hand toward the controls. “Just in case I get into trouble.”

Maia soon learned the knack of waving before those dark circles in the wall. She adjusted the shower to a temperature between tepid and scalding, and texture between mist and needle spray. Then, on stepping under the multiple jets, she forgot everything in a roar of bodily sensations.

Everything save one triumphant thought.

Those cheating murderers and their guns… they think I’m dead. Even Leie probably does. But I’m not. Brod and I are far from it.

In fact, she was sure none of her enemies had ever experienced anything remotely like what she luxuriated in now. Even when it came time to scrub and pry embedded grains of sand out of her wounds, that stinging seemed no great price to pay.

Sitting before a mirror broad enough for dozens, Maia touched her unkempt locks, which for weeks had grown out tangled, filthy, uncombed. It was, indeed, free of the dye her sister had hastily applied while Maia squirmed, helplessly bound and gagged aboard the Reckless. I ought to hack it all off, she decided.

Brod sang while finishing his shower. His voice seemed to be cracking less, or perhaps it was the astonishing resonance lent by that tiled compartment—no doubt a wonder of technology, designed into the cleaning chamber for some mysterious purpose lost to time. Nearby, on the countertop, Maia saw the bloody needle and thread the boy had used to stitch his worst gashes. Maia had not heard him cry out even once.

The little medical kit he had found behind one of the mirrors was woefully ill-equipped. A good thing, since that had made it small enough to overlook under wadded trash when this place was evacuated. There had been a few sealed bandages, which hissed and gave off a funny, emphatically neutral smell on unwrapping, plus a tiny bottle of still-pungent disinfectant, which they decided to leave alone. And finally a pair of scissors, which Maia lifted after all other matters had been attended to, taking a few tentative, uncertain swipes at her hair. There had been nothing else useful to find amid the litter.

Behind her, the clamor of water cut off, and the same nozzles could be heard pouring hot air over her companion’s body. Brod whooped, as noisy in pleasure as he had been stoical in pain. “Hey, Maia! Why not use this machine to do our clothes, too! Clean and dry in five minutes. Toss me yours.”

She bent to pick up her filthy tunic and breeches between a thumb and forefinger, and threw them in his direction. “All right,” she said. “You’ve convinced me. Men are good for something, after all.”

Brod laughed. “Try me out next springtime!” he shouted over the renewed roar of jetting steam. “If you wanna see what a man’s good for.”

“Talk, talk!” she answered. “Lysos shoulda cut all the talk-talk genes off the Y chromosome, an’ put in more action!”

It was the sort of easy repartee she had envied of Naroin and the men and women sailors, devoid of real threat, but carrying a patina of stylish daring. Maia grinned, and her smile transformed her appearance in the mirror. She sat up straight, using her fingers as combs and shaking her trimmed bangs. That’s, better, she thought. Now I wouldn’t scare a three-year-old on the street.

Not that her scars were shameful in the least, but Maia felt glad that most of the knocking around had spared her face. A face that was, nevertheless, transformed by recent months. Some adolescent roundness still hemmed the cheekbones, and her complexion was clear and flushed from scrubbing. Nevertheless, privation and struggle had sculpted a new firmness of outline. It was a different visage than she remembered back when sharing a dim table mirror with her twin, in a shabby attic room full of unrealistic dreams.

“Here they are,” Brod announced, putting two folded garments on the counter next to her. Like Maia herself, the clothes looked and smelled transformed, though badly in need of mending. The same held for Brod, Maia thought, upon turning around. The young man shrugged into his own shirt and trousers, grinning as he poked fingers through long gashes. “We’ll take along some thread, and maybe sew ’em later. I say we move on now, though. Who knows? We may strike it lucky and find someone’s apartment, with a full wardrobe.”

“Plus three bowls of porridge to swipe, and three beds to sleep on?” Maia yawned as she stood, stealing one last glance at the mirror.

I used to see Leie—whenever I looked at my reflection—as well as myself. But this person before me is unique. There is nothing else like her in the world.

Strangely, Maia found no disappointment in that notion. None at all.

Clean and partially rested, they resumed exploring and soon found themselves traversing another zone of ruin, where powerful upheavals had wracked every plastered wall. In places, damage had been rudely patched, while elsewhere, lesions exposed bare, cracked stone. Maia and Brod stepped carefully where the floor canted or faulting had driven a corridor in two. Some of this harm might have come from age—the natural action of millennia since this refuge was evacuated. But to Maia another hypothesis seemed more likely. Blows from space, the marks of which still scarred Jellicoe and other isles, must have come near to toppling even these mighty halls.