David Brin - Glory Season

Now what are they doing back there? Maia wondered as they remained hidden from sight. As if it’s any of my business.

An echoing cry from the ship’s hold sent her scurrying to adjust the conveyor again, prying away at the apparatus so that the buckets flowed smoothly to reach the coal hillocks below. No sooner had she finished jiggering the inboard end than a shout from the woman lorry driver told Maia that the other boom needed one last shift to fill the cargo bed properly. Kicking away the forward chocks, Maia looked forward to diving with a whoop over the side just as soon as the loading run was over. Even the scummy dockside water seemed fantastically inviting at this point.

The final chock stayed stuck. With a sigh, she crawled underneath the conveyer to pound it with the heel of her hand, already bruised and sore. “Come on, you stupid, atyp chunk!” she cursed the tightly wedged block. Her hand throbbed. “Move! You lugar-made piece of homlog—”

A sharp, nipping pain in an alarming quarter caused Maia to jump, slamming her head against a bucket, which responded with a low, throaty gong.

“Ow! What the tark’l hell—?”

Emerging, rubbing her head with one hand and left buttock with the other, Maia blinked in confusion at three sailors who stood grinning, just beyond arm’s reach. She recognized the off-duty crewmen who had seemed so ineptly casual with the stylish male from town. Two smirked, while the third let out a high-pitched giggle.

“Did…” Maia almost couldn’t bring herself to ask. “Did one of you pinch me?”

The nearest, tall and rangy with several days’ beard, laughed again. “An there’s more where’n that come from, if yer want it.”

Maia tilted her head, quite sure she’d misheard. “Why would I want more pain than I’ve already got?”

The giggler, who was short but barrel-chested, tittered again. “Only hurts at first, sweets… then ye ferget all that!”

“Ferget ever’thing but feeling good!” the first one added, to Maia’s growing confusion and irritation. The third man, of average height, with a dark complexion, nudged his companions. “Come on. You can whiff she’s just a virgie. Let’s go clean up an’ head for Bell House.”

There was an eager wildness in the small one’s eyes. “How ’bout it, li’l var? We’ll fetch yer sister off’n our ship. Dress you both fancy. It’ll look like some pretty little clan, holdin’ a frost party for us. Like that idea? Your own little Hall o’ Happiness, right on board!”

He was so close, Maia caught a strange, off-sweet odor, and glimpsed a powdery stain at one corner of his mouth. More importantly, she now recognized, in stance and manner, several signs taught to girls at an early age. His eyes stroked her body closer than the clinging dust. Breathing heavily, his grin exposed teeth glistening with saliva.

There was no mistaking these omens of male rat.

But it wasn’t summer anymore! All the myriad cues that set off aurora season in males were months gone. Oh, surely some men retained libido through autumn, but to make blatant advances… on a var ? One covered head to toe in grime, yet? One without a hint of fecundity—scents from past births?

It was incredible. Maia hadn’t a clue how to react.

“Button an’ jet,” a stern voice cut in.

The lanky sailor kept leering, but the other two stepped back for Wotan’s master-at-arms. “Uh, bosun”—the darker man nodded—“We’re off duty, so we were just—”

“Just leaving, so my work party can go off-duty too, was that it?” Naroin asked, fists on hips, forming the words sweetly, but with an edge that cut.

“Uh huh. Come on, Eth. Eth!” The dark sailor grabbed the one ogling Maia, breaking his unnerving stare and dragging him off. Only then did Maia start controlling her own adrenaline surge. Her mouth felt dry from more than coal dust. The pounding in her chest slowly abated.

“What,” she inquired of Naroin, “was that all about?”

The master-at-arms watched the three sailors walk away, their footsteps neither uneven nor intoxicated. Rather, there was a prowling, even graceful menace to the way they departed. Naroin glanced at Maia.

“Don’t ask me.”

Without another word, she got down and crawled under the conveyor to pound at the recalcitrant chock, giving Maia a few moments more to recover. It was a kindness, yet something had not escaped Maia’s notice. Naroin’s answer implied ignorance. That was what the phrase usually meant. “Don’t ask me.”

But the tone hadn’t conveyed ignorance. No, it had been an order, pure and simple.

Maia’s curiosity flared.

Leie waxed enthusiastic as the sisters strolled the market quarter before dusk, munching fish pies, listening to the cacophonous street-jabber, speculating what deals, intrigues, and treachery must be going on all around them. “This detour could be the best thing to happen to us!” Leie announced. “When we finally do reach the archipelago, we’ll know much more about commercial prospects. I was thinking… maybe next summer we should get work in one of these plastics factories…”

Maia let her twin rattle on, feeling pensive, restive. This afternoon’s incident had left her sensitized. The heretic’s crumpled pamphlet lay unforgotten in her pocket, a reminder that the fervid activity on all sides might not be “normal,” even for a big-city port.

Now that Maia looked for them, she saw signs everywhere of an economy under strain. Near the city hall, bulletin boards showed basic labor, even skilled crafts, going for record low wages. Long-term contracts were nonexistent, and the sole civil-service post on offer was in the city guard. Just like back home , Maia thought. Only more so.

Then there were the men, more than she had ever seen before. And not just playing endless Game of Life tournaments on quayside grids, or whittling to pass the time between voyages, but moving briskly, intently, quite some distance inland. Look down any crowded street and you’d catch sight of two or three, standing out amid the crowds of women. Again, all the shipping might explain it. Except why were such a high percentage of them so young?

In nature, just being male was enough to lower an animal’s life expectancy, and it was no different among humans on Stratos. Storms and shifting reefs, icebergs and equipment failures, sent ships down every year. Few men lived to become retirees. Still, there seemed so many young ones on the streets. It made her nervous.

While most sailors were well-behaved, strolling, shopping, or drinking quietly at taverns set aside for their kind, each day had its whispered tales of incidents like one overheard last night—concerning a bloody corpse found in an alley, the killer fleeing wild-eyed, pursued by city guards-women armed with stun tridents.

After the episode next to the conveyor belt, Maia found herself overreacting to those lazy smiles of halfhearted flirtation young men normally cast this time of year, more as a courtesy than any kind of offer. When one gangly youth winked at her, Maia scowled back, eliciting a look of hurt dismay that instantly made her feel embarrassed, contrite.

Should all males be feared, because a few go crazy?

It wasn’t only men causing problems, after all. The three races—winter folk, men, and vars—mingled peaceably for the most part. But the twins had seen incidents of rowdy summerlings—wildly varied in shape and color, but united in poverty—harassing small groups of identicals from some local clan. Frustration boiling over in rebellious hostility.

Are these really signs? The heretic spoke of a “time of changes,” a term familiar from teledramas and lurid storybooks. Stability, the great gift of Lysos and the Founders, was never guaranteed to any particular generation. Even scripture said a perfect society must flex, from time to time.