"You got hopes! The committee's already picked those who'll get first crack. You'll wait your turn, and chew a Kilo of ovop if you're lucky."
"Yuck," the second one grimaced. Yet a covetous gleam did not leave her eye as she watched the man from space depart for the quarterdeck.
Maia's thoughts whirled. Apparently, the rads had designs to keep Renna busy while they sheltered him and dickered with the Reigning Council. Her first reaction was outrage. How dare they assume he'd go along, just like that?
Then she bit back her initial wrath and tried hard to see it calmly. I guess he's in their debt, Maia admitted reluctantly. It would be churlish to refuse his rescuers at least an effort, even in the dead of winter. The Radical organization had no doubt promised members of the rescue party rewards if they succeeded — perhaps sponsorship of a winter sparking, with an apartment and trust fund to see a first cloneling child through primary schooling. The leaders, Kiel and Thalia, will be first, Maia realized. Given her education and talents, Kiel would then be in a good position to become a founding mother of a growing clan.
So politics is just part of it, Maia thought, considering the motives of her former cottage-mates. None of my damn business, she told herself, knowing that she cared intensely, anyway. The first rad glanced at Maia standing nearby, listening. "Of course, there's an element of choice on his part, too," she said. "Equal rights, y'know. And there's no accounting for alien tastes. . . ." The var turned to Maia, and winked.
Maia flushed and strode away. Leaning on the starboard rail, she stared across foam-flecked waves, unable to contain her roiling thoughts. The busybody had voiced a question Maia herself hadn't admitted: I wonder what Renna likes in women? Shaking her head vigorously, she made a resolute effort to divert her thoughts. Troublesome maunderings like these were at best impractical, and she had vowed to be a practical person.
Think. Soon they'll take Renna far away and you'll be alone in a big city. When he's long gone, you'll he left to live off what you know.
What assets do you have? What skills can you sell? She tried to concentrate — to bring forth a catalog of resources — but found herself facing only disconcerting blankness.
The blankness was not neutral. Born in a tense moment of angst, it spread outward from her dark thoughts and seemed to color her view of her surroundings, saturating the seascape, washing it like a canvas painted from a savage palette, in primitive and brutal shades. The air felt charged, like before a lightning storm, and a sense of fell expectation set her heart pounding.
Maia tried closing her eyes to escape the distressing epiphany, but extracted impressions only pursued her. Squeezing her eyelids shut caused more than familiar, squidgy sensations. A coruscation of light and dark speckles flickered and whirled, changing too fast to be tracked. She had known the phenomenon all her life, but now it both frightened and fascinated her. Combining in overlapping waves, the speckles seemed to offer a fey kind of meaning, drawing her away from centered vision toward something both beautiful and terrible.
Breath escaped her lungs in a sigh. Maia found the will to rub her eyes and reopen them. Purple blotches throbbed concentrically before fading away, along with some eerie, unwelcome sense of formless form. Yet, for a stretch of time there lay within Maia a vague but lingering surety. Looking outward, she no longer saw, but continued imagining a vista of everchanging patterns, stretching into infinite recursion across the cloud-flecked sky. Momentarily, the heavens seemed made of ephemeral, quickly wavering, emblematic forms, overlapping and merging to have the illusion of solidity she had been taught to call reality.
Relief mixed with awed regret as the instant passed. It could only have lasted moments. The atmosphere resumed its character of heavy, moist air. The wood rail beneath her hands felt firm.
Now I know I'm going crazy, Maia thought sardonically. As if she didn't have troubles enough already.
Breakfast was called. Tentatively, as if the deck might shift beneath her feet, Maia went to take her turn in line.
