Maia sighed. Renna seemed determined to wear down her carefully tailored apathy with sheer, overpowering enthusiasm. "Okay," she said warily.
"Great! First, let's verify the basics." He held up one finger. "Summertime matings result in normal, genetically diverse variants, or vars. Is that word derogatory, by the way? I've heard it used insultingly, in Caria."
"I'm a var," Maia said tonelessly. "No point being insulted by a fact."
"Mm. I guess you'd say I'm a var, too."
Of course. All boys are vars. Only the name doesn't cling to them like a parasite. But she knew Renna meant well, even when dredging clumsily through matters that hurt.
"All right, then. During autumn, winter, and spring, Stratoin women have parthenogenetic clones. In fact, they often can't conceive in summer till they've already had a winter child."
"You're doing fine so far."
"Good. Now, even cloning requires the involvement of men, as sparklers, since sperm induces placental—"
"That's sparkers," Maia corrected in a low voice.
"Yeah, right. Okay, here's the part I've been having trouble with." Renna paused. "It's about how Lysos meddled with sexual attraction. You see, on most hominid worlds, sex is an eternal distraction. People dwell on it from puberty to senility, spend vast measures of time and money, and sometimes act incredibly disagreeably, all because of a gene-driven, built-in obsession."
"You make it sound awful."
"Mm. It has compensations. But, arrangements on Stratos seem intended to cut down the amount of energy centered on sex. All in keeping with good Herlandist ideology."
"Go on," she said, growing interested despite herself. Do people on other planets really think about sex more than I, How do they get anything done?
Renna continued. "Stratoin men are stimulated by visual cues in the summer sky, when women are least aroused. Today, on the other hand, I got to witness this peculiar ice-frost you get in winter—"
"Glory."
"Yeah. A natural product of some pretty amazing stratospheric processing that I plan looking into. And it stimulates women!"
"So I'm told." Maia felt warm. "According to legend, Lysos took the Old Craziness out of men and women, and poked around for someplace to put it. Up in the sky seemed safe enough. But one summer Wengel Star came along. He stole some of the madness and made a flag to wave and shine and put the old rut back into men, through their eyes."
"And during high winter it sneaks back down as Glory?"
"Right, seizing women through their noses." "Mm. Nice fable. Still, doesn't it seem queer that women and men should be so perfectly off-sync in desire?"
"Not perfectly. If it were, nobody'd get born at all." "Oh sure, I'm oversimplifying. Men can enjoy sex in winter and women in summer. But how odd that males are aggressive suitors during one season, only to grow demure half a year later, when women seek them out."
Maia shrugged. "Man and woman are opposites. Maybe all we can hope for is compromise."
Renna nodded in a manner reminiscent of an absent-minded but eager savant from Burbidge Clan, whom the Lamai mothers used to hire to teach varlings trigonometry. "But however carefully Lysos designed your ancestors' genes, time and evolution would erase any setup that's not naturally stable. Those few males who escaped the program just a little would pass on their genes more often, and so on for their offspring. The same holds for women. Over time, male and female urges would come into rough synchrony again, with lots of tension and two-way negotiating, just like on other worlds.
"But here's the brilliant part. On Stratos there's greater payoff, in strict biological terms, for a woman to have clone children than normal sons and daughters, who carry only half her genes. So the trait of women seeking winter matings would reinforce."
Maia blinked. "And the same logic applies to men?"
"Exactly! A Stratoin male gets no genetic benefit from sex in winter! No reason to get all worked up, since any child spawned won't be his in the most basic sense. The cycle tends to bolster the cues Lysos established." He shook his head. "I'd need a good computer model to see if it's as stable as it looks. There are some inherent problems, like inbreeding. Over time, each clone family acts like a single individual, flooding Stratos with . . ."
Renna's enthusiasm was infectious. Maia had never known anyone so uninhibited, so unrestrained by conventional ideas. Still, a part of her wondered. Is he always like this? Was everybody like this, where he came from?
"I don't know," she cut in when he paused for breath. "What you're saying makes sense . . . but what about that happy, stable world Lysos wanted? Are we happy? Happier than people on other planets?"
