Halfway across the Great Bridge, they stopped to stare down into the blackness of the crevasse that divided the city. Several ages ago the ground here had been full of firestone; the first settlements had grown up around shallow mines. Later an elaborate system of tunnels had been built, plunging deep into the stone. But early in the eleventh age there’d been an accident in the mines and the whole deposit had been ignited. Half the city had been destroyed, and every trace of fuel had been burned away. All that remained was this jagged abyss, a taunting geochemical map in reverse: here’s what you could have had, now that it’s gone.
“I think every world probably started out with much the same mixture of minerals,” Tullia said. “Maybe they were all part of a single, primal world, eons ago. But I suspect that, whatever its origin, there are only three things that can happen to a world: it remains dark, like Gemma and Gemmo; it catches fire, like the sun and the stars; or life comes along to perform the same kind of chemistry in a more controlled way.”
Yalda gazed into the hole left behind by the Great Ignition. “This place makes me think that those possibilities need not be mutually exclusive.”
“True enough,” Tullia replied. “In fact, for all we know that might be a universal truth. Maybe the stars didn’t just burst into light; maybe they started out covered in plants, which grew too productive for their own good. All the liberators we’ve discovered so far are plant extracts, after all. And maybe it’s just a matter of time before the same thing happens here—either the plants do it, or the honor goes to someone in the chemistry department.”
“Now I’m worried,” Yalda said, only half-joking. “If anyone can set calmstone on fire, it’s a chemist.”
They continued across the bridge into the south quarter. “I used to work in that restaurant,” Tullia said, pointing to a brightly lit building on a crowded side street. “When I was a student.”
“Is that where we’re going?”
“Only if you want to drop in for a spot of arson.”
“You sound nostalgic.”
“The clientele were mostly Councilors’ sons and their entourages,” Tullia said. “How could I not have fond memories?”
She led the way to another restaurant, one that Yalda had passed many times before, but instead of taking the front entrance they slipped into a winding alley that ran behind the kitchen. Tullia exchanged shouted greetings with a woman Yalda glimpsed working inside, but they continued down the alley until they reached an unlit flight of stairs. It took Yalda a moment to orient herself; the stairs led back to a second story over the restaurant.
“Your friends aren’t eating with everyone else?” Yalda was growing puzzled, and a little anxious; why were they creeping around in the dark like this?
Tullia paused on the stairs. “This is a place to talk freely, without worrying who’s listening,” she explained. “We call it the Solo Club—though there are only a few genuine solos among us. Some of us had cos who died, some of us are runaways, some of us are just thinking about breaking the tie.”
Yalda had heard of runaways—and thoroughly approved, in principle—but it was something else to be told that there was a whole cabal of radicals huddled a few strides away at the top of these stairs.
She said, “If the city police—”
“The police won’t come here,” Tullia assured her. “We make it worth their while to stay away.”
Yalda steadied herself. One reason she’d rarely befriended the women she’d encountered in Zeugma was the disparity between their expectations and her own. Here, finally, was a chance to meet a few whose lives did not revolve around the imminent certainty of childbirth. What kind of coward would she be to forego that, just because some of them were on the wrong side of the law?
She said, “I’d like to meet your friends.”
Though the stairway was dark, the curtain at the top parted to reveal a room as brightly lit as the restaurant below. No one was huddled behind partitions, whispering seditiously; they were seated on the floor in small groups, clustered around lamps and dishes, talking and buzzing and chirping just like students in the university food hall.
One woman in a group of three turned toward them and called to Tullia. They approached, and Tullia made introductions.
“Daria, Antonia, Lidia: this is Yalda. We only met a few chimes ago, but she’s into the glorious mysteries of optics, so she must be worth knowing.”
“Please join us,” said Daria. There was a diagram of some kind displayed on her chest, though Yalda could make no immediate sense of it.
As they sat, Tullia asked about the picture.
“I was just talking about the western shrub vole,” Daria explained. “The young need care for half a year after birth, but they have no sterile caregivers; instead, one of each brood delays reproduction for a season. Children whose mother was an early reproducer are cared for by their late-reproducing aunt; those whose mother was a late reproducer—making their aunt the early reproducer—are cared for by that aunt’s late-reproducing child.”
Yalda could interpret the diagram, now; the lines sloping down across Daria’s chest represented the life of each vole, with dashed lines when they were so young as to need care, and annotations showing which relative provided it. “Some late reproducers look after two young, some four,” she noticed. “They all look after their sister’s children, but if their mother was an early reproducer they’re stuck with their aunt’s children as well. That’s hardly fair.”
Daria was amused. “And the early reproducers live half as long as the others—of course it’s not fair! But it’s worth learning about the full range of possibilities nature has invented, in the hope that one day we can steal the useful parts and assemble them into something better.”
Before Yalda could ask how anyone might steal a useful part of another species’ biology, Lidia said, “How about a drug that lets men reproduce? That would make a nice addition to holin!”
“I doubt that a drug alone could do that,” Daria replied. “Men aren’t likely to possess any kind of dormant capacity for childbirth, given that all our close relatives have sterile caregivers. Even when the young need more physical protection than education—so the caregivers tend to be quite large—the pattern is the same: reproduction or care, never both. The voles are an interesting exception, but they’re on a distant branch of the family tree.”
Daria smoothed the picture away, and the conversation turned to more mundane matters. As the women recounted the day’s tribulations, Yalda picked up a little more about Tullia’s circle of friends. Daria taught medicine at the university, while Lidia worked in a dye factory and Antonia sold lamps in the markets.
“Anyone for six-dice?” Lidia suggested.
“Sure,” said Daria. The others agreed.
“I don’t know the rules,” Yalda confessed.
Lidia pulled a handful of small cubical dice from a pocket. “We each start with six of these; the sides are numbered one to three in red and in blue.” She gave one to Yalda to inspect. “You roll your dice, and your total is the sum of the blue faces minus the sum of the red. There are some simple rules which decide how many dice you should have, according to your total; if it’s not correct, you either have to get rid of some dice, or collect some from the bank. When you collect, you always take pairs and set them down with the same number showing, one red one blue, so your total is unchanged.
“Then, we take turns playing. The player can make any change to one of their own dice that they can balance with a corresponding change to another person’s. For example, I can turn my red three into a blue two by turning your blue three into a red two. Then both of us adjust our numbers of dice to fit our new totals, and on it goes.”
“How does someone win?” Yalda asked.
“Their total hits a gross, or they have the highest total after everyone has made six dozen moves.”
“Those rules about the numbers of dice—?”
“You’ll pick them up easily,” Lidia promised.
In fact, it took Yalda three games before she really knew what she was doing. Lidia won the first two, Daria the third.
After the fourth game, a win to Lidia again, Antonia made her apologies and rose to leave.
“My co thinks I’m taking a delivery,” she said. “But he knows they never come much later than this, so I’d better not push my luck.”
When Antonia had left, Yalda asked glumly, “How does anyone put up with that?” Whatever taunts and humiliations she’d suffered herself, at least she was nobody’s prisoner.
“Things are going to change,” Lidia said. “Once we get a few women on the City Council, we can start to work toward banning forced returns.”
“Women on the Council?” The idea struck Yalda as utterly fanciful. “Are there any women with that kind of money?”
Tullia pointed out a woman seated on the far side of the room. “She owns the company that distributes grain throughout the city. She could easily afford to pay for a seat; the real issue is wearing down the men who are refusing to let her buy in.”
“We’ll live to see it happen,” Lidia declared confidently. “There are a dozen wealthy women in this city who are working toward the same agenda. First, legalize runaways. Second, legalize holin.”
“What’s holin?” This was the second time Lidia had mentioned it, but Yalda had never heard the word used anywhere else.
For a moment the whole group was silent, then Daria said, “I know you only met her tonight, Tullia, so I don’t blame you at all. But if an educated woman in Zeugma doesn’t know what holin is, what hope has anyone got out in the sticks?”