Including crime?

The blonde woman lay sprawled with one arm over her eyes, snoring softly. Maia stood up with a sigh. I know I'm gonna regret this.

She took one hesitant step.. Another. A floorboard creaked, making her flinch. She peered near her feet. Through the dust, nail heads showed where the joists were. Maia resumed her creep more carefully, until finally she crouched next to the sleeping woman.

The suitcase was woven from coarse fabric, with designs of abstract, interlocking geometric forms. A soft hum told of some metal part vibrating in harmony with the magnetic-pulse impeller of the locomotive. Examining the lock mechanism, she saw that the simple keyhole was cosmetic camouflage. Three small buttons protruded along one side. Maia blew a silent sigh, recognizing expensive technology. There would be a code for pressing them in a certain order, or an alarm might go off.

Maia backed away cautiously, and returned with a thin, stiff length of wire, normally used to bind heavy articles of baggage. Checking once more that her "assistant" still slept, she began working one end of the wire between the heavy fabric's warp and weft. With a final shove, it pierced through and met softer resistance, presumably Tizbe's clothes. Pushing farther revealed nothing. Maia drew the wire out again, and repeated the procedure a few centimeters away, with the same result.

I could be wrong . . . about a lot of things. Maia squatted on her haunches, pondering. Prudence urged that she forget about it.

Curiosity and obstinacy were stronger. She shifted her weight, maneuvering to get at the satchel from another angle …

A floorboard groaned, like a dying animal. Maia's breath caught. It can't have been as loud as that! It's just because I'm nervous. Eyeing Tizbe, Maia wondered what she'd say if the clone wakened to find her here. The hitchhiker smacked her lips and changed position slightly, then settled down again, snoring a little louder. Dry-mouthed, Maia positioned her tool at a new location and worked it once more between the fibers. It resisted, penetrated, and then halted with an abrupt, faint tinkling sound.

Aha!

She repeated the experiment several more times, delving a rough map of the satchel's interior. For a var on the road, Tizbe seemed to be carrying few personal effects and a lot of heavy glass bottles.

Gingerly, Maia backed away until she was safely at her desk again. She tossed aside the wire, chewing her lower lip. So, now you know Tizbe's a courier, carrying something mysterious. You still can't prove anything illegal's going on. All the sneaking around, the whispers at dockside, rich clones pretending to be poor vars, those might point to crime. Or they might have legitimate reasons for secrecy, business reasons.

A second aspect worried Maia more. The chaos in Lanargh may have been partly caused by this. The accident in Clay Town sure was. Could anything that makes so much trouble be legal?

In theory, the law was where all three social orders met as equals. In practice, it took time to learn the marsh of planetary, regional, and local codes, as well as precedents and traditions passed down from the Founding, and even Old Earth. Large clans often deputized one or more full daughters to study law, argue cases, and cast block votes during elections. What young var could afford to give more than a passing glance through dusty legal tomes, even when they were available? The system might seem intentionally designed to exclude the lower classes, except why bother, since clones far outnumbered summerlings, anyway?

Maia shook her head. She needed advice, wisdom, but how to get it? Long Valley didn't even have an organized Guardia. What need, with reavers and other coastal troubles far away, and men banished during rut time?

There was one place Maia could go. Where a young var like her was supposed to take troubles beyond her grasp.

She decided she had better try something else, first.

The train's last stop for the day was Holly Lock. This time, Tizbe didn't even pretend to help as Maia hauled packages, struggled with the cumbersome Musseli accounting system, then faced the scrutiny of a hairsplitting freight-mistress. With an airy "g'bye-see-you-round!" the blonde traveler was gone. By the time Maia finished, she was telling herself good riddance. Let those cryptic bottles be someone else's problem.

Holly Lock was little more than a cluster of warehouses, grain elevators, and cattle chutes on one side of the tracks, and a warren of small houses for singleton vars and microclans on the other. There was nothing resembling even the modest "town center" of Port Sanger, where a few civil servants performed their functions, ignored by the population at large. Hefting her bag, Maia paused in front of the station office, where an older, slightly-less-unfriendly-looking Musseli chatted with a burly woman whose suntan was the color of rich copper. As Maia stood indecisively in the doorway, the stationmaster looked up with a raised eyebrow. "Yes?"

On impulse, Maia decided. "Excuse me for intruding, madame, but . . ." She swallowed. "Can you tell me where I'd find a savant in town? One who has net access? I need to buy a consultation."

The two older women looked at each other. The stationmaster snickered. "A savant, you say? A savant. I think mebbe I heard o' such things. Is they anythin' like smart bees?" Her sarcastic rendition of man-speech made Maia blush.

The woman with the weathered skin had eyes that crinkled when she smiled. "Now, Tess. She's an earnest little varling. Lysos, can you figure what a consult's gonna cost her, not gettin' clan rates? Must need it pretty bad." She turned to Maia. "Got no licensed savants in this part o' the valley, little virgie. But tell you what. I'm swinging past Jopland Hold on my way back to the mine. Could give you a lift."

"Um. Do they have—"

"An uplink, sure. Richest mothers in these parts. Got full console an' everything. But maybe you won't have to use it. What you're really needing, I figure, is some good motherly advice. Could save you the cost of a consult."

Motherly advice was what she had been taught to seek, if ever in trouble out in the world. Ideally, the mothers of the largest, best-respected local clan were available not just to their own daughters, but anyone, even man or var, who was righteous and in need. In fact, Maia didn't have much appetite for a band of elderly clones, accustomed to holding feudal court out in the sticks, pouring platitudes and assigning her verses from the Book of the Founders.

But she says they have a console.

"All right," she said, and turned to the stationmaster. "I'm afraid that means—"

"Don't tell me. You may not make it back in time to catch the 6:02. Oh, shoot." The Musseli yawned to show how upset she was. "I guess there's always another var waitin' in the pool. Come back and we'll put you in queue for another run, sometime."

Great. Lost seniority and maybe a week waiting around for another train. This is already costing me plenty.

Maia had a gnawing feeling it was going to add up to a lot more, before she was done.

We are programmed to find sex pleasurable for one simple reason — because animals who mate have offspring. Those who do not mate have none. Traits that result in successful reproduction get reinforced and passed on. Evolution is that simple.

It is therefore useless to bemoan as evil the fact that men tend toward aggression. Among our ancestors, aggression often helped males have more offspring than their competitors. "Good" or "evil" had little to do with it.

That is, until we reached consciousness, at which point, good and evil became pertinent indeed! Behaviors which might be excusable in dumb beasts can seem perverted, criminal, when performed by thinking beings. Just because a trait is "natural" does not oblige us to keep it.