Reluctantly, Maia smiled. She hadn't always been the more cautious sister. One long Stratos year ago, it had been Leie who always took careful gauge before acting, and Maia who kept coming up with schemes that got them in trouble. We're alike, all right. We just keep getting out of phase. And maybe that's good. Someone has to take turns being the sensible one.

"This is different," she replied, trying to keep to the point. "It's real life now."

Leie shrugged. "Want to talk about life? Look at those cretins, over there." She nodded toward a paved area on the quay, laid out in a geometric grid, where a number of seamen stood idly, pondering an array of small black or white disks. "They call their game Life, and take it damn seriously. Does that make it real, too?"

Maia refused to acknowledge the pun. Whenever ships were in port, clusters of men could be found here, playing the ancient game with a passion matched only during auroral months by their seasonal interest in sex. The men, deckhands off some freighter, wore rough, sleeveless shirts and metal ringlets on their biceps denoting rank. A few of the onlookers glanced up as the sisters passed by. Two of the younger ones smiled.

If it had still been summertime, Maia would have demurely looked away and even Leie would have shown caution. But as the aurorae faded and Wengel Star waned, so too ebbed the hot blood in males. They became calmer creatures, more companionable. Autumn was the best season for shipping out, then. Maia and Leie could spend up to twenty standard months at sea before being forced ashore by next year's rut. By then, they had better have found a niche, something they were good at, and started their nest egg.

Leie boldly met the sailors' amiable, lazy leers, hands on hips and eye to eye, as if daring them to back up their bluster. One towheaded youth seemed to consider it. But of course, if he had any libido to spare this time of year, he wouldn't go wasting it on a pair of dirt-poor virgins! The young men laughed, and so did Leie.

"Come on," she told Maia as the men turned back to regard their game pieces. Leie readjusted her duffel. "It's nearing tide. Let's get aboard and shake this town off our feet."

"What do you mean, you're not sailing? For how long?" Maia couldn't believe this. The old fart of a purser chewed a toothpick as he rocked back on his stool by the gangplank. Unshaven in rumpled fatigues, he nudged the nearby barreltop where their refund lay . . . plus a little more thrown in for "compensation."

"Dunno, li'l liss. Prob'ly a month. Mebbe two."

"A month!" Leie's voice cracked. "You spew of wormy bottom muck! The weather's fair. You've got cargo and paying passengers. What do you mean?"

"Got a better offer." The purser shrugged. "One o' the big clans bought our cargo, just t'get us to stay. Seems they likes our boys. Wants 'em sticking round awhile, I reckon."

Maia felt a sinking realization in the pit of her stomach. "I guess some mothers want to start winter breeding early, this year," she said, trying to make sense of this catastrophe. "It's risky, but if they catch the men with heat still in them—"

"Which house!" Leie interrupted, in no mood for rational appraisal. She kicked the barrel, causing the money sticks to rattle. The grizzled sailor, massing twice Leie's fifty kilos, placidly scratched his beard.

"Lesse now. Was it the Tildens? Or was it Lam—"

"Lamatia?" Leie cried, this time flinging her arms so wildly the purser scrambled to his feet. "Now, lissie. No cause t'get excited . . ." Maia grabbed Leie's arm as she seemed about to throw the sailor's stool at him. "It makes sense!" Leie screamed. "That's why they opened the guesthouse weeks early, and had us pouring wine for those lunks all night!"

Maia sometimes envied her sister's refuge in tantrums. Her own reaction, a numb retreat to logic, seemed less satisfying than Leie's way of breaking everything in sight. "Leie," she urged hoarsely. "It can't be Lamatia. They only deal with high-class guilds, not the sort of trash we can afford passage with." It was satisfying to catch the purser wincing at her remark. "Anyway, we're better off dealing with honest men. There are other ships."

Her sister whirled. "Yeah? Remember how we studied? Buying books and even net time, researching every port this tub was going to? We had a plan for every stop . . . people to see. Questions. Prospects. Now it's all wasted!"

How could it be wasted? Maia wondered woodenly. All those hours studying, memorizing the Oscco Isles and Western Sea. …

Maia realized neither of them was reacting well to sudden despair.

"Let's go," she told her sister, scooping up the money and trying for both their sakes to keep worry out of her voice. "We'll find another ship, Leie. A better one, you'll see."

That proved easier said than done. There were many sails in Port Sanger, from hand-carved, hard-edged windwings, to stormjammers, to clippers with flapping sheets of woven squid-silk. At the diplomatic docks, just below the harbor fort, there was even one rare, sleek cruiser whose banks of gleaming solar panels basked in the angled sunshine. Maia and Leie did not bother with such rich craft, whose crews would have spurned their paltry coinsticks as fishing lures. They did try their luck with well-turned freighters flying banners of the Cloud Whale League, or the Blue Heron Society, voyager guilds whose gray-bearded commodores sometimes called at Lamatia Hall to interview bright boys for lives at sea.

According to children's fables, once upon a time boys like Albert simply joined the guilds of their fathers. Even summer girls used to grow up knowing which daddy-ship would take them someday, free of charge, to wherever opportunities shone brightest for young vars.

Clone-child you must stay within,

Home-hive to protect, renew.

Var-child you must strive and win,

Half-mom and half-man, it's true.

Let the heartwinds blow away,

Winter's frost, or summer's bright.

Name the special things that stay,

Fixed, to guide you through the night.

Stratos Mother, Founders' Gifts,

Your own skill and eager hands.

One more boon, the lucky lifts,

Father ticket to far lands.

One old teacher, Savant Judeth — a Lamai with unusual sympathy for her summerling charges — once testified that truth underlaid the old tales. "In those days, each sailing society kept close contact with one house in Port Sanger, carrying clan cargoes and finding welcome in clan hostels, summer and winter both. When var girls turned five, their fathers — or their fathers' compeers — used to carry them off as treasures in their own right, helping them get settled in lands far away."

To Maia it had sounded like romantic drivel, much too sappy to be true. But Leie had asked, "Why'd it stop being so?"

Momentarily wistful, Savant Judeth looked anything but typical for a stern-browed Lamai.

"Wish I knew, seedling. It may have to do with the rise in summer births. There seemed a lot when I was young. Now it's up to one in four. So many vars." The old woman shook her head. "And rivalry among the clans and guilds has grown fierce; there's even outright fighting . . ." Judeth had sighed. "All I can say is, we used to know which men would lodge here, to spark clones during cooltime and sire sons during the brief hot. Oh, and beget you summer girls, as well. But those days are gone."

Hesitantly, Leie had asked if Judeth knew their father.

"Clevin? Oh, yes. I can even see him in your faces. Navigator on the Sea Lion he was. A good egg, as men go. Your womb mother, Lysos keep her, would favor none other. You got to know men in those days. Pleasant it was, in a strange way."

And hard to imagine. Whether as noisy creatures who sheltered in the getta during summer, slaking their rut in houses of ease, or as taciturn guests during the cool seasons, lounging like cats while the Lamai sisters coaxed them with wine and plays and games of Chess or Life, either way, they were soon off again. Their names vanished, even if they left their seed. Yet, for one entire year after hearing Savant Judeth's tale, Maia used to search among the masts for the Sea Lion's banner, imagining the expression on her father's sunburnt face when he laid eyes upon the two of them. Then she learned, Pinniped Guild no longer sailed the Parthenia Sea. The var daughters its men had sired, five long cycles ago, were on their own.