Glory Season

1

Sharply angled sunlight splashed across the table by Maia’s bed, illuminating a meter-long braid of lustrous brown hair. Freshly cut. Draped across the rickety night-stand and tied off at both ends with blue ribbons.

Stellar-shell blue, color of departure. And next to the braid, a pair of gleaming scissors stood like a dancer balancing on toe, one point stabbed into the rough tabletop. Blinking past sleep muzziness, Maia stared at these objects—illumined by a trapezoid of slanting dawn light—struggling to separate them from fey emblems of her recent dream.

At once, their meaning struck.

“Lysos,” Maia gasped, throwing off the covers. “Leie really did it!”

Sudden shivers drew a second realization. Her sister had also left the window open! Zephyrs off Stern Glacier blew the tiny room’s dun curtains, driving dust balls across the plank floor to fetch against her bulging duffel. Rushing to slam the shutters, Maia glimpsed ruddy sunrise coloring the slate-roofs of Port Sanger’s castlelike clan houses. The breeze carried warbling gull cries and scents of distant icebergs, but appreciating mornings was one vice she had never shared with her early-rising twin.

“Ugh.” Maia put a hand to her head. “Was it really my idea to work last night?”

It had seemed logical at the time. “We’ll want the latest news before heading out,” Maia had urged, signing them both for one last stint waiting tables in the clan guesthouse. “We might overhear something useful, and an extra coin or two won’t hurt.”

The men of the timber ship, Gallant Tern, had been full of gossip all right, and sweet Lamatian wine. But the sailors had no eye for two adolescent summerlings—two variant brats—when there were plump winter Lamais about, all attractively identical, well-dressed and well-mannered. Spoiling and flattering the officers, the young Lamais had snapped their fingers till past midnight, sending Maia and Leie to fetch more pitchers of heady ale.

The open window must have been Leie’s way of getting even.

Oh, well, Maia thought defensively. She’s had her share of bad ideas, too. What mattered was that they had a plan, the two of them, worked out year after patient year in this attic room. All their lives, they had known this day would come. No telling how many dreary jobs we’ll have to put our backs to, before we find our niche.

Just as Maia was thinking about slipping back between the covers, the North Tower bell clanged, rattling this shabby corner of the sprawling Lamai compound. In higher-class precincts, winter folk would not stir for another hour, but summer kids got used to rising in bitter cold—such was the irony of their name. Maia sighed, and began slipping into her new traveling clothes. Black tights of stretchy web-cloth, a white blouse and halter, plus boots and a jacket of strong, oiled leather. The outfit was more than many clans provided their departing var-daughters, as the mothers diligently pointed out. Maia tried hard to feel fortunate.

While dressing, she pondered the severed braid. It was longer than an outstretched arm, glossy, yet lacking those rich highlights each full-blooded Lamai wore as a birthright. It looked so out of place, Maia felt a brief chill, as if she were regarding Leie’s detached hand, or head. She caught herself making a hand-sign to avert ill luck, and laughed nervously at the bad habit. Country superstitions would betray her as a bumpkin in the big cities of Landing Continent.

Leie hadn’t even laced her braid very well, given the occasion. At this moment, in other rooms nearby, Mirri, Kirstin, and the other summer fivers would be fixing their tresses for today’s Parting Ceremony. The twins had argued over whether to attend, but now Leie had typically and impulsively acted on her own. Leie probably thinks this gives her seniority as an adult, even though Granny Modine says I was first out of our birth-momma’s womb.

Fully dressed, Maia turned to encompass the attic room where they had grown up through five long Stratoin years—fifteen by the old calendar—summer children spinning dreams of winter glory, whispering a scheme so long forming, neither recalled who had thought it first. Now… today… the ship Grim Bird would take them away toward far western lands where opportunities were said to lay just waiting for bright youths like them.

That was also the direction their father-ship had last been seen, some years ago. “It can’t hurt to keep our eyes open,” Leie had proposed, though Maia had wondered, skeptical, If we ever did meet our gene-father, what would there be to talk about?

Tepid water still flowed from the corner tap, which Maia took as a friendly omen. Breakfast is included, too, she thought while washing her face. If I make it to kitchen before the winter smugs arrive.

Facing the tiny table mirror—a piece of clan property she would miss terribly—Maia wove the over-and-between braid pattern of Lamatia Family, obstinately doing a neater job than Leie had. Top and bottom ends she tied off with blue ribbons, purchased out of her pocket. At one point, her own brown eyes looked back at her, faintly shaded by distinctly un-Lamai brows, gifts of her unknown male parent. Regarding those dark irises, Maia was taken aback to find what she wanted least to see—a moist glitter of fear. A constriction. Awareness of a wide world, awaiting her beyond this familiar bay. A world both enticing and yet notoriously pitiless to solitary young vars short on either wit or luck. Crossing her arms over her breast, Maia fought a quaver of protest.

How can I leave this room? How can they make me go?

Abrupt panic closed in like encasing ice, locking her limbs, her breath. Only Maia’s racing heart seemed capable of movement, rocking her chest, accelerating helplessly… until she broke the spell with one serrated thought:

What if Leie comes back and finds me like this?

A fate worse than anything the mere world had to offer! Maia laughed tremulously, shattering the rigor, and lifted a hand to wipe her eyes. Anyway, it’s not like I’ll be completely alone out there. Lysos help me, I’ll always have Leie.

At last she contemplated the gleaming scissors, embedded in the tabletop. Leie had left them as a challenge. Would Maia kneel meekly before the clan matriarchs, be given sonorous advice, a Kiss of Blessing, and a formal shearing? Or would she take leave boldly, without asking or accepting a hypocritical farewell?

What gave her pause, ironically, was a consideration of pure practicality.

With the braid off, there’ll be no breakfast in the kitchen.

She had to use both hands, rocking the shears to win them free of the pitted wood. Maia turned the twin blades in a shaft of dawn light streaming through the shutters.

She laughed aloud and decided.

Even winter kids were seldom perfectly identical. Rare summer doubles like Maia and Leie could be told apart by a discerning eye. For one thing, they were mirror twins. Where Maia had a tiny mole on her right cheek, Leie’s was on the left. Their hair parted on opposite sides, and while Maia was right-handed, her sibling claimed left-handedness was a sure sign of destined greatness. Still, the town priestess had scanned them. They had the same genes.

Early on, an idea had occurred to them—to try using this fact to their advantage.

There were limits to their scheme. They could hardly put it over on a savant, or among the lordly merchant houses of Landing Continent, where rich clans still used the data-wizardry of the Old Network. So Maia and Leie had decided to stay at sea awhile, with the sailors and drifter-folk, until they found some rustic town where local mothers were gullible, and male visitors more taciturn than the gossipy, bearded cretins who sailed the Parthenia Sea.

Lysos make it so. Maia tugged an earlobe for luck and resumed hauling her gear down the twisty back stairs of Lamatia’s Summer Creche, worn smooth by the passage of generations. At each slit window, a chill breeze stroked the newly bare nape of her neck, eliciting a creepy feeling that she was being followed. The duffel was heavy, and Maia nursed a dark suspicion that her sister might have slipped in something extra while her back was turned. If they had kept their braids for another hour, the mothers might have assigned a lugar to carry their effects to the docks. But Leie said it made you soft, counting on lugars, and on that she was probably right. There would be no docile giants to ease their work at sea.

The Summer Courtyard belied its name, permanently shadowed by the towers where winterlings dwelled behind banks of glass windows with silk curtains. The dim quad was deserted save a single bent figure, pushing a broom under dour, stone effigies of early Lamai clan mothers, all carved with uniform expressions of purse-lipped disdain. Maia paused to watch Coot Bennett sweep autumn demi-leaves, his gray beard waving in quiet tempo. Not legally a man, but a “retiree,” Bennett had been taken in when his sailing guild could no longer care for him—a tradition long abandoned by other matriarchies, but proudly maintained by Lamatia.

On first taking residence, a touch of fire had remained in Bennett’s eyes, his cracking voice. All physical virility was certifiably gone, but well-remembered, for he used to pinch bottoms now and then, rousing girlish shrieks of delighted outrage, and glaring reproval from the matrons. While formally a tutor for the handful of male children, he became a favorite of all summer kids for his thrilling, embroidered tales of the wild, open sea. That year, Bennett took a special shine to Maia, encouraging her interest in constellations, and the mannish art of navigation.

Not that they ever actually talked, the way two women might, about life and feelings and matters of substance. Still, Maia fondly recalled a strange friendship that even Leie never understood. Alas, too soon, the fire had left Bennett’s old eyes. He stopped telling coherent stories, lapsing into gloomy silence while whittling ornate flutes he no longer bothered to play.

The old man stooped over his broom as Maia bent to catch his rheumy eye. Her impression, perhaps freighted with her own imaginings, was of an active void. Of anxious, studied evasion of the world. Did this happen naturally to males no longer able to work ships? Or had the Lamai mothers somehow done it to him, both erasing a nuisance and guaranteeing he really was “retired”? It made her curious about the fabled sanctuaries, which few women entered, where most men finally went to die.

Two seasons ago, Maia had tried drawing Bennett out of his decline, leading him by hand up narrow spiral steps to the small dome holding the clan’s reflecting telescope. Sight of the gleaming instrument, where months earlier they had spent hours together scanning the heavens, seemed to give the old man pleasure. His gnarled hands caressed its brass flank with sensuous affection.

That was when she had shown him the Outsider Ship, then so new to the sky of Stratos. Everyone was talking about it, even on the tightly censored tele programs. Surely Bennett must have heard of the messenger, the “peripatetic,” who had come so far across space to end the long separation between Stratos and the Human Phylum?

Apparently, he hadn’t. Bewildered, Bennett seemed at first to think it one of the winking navigation satellites, which helped captains find their way at sea. Eventually, her explanation sank in—that the sharp glimmer was, in fact, a starship.

“Jelly can!” he had blurted suddenly. “Bee-can Jelly can!”

“Beacon? You mean a lighthouse?” She had pointed to the spire marking Port Sanger’s harbor, its torch blazing across the bay. But the old man shook his head, distraught. “Former!… Jelly can former!” More phrases of slurred, nonsensical man-dialect followed. Clearly, something had happened that was yanking mental strings. Strings once linked to fervent thoughts, but long since fallen to loose threads. To Maia’s horror, the coot began striking the side of his head, over and over, tears streaming down his ragged cheeks. “Can’t ’member… Can’t!” He moaned. “Former… gone… can’t …”

The fit had continued while, distraught, she maneuvered him downstairs to his little cot and then sat watching him thrash, muttering rhythmically about “guarding” something… and dragons in the sky. At the time, Maia could think of but one “dragon,” a fierce figure carved over the altar in the city temple, which had frightened her when she was little, even though the matrons called it an allegorical beast, representing the mother spirit of the planet.

Since that episode on the roof, Maia had not tried communicating with Bennett again… and felt ashamed of it. “Is anyone there?” she now asked softly, peering into his haunted eyes. “Anyone at all?”

Nothing fathomable emerged, so she bent closer to kiss his scratchy cheek, wondering if the confused affection she now felt was as close as she would ever come to a relationship with a man. For most summer women, lifelong chastity was but one more emblem of a contest few could win.

Bennett resumed sweeping. Maia warmed her hands with steamy breath, and turned to go just as a ringing bell cracked the silence. Clamoring children spilled into the courtyard from narrow corridors on all sides. From toddlers to older threes and fours, they all wore bright Lamatia tartans, their hair woven in clan style. Yet, all such bids at tasteful uniformity failed. Unlike normal kids, each summer brat remained a blaring show of individuality, painfully aware of her uniqueness.

Except the boys, one in four, hurrying like their sisters to class, but with a swagger that said, I know where I’m going. Lamatia’s sons often became officers, even shipmasters.

And eventually coots, Maia recalled as old Bennett blankly kept sweeping around the ruckus. Women and men had that much in common… everyone grew old. In her wisdom, Lysos had long ago decreed that life’s rhythm must still include an end.

Running children stopped and goggled at Maia. She stared back, poker-faced. Dressed in leather, with her hair cropped, she must look like one of last night’s revelers, gone astray from the tavern. Slim as she was, perhaps they took her for a man!

Suddenly several kids laughed out loud. Jemanine and Loiz threw their arms around her. And sweet little Albert, whom she used to tutor till he knew the constellations better than Port Sanger’s twisty lanes. Others clustered, calling her name. Their embraces meant more to Maia than any benediction from the mothers… although next time she met any of them, out in the world, it might be as competitors.

The clanging resumed. A tall lugar with white fur and a droopy snout lurched into the courtyard waving a brass bell, clearly perturbed by this break in routine. The children ignored the neckless creature, peppering Maia with questions about her braid, her planned voyage, and why she’d chosen to snub the Parting Ceremony. Maia felt a kind of thrill, being what the mothers called a “bad example.”

Then, into the courtyard flowed a figure smaller but more fearsome than the upset lugar—Savant Mother Claire, carrying a tang prod and glaring fiercely at these worthless var brats who should be at their desks… The children took heel, with a few of the boldest daring to wave one last farewell to Maia before vanishing. The distressed lugar kept swinging the bell until the wincing matron put a stop to the clangor with a sharply driven elbow..

Mother Claire turned and gave Maia a calculating regard. Even in old age, she embodied the Lamai type. Furrow-browed and tight-lipped, yet severely beautiful, she had always, as far back as Maia remembered, cast a gaze of withering disdain. But this time, instead of the expected outrage at Maia’s shorn locks, the headmistress’s appraisal ended with an astonishing smile!

“Good.” Claire nodded. “First chance, you claimed your own heritage. Well done.”

“I…” Maia shook her head. “…don’t understand.”

The old contempt was still there—an egalitarian scorn for anything and everybody non-Lamai. “You hot-time brats are a pain,” Claire said. “Sometimes I wish the founders of Stratos had been more radical, and chosen to do without your kind.”

Maia gasped. Claire’s remark was almost Perkinite in its heresy. If Maia herself had ever said anything remotely slighting the first mothers, it would have meant a strapping.

“But Lysos was wise,” the old teacher went on with a sigh. “You summerlings are our wild seeds. Our windblown heritage. If you want my blessing take it, var-child. Sink roots somewhere and flower, if you can.”

Maia felt her nostrils flare. “You kick us out, giving us nothing…”

Claire laughed. “We give plenty. A practical education and no illusions that the world owes you favors! Would you prefer we coddled you? Set you up in a go-nowhere job, like some clans do for their vars? Or drilled you for a civil-service test one in a hundred pass? Oh, you’re bright enough to have had a chance, Maia, but then what? Move to Caria City and push papers the rest of your life? Scrimp on salary to buy an apartment and someday start a microclan of one?

“Pah. You may not be all Lamai, but you’re half! Find and win a real niche for yourself. If it’s a good one, write and tell us what you’ve got. Maybe the clan will buy into the action.”

Maia found the strength to voice what she had wanted to say for years. “You hypocritical cat—”

“That’s it!” Mother Claire cut her off, still grinning. “Keep listening to your sister. Leie knows it’s tooth and claw out there. Go on now. Go and fight the world.”

With that, the infuriating woman simply turned away, leading the placid lugar past the nodding, bleary-eyed old coot, following her charges toward the classroom where sounds of recitation rose to fill the cool, dry air.

To Maia, the courtyard, so long such a broad part of her world, suddenly felt close, claustrophobic. The statues of old-time Lamais seemed more stony-chill and stark than ever. Thanks, Momma Claire, she thought, pondering those parting words. I’ll do just that.

And our first rule, if Leie and I ever start our own clan, will be—no statues!

Maia found Leie munching a stolen apple, leaning against the merchants’ gate, looking beyond the thick walls of Lamatia Hold to where cobblestone streets threaded downhill past the noble clanholds of Port Sanger. In the distance, a cloud of hovering, iridescent zoor-floaters used rising air currents to drift above the harbor masts, on the lookout for scraps from the fishing fleet. The creatures lent rare, festive colors to the morning, like the gaudy kite-balloons children would fly on Mid-Winter’s Day.

Maia stared at her twin’s ragged haircut and rough attire. “Lysos, I hope I don’t look like that!”

“Your prayer is answered,” Leie answered with a blithe shrug. “You got no hope of looking this good. Catch.”

Maia grabbed a second apple out of the air. Of course Leie had swiped two. On matters of health, her sister was devoted to her welfare. Their plan wouldn’t work without two of them.

“Look.” Leie gestured with her chin toward the slope-sided clanhold chapel, where a group of five-year summer girls had gathered on the portico. Rosin and Kirstin munched sweet cakes nervously, careful not to get crumbs on their borrowed gowns. Their braids were all primly tied with blue ribbons, ready to be clipped in ceremony by the clan archivist. In cynical conjecture, Leie bet that the pragmatic mothers traded all that glossy hair to burrower colonies to use as nest material, in exchange for a few pints of zee-honey.

Each of those young women bore a family resemblance, having effectively shared the same mother as Maia and Leie. Still, the half sisters had grown up knowing, even better than the twins did, what it meant to be unique.

They must be even more scared than I am, Maia thought sympathetically.

Within the dim recesses of the chapel, she made out several senior Lamai and the priestess who had come up from the city temple to officiate. Maia envisioned wax candles being lit, setting a flicker the deep-incised lettering that rimmed the stone sanctum with quotations from the Founders’ Book and, along one entire wall, the enigmatic Riddle of Lysos. Closing her eyes, she could picture every carven meter, feel the rough texture of the pillars, almost smell the incense.

Maia didn’t regret her choice, following Leie’s example and spurning all the hypocrisy. And yet …

“Suck-ups,” Leie snapped, dismissing their peers with a disdaining snort. “Want to watch them graduate?”

After a pause, Maia answered with a headshake. She thought of a stanza by the poet Wayfarer …

“No. Let’s just get out of here.”

Lamai clan mothers had their hands in shipping and high finance, as well as management of the city-state. Of the seventeen major, and ninety minor matriarchies in Port Sanger, Lamatia was among the most prominent.

You wouldn’t imagine it, walking the market districts…There were some russet-haired Lamais about, proud and uniformly buxom in their finely woven kilts, striding ahead of hulking lugars in livery, laden with packages. Still, among the bustling stalls and warehouses, members of the patrician caste seemed as scarce as summer folk, or even the occasional man.

There were plenty of stocky, pale-skinned Ortyns in sight, especially wherever goods were being loaded or unloaded. Identical except in the scars of individual happenstance, the pug-nosed Ortyns seldom spoke. Among themselves words seemed unnecessary. Few of that clan became savants, to be sure, but their physical strength and skill as teamsters—handling the temperamental sash-horses—made them formidable in their niche. “Why keep and feed lugars,” went a local saying, “when you can hire Ortyns to move it for you.”

A gang of those stocky clones had Musician’s Way snarled, their dray obstructing traffic as six identical women wrestled with a block and tackle slung from the rafter of an upper-story workshop. Like many buildings in this part of town, this one leaned over the street, each floor jutting a little farther on corbeled supports. In some neighborhoods, edifices met above the narrow road, forming arches that blocked the sky.

A crowd had gathered, entranced by the creaking load high above—an upright harp-spinet, constructed of fine wood inlay by the Pasarg clan of musical craftswomen for export to one of the faraway cities of the west. Perhaps it would ride the Grim Bird along with Maia and Leie… if the workers got it safely to ground first. A gaggle of the sallow-faced, long-fingered Pasargs had gathered below, trilling nervously whenever the sash-horses stamped, setting the cargo swaying overhead. If it crashed, a season’s profits might be ruined.

To other onlookers, the tense moment highlighted a drab autumn morning. Hawkers converged, selling roasted nuts and scent-sticks to the gathering crowd. Slender money rods were swapped in bundles or broken to make change.

“Winter’s comin’, so get yerself a’ready!” shouted an ovop seller with her basket of bitter contraceptive herbs. “Men are finally coolin’ off, but can you trust yerself with glory frost due?”

Other tradeswomen carried reed cages containing live birds and Stratoin hiss lizards, some of them trained to warble popular tunes. One young Charnoss clone tried to steer a herd of gangly llamas past the high wheels of the jiggling wagon, and got tangled with a political worker wearing a sandwich board advertising the virtues of a candidate in the upcoming council elections.

Leie bought a candied tart and joined those gasping and cheering as the delicately carved spinet narrowly escaped clipping a nearby wall. But Maia found it more interesting to watch the Ortyn team on the back of the wagon, working together to free the jammed winch. It was a rare electrical device, operating on battery power. She had never seen Ortyns use one before, and thought it likely they had mishandled it in some way. None of the clans in Port Sanger specialized in the repair of such things, so it came as no surprise when, without a word or any other apparent sign, the Ortyns gave up trying to make it work. One member of the team grabbed the release catch while the others, as in a choreographed dance, turned and raised callused hands to seize the rope. There were no cries or shouts of cadence; each Ortyn seemed to know her sisters’ state of readiness as the latch let go. Muscles bunched across broad backs. Smoothly, the cargo settled downward, kissing the wagon bed with deceptive gentleness. There were cheers and a few disappointed boos as money sticks changed hands, settling wagers. Maia and her twin hoisted their duffels once more, Leie finishing her tart while Maia turned pensive.

The Ortyns almost read each others’ minds. How are Leie and I supposed to fake something like that?

When they were younger, she and her sister sometimes used to finish each other’s sentences, or knew when and where the other was in pain. But at best it had been a tentative link, nothing like the bond among clones, whose mothers, aunts, and grandmothers shared both genes and common upbringing, stretching back generations. Moreover, the twins had lately seemed to diverge, rather than coalesce. Of the two, Maia felt her sister had more of the hard practicality needed to succeed in this world.

“Ortyns an’ Jorusses an’ Kroebers an’ bleedin’ Sloskies…” Leie muttered. “I’m so sick of this rutty place. I’d kiss a dragon on the mouth, not to have to look at the same faces till I julp.”

Maia, too, felt an urge to move on. Yet, she wondered, how did a stranger get to know who was whom in a foreign town? Here, one learned about each caste almost from birth. Such as the willowy, kink-haired Sheldons, dark-skinned women a full head taller than the blocky Ortyns. Their usual niche was trapping fur-beasts in the tundra marshes, but Sheldons in their mid-thirties often also wore badges of Port Sanger’s corps of Guards, overseeing the city’s defense.

Long-fingered Poeskies were likewise well-suited to the tasks—deftly harvesting fragile stain glands from jked stellar snails. They were so good at the dye trade, vadet branches had set up in other towns along the Parthenia Sea, wherever fisherfolk caught the funnel-shaped shells.

Near cousins to that clan, Groeskies used their clever hands as premier mechanics. They were a young matriarchy, a summer-stock offshoot that had taken root but a few generations ago. Though still numbering but two score, the pudgy, nimble “Grossies” were already a clan to be reckoned with. Every one of them was clone-descended from a single, half-Poeskie summerling who had seized a niche by luck and talent, thereby winning a posterity. It was a dream all var-kids shared—to dig in, prosper, and establish a new line. Once in a thousand times, it happened.

Passing a Groeskie workshop, the twins looked on as ball bearings were slipped into axles by robust, contented redheads, each an inheritor of that clever forbear who won a place in Port Sanger’s tough social pyramid. Maia felt Leie nudge her elbow. Her sister grinned. “Don’t forget, we’ve got an edge.”

Maia nodded. “Yeah.” Under her breath, she added, “I hope.”

Below the market district, under the sign of a rearing tricorn, stood a shop selling sweets imported from faraway Vorthos. Chocolate was one vice the twins knew they must warn their daughter-heirs about, if ever they had any. The shopkeeper, a doe-eyed Mizora, stood hopefully, though she knew they weren’t buyers. The Mizora were in decline, reduced to selling once-rich holdings in order to host sailors in the manner of their foremothers. They still coiffed their hair in a style suited to a great clan, though most were now small merchants, less good at it than upstart Usisi or Oeshi. The Mizora shopkeeper sadly watched Maia and Leie turn away, continuing their stroll down a street of smaller clanholds.

Many establishments bore emblems and badges featuring extinct beasts such as firedrakes and tricorns—Stratoin creatures that long ago failed to adapt to the coming of Earth life. Lysos and the Founders had urged preservation of native forms, yet even now, centuries later, tele screens occasionally broadcast melancholy ceremonies from the Great Temple in far-off Caria City, enrolling another species on the list to be formally mourned each Far-sun Day.

Maia wondered if guilt caused so many clans to choose as symbols native beasts that were no more. Or was it a way of saying, “See? We continue. We wear emblems of the defeated past, and thrive.”

In a few generations, Mizora might be as common as tricorns.

Lysos never promised an end to change, only to slow it down to a bearable pace.

Rounding a corner, the twins nearly plowed into a tall Sheldon, hurrying downhill from the upper-class neighborhood. Her guard uniform was damp, open at the collar. “Excuse me,” the dark-skinned officer muttered, dodging by the two sisters. A few paces onward, however, she suddenly stopped, whirling to peer at them.

“There you are. I almost didn’t recognize you!”

“Bright mornin’, Cap’n Jounine.” Leie greeted with a mocking half-salute. “You were looking for us?”

Jounine’s keen Sheldon features were softened by years of town life. The captain wiped her brow with a satin kerchief. “I was late catching you at Lamatia clanhold. Do you know you missed your leave-taking ceremony? Of course you know. Was that on purpose?”

Maia and Leie shared brief smiles. No slipping anything by Captain Jounine.

“Never mind.” The Sheldon waved a hand. “I just wanted to ask if you’d reconsidered…”

“Signing up for the Guard?” Leie interrupted. “You’ve got to be—”

“I’m sure we’re flattered by the offer, Captain,” Maia cut in. “But we have tickets—”

“You’ll not find anything out there”—Jounine waved toward the sea—“that’s more secure and steady—”

“And boring …” Leie muttered.

“—than a contract with the city of your birth. It’s a smart move, I tell you!”

Maia knew the arguments. Steady meals and a bed, plus slow advancement in hopes of saving enough for one child. A winter child—on a soldier’s salary? Mother Claire’s derision about “founding a microclan of one” seemed apropos. Some smart moves were little more than nicely padded traps.

“A myriad thanks for the offer,” Leie said, with wasted sarcasm. “If we’re ever desperate enough to come back to this frigid—”

“Yes, thanks,” Maia interrupted, taking her sister’s arm. “And Lysos keep you, Captain.”

“Well … at least stay away from the Pallas Isles, you two! There are reports of reavers …”

As soon as they turned a corner, Maia and Leie dropped their duffels and broke out laughing. Sheldons were an impressive clan in most ways, but they took things so seriously! Maia felt sure she would miss them.

“It’s odd, though,” she said after a minute, when they resumed walking. “Jounine really did look more anxious than usual.”

“Hmph. Not our problem if she can’t meet recruitment quotas. Let her buy lugars.”

“You know lugars can’t fight people.”

“Then hire summer stock down at the docks. Plenty of riffraff vars always hanging around. Dumb idea expanding the Guard anyway. Bunch of parasites, just like priestesses.”

“Mm,” Maia commented. “I guess.” But the look in the soldier’s eye had been like that of the Mizora sweets-merchant. There had been disappointment. A touch of bewilderment.

And more than a little fear.

A month ago wardens had stood watch at the getta gate, separating Port Sanger proper from the harbor.

Maia recalled how the care-mothers used to take Lamatia’s creche kids from the high precincts down steep, cobbled streets to ceremonies at the civic temple, passing near the getta gate along the way. Early one summer, she had bolted from the tidy queue of varlings, running toward the high barrier, hoping to glimpse the great freighters in drydock. Her brief dash had ended with a sound spanking. Afterward, between sobs, she distantly heard one matron explain that the wharves weren’t safe for kids that time of year. There were “rutting men” down there.

Later, when the aurorae were replaced in northern skies by autumn’s placid constellations, those same gates were flung back for children to scamper through at will, running along the docks where bearded males unloaded mysterious cargoes, or played spellbinding games with clockwork disks. Maia recalled wondering at the time—were these men different from the “rutting” kind? It must be so. Always ready with a smile or story, these seemed as gentle and harmless as the furry lugars they somewhat resembled.

“Harmless as a man, when stars glitter clear.” So went a nursery rhyme, which finished, But wary be you, woman, when Wengel Star is near.

Traversing the gate for the last time, Maia and Leie passed through a variegated throng. Unlike the uphill precincts, here males made up a substantial minority, contributing a rich mix of scents to the air, from the aromas of spice and exotic cargoes to their own piquant musk. It was the ideal and provocative locale for a Perkinite agitator to have set up shop, addressing the crowd from an upturned shipping crate as two clone-mates pushed handbills at passersby. Maia did not recognize the face type, so the trio of gaunt-cheeked women had to be missionaries, recently arrived.

“Sisters!” the speaker cried out. “You of lesser clans and houses! Together you outnumber the combined might of the Seventeen who control Port Sanger. If you join forces. If you join with us, you could break the lock great houses have on the town assembly, and yes, on the region, and even in Caria City itself! Together we can smash the conspiracy of silence and force a long-overdue revelation of the truth—”

“What truth?” demanded an onlooker.

The Perkinite glanced to where a young sailor lounged against the fence with several of his colleagues, amused by the discomfiture his question provoked. True to her ideology, the agitator tried to ignore a mere male. So, for fun, Leie chimed in. “Yeah! What truth is that, Perkie?”

Several onlookers laughed at Leie’s jibe, and Maia could not hide a smile. Perkinites took themselves and their cause so seriously, and hated the diminutive of their name. The speaker glared at Leie, but then caught sight of Maia standing by her side. To the twins’ delight, she instantly drew the wrong conclusion and held out her hands to them earnestly, imploringly.

“The truth that small clans like yours and mine are routinely shoved aside, not just here but everywhere, especially in Caria City, where the great houses are even now selling our very planet to the Outsiders and their masculinist Phylum …”

Maia’s ears perked at mention of the alien ship. Alas, it soon grew clear that the speaker wasn’t offering news, only a tirade. The harangue quickly sank into platitudes and cliches Maia and her sister had heard countless times over the years. About the flood of cheap var labor ruining so many smaller clans. About laxity enforcing the Codes of Lysos and the regulation of “dangerous males.” Such hackneyed accusations joined this year’s fashionable paranoid theme—playing to popular unease that the space visitors might be precursors to an invasion worse even than the long-ago horror of the Enemy.

There had been brief pleasure in being mistaken for a “clan,” just because Maia and Leie looked alike, but that quickly faded. Autumn meant elections were coming, and fringe groups kept trying to chivvy a minority seat or two in the face of en masse bloc-voting by holds like Lamatia. Perkinism appealed to small matriarchies who felt obstructed by established lines. The movement got little support from vars, who had no power and even less inclination to vote.

As for men, they had no illusions should Perkinism take hold in a big way on Stratos. If that ever seemed close to happening again, Maia might witness something unique in her lifetime, the sight of males lining up at polling booths, exercising a right enshrined in law, but practiced about as often as glory frost fell in summer.

Though Leie was still chuckling over the Perkinites’ political tract, Maia nudged her sister. “Come on. There are better things to do with our last morning in town.”

The rising sun had sublimed away a shore-hugging fog by the time the twins reached the harbor proper. Midmorning heat had also carried off most of the gaudy zoor-floaters that Maia had glimpsed earlier. A few of the luminous creatures were still visible as bright, ovoid flowers, or garish gasbags, drifting in a ragged chain across the eastern sky.

One laggard remained over the docks, resembling a filmy, bloated jellyfish with dangling, iridescent feelers a mere twenty meters long. A baby, then. It clutched the main mast of a sleek freighter, caressing the cloth-draped yards, groping for treats laid on the upper spars by nimble sailors. The agile seamen laughed, dodging the waving, sticky suckers, then dashed in to stroke the knotty backs of the beast’s tentacles, or tie on bright ribbons or paper notes. Once a year or so, someone actually recovered a ragged message that had been carried in such a fashion, all the way across the Mother Ocean.

There were also stories of young cabin boys who actually tried hitching rides upon a zoor, floating off to Lysos-knew-where, perhaps inspired by legends of days long ago, when zep’lins and airplanes swarmed the sky, and men were allowed to fly.

As if proving that it was a day of fate and synchrony, Leie nudged Maia and pointed in the opposite direction, southwest, beyond the golden dome of the city temple. Maia blinked at a silvery shape that glinted briefly as it settled groundward, and recognized the weekly dirigible, delivering mail and packages too dear to entrust to sea transport, along with rare passengers whose clans had to be nearly as rich as the planet goddess in order to afford the fare. Both Maia and Leie sighed, for once sharing exactly the same thought. It would take a miracle for either of them ever to journey like that, amid the clouds. Perhaps their clone descendants might, if luck’s fickle winds blew that way. The thought offered some slight consolation.

Perhaps it also explained why boys sometimes gave up everything just to ride a zoor. Males, by their very natures, could not bear clones. They could not copy themselves. At best, they achieved the lesser immortality of fatherhood. Whatever they most desired had to be accomplished in one lifetime, or not at all.

The twins resumed their stroll. Down here near the wharves, where fishing boats gave off a humid, pungent miasma, they began seeing a lot more summer folk like themselves. Women of diverse shapes, colors, sizes, often bearing a family resemblance to some well-known clan—a Sheldon’s hair or a Wylee’s distinctive jaw—sharing half or a quarter of their genes with a renowned mother-line, just as the twins carried in their faces much that was Lamai.

Alas, half resemblance counted for little. Dressed in monocolor kilts or leather breeches, each summer person went about life as a solitary unit, unique in all the world. Most held their heads high despite that. Summer folk worked the piers, scraped the drydocked sailing ships, and performed most of the grunt labor supporting seaborne trade, often with a cheerfulness that was inspirational to behold.

Before Lysos, on Phylum worlds, vars like us were normal and clones rare. Everyone had a father… sometimes one you even grew up knowing.

Maia used to ponder images of a teeming planet, filled with wild, unpredictable variety. The Lamai mothers called it “an unwholesome fixation,” yet such thoughts came more frequently since news of the Outsider Ship began filtering down, through rumors and then terse, censored reports on the tele.

Do people still live in old-fashioned chaos, on other worlds? She wondered. As if life would ever offer any opportunity to find out.

With storm season over and the getta fence wide open, the harbor was a lively, colorful precinct. A season’s pent-up commerce was getting under way. People bustled among the loading docks and slate-roofed warehouses, the chapels and recurtained Houses of Ease. And ship chandleries—a favorite haunt while the twins were growing up, crammed with every tool or oddment a crew might need at sea. From an early age, Maia and her sister had been drawn by the bright brasswork and smell of polishing oil, browsing for hours to the exasperation of the shopkeepers. For her part, Leie had been fascinated by mechanical devices, while Maia focused on charts and sextants and slender telescopes with their clicking, finely beveled housings. And timepieces, some so old they carried an outer ring dividing the Stratoin calendar into a little more than three “Standard Earth Years.” Not even hazing by fiver boys—itinerant midshipmen who often knew less about shooting a latitude than spitting into the wind—ever kept the twins away for long.

Peering into the biggest chandlery, Maia caught the eye of the manager, a bluff-faced Felic. The clone noticed Maia’s haircut and duffel, and her habitual grimace slowly lightened into a smile; She made a brief hand gesture wishing Maia good luck and safe passage.

And good riddance, I’ll bet. Recalling what nuisances she and her sister had been, Maia returned an exaggerated bow, which the shopkeeper dismissed with laughter and a wave.

Maia turned around to find Leie over by a nearby pier, conversing with a dockworker whose high cheekbones were reminiscent of Western Continent. “Naw, naw,” the woman said as Maia approached, not pausing in her rapid knotting of the sail she was mending. “So far ain’t heard nary judgment by the Council in Caria. Nary t’all.”

“Judgment about what?” Maia asked.

“The Outsiders,” Leie explained. “Those Perkie missionaries got me wondering if there’s been news. This var works on a boat with full access.” Leie pointed toward a nearby fishing craft, sporting a steerable antenna. It wasn’t farfetched that someone spinning dials with a rig like that might pick up a tidbit or two.

“As if the owners invite me to tea an’ tele!” The sailmaker spat through a gap in her teeth toward the scummy water glistening with floating fish scales.

“But have you overheard anything? Say, on an unofficial channel? Do they still claim only one Outsider has landed?”

Maia sighed. Caria City was remote and its savants only broadcast sparse accounts. Worse, the Lamai mothers often forbade summer kids to watch tele at all, lest their volatile minds find programs “disturbing.” Naturally, this only piqued the twins’ curiosity. But Leie was taking inquisitiveness too far, grilling simple laborers. Apparently the sailmaker agreed. “Why ask me, you silly hots? Why should I listen to lies hissing outta the owners’ box?”

“But you’re from Landing Continent. …”

“My province was ninety gi from Caria! Ain’t seen it in ten year, nor will again, never. Now go way!”

When they were out of earshot, Maia chided, “Leie, you’ve got to go easy on that stuff. You can’t make a pest of yourself—”

“Like you did, when we were four? Who tried stowing away on that schooner, just to find out how the captain got a fix on a rolling horizon? I recall we both got punished for that one!”

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.

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.

None of the better ships in harbor had berths for them. Most were already overloaded with uniques—hard-eyed var women who glared down at the twins or laughed at their plaintive entreaties. Captains and pursers kept shaking their heads, or asking for more money than the sisters could afford.

And there was something else. Something Maia couldn’t pin down. Nobody said anything aloud, but the mood in the harbor seemed… jumpy.

Maia tried to dismiss it as a reflection of her own nerves.

Working their way along the docks, the twins found nothing suitable departing in under a fortnight. Finally, exhausted, they arrived on the left bank of the river Slopes, where tugs and hemp barges tied up at sagging wharves owned by local clans that had fallen on ill fortune or simply did not care anymore. Dejected, Leie voted for going back to town and booking a room. Surely this string of bad luck was an omen. In ten days, maybe twenty, things could change.

Maia wouldn’t hear of it. Where Leie fluxed from wrath to smoldering despair, Maia tended toward a doggedness that settled into pure obstinacy. Twenty days in a hotel? When they could be on their way to some exotic land? Somewhere they might have a chance to use their secret plan?

It was in a grimy hostelry of the lowly Bizmish Clan that they met the captains of a pair of colliers heading south on the morrow tide.

The world of men, too, had its hierarchies. The sort who were smart-eyed and successful, and made good sires, were wooed by wealthy matriarchies. Poorer mother-lines entertained a lower order. Stooped, sallow-skinned Bizmai, still gritty from the mines they worked nearby, shuttled about the guesthouse, toting jars of flat beer that Maia wouldn’t touch, but the coarse seamen relished. The twins met the two captains in the stifling, dank common room, where carbon particles set Maia’s nictitating membranes blinking furiously until they moved outside to the “veranda” overlooking a marsh. There, swarms of irritating zizzerbugs dove suicidally around the flickering tallow candles until their wings ignited, turning them into brief, flaming embers that dropped to the sooty tabletop.

“Sure will miss this place, betcha,” Captain Ran said, smacking his lips, laying his beer mug down hard. “These’s friendly ladies, here. Come hot season, uptown biddies won’t give workin’ stiffs like us a fin or fizz, let ’lone a good roll. But here we got our fill.”

Maia well believed it. Of the Bizmai in sight who were of childbearing age, half were heavy with summer pregnancies. Her nostrils flared in distaste. What would a poor clan like this do with all those uniques? Could they feed and clothe and educate them? Would they, when summer offspring seldom returned wealth to a household? Most of those babies would likely be disposed of in some ugly way, perhaps left on the tundra… “in the hands of Lysos.” There were laws against it, but what law carried greater weight than the good of the clan?

Perhaps the Bizmai would be spared the trouble. Many summer pregnancies failed by themselves, spontaneously ending early due to defects in the genes. Or so Savant Judeth had explained it. “All clones come as tried and tested designs,” she had put it. “While every summerling is a fresh experiment. And countless experiments fail.”

Nevertheless, the var birthrate kept climbing. “Experiments” like Maia and Leie were filling the lower streets in every town.

“That’s one reason we’re on a short haul, this run…” said the other officer. Captain Pegyul was thinner, grayer, and apparently somewhat smarter than his peer. “…carryin’ anthracite to Queg Town, Lanargh, Grange Head, an’ Gremlin Town. We may not be one o’ those big-time, fruity guilds, but we got honor. The Bizmai want us stoppin’ back again midwinter? We’ll do that for ’em, after they been so kind durin’ hot!”

That must be why the mining clan was so accommodating to these lizards. Men tended to get sentimental toward women carrying their summer kids—offspring with half their genes. In half a year, though, would these idiots even notice that few of those babes were still around?

“Gremlin Town will do fine,” Leie said, draining her stein and motioning for a refill. The destination was south instead of west, but they had talked it over. A detour could be corrected later, after they had worked awhile at sea and on land. This way, they’d arrive at the Oscco Archipelago seasoned, no longer naive.

The thinner of the two masters rubbed his stubbled jaw. “Uh huh. So long’s you both’ll do what yer told.”

“We’ll work hard. Don’t worry about that, sir.”

“An’ yer mother clan taught you all the right stuff? Like, say, stick-fightin’?”

Maia was sure Leie also picked up the sailor’s sly effort at nonchalance. As if he were asking about sewing, or smithing, or any other practical art.

“We’ve had it all, sir. You won’t regret bringing us aboard, whichever of you takes us.”

The two seamen looked at each other. The shorter one leaned forward. “Uh, it’s both of us you’ll be goin’ with.”

Leie blinked. “What do you mean?”

“It’s like this,” the tall one explained. “You two is twins. That’s nice, but it can make trouble. We got clan women booking passage from town to town, all along the way. They may see you two, scrubbin’ decks, doin’ scut work, an’ get the wrong idea …”

Maia and Leie looked at each other. Their private scheme involved taking advantage of that natural reaction—the assumption that two identicals were likely to be clones. Now the irony sank in, that their boon could also be a drawback.

“I dunno about splitting up,” Leie said, shaking her head. “We could change our looks. I could dye my hair—”

Maia cut in. “Your vessels convoy together all the way down the coast, right?” The captains nodded. Maia turned to Leie. “Then we wouldn’t be separated for long. This way we’ll get recommendations from two shipmasters, instead of just one.”

“But—”

“I won’t like it either, but look at it this way. We double our experience for the same price. Each of us learns things the other doesn’t. Besides, we’ll have to go apart at other times. This will be good practice.”

The startled expression in her sister’s eyes told Maia a lot about their relationship. There was a soft pleasure in surprising Leie, something that happened all too seldom. She never expected me to be the one accepting a separation so easily.

Indeed, Maia found she looked forward to the prospect of time by herself, away from her twin’s driving personality. This should be healthy for both of us.

Hiding her brief discomfiture behind an upraised beer stein, Leie finally nodded and said, “I don’t guess it matters—”

At that instant, a flash whitened their faces, casting shadows from the direction of town. A sparking, spiraling rocket trailed upward from the harbor fortress, arcing into the sky and then exploding, lighting the docks and clanholds with stark, crawling patterns of white and dark. Silhouettes revolved around pedestrians stunned motionless by the abrupt glare, while a low growling sound rapidly climbed in pitch and intensity to become an ululation, filling the night.

Maia, her sister, and the two captains stood up. It was the seldom-heard wail of Port Sanger’s siren… calling out the militia… alerting its citizens to stand to the defense.

2

An acrid scent of smoke. A fuming, cinder mist rising from smoldering planks. Distress flags flapping from the singed mizzen of a crippled ship, staggering toward asylum. The impressions were more vivid for occurring at night, with the larger moon, Durga, laying wan glimmers across the scummy waters of Port Sanger’s bayside harbor.

Under glaring searchlights from the high-walled fortress, a dry-goods freighter, Prosper, wallowed arduously toward safe haven, assisted by its attacker. Half the town was there to watch, including militia from all of the great clanholds, their daughters of fighting age decked in leather armor and carrying polished trepp bills. Matronly officers wore cuirasses of shiny metal, shouting to squads of identical offspring and nieces. The Lamatia contingent arrived, quick-marching downhill in helmets crowned with gaeo bird feathers. Maia recognized most of the full-clone winterlings, her half sisters, despite their being alike in nearly every way. The Lamai companies briskly spread along the roof of the family warehouse before dispatching a detachment to help defend the town itself.

It was quite a show. Maia and her sister watched in fascination from a perch on the jetty wall. Not since they had been three years old had there been an alert like this. Nor were the commanders of the clan companies pleased to learn that a jumpy watchwoman had set off this commotion by pressing the wrong alert button, unleashing rockets into the placid autumn night where a few hoots from the siren would have been proper. An embarrassed Captain Jounine spent half an hour apologizing to disgruntled matrons, some of whom seemed all the more irascible for being squeezed into armor meant for younger, lither versions of themselves.

Meanwhile, rowboats threw lines to help draw the limping, smoldering Prosper toward refuge. Maia saw buckets of seawater still being drawn to extinguish embers from the fire that had nearly sent the ship down. Its sails were torn and singed. Dozens of scorched ropes festooned the rigging, dangling from unwelcome grappling hooks.

It must have been some fight, she figured, while it lasted.

Leie peered at the smaller vessel that had the Prosper in tow, its tiny auxiliary engine chuffing at the strain. “The reaver’s called Misfortune,” she told Maia, reading blocky letters on the bow. “Probably picked the name to strike terror into their victims’ hearts.” She laughed. “Bet they change it after this.”

Maia had never been as quick as her sister to switch from adrenaline to pure spectator state. Only a short time ago, the city had been girding for attack. It would take time to adjust to the fact that all this panic was over a simple, bungled case of quasilegal piracy.

“The reavers don’t look too happy,” Maia observed, pointing to a crowd of tough-looking women wearing red bandannas, gathered on Misfortune’s foredeck. Their chief argued with a guardia officer in a rocking motor launch. A similar scene took place near the prow of the Prosper, where affluent-looking women in smoke-fouled finery pointed and complained in loud voices. Farther aft on both vessels, male officers and crew tended the tricky business of guiding their ships to port. Not a man spoke until the vessels tied at neighboring jetties, at which time Prosper’s master toured the maimed vessel. From his knotted jaw and taut neck muscles, the glowering man seemed capable of biting nails in two. Soon he was joined by Misfortune’s skipper, who, after a moment’s tense hesitation, offered his hand in silent commiseration.

A rumor network circulated among dockside bystanders, passing on what others, closer in, had learned. Leie dropped off the jetty in order to listen, while Maia stayed put, preferring what she could decipher with her own eyes. There must have been an accident during the fight, she surmised, tracing how fire had spread from a charred area amidships. Perhaps a lantern got smashed while the reavers battled the owners for their cargo. At that point, the male crews would have called a truce and put both sides to work saving the ship. It looked like a near thing, even so.

Reavers were uncommon in the Parthenia Sea, so near the stronghold of Port Sanger’s powerful clans. But that wasn’t the only curious thing about this episode.

Seems a stupid idea, hiring a schooner to go reaving this early in autumn, Maia thought. With storm season just ending, there were plenty of tempting cargoes around. But it was also a time when males still flowed with summer rut hormones, which might kick in under tense circumstances. Watching the edgy sailors, their fists clenched in rage, Maia wondered what might drive, the young vars in a reaver gang to take such a risk.

One of the men kicked a bulkhead in anger, splintering the wood with a resounding crack.

Once, on a visit to a Sheldon ranch, Maia had witnessed two stallions fight over a sash-horse herd. That struggle without quarter had been unnerving, the lesson obvious. Perkinite scandal sheets spread scare-stories about “incidents,” when masculine tempers flared and instincts left over from animal times on Old Earth came to fore. “Wary be you women,” went a stanza of the rhyme oft quoted by Perkinites. “For a man who fights may kill …”

To which Maia added privately, Especially, when their precious ships are in danger. This misadventure might easily have tipped over into something far worse.

Militia officers led the band of reavers, and Prosper’s passengers, toward the fort where a lengthy adjudication process would begin. Maia caught one shrill cry from the pirate leader: “… they set the fire on purpose ’cause we were winning!”

The owners’ spokeswoman, a clone from the rich Vunern trading clan, vehemently denied the charge. If proven, she risked losing more than the cargo and fines to repair Prosper. There might even be a boycott of her family’s goods by all the sailing guilds. At such times, the normal hierarchy on Stratos was known to reverse, and mighty matrons from great holds went pleading leniency from lowly men.

But never from a var. It would take a true revolution to reverse the social ladder that far. For summer-born women ever to sit in judgment over clones.

Maia watched the procession march past her vantage point, some of the figures limping, holding bloody gashes from the fight that led to this debacle. Medical orderlies carried stretchers at the rear. One of the burdens lay completely covered.

Perkies may be right about women having less murderous tempers, Maia contemplated. We seldom try to kill. It was one reason Lysos and the Founders had come here—to create a gentler world. But I guess that makes small difference to the poor wretch under that blanket.

Leie returned, breathless to relate all she had learned from the throng. Maia listened and made all the right astonished sounds. Some names and details she hadn’t pieced together by observing… and some she felt sure were garbled by the rumor chain.

Did details matter, though? What stuck in her mind, as they left with the dispersing crowd, had been the expression on Captain Jounine’s face as the guardia commander escorted her bickering charges over a drawbridge into the fortress.

These aren’t the peaceful times she grew up in. These are tougher days.

Maia glanced at her twin as they walked toward the far pier where the colliers Zeus and Wotan lay loaded and ready for the morning current. Despite her accustomed bravado, Leie suddenly looked every bit as young and inexperienced as Maia felt.

These are our days, Maia pondered soberly. We’d better be ready for them.

The moons’ pull had modest effect on the huge seas of Stratos. Still, tradition favored setting sail with Durga tide. After last night’s excitement, the predawn departure was less poignant than Maia had expected. All these years she’d pictured looking back at Port Sanger’s rugged buildings of pink stone—castlelike clanholds studding the hillsides like eagles’ nests—and feeling a cascade of heady emotions, watching the land of her childhood recede from sight, perhaps forever.

There was no time for dwelling on milestones, however. Gruff-voiced chiefs and bosuns shouted orders as she and several other awkward landlubbers rushed to help haul lanyards and lash straining sheets. Supplementing the permanent crew were more than a dozen vars like herself, “second-class passengers” who must work to supplement their fares. Despite Lamatia’s stern curriculum for its summerlings, a stiff regimen of toil and exercise, Maia soon found herself hard-pressed to keep up.

At least the biting chill eased as the sun climbed. Off came the leather garments, and soon she was working in just loincloth and halter. The sluggish, heavy air left her coated with a perspiration sheen, but Maia preferred wiping sweat to having it freeze on her.

By the time she finally had a spare moment to look back, the headlands of Port Sanger’s bay were disappearing behind a fog bank. The ancient fortress on the southern bluff, at present covered in a spindly shroud of repair scaffolding, was soon masked by brumous haze and lost to view. On the other bank, the spire of the sanctuary-lighthouse remained a mysterious gray obelisk for a while longer. Then it too faded behind low clouds, leaving an endless expanse of ice-flecked sea surrounding her contracted world of wood planks, fiber cords, and coal dust.

For what felt like hours, Maia ran wherever sailors pointed, loosening, hauling, and tying down sections of coarse rope on command. Her palms were soon raw and her shoulders sore, but she began learning a thing or two, such as not trying to brake a lanyard by simply holding on. Fighting a writhing cable by brute force could send you flying into a bulkhead or even overboard. Watching others, Maia learned to wrap a length of hawser around some nearby post in a reverse loop, and let the rope’s own tension lock it in place.

That left the converse problem of releasing the damned thing, whenever the mates wanted slack for some reason. After Maia was nearly slashed across the face on two occasions, a sailor took time to show her how it was done.

“Y’do it like these, an’ than these,” a wiry male, no taller than she was, explained without obvious impatience. Maia awkwardly tried to imitate what in experienced hands seemed such a fluid motion. “Yell get it,” he assured her, then hurried off, shouting to prevent another landlubber from getting her leg caught in a loop of cord and being dragged over the side.

Well, I was hoping for an education. Maia now understood why a noticeable minority of the men she’d seen in her life lacked a finger or two. If you weren’t careful, a surge of wind could yank a rope while your hand was busy looping a pin, tightening with abrupt, savage force, sending a part of you spurting away. With that nauseating realization, Maia forced herself to slow down and think before making any sudden moves. The shouts of the bosuns were terrifying, but no more than that awful mental image.

Nothing was made easier by the film of carbon dust coating nearly every surface. The cargo of Bizmai anthracite sent black puffs through poorly sealed cargo hatches each time the Wotan shifted in the wind. Luckily, Maia didn’t have to climb the grimy sheets, which crewmen scaled with such uncanny diligence, like apes born to dwell in treelike heights amid the wind.

Whenever duties sent her to the port side, she tried stealing glimpses of their sister vessel, the Zeus, keeping pace two hundred meters to the east. Once, Maia caught sight of a trim shape she felt must be Leie, but she dared not wave. That distant figure appeared plenty busy, running awkwardly about the other collier’s deck.

At last they cleared the tricky coastal waters and the convoy’s course was set. A north wind rose, filling the squat sails and, as a bonus, spinning the electric generator on the fantail, giving rise to a shrill whine. When the mates seemed satisfied that all was well in hand, they shouted fore and aft, calling a break.

Maia slumped amidships as her throbbing arms and legs complained. Get used to it, she told them. Adventure is ninety percent pain and boredom. The saying supposedly went on, “and ten percent stark, flaming terror.” But she hoped to give that part a miss.

A crusty ladle appeared in front of her, proffered by a stick-thin old man with a sloshing bucket. Maia suddenly realized how ravenously thirsty she was. She put her mouth to the cup, slurping gratefully… and instantly.

Seawater!

Maia felt eyes turn toward her as she coughed in embarrassment, trying to cover the reaction. She managed to clamp down and drink some more, recalling that she was just another vagrant summerling now, no longer the daughter of a rich, uptown clan with its own artesian well. In poorer sections of town, vars and even low-caste clones drew their drinking water from the sea and grew up knowing little else.

“Bless Stratos Mother, for her mild oceans,” went a sardonic adage, not part of any liturgy. And bless Lysos, for kidneys that can take it. Thirst overcame the bland, salty taste and she finished the ladle without further trouble. The old man then surprised her with a gap-toothed grin, tousling her ragged-cut hair.

Maia stiffened defensively… then self-consciously relaxed. It took more than the passing heat of hard labor to trigger male rut. Anyway, a man would have to be hard up to waste time on a virgin like her.

Actually, the coot reminded her a little of old Bennett, back when that aged male’s eyes still danced with interest in life. Hesitantly, she smiled back. The sailor laughed and moved on to water others in need.

A whistle blew, ending the work break, but at least now commands came at a slower pace. Instead of the former frenzy of reefing and unfurling sails, coaxing the sluggish vessel past frothy shoals toward open water, their new chores consisted of stowing and battening down. Now that she had a chance to look around, Maia was struck by how much less mysteriously alien the men of the crew appeared than she’d expected. Moving about their tasks, they seemed as businesslike and efficient as any clan crafts-woman in her workshop or mill. Their laughter was rich and infectious as they bantered in a dialect she could follow, if she concentrated… although the drift of most of their jests escaped her.

Despite their dronelike behavior ashore, ranging from boisterous to slothful, depending on the season, Maia had always known men must lead lives of toil and danger at sea. Even the crew of this grimy lug must apply both intelligence and concentration—among the best womanly traits—as well as their renowned physical strength in order to survive. She was filled with questions about the tasks she saw performed with such industry, but that would have to await the right opportunity.

Besides, she found even more interesting the women on board. After all, men were another race—less predictable than lugars, though better swimmers and conversationalists. But whether summer- or winter-born, women were her kind.

At the elevated aft end of the ship, distinguished by their better clothes, stood or lounged the first-class passengers, who did not have to work. Few summerlings could afford full fare, even on ships like this one, so only clones leaned on the balcony, not far from the captain and his officers. Those winter folk came from poorer clans. She spotted a pair of Ortyns, three Bizmai, and several unfamiliar types, who must have come from towns further north before changing ships in Port Sanger.

The working passengers, on the other hand, were all vars like herself—uniques whose faces were as varied as clouds in the sky. They were an odd lot, mostly older than she was and tougher looking. For some, this must be one more leg of countless many as they worked their way around the seas of Stratos, always looking for some special place where a niche awaited.

Maia felt more sure than ever that she and Leie were correct to travel separately. These women might have resented twins, just as Captain Pegyul said. As it was, Maia felt conspicuous enough when the noon meal was served. “Here you go, li’l virgie,” said a gnarly, middle-aged woman with gray-streaked hair, as she poured stew from a kettle into a battered bowl. “Want a napkin too, sweetie?” She shared a grin with her companions. Of course the var was having Maia on. There were some greasy rags about, but the back of a wrist seemed the favored alternative.

“No, thank you,” Maia answered, almost inaudibly. That only brought more hilarity, but what else could she say? Maia felt her face redden, and wished she was more like her Lamai mothers and half sisters, whose visages never betrayed emotion, save by careful calculation. As the women passed around a jug of wine, Maia took her plate of mysterious curry to a nearby corner and tried not to betray how self-conscious she felt.

No one’s watching you, she tried convincing herself. Or if they are, what of it? No one has any cause to go out of their way to dislike you.

Then she overheard someone mutter, not too softly, “… bad enough breathin’ this damn coal dust all th’ way to Gremlin Town. Do I also gotta stand th’ stink of a Lamai brat aboard?” Maia glanced up to catch a glower from a tough-looking var in her mid-eights or nines. The woman’s fair hair and sharp-jawed features reminded Maia of the Chuchyin clan, a rival of Lamatia based up-coast from Port Sanger. Was she a Chuchyin half or quarter sister, using an old grudge between their maternal houses as an excuse to start a private one of her own?

“Stay downwind from me, Lamai virgie,” the var grunted when she caught Maia’s gaze, and snorted in satisfaction when Maia looked away.

Bleeders! How far must I to go to escape Lamatia? Maia had none of the advantages of being her mother’s child, only an inheritance of resentment toward a clan widely known for tenacious self-interest.

So intent was she on her plate that she jerked when someone nudged her arm. Blinking, Maia turned to meet a pair of pale green eyes, partly shaded under a dark blue bandanna. A small, deeply tanned, black-haired woman, wearing shorts and a quilted halter, held out the wine jug with a faint smile. As Maia reached for it, the var said in a low voice, “Relax. They do it to every fiver.”

Maia gave a quick nod of thanks. She lifted the jug to her mouth …

…and doubled over, coughing. The stuff was awful! It stung her throat and she could not stop wheezing as she passed the bottle to the next var. This only brought more laughter, but now with a difference. It came tinged with an indulgent, rough-but-affectionate tone. Each of them was five once, and they know it, Maia realized. I’ll get through this too.

Relaxing just a bit, she started listening to the conversation. The women compared notes on places each had been, and speculated what opportunities might lie to the south, with storm season over and commerce opening up again. Derisory comments about Port Sanger featured prominently. The image of a whole town called to arms because some clumsy reavers spilled a lantern had them in stitches. Maia couldn’t help also grinning at the farcical picture. It didn’t seem funny to that dead woman, a part of her recalled soberly. But then, hadn’t somebody written that one essence of humor is the tragedy you managed to escape?

From hints here and there, Maia surmised that some of these vars had wore the red bandanna themselves. Say you gather a pack of down-and-out summerlings, resentful at society’s bottom rung, and sign a sisterly compact. Together, you hire a fast schooner… men willing to pilot their precious ship alongside some freighter, giving your band of comrades a narrow moment to dare all, win or lose.

Savant Judeth had explained why it was grudgingly allowed.

“It would’ve happened anyway, sooner or later,” the Lamai teacher once said. “By laying down rules, Lysos kept piracy from getting out of hand. Call it welfare for the desperate and lucky. A safety valve.

“And if reavers get too uppity?” There had been confident menace in Judeth’s smile. “We have ways of dealing with that, too.”

Maia never intended to find out what the great clans did, when provoked too far. At the same time, she pondered the sanitized legends told about the very first Lamai… the young var who, long ago, turned a small nest egg into a commercial empire for her clone descendants. Stories were vague about where the first mother got her stake. Perhaps a red bandanna lay somewhere in a bottom drawer of the clan’s dustiest archive.

As expected, most of the vars aboard were working off passage while seeking permanent employment ashore. But a few actually seemed to consider themselves regular members of the Wotan’s crew. Maia found it strange enough that women were able to interact with the planet’s other sapient race to reproduce. Could women and men actually live and work together for long periods without driving each other crazy? While using a stiff brush to scrub the lunch dishes, she watched some of these “female sailors.” What do they talk to men about? she wondered.

Talk they did, in a singsong dialect of the sea. Maia saw that the petite woman who had spoken kindly to her was one of these professional seawomen. In her gloved left hand, the brunette held a treppbill, a practice model bearing a cushioned Y-shaped yoke at one end and a padded hook at the other. From the way she joked with a pair of male comrades, it appeared she was offering a challenge which, grinning, they accepted.

One seaman opened a nearby storage locker, revealing a great stack of thin, tilelike objects, white on one side, black on the other. He removed one square wafer and turned it over, checking eight paddles set along its edges and corners. Maia recognized an old-fashioned, wind-up game piece, which sailors used in large numbers to pursue a favorite pastime known as Life. Since infancy, she had watched countless contests in dockside arenas. The paddles sensed the status of neighboring tiles during a game, so that each piece would “know” whether to show its white or its black face at a given time. By the nature of the game, a single token by itself was useless, so what was the man doing, inserting a key and winding up just one clockwork tile?

If programmed normally, the simple device would smoothly flip a row of louvered panels exposing its white surface unless certain conditions were met. Three of its paddles must sense neighboring objects within a certain time interval. Two, four, or even eight touches wouldn’t do. Exactly three paddles must be triggered for it to remain still.

The burly sailor approached the small woman, laying the game token on the deck in front of her, black side up. With one foot resting lightly on its upper surface he kept it from activating until, gripping her treppbill in both hands, she nodded, signaling ready.

The sailor hopped back and the tile started clicking. At the count of eight, the woman suddenly lanced out, tapping the piece at three spots in rapid succession. A beat passed and the disk remained still. Then the eight-beat countdown repeated, only faster. She duplicated her feat, choosing a different trio of paddles, making it seem as easy as swatting zizzers. But the piece had been programmed to increase its tempo. Soon the tip of her treppbill moved in a blur and the clock-ticking was a staccato ratchet. Sweat popped out on the small woman’s brow as her wooden pole danced quicker and quicker…

Abruptly, the disk louvers flashed with a loud clack! turning the upper surface white. “Agh!” she cried out. “Twenty-eight!” a sailor shouted, and the woman laughed in chagrin as her comrades teased her for falling far short of her record.

“Too much booze an’ lazin’ about on shore!” they chided.

“You should talk!” she retorted, “jutzin’ with them Bizzie hoors!”

One of the men started rewinding the game piece for another try, but Wotan’s second mate chose that moment to descend from the quarterdeck and call the small brunette over for a talk. They spoke for a few minutes, then the officer turned to go. The woman sailor fished a whistle out of her halter and blew a shrill blast that got the attention of all hands.

“Second-class passengers aft,” she called in an even tone, motioning for Maia and the other vars to stand in a row by the starboard gunwales.

“My name is Naroin,” the petite sailor told the assembled group. “Rank is bosun, same as Sailor Jum and Sailor Rett, so don’t forget it. I’m also master-at-arms on this tub.”

Maia had no trouble believing the statement. The woman’s legs bore scars of combat, her nose had been broken at least twice, and her muscles, if not manlike, were imposing.

“I’m sure you all saw last night that the rumors we been hearin’ are true. There’s reaver activity farther north than ever this year, an’ it’s startin’ earlier. We could be a target anytime.”

Maia found that a stretched conclusion to reach from one isolated incident, and apparently so did the other vars.

But Naroin took her responsibilities seriously. She told them so, laying the padded bill across her back.

“Captain’s given orders. We should be ready, in case o’ trouble. We’re not goin’ to be anybody’s sealfish steak. If a gang o’ jumped-up unniks tries hopping this ship—”

“Why would anyone want it!” a var muttered, eliciting chuckles. It was the sharp-jawed woman who had cursed earlier about “Lamai brats.”

“What kind of atyp bleeders’d hop us for a load o’ cffall the half-Chuchyin went on.

“You’d be surprised. The market’s up. B’sides, even a coerced split of profits could ruin the owners—”

Naroin’s explanation was interrupted by an offensive blat, imitating a fart. When the bosun glanced sharply, the Chuchyin var nonchalantly yawned. Naroin frowned. “Captains’ orders needn’t be explained to likes of you. A crew that doesn’t drill together—”

“Who needs drill?” The tall var cracked her knuckles, nudging her friends, apparently a tight-knit group of tested traveling companions. “Why fret about lugar-lovin’ reavers? If they come, we’ll send them packin’ for their daddies.”

Maia felt her cheeks redden, and hoped no one noticed. The master-at-arms simply smiled. “All right, grab a bill an’ show me how you’ll fight, if the time comes.”

A snort. The Chuchyin variant spat on the deck. “I’ll just watch, if it’s all the same.”

Naroin’s forearms revealed bowstring tendons. “Listen, summer-trash. While on board, you’ll take orders, or swim back where you came from!”

The tall woman and her comrades glared back, confrontation certain in their hard faces.

A low voice interrupted from behind. “Is there a problem, Master-at-Arms?”

Naroin and the vars swiveled. Captain Pegyul stood at the edge of the quarterdeck, scratching a four-day growth of beard. Banal of appearance back at the Bizmai tavern, he now cut an impressive figure, stripped down to his blue undershirt, something males never did in port. Three brass armrings, insignia of rank, circuited an arm like Maia’s thigh. Two other crewmen, taller and even broader in the shoulders, stood bare-chested behind him at the head of the stairs. Despite the redolent tension, Maia found herself fascinated by those torsos. For once, she could credit certain farfetched stories… that sometimes, in the heat of summer, a particularly large and crazy male might purposely torment a lugar into one of those rare but awesome furies the beasts were capable of, just to wrestle the creature one-on-one, and occasionally win!

“No, sir. There’s no problem,” Naroin answered calmly. “I was just explaining that all second-class passengers will train to defend the ship’s cargo.”

The captain nodded. “You have your crewmates’ backing, Master-at-Arms,” he said mildly, and walked away.

The shiver down Maia’s back wasn’t from the north wind. Generally speaking, men were supposedly as harmless, four-fifths of the year, as lugars were all the time. But they were sentient beings, capable of deciding to get angry, even in winter. The two big seamen remained, observing. Maia sensed in their eyes a wariness toward any threat to their ship, their world.

The Chuchyin made a show of examining her fingernails, but Maia saw perspiration on her brow. “Guess I could spar a bit,” the tall var muttered. “For practice.” Still feigning nonchalance, she stepped over to the weapons rack. Instead of taking up the other padded training bill, she grabbed a trepp meant for combat, made of hard Yarri wood with minimal wrapping round the hook and prong.

From the rigging, two of the women crew gasped, but Naroin only backed onto the broad, flat door covering the aft hold, scuffing a film of coal dust with her bare feet. The tall var followed, leaving tracks with her sandals. She did not bow. Nor did the short sailor as they began circling.

Maia glanced toward the two shirtless seamen, who now sat watching, all wrath gone from their docile eyes. Once more, she felt a half-excited, half-nauseated curiosity about sex. Her ignorance was normal. Few clans let summer daughters enter their Halls of Joy, where the dance of negotiation, approach, refusal, and acceptance between sailor and mother-to-be reached its varied consummations, depending on the season. Among the ambitions she shared with Leie was to build a hall of their own, where she might yet learn what delights were possible—unlikely as it seemed—in mingling her body with one such as those, so hirsute and huge. Just trying to imagine made her head hurt in strange ways.

The two women finished their preliminary swings, waving and thrusting their bills. Naroin seemed in no hurry to take the offensive, perhaps because of her padded, ill-balanced weapon. The Chuchyin var spun her chosen trepp in one hand with panache. Suddenly she leapt forward to sweep at her opponent’s well-scarred legs—and abruptly found those legs wrapped around her throat! Naroin hadn’t awaited the traditional-exchange of feints and parries, but instead rammed her awkward bill onto the deck, using it as a pole to vault over her foe’s slashing weapon, landing with one leg across each of the other woman’s shoulders. The var staggered, dropped her trepp, and tried to claw at the master-at-arms, but found her hands seized with wiry strength. Her knees buckled and her face started to color between the woman sailor’s tightening thighs.

Maia breathed at last as Naroin jumped back, letting her opponent collapse to the sooty hatch. The dark-haired sailor grabbed the Yarri-wood weapon dropped by her foe and used its Y-shaped yoke to pin the var’s neck to the cargo door. Naroin was barely breathing hard.

“Now what’d you expect, comin’ at me that way? Bare wood against padding? No courtesy, then choppin’ a cripple blow? Try that against reavers and they’ll do more’n take our cargo or sell you for a season’s labor. They’ll sea-dump you an’ any other wench who cheats. And our men won’t lift a finger, hear? Eia!”

The female crew shouted in refrain. “Eia!” Naroin tossed the bill aside. Wheezing, the half-Chuchyin crawled off the makeshift arena, covered with black smears. A glance at the quarterdeck showed that the men had departed, but assorted clones watched from first class, wearing amused expressions.

“Next?” Naroin asked, looking down the file of vars, no longer appearing quite so small.

I know what Leie would do now, Maia thought. She’d wait for others to wear Naroin down, pick out some weakness, then go at it with all panels charged.

But Maia wasn’t her sister. Back in school she might watch a dozen bouts without recalling who had won, let alone who parried when for points. While her churning guts wanted to find some dim shadow, her rational mind said, Just get it over with. Anyway, if Naroin was trying to encourage proper womanly combat virtues, Maia could offer a good contrast to the Chuchyin, and surprise those who called her “virgie.”

Fighting a queasy tremor, she stepped forward, silently drew the other padded training bill from the rack and faced the arena. She ignored the staring clones and vars, ritually scuffed the dust thrice, and bowed. Bearing her own cushioned weapon, Naroin beamed beneficence toward Maia’s courtesy. Both of them extended their bills, hook end forward, for that first, formal tap …

Someone splashed water in her face. Maia coughed and sputtered. It stung not only of salt but of coal. A blur slowly resolved into a face … an old man’s … the one who earlier had tousled her hair, she dimly recalled. “Here, now. Y’all hokay? Nothin’ broke, i’zer?” He spoke a thick mannish dialect. But Maia got the drift. “I … don’t think so…” She started to rise, but a sharp pain lanced through her left leg, below the knee. A bloody cut went halfway around the calf. Maia hissed.

“Mm. Ah see yet. S’not so bid. Here’s sum salve that’ll seer a beet.”

Maia felt a whimper rise in her gorge and stifled it as he applied medicine from an earthenware jar. The agony departed in waves like an outgoing tide. Her throbbing pulse settled. When she next looked, the bleeding had stopped.

“That’s… good stuff,” she sighed.

“Our guild maybe small ’n’ poorly, bit we got smart tube-boys beck in sanctuary.”

“Mm, I’ll bet.” Between shipping seasons, some men dealt with extra time on their hands by fiddling in laboratories, either as guests in clanholds or at their own craggy hermitages. Few of the bearded tinkerers had much formal education, and most of their inventions were at best one-season marvels. A fraction reached the attention of the savants of Caria, to eventually be published or banned. This salve, though—Maia vowed to get a sample and find out if anyone yet had the marketing rights.

She rose up on her elbows and looked around. Two pairs of second-class passengers were out on the hatch cover, sparring under shouted direction from the master-at-arms. Several others lay sprawled like she was, nursing bruises. Meanwhile, two female crew members sat by the forward cowling, one blowing a flute while the other sang in a low, sad alto voice.

The old man tsked. “Really pushin’ this yar. Fool’sh, runnin’ fems too ragged t’work. Not roit, boy my lights.”

“I s’pose,” Maia murmured noncommittally. She rose to sitting position and then, grabbing a nearby rail, managed to hobble onto one leg. She was still woozy, and yet felt vaguely relieved. Real pain was seldom as bad as the expectation.

Funny, hadn’t Mother Claire once said that about childbirth? Maia shivered.

One of the practicing vars shouted and landed on the hatch with a loud thump. The women playing music switched to an ancient, plaintive melody that Maia recognized—about a wanderer, yearning for a home, a beloved, all of the hearth-joys that came so easily to some, but not others.

Resting against the gunnels, Maia gazed across the seascape and found the Zeus keeping pace a bit behind, plowing through choppy waves with billowed sails. So far, this voyage had been at least as much a learning experience as her sister promised.

I do hope Leie’s finding her trip just as interesting, came Maia’s biting thought.

Two weeks later, on hitting their first landing in Queg Town, the twins finally set eyes on each other after their longest separation, and their reactions were identical. Each looked the other up and down… and simultaneously broke up laughing.

On the lower part of Leie’s right leg, in a spot perfectly mirroring her own left, Maia saw a strip of new, pink scar tissue, healing neatly under the benign influence of sun, air, hard work, and saltwater.

3

Lanargh, their second port of call, was not counted among the chief cities of the world. Not in a league with those rimming the coast of Landing Continent. Still, the metropolis was big enough to give the twins pause after weeks evading icebergs on the high seas.

In Queg Town, the owners had found few buyers for Port Sanger coal. So the Zeus and Wotan wallowed with waves lapping high along their dented flanks. Whenever lookouts spotted floating isles of ice, auxiliary motors strained to alter course and miss the terrible white growlers. The wind was a fickle ally. Bosuns shouted and all hands heaved at balky sails. One jagged berg passed chillingly near Wotan’s starboard withers—leaving Maia dry-mouthed and grateful they were convoying. In case of a mischance, only the Zeus was close enough to save them.

When they next neared shore, the former monotony of tundra had been replaced by stands of fog-shrouded conifers, giant redwoods whose ancestors had come to Stratos along with Maia’s, tortuously, from Old Earth. The terran trees liked the misty coast, encouraged by forestry clans in their slow, silent struggle with native scrub. Sinuous trails showed where harvesters had recently dragged cut logs, to be herded in great rafts to market.

Maia’s breath came short and quick as the Wotan finally rounded Point Defiance, where a famed stone dragon lay shadows of its broad wings over the harbor strait, symbolizing the protective love of Stratos Mother. Carved long ago, it honored the repulse, at great cost, of a landing force sent down by the Enemy foe ship, during dark, ancient days when women and men together fought to save the colony, their lives, and posterity. Maia knew little about that bygone era—history wasn’t deemed a practical curriculum—but the statue was a stirring sight nonetheless.

Lanargh’s famous five hills then appeared, one after another, lined with pale stone tiers, clanholds, and gardens, stretching for kilometers along the bay and into green-flanked mountainsides. The twins had always pictured Port Sanger as large and cosmopolitan, since its trade dominated much of the Parthenia Sea. But here, at the pivot of a vast ocean, Maia saw why Lanargh was properly called “Gateway to the East.”

After tying at the quay assigned them by the harbor mistress, the crew watched the captain set off with the Bizmai cargo-owners to meet potential clients. Then liberty was called and the hands themselves spilled ashore, shouting with pleasure. Maia found Leie waiting at the foot of the wharf. “Beat ya again!” Maia’s twin laughed, eking out another minor victory, knowing Maia didn’t give a damn.

“Come on,” Maia answered, grinning. “Let’s get a look at this place.”

More than five hundred matriarchal clans dwelled in the city, filling broad piazzas and clamoring market avenues with contingents of finely dressed, elaborately coiffed, magnificently uniformed clones, their burdens carried on well-oiled carts or the backs of patient lugars in liveried tunics. There were sumptuous scents of strange fruits and spices, and creatures the twins had only read about, such as red howler monkeys and flapping mere-dragons, which rode upon their owners’ shoulders, hissing at passersby and snatching grapes from unwary vendors.

The sisters roamed plazas and narrow shopping streets, eating sweets from a patissiere’s stall, laughing at the antics of a small clan of agile jugglers, dodging the harangues of political candidates, and pondering the strangeness of such a wide, marvelous world. Never before had Maia seen so many faces she didn’t recognize. Though Port Sanger held a population of several thousand, there had never been more than a hundred distinct visages to know while growing up.

For the first time, they tasted what life might be like if their secret scheme succeeded. Although they were humbly dressed, some vars they encountered stepped aside for them in automatic deference, as if they were winter-born. “I knew it!” Leie whispered. “Twins are rare enough that people simply jump to the wrong conclusion. Our plan can work!”

Maia appreciated Leie’s enthusiasm. Yet, she knew success would count on filling in countless details. They shouldn’t spend their free moments playing games, she insisted, but combing the port for useful information.

Unfortunately, the town was a babble of strange tongues. Whenever clone-sisters met on the street, they often spoke an incomprehensible rasp of family code, handed down by hive mothers and embellished by their daughters for generations. This frustrated Leie at first. Back in easy-going Port Sanger, common speech had been the norm.

Then Leie grew enthusiastic. “We’ll need a secret jarg too, when we start our own clan.”

Maia neglected to remind her sister that as little girls they had experimented with codes, cryptograms, and private jargon, until Leie grew bored and quit. Privately, Maia had never stopped making anagrams or finding patterns in letter blocks scattered on the creche floor. It might even have been what first triggered her interest in constellations, for to her the sparkling stellar patterns always seemed to hint at the Creator’s private code, one that was open to all who learned to see.

Strolling the grand plaza in front of Lanargh’s city temple, the twins watched a group of kneeling sailors receive blessing from an orthodox priestess wrapped in burgundy-striped robes. Raising her arms, the clergywoman called for intercession from the planet spirit, its rocks and air, its winds and waters, so that the men might reach safe haven at their journey’s end. The singsong benison finished with a favorite passage about the sanctity of comradeship amid shared danger. Yet, the holy woman’s quavering delivery showed that clerics, too, had a “language” all their own, especially when quoting the mysterious Fourth Book of Scriptures.

“Soto their ships ontime ofneed kaul uponthat whichishidden …”

No wonder Book Four was popularly known as the Riddle of Lysos. It even had its own eighteen-letter alphabet, which used to bring Maia pleasurable diversion during long weekly services in the Lamatia chapel, silently puzzling over cryptic passages incised on the stone walls.

Leie glanced at the clock set in the Temple’s face and sighed. “Oops, sorry. Gotta get back to work now.”

Maia blinked. “What? On first day?”

“Ain’t it var’s luck? Mop an’ pail duty. Our chief wants ol’ Zeus to get more customers than Wotan, even though it all goes to the same owners and guild.” She grimaced. “Are your bosuns as awful as ours?”

Maia wouldn’t have used that word. “Hard,” maybe, and quick to catch when you were inattentive. But she was learning a lot from Naroin and the others, and growing stronger by the day. Anyway, Leie was clearly fibbing.

Maia bet her sister was on punishment detail, probably for mouthing off when she should have kept quiet.

Despite that, Maia grunted sympathetically. “Unloading coal for a living. Huh. I guess the mothers’d be proud of us lor starting at the bottom.”

“Not for long, though!” Leie answered. “Someday we’ll sail back into Port Sanger with enough coin sticks to buy the place!” She laughed, and her cheerfulness forced Maia to smile.

It felt different walking through town alone, and not simply because no one stepped aside for her anymore. Maia had enjoyed pointing things out to Leie, sharing the sights. It had been comforting knowing another person in this sea of strangers was an ally.

On the other hand, the town seemed more vivid this way. Sound and smell and vision felt sharper as she grew more aware of the downside of city life. Sweating var laborers, dragging loads on creaking carts. Beggars, some crippled, shaking tithe cups bearing wax temple seals. Sly-looking women who leaned against the corners of buildings, eyeing her speculatively, perhaps wondering how well her purse was tied on…

It was right for us to take separate ships, Maia thought, feeling both wary and alive. We needed this. I needed it.

There were placards she had never seen before, denoting clans she didn’t know, offering goods she had never heard of. Some shop floors were shared by a dozen midget enterprises, each with a pretentious, hand-painted heraldic device, run by single women pooling together for the rent, each hoping to begin the slow rise to success. At the other extreme, the city hospital seemed both modern and colorless, the white-jacketed professionals within having no need to advertise their family affiliations.

A blatting sound, a horn and crashing cymbals, caused the street crowd to divide for a new disturbance. Onlookers laughed as a short parade wound its way downhill. The male membership of a secret society, dressed in flamboyant outfits and carrying mystery totems, wove across the cobblestones to applause and good-natured catcalls from the throng. Some of the men seemed sheepish, lugging ornate model ships and wooden zep’lins on their shoulders to the beat of thumping drums, while others held their chins out, as if daring anyone to make fun of their earnest ritual. Only a few spectators seemed unfriendly, such as when one cluster of frowning women pointedly refused to step aside, forcing the procession to wind around them.

Perkinites, Maia thought, moving on. Why don’t they leave the poor men alone and pick on someone their own size?

Lanargh offered a wider range of services than she had ever imagined, from palmists and professed witches all the way to esteemed phrenologists, equipped with calipers, cranial tapes, and ornate charts. Maia considered having a reading done, till she saw the prices and decided nothing could be done about the shape of her head, anyway.

Glancing through one expensive glass window, Maia watched three high-browed redheads consult with customers over leather-bound folders. Perusing gilt posters, Maia gleaned that this was a local branch of a farflung family enterprise, one offering commercial message services. On a separate chart, the redheads advertised a local sideline—designing private languages for up-and-coming houses.

“Now there’s a niche,” Maia murmured admiringly. Success on Stratos often lay in finding some product or service no one else had mastered. This was one she might have enjoyed exploring herself. She sighed. “Too bad it already seems pretty well filled.”

“They’re all filled, sister. Don’t you know? It’s one of the foretold signs.”

Maia spun around to face a young woman about her own age and height, wearing a cowled robe with the embroidered stripes of some religious order. The priestess, or dedicant, clutched a sheaf of yellow pamphlets, peering at Maia through thick spectacles.

“Um… signs of what, sister?” Maia asked, overcoming surprise.

A friendly, if fervent, smile. “That we are entering a Time of Changes. Surely you’ve noticed, a bright fiver like yourself, that things are on edge? Clan matrons have long complained about the climbing summer birthrate, but do they act to stop it? A force within Stratos Herself wills that it be so, despite all inconvenient consequences.”

Maia overcame her accustomed reaction to being accosted by a clergywoman—an impulse to seek the nearest exit. “Mm… inconvenient?”

“To the great houses. To the bureaucracy in Caria. And especially to those selfsame hordes of summerlings, for whom there’s no place on this planet. No place save one.”

Aha! Maia thought. Is this a recruitment drive? The priesthood was even less selective than the Port Sanger city guard. By taking vows, any var might guarantee a full meal bowl for the rest of her days. If it also meant forsaking childbearing, or ever establishing a clan of one’s own, how many summerlings achieved that anyway? Abjuring sex someday, with a sweaty man, was no decision-stopper. All Stratos was your lover when you took the robe, and all Stratoins your children.

Still, why go recruiting? In Lanargh, a stone thrown in any direction would pass over some priestess or deacon. More were choosing that route to safety every day.

“Meanin’ no disrespect,” Maia said, backing away. “I don’t think the Temple is my place.”

The priestess seemed undismayed. “My child, that’s obvious from the look of you.”

“But… then what…?” Maia suddenly found her hand filled with a printed broadsheet. She glanced down at the first few lines.

It was hard to follow the run-on screed, but a tone of antagonism to authority was stridently clear. Maia looked again at the dedicant, seeing that the stripes of her robe were broken with colored threads. “You’re a heretic,” she breathed.

“Smart lass. Not many where you’re from?” Maia found herself smiling faintly. “We’re a bit out of the way. We had Perkinites—”

“Everyone has Perkinites. Specially since the Outsider Ship gave ’em an excuse to spread boogie-man stories. You know the ones… Now that Stratos is rediscovered, the Phylum will send fleets of ships full of drooling, hairy, unmodified males, worse than the Enemy of old.”

“Well”—Maia grinned at the image—“that may exaggerate what they say.”

“And your local Perkies may be milder than ours, O virgin from the frozen north!” The heretic laughed sardonically. “At any rate, even the temple hierarchy’s in a lather over alien humans barging in, possibly changing Stratos forever. It never seems to occur to the silly smugs that it might be the other way around. That this may be the moment Lysos was planning for, from the very start!”

Maia was confused, “You don’t see the starship as a threat?”

“Not my order, the Sisters of Venture. In early days, restored contact might’ve been harmful. But now our way of life is proven. Sure, we have problems, injustices, but have you read about the way things were back on the Old Worlds, before our founders’ exodus?”

Maia nodded. It was favored fare in books and on the tele.

“Animal chaos!” The woman waxed passionate. “Picture how violent and uncertain life was, especially for women and children. Now realize, it’s probably still going on out there! That is, on whatever worlds haven’t been destroyed, by the Enemy, or by aggression among male humans.”

“But the Outsider proves some colonies still—”

“Exactly! There may be dozens of surviving, battered worlds, crying out for what we can offer—salvation.”

Maia had backed away until a gritty wall jabbed her spine. Yet she felt torn between flight and fascination. “You think we should welcome contact… and send missionaries?”

The dedicant, who had been hunching forward in pursuit, now stood straighter and smiled. “I was right about you being a sharpie. Which brings up my original comment about there being a reason for everything, including the surge in summer births, even though niches seem so few.” She raised one finger. “Few here on Stratos! But not out there.” The finger jabbed skyward. “Destiny calls, and only timid fools in Caria stand in the way!”

Maia saw fervor in the young woman’s eyes, a belief transcending logic and all obstacles. Suppose you find yourself insignificant in the world, dwarfed by the mighty. How to feel important after all? All you need is a convenient conspiracy. One that’s keeping you from taking your rightful place as a leader toward the light.

Only there are so many lights…

Maia withheld judgment on the Venturist’s actual idea, which had a grand sound, and might even be worth discussing. “I’ll give it a read,” she promised, holding up the pamphlet. “But…”

Her voice trailed off. The priestess was staring past her shoulder. In a distracted tone, the young dedicant said, “Very good. But now I must go. To the stars, sister.”

“Eia, sister,” Maia replied conventionally to the unusual farewell, watching the striped robe vanish into the crowd. She turned to see what had spooked the heretic, and soon caught sight of four sturdy women pushing through the throng, nonchalantly swinging walking sticks they didn’t seem to need… not for walking, at least.

Temple wardens, Maia realized. There were priestesses and then there were priestesses. Although heresy was officially no crime, the temple hierarchy had ways of making it less comfortable than following classical dogma. Of the fringe groups, only Perkinism was strong enough that no one dared rough up its adherents.

Oh, I guess there are still niches, Maia thought, watching the stern women move along, causing even members of the city watch to step aside. Vars with muscle can always find employment in this world.

Which suddenly reminded her, she was due back at the Wotan before dusk. Kitchen duty. And there’d be patarkal hell to pay if she was late!

Maia stuffed the heretical tract into a pocket, to show Leie later. Giving the Temple warders a wide berth, she found her bearings and hurried through the market crowd toward the unmistakable aroma of the docks.

“Work now, gawk later!” Bosun Naroin snapped, late on their fourth day in port.

Maia’s attention had wandered toward a distracting sight at the foot of the wharf. Drawing back quickly, she nodded—“Yessir”—and concentrated on resetting the conveyor belt, making sure that buckets hauling coal out of the ship’s hold did not jitter or spill. Sometimes it took muscle to lever the balky contraption into line. Even after all seemed in perfect order, Maia watched the buckets warily for a while to be sure. Finally, she lifted her head above the portside rail once more.

What had drawn her gaze before was the arrival of a car, cruising with a methane-driven purr down the bay-side embankment, toward the pier where Wotan was moored.

A car, she thought. For personal transport and nothing else. There had been two in all of Port Sanger—used on ceremonial occasions or to carry visiting dignitaries. Other motor vehicles had been nearly as rare, since most products entered and left her hometown by sea. In cosmopolitan Lanargh, one might glimpse a motor-lorry down any street, each employing a driver, several loaders, and a guardian who walked in front bearing a red flag, making sure no children fell beneath the rumbling wheels. They were impressive machines, even if their growling, chuffing rumble frightened Maia a little.

For several days, one battered, ugly high-bed had been coming to the pier to fill its hopper with coal from the Parthenia Sea. The unloading crew grew to hate the sight of the thing. But hey, it’s a job, Maia thought as the truck’s bin filled with Port Sanger anthracite, bound for a family-run petrochemical plant for conversion to molten plastic, then used by certain other Lanargh clans for making fine injection-moldings.

Her gaze drifted once more to the foot of the wharf. The car had parked, but no one had yet emerged. Curious.

She turned back to make sure the returning, empty buckets weren’t clipping Wotan’s cargo hatch. If the conveyor jammed, the sweating team below would blame her. “Hold!” Maia cried when the clearance narrowed thinner than she liked. Naroin echoed with a shout. While the saw-toothed buckets rumbled to a halt, Maia kicked free a pair of chocks and set a pry bar under the conveyor’s frame, straining to jigger the massive apparatus several times until the new arrangement seemed right. Finally, she bent to pound the chocks back into place, then called, “Ready away!” Naroin threw a lever and precious electricity poured from the ship’s accumulators, setting the scarred machinery into motion with a rumble of grinding gears.

It was hard work, but Maia felt grateful to be out on deck. Her stints below, shoveling coal into the ever-hungry buckets, had been like sentences to hell. Floating grit stuck to your perspiration, running down your arms and sides in sooty rivulets. It got into everything, including your mouth and underwear. Finally, like the others, she had stripped completely.

Nor could she complain, for this crew was luckier than most. Half the ships in port used human-powered winches to unload, or doubled-over stevedores, groaning as they dumped gunnysacks onto horse-drawn wagons. Even those freighters equipped with electric or steam-driven gear used it sparingly, relying mostly on muscle power.

“Savin’ wear and tear on the machinery,” Naroin had explained. “Some seasons, var labor’s cheaper’n replacement parts.” This year, it seemed especially so.

Not that summer women worked alone. Clones supervised unloading delicate merchandise, and men appeared whenever their specialized skills were needed. Still, the sailors mostly spent time caring for their precious ships, and no one expected different. What men and vars had in common was that both had fathers—though seldom knew their names. Both were lowlife in the eyes of haughty clones. Beyond that, all resemblance dimmed.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly, so Maia returned to the portside rail, fleeing the dust. Rubbing the back of her neck, she turned and saw that someone had left the motorcar at the base of the pier, and was walking this way. A man, dressed in foppish lace and wearing a wide-brim hat, sauntered toward the Zeus and Wotan, dodging the black plume wafting from the truck bed. Whistling, the male paused to inspect the paint flaking from the Wotan’s aft. He buffed his shoes, then squinted at the sky. So that’s what a person looks like when they’re trying not to look suspicious, Maia observed with amusement. This character was no sailor, nor did he look like the type to be kept waiting.

Sure enough, three crewmen appeared, one from her own ship and two from Leie’s, hurrying down the gangways with exaggerated nonchalance. The stranger, with a courteous flourish, led the sailors behind the girth of the motortruck, where bucket after bucket of black hydrocarbons showered into an already-creaking loading bin.

Now what are they doing back there? Maia wondered as they remained hidden from sight. As if it’s any of my business.

An echoing cry from the ship’s hold sent her scurrying to adjust the conveyor again, prying away at the apparatus so that the buckets flowed smoothly to reach the coal hillocks below. No sooner had she finished jiggering the inboard end than a shout from the woman lorry driver told Maia that the other boom needed one last shift to fill the cargo bed properly. Kicking away the forward chocks, Maia looked forward to diving with a whoop over the side just as soon as the loading run was over. Even the scummy dockside water seemed fantastically inviting at this point.

The final chock stayed stuck. With a sigh, she crawled underneath the conveyer to pound it with the heel of her hand, already bruised and sore. “Come on, you stupid, atyp chunk!” she cursed the tightly wedged block. Her hand throbbed. “Move! You lugar-made piece of homlog—”

A sharp, nipping pain in an alarming quarter caused Maia to jump, slamming her head against a bucket, which responded with a low, throaty gong.

“Ow! What the tark’l hell—?”

Emerging, rubbing her head with one hand and left buttock with the other, Maia blinked in confusion at three sailors who stood grinning, just beyond arm’s reach. She recognized the off-duty crewmen who had seemed so ineptly casual with the stylish male from town. Two smirked, while the third let out a high-pitched giggle.

“Did…” Maia almost couldn’t bring herself to ask. “Did one of you pinch me?”

The nearest, tall and rangy with several days’ beard, laughed again. “An there’s more where’n that come from, if yer want it.”

Maia tilted her head, quite sure she’d misheard. “Why would I want more pain than I’ve already got?”

The giggler, who was short but barrel-chested, tittered again. “Only hurts at first, sweets… then ye ferget all that!”

“Ferget ever’thing but feeling good!” the first one added, to Maia’s growing confusion and irritation. The third man, of average height, with a dark complexion, nudged his companions. “Come on. You can whiff she’s just a virgie. Let’s go clean up an’ head for Bell House.”

There was an eager wildness in the small one’s eyes. “How ’bout it, li’l var? We’ll fetch yer sister off’n our ship. Dress you both fancy. It’ll look like some pretty little clan, holdin’ a frost party for us. Like that idea? Your own little Hall o’ Happiness, right on board!”

He was so close, Maia caught a strange, off-sweet odor, and glimpsed a powdery stain at one corner of his mouth. More importantly, she now recognized, in stance and manner, several signs taught to girls at an early age. His eyes stroked her body closer than the clinging dust. Breathing heavily, his grin exposed teeth glistening with saliva.

There was no mistaking these omens of male rat.

But it wasn’t summer anymore! All the myriad cues that set off aurora season in males were months gone. Oh, surely some men retained libido through autumn, but to make blatant advances… on a var? One covered head to toe in grime, yet? One without a hint of fecundity—scents from past births?

It was incredible. Maia hadn’t a clue how to react.

“Button an’ jet,” a stern voice cut in.

The lanky sailor kept leering, but the other two stepped back for Wotan’s master-at-arms. “Uh, bosun”—the darker man nodded—“We’re off duty, so we were just—”

“Just leaving, so my work party can go off-duty too, was that it?” Naroin asked, fists on hips, forming the words sweetly, but with an edge that cut.

“Uh huh. Come on, Eth. Eth!” The dark sailor grabbed the one ogling Maia, breaking his unnerving stare and dragging him off. Only then did Maia start controlling her own adrenaline surge. Her mouth felt dry from more than coal dust. The pounding in her chest slowly abated.

“What,” she inquired of Naroin, “was that all about?”

The master-at-arms watched the three sailors walk away, their footsteps neither uneven nor intoxicated. Rather, there was a prowling, even graceful menace to the way they departed. Naroin glanced at Maia.

“Don’t ask me.”

Without another word, she got down and crawled under the conveyor to pound at the recalcitrant chock, giving Maia a few moments more to recover. It was a kindness, yet something had not escaped Maia’s notice. Naroin’s answer implied ignorance. That was what the phrase usually meant. “Don’t ask me.”

But the tone hadn’t conveyed ignorance. No, it had been an order, pure and simple.

Maia’s curiosity flared.

Leie waxed enthusiastic as the sisters strolled the market quarter before dusk, munching fish pies, listening to the cacophonous street-jabber, speculating what deals, intrigues, and treachery must be going on all around them. “This detour could be the best thing to happen to us!” Leie announced. “When we finally do reach the archipelago, we’ll know much more about commercial prospects. I was thinking… maybe next summer we should get work in one of these plastics factories…”

Maia let her twin rattle on, feeling pensive, restive. This afternoon’s incident had left her sensitized. The heretic’s crumpled pamphlet lay unforgotten in her pocket, a reminder that the fervid activity on all sides might not be “normal,” even for a big-city port.

Now that Maia looked for them, she saw signs everywhere of an economy under strain. Near the city hall, bulletin boards showed basic labor, even skilled crafts, going for record low wages. Long-term contracts were nonexistent, and the sole civil-service post on offer was in the city guard. Just like back home, Maia thought. Only more so.

Then there were the men, more than she had ever seen before. And not just playing endless Game of Life tournaments on quayside grids, or whittling to pass the time between voyages, but moving briskly, intently, quite some distance inland. Look down any crowded street and you’d catch sight of two or three, standing out amid the crowds of women. Again, all the shipping might explain it. Except why were such a high percentage of them so young?

In nature, just being male was enough to lower an animal’s life expectancy, and it was no different among humans on Stratos. Storms and shifting reefs, icebergs and equipment failures, sent ships down every year. Few men lived to become retirees. Still, there seemed so many young ones on the streets. It made her nervous.

While most sailors were well-behaved, strolling, shopping, or drinking quietly at taverns set aside for their kind, each day had its whispered tales of incidents like one overheard last night—concerning a bloody corpse found in an alley, the killer fleeing wild-eyed, pursued by city guards-women armed with stun tridents.

After the episode next to the conveyor belt, Maia found herself overreacting to those lazy smiles of halfhearted flirtation young men normally cast this time of year, more as a courtesy than any kind of offer. When one gangly youth winked at her, Maia scowled back, eliciting a look of hurt dismay that instantly made her feel embarrassed, contrite.

Should all males be feared, because a few go crazy?

It wasn’t only men causing problems, after all. The three races—winter folk, men, and vars—mingled peaceably for the most part. But the twins had seen incidents of rowdy summerlings—wildly varied in shape and color, but united in poverty—harassing small groups of identicals from some local clan. Frustration boiling over in rebellious hostility.

Are these really signs? The heretic spoke of a “time of changes,” a term familiar from teledramas and lurid storybooks. Stability, the great gift of Lysos and the Founders, was never guaranteed to any particular generation. Even scripture said a perfect society must flex, from time to time.

Is it just Lanargh, or is this happening all over Stratos? Maia felt more determined than ever to try catching the tele-news tonight.

She reacted with a startled jump to a nudge in the ribs, and quickly saw that they had wandered onto the chief city square. Strollers, who had spent midday under shaded loggias, were emerging to enjoy the late sun’s slanting rays. Leie pointed across the broad piazza toward a row of elegant, multistoried houses. “Over there, leaning against that column. Ain’t that your Bosun, trying to look invisible?”

Maia picked out the trim figure of Naroin, resting one shoulder on a pillar, acting as if she had only to watch the world go by. What’s she up to? That var never relaxed a day in her life.

As if reading her thoughts—which she still did all too often—Leie nudged Maia a second time. “I bet your bosun’s spying on that lot over there.”

“Hm… Maybe.” Naroin appeared well-positioned to discreetly observe a mixed gathering of lavishly dressed males and females sitting at an open-air cafe. The men didn’t look like sailors, while the women had a massaged, billowy appearance Maia associated with pleasure clans, specializing in relieving the tensions of others in houses of ease. Several such houses lined the square, positioned to serve clients coming from the harbor in summer, and uptown in winter. Above each entrance, gaily painted signs depicted a leaping rabbit, a snowflake, a grinning bull clutching a bell between its jaws. Servants labored on the house overlooking the cafe, changing the decorations from warm, aurora shades to those of frost.

In autumn, the two clienteles of such places overlapped like incoming and ebbing waves, which explained the mixed group at the veranda cafe. Maia wondered what the men and women found to talk about.

Was Naroin’s surveillance also out of curiosity?

Unlikely. Especially when Maia noticed among the loungers a man in a floppy hat. “So that’s the guy?” Leie asked. “I don’t know what he did to Lem and Eth, but those boys sure got in trouble. Think your bosun’s gonna pick a fight? The fop’s got twice her mass.”

Whatever the reason or season, Maia wouldn’t bet against the petite sailor. “Don’t ask me,” the Naroin had said. Or, Keep your nose out of this.

Despite the power of her own inquisitiveness, almost hormonally intense, Maia decided to quash it. At her station in life, wisdom dictated keeping a low profile.

And yet…

An abrupt clattering broke out to their left. The bell tower overlooking the piazza emitted a loud thunk, and beaten copper doors, green with verdigris, rattled open. Soon the famous clock figures of Lanargh would emerge to start their stately dance—five minutes of choreographed automation, finishing with the tolling of Three-Quarters Day. Crowds began moving up to watch the sublime, hundred-year-old gift from Gollancz Sanctuary perform its evening ritual, timed to satellite pulses from Caria University, halfway around the world.

Maia hadn’t realized it was so late. The program she wanted to watch would be on soon. “Come on,” she urged. “Or we’ll miss the news.”

Leie shook her head. “There’s lots of time. I want to see the first part again. We’ll go after that, I promise.”

Maia sighed, knowing by instinct when Leie’s tenacity could be fought, and when it was futile. Fortunately, they had a good view as the clock-tower doors finished opening with a reverberating clang. Then, first out its portal, emerged the bronze figure of the He-Ape, knuckle-walking above the onlookers, carrying a twitching four-legged animal under one arm and a sharpened stone in its mouth. The ape turned three times to a ratcheting beat, appearing to scrutinize those below. Then the figure rose up on its hind legs, miraculously unfolding into the erect figure of a man, now carrying loops of chain. The stone in his mouth had transformed into the stylized phallic protuberance of The Bomb.

Leie’s eyes gleamed with appreciation, the intricate play of bronze plates seemed so smooth and natural. It was a renowned rendition of one of the most famous allegorical tales on Stratos—a metaphor for one side of evolution.

Another door parted. The figure of a She-Ape emerged, carrying her traditional bundle of fruit. Same as last time, and the time before, Maia thought. It’s cute, but monotonous.

She took a moment to glance back toward the cafe… and started in surprise. Only moments had passed, but now empty bottles lay where the lounging customers had sat. Naroin; too, had vanished.

Oh, well. She shook her head. None of my business. Besides, it’s time to head uptown.

Maia tugged her sister’s arm. Leie tried to shrug her off, entranced by the swiveling dance of metal figures. But now Maia insisted. “We’ve seen this part twice already! I don’t want to miss the broadcast again.”

Leie sighed dramatically, and Maia thought, I wish for once she wouldn’t milk it, every time I want something, making it a “favor” to be repaid.

“All right,” Leie agreed with an exaggerated shrug. “Let’s go watch the news.”

Behind them, across the cobbled plaza, the giant figure of Mother Lysos emerged through her own door above the other automatons, holding a bioscope in the crook of one arm. Looking down benignly, she took the scroll of law in her other hand, and used it to strike a mighty blow, severing forever the chains binding Woman to the will of Man.

Sure enough, a long queue had formed four streets uphill, outside the wooden amphitheater. Maia groaned in frustration.

“Guess we’ll have to wait our turn,” Leie said. “Oh well.”

That was her twin, all right. Hot-tempered toward the faults of others. Fatalistically philosophical about her own. Maia fumed quietly, craning to see any sign of movement ahead. A guardia marshal stood by the ticket booth, both to keep order and to make sure no under-five summerlings from town creches sneaked in without notes from their clan mothers. Women by the door could be seen leaning inside, listening to snatches of amplified speech, then popping out to report to their friends. Murmurs of progressively degraded news riffled back to the sisters. As during the night of the reavers, Leie listened avidly and joined in this bucket brigade, even when the snippets were so obviously debased as to be worthless.

“You were right,” Leie reported. “There was a piece about the Outsiders.” She gestured vaguely skyward. “No pictures yet of the one that landed.”

Maia exhaled disappointment. She had never before thought much about the Grand Council’s stinginess with news. Power and wisdom went together, the clan mothers taught. Now though, Maia wondered if the heretic was right. The savants, councillors, and high priestesses seemed unwilling to say much, as if fearing the reaction of the masses.

From a clone’s point of view, I guess every person who’s not one of your full sisters is an unpredictable dilemma. It’s just the same for us vars, only we’re used to it. Maia found it a curiously comforting insight—that there was one way in which the winter-born went through life more afraid than summerlings. Uncertainty must be their biggest dread.

The middle moon, Athena, hung above the western horizon, a slender crescent with the plain of Mare Virgin-itatis brightening rapidly as the sun quenched behind a bank of sea clouds. It was a clear evening above Lanargh, with a chill in the air. The first stars were coming out.

There were separate lines for first-class and second-class viewing. The latter queue moved in stuttered fits toward the ticket booth, staffed by several pug-nosed women wearing spectacles and expressions of bemused skepticism. You’d think with demand this high, they’d build more theaters, no matter how much sets cost out here. Could all this public interest have taken them by surprise?

By the time standing room was available, and the twins squeezed into the back of the sweaty room, the program had finished with the headlines and main features, and was into a nightly segment called “Commentary.” The young interviewer on the big wall screen looked familiar, naturally, since the same show appeared back home in Port Sanger. Her guest was an older woman, from attire clearly a savant from the university.

“…despite all assurances we have received, what guarantee do we have that our Outsider friends are harmless, as they claim? We Stratoins recall with horror the last time danger arrived from space—”

The interviewer cut in. “But, Savant Sydonia, when the Enemy came, it was in a giant vessel, big as an asteroid! We can all see—those of us living in towns with astronomy clubs—that the Visitor Ship is far too small to carry armies.”

Maia felt, a thrill of luck. They were discussing the aliens, after all. On the screen, the wise-looking savant nodded her head of noble gray hair. Camera beams highlighted wisdom lines around her eyes, though Maia suspected some of them might be makeup.

“There are dangers beyond outright invasion. Serious potentialities for harm to our society. Remember, consciousness isn’t everything! Sometimes the race has more wisdom than its individual members.”

The young interviewer frowned. “I don’t quite follow.”

“There are signs—portents, if you will. For example, one might mention the increase, during the last several seasons, of—”

A sudden, jerky shift. Maia would have missed it, had she blinked. Studio editing. Something excised from the interview before transmission.

“—making it impossible to completely dismiss the prospect of harm coming from restored contact with the Phylum… much as we deplore some of the wilder fear campaigns being waged by certain radical groups…”

Blips like that were common on shows ’cast by Caria City. So common, Maia might not have given it much thought, if she hadn’t been so intensely interested in the answer. Now, she wondered. The heretic has a point. Vars grow up not expecting to be told much. We get used to it. But aren’t we citizens, too? Doesn’t this affect us all?

Just having such thoughts made Maia feel bold and rebellious.

“…so we must all strive together to reinforce the underpinnings of this good world left us by Lysos and the Founders. One that tests our daughters, but leaves them strong. Even the interstellar Visitor proclaims wonder over all we’ve achieved, especially our remarkable social stability, as hominidal colonies go.”

Maia took note. The savant seemed to be confirming the common rumor, that just one alien had actually landed on the surface of Stratos.

“It is important, therefore, to keep all other aspects in perspective, and remember what is fundamental. These accomplishments—this world and proud culture of ours—are worth defending with all the dedication we can muster from our souls.”

It was a stirring speech, uttered with passion and eloquence. Maia saw many of the heads between her and the screen nod in solemn agreement. Of course, those up front would be clones from lesser families, or rich vars. Anyone who could afford front seats already had a vested interest in the social order. Yet, many others seemed as moved by the savant’s words. Even Leie, when Maia turned to glance at her sister.

Of course Leie, the perpetual optimist, assumed it was just a matter of time before the two of them established their own clan. They would someday be revered grandmothers of a great nation. Any system that let quality rise in such a way might be stern, but could it be called unjust?

Could it? Maia long ago gave up arguing the topic. She never won contests of opinion with her twin.

“…so we are asking all citizens, from clanhold to sanctuary, to keep on the lookout. If anyone notices anything peculiar, it is her—or his—duty to report it at once—”

The change in the thread of Savant Sydonia’s words caught her by surprise. Maia whispered. “What’s she onto now? I missed—”

Leie hushed her curtly.

“…to inform the local guardia office in any large town. Or go to any major clanhold and tell the senior mothers what you have seen. There are rewards, up to a Level Three stipend, for information serving the interest of Stratos in these times of stress and danger.”

The young interviewer smiled ingratiatingly. “Thank you, Savant Sydonia, of Clan Youngblood and the Caria University. Now we turn to this month’s summary of tech judgments. Reporting from Patents Hall, here is Eilene Yarbro…”

Leie dragged Maia outside by the wrist.

“Did you hear?” she asked excitedly, once they were, some distance away, beside one of Lanargh’s countless canals. “A Class Three stipend… just for tattling!”

“I heard, Leie. And yes, it’s enough to start a hold, in some inexpensive town. But did you notice how vague they were? You don’t find that strange? Almost like they’re desperate to learn something, but julping at the thought of anybody finding out what they’re looking for!”

“Mm,” Leie grunted. “You have a point. But hey, you know what?” Her eyes gleamed. “That must mean they’re underplaying what they’re actually willing to pay. A stipend for information… and how much more for keeping quiet afterward? A whole lot, I’ll bet!”

Yeah, lots more. Like a garrote in the dark. There were legends of ancient parthenogenetic clans whose daughters brought status and wealth to the hive by hiring out as stealthy assassins. Not all scary stories told to little summerlings were baseless.

But Maia didn’t mention this. After all, Leie lived for possibilities, and her enthusiasm tugged at something similar within Maia—a zest for living that she might otherwise have been too reserved, too withdrawn to tap. She differed so from her sibling, even though they were as alike genetically as any pair of clones. It had made Maia more willing than most vars to accept the notion of individuality among winter folk.

“We’ve got to keep our eyes open!” Leie said, turning a great circle with her arms, and finally staring up at the starry vault overhead.

Constellations had emerged while they were inside, painting the heavens with sweeping, diamond brilliance.

The radiance of the galactic wheel. At expected intervals, Maia caught sight of rhythmically pulsing pinpoints that weren’t stars or planets, but rotating satellites vital to navigators at sea. She saw no sign of the Visitor Ship, but there was the black obscurity of the Claw, which bad little girls were told was the open, grabbing hand of the Boogey Man, reaching for children who failed their duty. Now Maia knew it as a dusty nebula, nearby in stellar terms, obscuring direct line of sight to Earth and the rest of the Human Phylum. That must have been comforting to the Founders, providing added shelter against interference by the old ways.

All that was over, now. Something had emerged from the Claw, and Maia doubted even great savants knew yet whether it meant menace or promise. The dark shape made her shiver, childhood superstitions clashing with her proud, if limited, scientific knowledge.

“If only we knew what the savants are looking for,” said Leie wistfully. “I’d shave my head to find out!”

Practically speaking, if the grand matrons of Caria sought something, it was doubtful two poor virgins on a frontier coast would stumble across it. “It’s a big world,” Maia sighed in reply.

Naturally, Leie took a different spin on her sister’s words.

“It sure is. Big, wide open, and just waiting for us to take it by the throat!”

4

There was little rain. Nevertheless, the squall swiftly turned into a vicious gale.

The freighter Wotan wallowed through deep, rolling seas, sliding half-sideways down serrated slopes, abeam to a wind that seized its masts like lever arms, so that the poorly balanced ship heeled dangerously with each stiffening gust, its helm not responding.

Screaming, the mate berated his captain for taking on too little ballast in Lanargh. Earlier, he had cursed because they were too laden to flee the surprise tempest. Ignoring the first officer’s shrill imprecations, the master sent sailors aloft to break the wind’s grip on the masts. Shivering in icy spray, barefoot crewmen took to the swaying sheets, clenching hatchets in their teeth, edging crablike along slippery spars to hack at rigging, torn canvas—anything the vicious storm might clutch and use to heel them over to their doom.

Dimly, through waves of churning nausea, Maia peered after the brave seamen, unable to credit such skill or fortitude. Needles of saltwater stung her eyes as she squeezed the gunnels, watching sailors take horrific risks high above, wielding axes one-handed, shouting as they struggled in common to save the lives of everyone aboard. Nor were there only men up there. Higher-pitched cries told of female crew who had also climbed into the gale, riding masts that whipped like tortured snakes.

Vars like her. How could human beings do such things? Maia felt queasy at the thought. Plus shame at being too landlubber-inept to lend a hand.

“ ’Ware below!” a voice bellowed. Something fell out of the chaos overhead, a ropy tangle that clanged off the gunnels, then slithered toward the dark, hungry waters. Blearily, Maia stared after the mass of blocks and rigging, which might have taken her along had it struck just a bit farther aft. But try as she might, she could not spy a safer place on deck than right here between the masts, gripping the railing for dear life.

One thing for sure, she wasn’t about to join other passengers cowering below. Out here one must face the storm unsheltered, staring at soaring mounds and abyssal gullies of heaving ocean. But across that terrifying vista, that maelstrom, she had last sighted the Zeus. Her twin rode that other frail matchbox of wood and cloth and flesh, and if Maia was too ill and clumsy to help Wotan’s struggling crew, at least she could keep watch, and call if she saw anything.

Mostly what she saw was watery nature, a conspiracy of foamy sea and sodden air, trying its best to kill them. The green hillocks, taller and steeper than the clanholds of Port Sanger, arrived in a rhythm well-timed to deepen the ship’s pendulous roll. On passing the next crest, Wotan heeled far to starboard, hanging precipitously, about to spill over a terrifying slant. The entire vessel shivered.

Just then, a fresh gust struck the other side, yanking mightily at the groaning masts, levering the freighter’s great bulk over its keel. Loudly protesting, the infirm ship listed and plummeted downslope. Gravity rotated, becoming a sideways force, pressing Maia against the rails. One leg slipped between, dangling into space. In horror, she saw the gray-green sea reach with foam-flecked gauntlets…

Time slowed. For a suspended moment, Maia thought she heard the waters call her name.

Then, as if bemused by her helplessness, the ocean-beast slowed… paused… halted just meters away. Eyeless, it looked at her. Like an unhurried predator staring straight through her soul.

Next time … Or the time after…

The trough bottomed out. Maia’s heart pounded as the freighter’s list began slowly to roll the other way again, drawing back the hungry waters. Gravity’s fickle tug rotated toward the deck, once more.

Suddenly, from underneath came a sharp, splintering crash. A horrible, fell vibration, like wooden ribs snapping. New, panicky cries pealed.

“…Eai! The cargo’s shifted! …”

An image came to mind, unasked for… Tons of coal moving in black, liquid waves from one side of the hold to the other, assailing the inner hull as the sea hammered from without. Wotan sobbed, Maia thought, listening to the horrific sound. Dark figures ran past, prying at the cargo hatch with steel bars, sending the door flying off like a leaf caught in the wind. Not waiting for help, the dim forms dove inside, presumably to try shifting, the load with their bare hands.

Maia glanced overboard as the sea rolled back again, nearly cresting at the gunnels this time, before receding even more reluctantly than before. Just a few more such oscillations, and Wotan was surely doomed. The cries of those aloft rose in pitch and urgency, along with sounds of frantic chopping. Someone screamed. An ax glittered in the rainswept beam of an emergency lantern, tumbling to the raging sea. Belowdecks echoed the wails of those facing a different hopeless task.

By utter force of will, Maia overrode her nausea, as wild as the storm. Her hands uncurled from the vibrating rail and pushed off. “I’m… coming…” she managed to croak, for no one to hear. Knowing she lacked any skill to aid those struggling aloft, Maia stumbled upslope across the slippery deck, toward the yawning darkness of the hatch.

Inside the hold, all hell had broken loose, as well as several partitions meant to guard the contents against shifting. One barrier had given way in the worst possible place, near the bow, where all that mass suddenly piling starboard added to their list and worsened the rudder’s lumberous response. Dim electric bulbs, running on reserve batteries, swung wildly and cast dervish shadows as Maia grimly traversed a creaky catwalk straddling huge bins half-filled with chunky coal. Black dust rose like spindrift, clogging her throat and causing her nictitating membranes to close over her eyes, just when she needed more light, not less!

Stumbling down a crumbly talus, Maia came upon an infernal scene, where shattered boards let tons of coal pile rightward in great sloping mounds. Other vars had already joined the men below, toiling to tame the rebel cargo, tossing it morsel by morsel over groaning walls into yet unbroken compartments. Someone handed Maia a shovel and she dug in, adding what she could to the pitiful effort. Through the suffocating haze, she saw that a trio of clones were also hard at work—first-class passengers whose clan must have taught its daughters that dirty hands were less objectionable than dying.

A good thing to remember for our daughters’ curriculum, pondered a remote part of her, exiled to a far corner along with notions that kept gibbering in stark terror. There wasn’t time for dread or detachment as Maia bent to her task with a will.

More helpers arrived carrying buckets. An officer began shouting and pointing, organizing a human chain—women in the middle, passing plastic pails, while men shoveled and filled at one end, heaving coal over a partition at the other. Maia’s job was to keep one shoveler provided with fresh buckets, then send each laden pail on its way. Although desperation lent her strength, and danger hormones surmounted her nausea, she had trouble keeping up with the frantic pace. The male sailor’s wedge-shaped torso heaved like some great beast, emitting heat so palpable she dimly feared it might ignite the flying coal, sending everyone to patarkal hades in one giant fireball.

The rhythm accelerated. Agony spread from her hands, up her fatigued arms, and across her back. Everyone else was older, stronger, more experienced, but that hardly mattered, with all lives at stake together. Only teamwork counted. When Maia fumbled a bucket, it felt like the world coming to an end.

Concentrate, dammit!

It didn’t end, not yet. No one chided, and she did not cry, because there was no time. Another pail took the fallen one’s place and she bore down, striving to work faster.

Bucket by bucket, they chewed away at the drift. But despite all their efforts, the tilt seemed only to increase. The black mountain climbed higher up the starboard bulkhead. Worse, the bin they had been loading, on the port side, began to creak and groan, its straining planks bowing outward. No telling how long that partition would hold against a growing gravitational discord. Every pailful they tossed just added to the load.

Suddenly, a startling, earsplitting crash pounded the deck overhead. Something heavy must have come loose from the rigging, at last. Through the ringing in her skull, Maia heard sounds of distant cheering. Almost at once, she felt the freighter slip out of the wind’s frustrated clutches. With a palpable moan, Wotan’s tiller finally answered its helmsman’s weary pull and the ship broke free, turning to run before the storm.

In the hold, a var near Maia let out a long sigh as the awful list began to settle. One of the clones laughed, tossing her shovel aside. Maia blinked as someone patted her on the back. She smiled and started to let go of the bucket in her hands—

“ ’Ware!” Someone screamed, pointing at the mountain of coal to the right. Their efforts had paid off, all right. Too quickly. As the starboard tilt gave way, momentum swung the ship past vertical in a counterclockwise roll. The sloping mass trembled, then started to collapse.

“Out! Out!” An officer cried redundantly, as screaming crew and passengers leaped for ladders, climbed the wooden bins, or merely ran. All except those nearest the avalanche, for whom it was already too late. Maia saw a stupefied look cross the face of the huge sailor next to her, as the black wave rumbled toward them. He had time to blink, then his startled yell was muffled as Maia brought her bucket down upon his shoulders, covering his head.

The momentum of her leap carried her upward, so the anthracite tsunami did not catch her at once. The poor sailor’s bulk shielded Maia for an instant, then she was swimming through a hail of sharp stones, frantically clawing uphill. Grabbing for anything, her hand struck the haft of a shovel and seized it spasmodically. As her legs and abdomen were pinned, Maia just managed to raise the tool, using the steel blade to shield her face.

A noise like all eternity ending brought with it sudden darkness.

Panic seized her, an intense, animal force that jerked and heaved convulsively against burial and suffocation. Terrifying blindness and crushing weight enveloped her. She wanted to maul the enemy that pressed her from all sides. She’wanted to scream.

The fit passed.

It passed because nothing moved, no matter how she strained. Not a thing. Maia’s body returned to conscious control simply because panic proved utterly futile. Consciousness was the only part of her that could even pretend mobility.

With her first coherent thought, finding herself blanketed by tons of stony carbon, Maia realized that there were indeed worse things than acrophobia or seasickness. And there was yet one item heading the catalogue of surprises.

I’m not dead.

Not yet. In darkness and battered agony, straddling a fine zone between fainting and hysteria, Maia clung to that fact and worked at it. The press of warm, rusty steel against her face was one clue. The shovel blade hadn’t kept the avalanche from burying her, but it had protected a small space, a pocket filled with stale air, rather than coal. So perhaps she’d suffocate, rather than drown. The distinction seemed tenuous, yet the tangy smell of metal was preferable to having her nostrils full of horrible dust.

Time passed. Seconds? Fractions of seconds? Certainly not minutes. There couldn’t be that much air.

The ship had stopped rocking, thank Stratos, or the shifting cargo would have quickly ground her to paste. Even with the coal bed lying still, nearly every square inch of her body felt crushed and scraped by jagged rocks. With nothing to do but inventory agonies, Maia found it possible to distinguish subtle differences in texture. Each chunk pressing her body had a sadistic personality so individual she might give it a name… this one, Needle; that one under her left breast, Pincher; and so on.

As fractions stretched into whole seconds and more, she grew aware of one, unique point of contact—a tight, throbbing constriction that felt smooth but rhythmically adamant. With shock, she realized someone was holding onto her leg! Hope coursed through Maia that she had been tossed upside down, leaving a foot exposed, and those pulsating squeezes meant help was coming!

Then she realized. It’s the big sailor!

His hand must have connected with her foot at the last moment, while she swam the carbon tide. Now, whether conscious or dying, the man maintained this thin thread of human contact through their common tomb.

How ironic. Yet it seemed no more bizarre than anything else right now. It was company.

Maia felt sorry for Leie, when the news came. She’ll imagine the end was more horrible than it is. It could be worse. I can’t think how right now, but I’m sure it could be worse.

As she pondered that, the pulsing grip around her ankle tightened abruptly, spasmodically, clenching so hard that Maia moaned in fierce new pain. She felt the sailor’s terrible convulsions, and his reflexive strength yanked her downward, stabbing her in a hundred places, making her gasp in anguish. Then the fierce grip began subsiding in a chain of diminishing tremors.

The throbbing constrictions stopped. Maia imagined she heard a distant rattle.

See? she told herself, as hot tears swept her eyes in total darkness. I told you. I told you it could be worse.

Quietly, she prepared for her own turn. The scientio-deist liturgy of her upbringing rose in her mind—catechistic lines Lamatia Hold dutifully taught its summer children in weekly chapel services, about the formless, maternal spirit of the world, at once loving, accepting, and strict.

She knew prayers for comfort, prayers for humility. But then, Maia wondered, if the soul field really does continue after organic life has ceased, what difference would a few words, mumbled in the dark mean to Stratos Mother? Or even the strange, all-seeing thunder god said to be worshiped privately by men? Surely neither of them would hold it against her if she saved her breath to live a few seconds longer?

Perceptory overload gradually shut down part of her agony. The claustrophobic pressure surrounding Maia, at first a horrid mass of biting claws, now had a numbing effect, as if satisfied to slowly crush all remaining sensation. The only impression increasing with time was of sound. Thumps and distant, dragging clatters.

Heartbeats passed, one by one. She counted them, at first to pass the time. Then incredulously, because they showed no imminent sign of stopping. Experimenting, Maia opened her mouth slightly, exposing her tongue and inner lips to sense what her battered, dust-covered face could not—a faint thread of cool air that seemed to stream down the shovel blade from somewhere near her hairline!

Yet, there had to be at least a meter of coal overhead. Probably much more!

There was no easy answer to this puzzle, and she tried not to think too hard. Even when Maia made out footsteps crunching overhead, and the hurried scrape of tools, she paid scant heed, clinging to the blanket of numb acceptance. Hope, if it raised her metabolism, was the last thing she needed right now.

Maybe it would be better if I slept awhile.

So Maia drifted in and out of anoxic slumber, vibrations along the shovel blade telling her how slow the progress of the rescuers remained. As if it matters.

Without warning, the tool shifted, and the blade that had succored her suddenly threatened to gouge her neck, causing Maia to squirm in terror. All at once, the black swaddling of coal became more tight, constricting, suffocating, than ever. Hysteria, so long held at bay by resigned numbness, sent tremors of resurgent fury coursing through her pinned arms and legs. Maia desperately fought a rising in her gorge.

Then, unexpected and unbidden, light struck her eyes with abrupt, painful brilliance, outbalancing even clawing panic, driving out all thoughts with its sheer, blinding beauty. Uncovered, her ears filled with noise—rattles, rasps, and hoarse shouts. Maia took long, shuddering gasps as blurry shapes congealed into silhouettes and finally soot-streaked faces, starkly outlined by swaying bulbs. On their knees, sailors and passengers used bare hands to clear more coal away from her head. Someone with a rag and bucket cleaned her eyes, nose, and mouth, then gave her water.

Finally, Maia was able to choke out words. “Don’t… b-bother… w-w-me.” She shook her head, cutting fresh scrapes along her neck. “Ma… man… down… right.”

It came out barely a gargle, but they acted as if they understood, commencing to dig furiously where Maia indicated with her chin. Meanwhile, others more gradually liberated the rest of her. When she was almost free, an overturned yellow bucket came into view below, and the work went even faster.

At that point, Maia could have saved them effort. The hand still clutching her ankle was growing cold. Yet she could not bring herself to say it. There was always a chance. …

She had never known his name. He was not even a member of her race. Still, tears flowed when she saw his purple face and bulging eyes. Hands pried his fingers off her leg, and with that break of contact she knew with tragic certainty and unwonted loss that they would never again share communication, this side of death.

Seabirds cried possessive calls of territoriality, warning others of their kind to keep away from private nesting niches, chiseled in the steep bluffs overlooking Grange Head harbor. Jealous of their neighbors, the birds virtually ignored a small group of bipeds who swung along the cliffs, hanging from slender ropes, taking turns harvesting molted feathers in great bags and alternately chipping still more roosts for this year’s crop of mating pairs. From a distance, or even from the birds’ close vantage point, no one could distinguish among the sunburned, narrow-boned, black-haired women performing these strange tasks. They all looked identical.

Idly, without much interest, Maia watched the harvester family labor along those vertiginous heights, working their feather farm. It was a niche, all right. Not one she’d ever be tempted to fill. Yet, something equally at the fringe was probably her destiny now. All the fond hopes and ambitious schemes of childhood lay broken, and her heart was numb.

With a heavy sigh she looked at the figures she had scratched on her slate. The calculations needed no further massaging. Gingerly, because each movement still caused her pain, she flipped the tablet over and slid it across the chart table.

“I’m done, Captain Pegyul.”

The tall sallow-faced sailor looked up from his own figures and stared at her a moment. He scratched behind his battered green cap. “Well, give me another minute, then, will yer?”

Sitting on a railing nearby, Naroin the bosun puffed her pipe and gave Maia a headshake. Don’t show up officers. That would be her advice.

What do I care? Maia responded with a shrug. With the navigator and second mate lost in the storm, and the first mate in bed with a concussion, there had been only one person aboard able to help Wotan’s master pilot this tub. Struggling to turn a hobby into a useful skill, Maia had quickly learned why tradition demanded more than one eye at a sextant, to cross-check each measurement. The custom proved valid during the last two dreadful weeks, retracing their way back on course. Each of them had made mistakes often enough to cause disaster, if the other hadn’t been there to notice.

But here we are. That’s what matters, I guess.

She was willing to humor the captain’s wish for this final exercise, comparing notes on technique here in a safe harbor, one whose official position was known down to the centimeter. It helped pass the time while her wounds healed, and while going through the motions of looking out to sea, hoping to spot a sail she knew would never come.

The captain threw down his stylus and uncovered a chart, peering at the coordinates of Grange Head harbor. “Gak. Yer right. M’dawn sighting was off ’cause of the red satellite in th’ Plough. It’s the five-pulser, not the three. Thet’s why m’longitude was wrong.”

Maia tried to be gallant, for Naroin’s sake. “It’s an easy mistake in twilight, Captain. The Outsiders put up the new strobe this summer, as a favor to the Caria Navigation Authority, after the old five-second light burned out.”

“Mmph. So you said. A new strobe-sat. Fancy thet. Musta been published. Our sanctuary tele’s been fritzin’, but thet’s no excuse. Oughta stay up t’ date, dammit.

“We’d hed it easy for so long, though,” he sighed. “Queer for a summer storm t’come so late, this yer.”

You can say that again, Maia thought. Aftereffects of the gale had lain strewn across still-choppy waters, the following day, when the winds finally calmed enough for searching. Planks and other floating debris fished out of the sea showed that theirs hadn’t been the only drama during the night. The capping moment came as they cruised back and forth, desperately seeking, when a broken clinker board was hauled in and turned over, showing parts of the letters Z-E-U.

The passengers and crew had stared in numb silence. Nor had the next few days encouraged hope. Lingering silence on the radio turned worry to despair. Assisting the crew to get their wounded ship to port had offered blessed distraction from Maia’s pain and gnawing anxiety.

I’ve got to get ashore. Maybe the feel of solid ground will help.

“Thanks for everything you taught me, Captain,” Maia said woodenly. “But now I see they’ve finished loading the barge. I shouldn’t keep them waiting.”

She bent gingerly to take the strap of her duffel, but Pegyul seized it and swung it over his shoulder. “Yer sure I can’t get ye t’stay?”

She shook her head. “As you said, there’s a chance my sister’s still alive out there. Maybe they’ll limp into port, or she might’ve been rescued by some other ship. Anyway, this was our destination when the storm hit. Here’s where she’ll come, if she can.”

The man looked dubious. He, too, had taken losses when the Zeus vanished. “Yer welcome with us. Ye’d have a home till spring, an’ each three-quarter year after.”

In its way it was a generous offer. Other women, such as Naroin, had taken that path, living and working in the periphery of the strange world of men. But Maia shook her head. “I’ve got to be here, in case Leie shows.”

She saw him accept her choice with a sigh, and Maia wondered how this could be the same person she had dismissed so two-dimensionally, back in Port Sanger. Flaws were still apparent, but now they comprised part of a surprisingly complex blend for so simple a creature as a man. After handing her bag down to the pilot of the waiting barge, topped off with a consignment of dark coal, Captain Pegyul drew from one of his pockets a compact brass tool.

“It’s m’second-best sextant,” he explained, showing her how the three sighting arms unfolded. There were two leather straps for attaching it to the owner’s arm. “Portable job. Been meanin’ t’fix the main reflector, ret here. See? Sort o’ hair loom, it is. Even had a redout for the Old Net, see here?”

Maia marveled at the miniaturized workmanship. The old readout dials would never light again, of course. They marked it as a relic of another age, battered and no match for the finely hand-wrought devices produced in modern sanctuary workshops. Still, the sextant was an object of both reverence and utility.

“It is very beautiful,” she said. When he refolded it, Maia saw that the watchcase cover bore an engraving of an airship—a flamboyant, fanciful design that obviously could never fly.

“It’s yers.”

Maia looked up in surprise. “I … couldn’t.”

He shrugged, trying to make matter-of-fact what she could tell was an emotion-laden gesture. “I heard how ye tried to save Micah with the bucket. Fast thinkin’. Mighta worked … if luck was diff’rent.”

“I didn’t really—”

“He was me own boy, Micah. Great, hulkin’, cheerful lad. Too much Ortyn in him, though, if y’know what I mean. Never would of learned to use a sextant right, anyway.”

Pegyul took Maia’s smaller hand in his huge callused one and put the brass instrument firmly in her palm, closing her fingers around the cool, smooth disk. “God keep ye,” he finished with a quaver in his voice.

Maia answered numbly. “And Lysos guide you. Eia.” He nodded with a faint jerk, and turned away.

Fully loaded, the coal barge slowly crossed the glassy bay. Grange Head didn’t look like much, Maia thought glumly. There was little industry besides transhipping produce for countless farming holds strewn across the inland plains, accessing the sea here by narrow-gauge solar railway. Sunlight wasn’t enough to lift fully laden trains over the steep coastal hills, so a small generating plant offered a steady market for Port Sanger coal. The solitary pier lacked draft to let old Wotan dock, so its cargo came ashore boatload by boatload.

Naroin smoked her pipe, quietly regarding Maia.. “Been meanin’ to tell you,” she said at last. “That was some trick you pulled durin’ the avalanche.”

Maia sighed, wishing it had occurred to her to lie about the damned bucket, instead of semiconsciously babbling the whole story to her rescuers.. Her impulsive act hadn’t been thought-out enough to be called generous, let alone heroic. Sheer instinct, that was all. Anyway, the futile gesture hadn’t saved the poor fellow.

However, Naroin wasn’t referring to that part of the episode, it turned out. “Usin’ the shovel the way you did,” she said. “That was quick thinking. The blade gave you a little cave to breathe in. And raisin’ the handle signaled us where to dig. But tell me this, did you know we make those hafts out o’ hollow bamboo? Did you figure air might pass through?”

Maia wondered where Naroin kept herself summers, so she could avoid ever being trapped in the same town. “Luck, bosun. You’re out of season if you see more in it. Just dumb luck.”

The master-at-arms shrugged. “Expected you’d say that.” To Maia’s relief, the older woman let it drop there, allowing Maia to ride the rest of the way in silence. When the barge bumped along the town dock, with its row of hand-built wooden cranes, the bosun stood up and shouted. “All right, scum, let’s get at it. Maybe we can clear this hole in the coast before the tide!”

Maia waited till the barge was tied securely, and the others had scrambled ashore, before stepping carefully across the gangplank with her duffel. The rock-steady pier made her feel momentarily queasy, as if the roll of a ship were more natural than a surface anchored to rock. Pressing her lips in order to not show her pain, Maia set off for town without a backward glance. Counting her bonus, she could afford to rest and heal for a while before looking for work. Still, the coming weeks would be a time of trial, staring out to sea, clutching the magnifier on her little sextant in forlorn hope each time a sail rounded those jagged bluffs, fighting to keep depression from enveloping her like a shroud.

“So long, Lamai brat!” someone shouted at her back—presumably the sharp-faced var who had been so hostile, that first day at sea. This time the insult was without bite, and probably meant with offhand respect. Maia lacked the will to reply, even with the obligatory, amiably obscene gesture. She just didn’t have the heart.

“In ancient days, in olden tribes, men obliged their wives and daughters to worship a stern-browed male god. A vengeful deity of lightning and well-ordered rules, whose way it was to shout and thunder at great length, then lapse into fits of maudlin, all-forgiving sentimentality. It was a god like men themselves—a lord of extremes. Wrangling priests interpreted their Creator’s endless, complex ordinances. Abstract disputes led to persecution and war.

“Women could have told them,” Lysos supposedly continued. “If men had only stopped their bickering and asked our opinion. Creation itself might have been a bold stroke of genius, a laying down of laws. But the regular, day to day tending of the world is a messy business, more like the inspired chaos of a kitchen than the sterile precision of a chartroom, or study.”

Intermittent breezes ruffled the page she was reading. Leaning on the crumbling stone wall of a temple orchard, looking past the sloping tile roofs of Grange Head, Maia lifted her gaze to watch low clouds briefly occult a brightly speckled, placid sea, its green shoals aflicker with silver schools of fish and the flapping shadows of hovering swoop-birds. The variegated colors were lush, voluptuous. Mixing with scents carried by the moist, heavy wind, they made a stew for the senses, spiced with fecund exudates of life.

The beauty was heavy-handed, adamantly consoling. She got the point—that life goes on.

With a sigh, Maia picked up the slim volume again.

“A living planet is a much more complex metaphor for deity than just a bigger Father, with a bigger fist,” the passage went on. “If an omniscient, all-powerful Dad ignores your prayers, it’s taken personally. Hear only silence long enough, and you start wondering about His power. His fairness. His very existence.

“But if a World-Mother doesn’t reply, Her excuse is simple. She never claimed conceited omnipotence. She has countless others clinging to Her apron strings, including myriad species unable to speak for themselves. To Her elder offspring She says—go raid the fridge. Go play outside. Go get a job.

“Or better yet, lend me a hand! I have no time for idle whining.”

Maia closed the slim volume with a sigh. She had spent a good part of the afternoon pondering this excerpt, purported to have been written by the Great Founder herself. The passage was not part of formal scripture. Yet, even while working in the temple garden, Maia kept thinking about it. Priestess-Mother Kalor had lent her the book when more traditional readings failed to help ease her heart-pain. Against all expectation it had helped. The tone, more open and casual than liturgy, was poignantly humorous in parts. For the first time, Maia found she could picture Lysos as a person she might have liked to know. After weeks of depression, Maia managed her first, tentative smile.

Her injuries had been worse than anyone thought, on stepping from the Wotan’s barge some weeks ago. Or perhaps the will to heal was lacking. When the manager of the small, dingy hotel found her in bed one morning, sweating and feverish, the clone had sent for sisters from the local temple, to come fetch Maia for tending.

“So sorry, younger sister,” the acolytes replied each morning. “There is no sign of the Zeus. No woman resembling Leie has made landfall.” The temple mother even paid out of her own pocket to make Net calls to Lanargh and other ports. The ship Leie had been aboard was listed missing. The guild had filed for insurance and was in official mourning.

Maia had thanked Mother Kalor for her kindness, then went to her cell and threw herself, sobbing, onto the narrow cot. She had wailed and clenched her fists, pounding the mattress till all sense left her fingers. She slept most of each day, tossed and turned each night, and lost interest in food.

I wanted to die, she recalled.

Mother Kalor had seemed unconcerned. “This is normal pass. We vars tend to cleave more closely, when we vi to someone. It makes mourning harder than any clone can understand.

“Unless the clone has lost all of her family at once, that is. Then such devastation you or I could not imagine.”

But Maia could imagine. In a sense she had lost a family, a clan. All her life, Leie had been there. Sometimes infuriating or stifling, that presence had also been her companionship, her ally, her mirrored reflection. The separation on departure morn had been Maia’s idea, a way to develop independent skills, but the ultimate goal had always been a common one. The dream shared.

She had cursed herself. It’s my fault. If they had stayed together, they would be united now, living or dead.

The priestess said all the expected things, about how survivors should not blame themselves. That Leie would have wanted Maia to prosper. That life must persevere. Maia appreciated the effort. At the same time, she felt resentment toward this woman for interfering in her misery. This var who had chosen to become a “mother” the safe and convenient way.

At last, partly in exhaustion, Maia started to let go. Youth and good food sped physical healing. Theological contemplations played a small part, as well. I used to wonder how it is that men still have a thunder god. An all-seeing deity who watches every action, cares about all thoughts.

Old Coot Bennett had spoken of his faith, which he thought fully consistent with devotion to Stratos Mother. Apparently it’s passed down within the male sanctuaries, and couldn’t be eradicated now, even if the savants and councillors and priestesses tried.

But how did it get started? There were no men among the Founders, when the first dome habitats bloomed on Landing Continent. Multiple lab-designed generations came and went before the Great Changes were complete. Our ancestors knew nothing but what the Founders chose to tell them.

So how did those first Stratoin men learn about God?

It was more than an intellectual exercise. If Leie’s gone, perhaps her soul field has joined with the planet’s, and is part of the rainbow I see out there. The image was poetic and beautiful. Yet there was also something tempting about Old Bennett’s notion of afterlife in a place called heaven, where a more personal continuation, including memories and a sense of self, was assured. According to Bennett, the dead could also hear you when you prayed.

Leie? She projected slowly, solemnly. Can you hear me? If you do, could you give a sign? What’s it like on the other side?

There might have been a reply in the play of light upon the water, or in the distant cries of gulls. If so, it was too subtle for Maia to grasp. So, she took wry comfort imagining how her twin might respond to such an impertinent request.

“Hey, I just got here, dummy. Besides, telling you would spoil the fun.”

With a sigh, Maia turned around and took a pair of pruning shears from the pocket of her borrowed smock. While healing, she had paid for room and board by helping tend the orchard of native Stratoin trees each temple was obliged to keep as part of a duty toward the planet. It was gentle work, and seemed to carry its own lesson.

“You and me, we’re both endangered, aren’t we?” she told one short, spindly shrub she had been caring for, before abstraction took her away. Eons of evolution had equipped the jacar tree’s umbrella leaves with chemical defenses to keep native herbivores at bay. Those toxins had proved useless at deterring creatures of Earthly stock, from rabbits to deer to birds. All found the jacar delicious, and only rarely did it take to cultivation. This garden’s five specimens were listed in a catalog maintained in faraway Caria.

“Maybe we both belong in a place like this,” Maia added, taking a final snip and stepping back to regard a finished job. Then she turned to regard the orchard, the flower beds, the stucco-walled temple of refuge. Having second thoughts? she asked herself. A little late for that, now that you’ve said you’re leaving.

On her way back to the gardener’s shed, she walked past the tumbled walls of an older building. An earlier temple, one of the sisters had explained, suggesting Maia ask Mother Kalor if she wanted to know more. First Maia had explored the ruins by herself, and been struck to find an eroded bas-relief, still faintly visible under clinging fingers of ivy. The easiest figure to recognize was a fierce, protecting dragon, a favorite symbol for the planetary spirit-deity, its wings outstretched above a scene of tumult. Jets of flame seemed to spear from its open jaws toward a hovering wheel-shape, defaced almost to nothing. Looking nearer, Maia had found that the “fire” consisted of thin lines originating from the dragon’s teeth.

Digging underneath the metaphorical beast, she had discovered, half-buried in the loam, a fierce battle of demons—one group bearing horns on their heads and the other beards—locked in hand-to-hand struggle so savage that, even muted by age, the sculpture made Maia shiver.

Later on, she had learned that it was an ancient work, from a time soon after the Enemy came and nearly smashed hominid culture on Stratos. And no, Mother Kalor explained when asked, those demon horns were allegorical. The real foe had none.

On closely inspecting the crumbly, sandstone faces, they had found that only half of the defending figures were bearded. Nevertheless, Maia asked, “Were they heretics?”

“Those who built this temple? I hardly think so. There are Perkinites and others inland, of course. But to my knowledge, Grange Head has always been orthodox.”

Mother Kalor offered free use of the temple archives, and Maia was tempted. Had she been here for any other reason, she might have let curiosity lead her. But there seemed little point, nor energy to spare amid the tedium of grief and recovery. Anyway, Maia had made herself a vow—to be practical from now on, and live from day to day.

Upon reaching the shed, she removed her smock and handed the pruning shears back to the chief gardener, who sat at a table tending seedlings. The elderly nun’s beneficent smile showed what peace could be attained down this life path. The gentle path called the Refuge of Lysos.

The priestess-mother hadn’t seemed hurt by Maia’s refusal of novice’s robes. She took it as a tribute to the temple’s ministrations that Maia was ready to set forth once more. “Your place is in the thick of things,” Kalor had said. “I’m sure fate and the world have a role for you.”

The kindness and gentleness she had received here lifted Maia’s heart. I’ll always remember this place. It was like folding a memento, to put away in an attic. She might take the memory out to look at, from time to time, but never to wear again.

In other days she had felt one special reaction, on encountering some new idea, or person, or thing. She had always savored telling her twin about it. That fine anticipation had been far richer than simply remembering for its own sake. But from now on, whatever good things Maia found in the world, she must learn to esteem them all by herself. That naked fact continued to form a void deep within, despite a gradual deadening of her pain. Though lessening with time, the faint sense of loss would remain with her for as long as she lived, and she would call it childhood.

5

The voice, reading aloud, was among the most soothing Maia had ever heard.

“ ‘…And so, now that you’ve left the coastal mountains far behind, the grassy plains of Long Valley roll by your window like purple-crested crinolines, starched for show. A vast sea of low, unmoving waves. From your hurtling chariot, your gaze reaches across the prairie ocean, seeking anything to break the undulating monotony, making what it can of any post or protuberance that might imaginatively be called topography.

“ ‘And you seek not in vain! For, far beyond this glorious expanse of blandness, you glimpse sequestered columns of wind-sculpted stone, green-crested rock monoliths, giving the eye something faraway to cling to. These are the distant Needle Towers, testaments to the power and persistence of natural erosion which carved them long before the arrival of humans on Stratos…’ ”

Already half-stupefied by the thrumming magnetic rails and the dusty sameness of the prairie, Maia listened to the other occupant of the baggage car orate from a volume with finely chased leather bindings. Though the air was parched, her companion never seemed to run dry.

“ ‘According to recent reports, the elders who rule Long Valley have ordained that male sanctuaries be built on several far-off Needles, breaking a tradition of seasonal banishment which started with the first Perkinite settlements…’ ”

The hitchhiker called her book a “travel guide.” Its apparent aim? To describe what the reader was seeing, while she was seeing it. But Tizbe Beller spent more time with her nose between the pages, making excited pronouncements, than actually looking through the grimy window at a succession of dreary farms and ranches. Does someone actually make a living writing such things? Maia wondered. Her companion proclaimed this one a masterpiece of its genre. Clearly, Tizbe came from a different background than Lamatia Clan, which gave its summer kids little exposure to the fine arts.

“ ‘…Currently, all men of virile years are banished from the valley each hot quarter, and kept away until the end of rut season…’ ”

Maia’s fellow traveler lay atop a pile of coarse gunny-sacks, her blonde hair tied in a simple bun. Tizbe’s clothing, ragged-looking from a distance, proved on closer inspection to be soft and well-made, clashing with the girl’s claim of utter poverty. As Maia’s assistant, she was supposed to pay for her passage by helping sling freight all the way to Holly Lock. So far, Maia was unimpressed.

Don’t be hasty to judge, she thought. Mother Kalor wouldn’t approve.

Before departing Grange Head, Maia had given the orthodox priestess a letter to deliver to any young woman passing through who resembled her. After all, Church doctrine held that miracles were possible, even in a world guided by chance and molecular affinities.

“Must you go inland, child?” Mother Kalor had asked. “Long Valley is Perkinite country. They’re a lock-kneed, fanatical bunch of smugs, and don’t much care for men or vars.”

“Maybe so,” Maia had replied. “But they hire vars for all sorts of jobs.”

“Jobs they won’t do themselves.”

“I can’t turn down steady work,” Maia had answered, ending all argument. One thing for certain, if Leie ever did show up, she’d dish out hell if Maia hadn’t been busy during their separation, using the time profitably.

What luck that a railroad clan was just then looking for someone with a knack for figures. The work didn’t involve differential calculus, only simple accounting, but Maia had been pleased to find some part of her education useful. Leie, too, would have been a cinch, with her love of machines. If only…

Fortunately, Tizbe broke Maia’s gloomy thought-spiral.

“Listen to this!” The young hitchhiker lifted a finger and changed to a deep, somewhat pompous tone. “ ‘Of special interest to travelers is the system of freight and passenger carriage used in Long Valley, ideally suited to a pioneering subculture. The solar railway, operated jointly by the Musseli, Fontana, and Braket clans, should get you to your destination without excessive delays.’ ” Tizbe laughed. “That Fontana train was four hours late yesterday! And this Musseli clunker isn’t doing much better!”

Maia felt compelled to return a wry smile. Yet, Tizbe’s contempt seemed unfair. Musseli Clan ran their trains on time during the cool seasons, when men of Rail Runner Guild helped drive the engines. Most males were banished each summer, though, and the long-limbed, flattish-faced Musseli were left short-staffed. They might have hired female engineers just as good as men—itinerant vars, or even a hive-clan of specialists. That would put the enterprise solely in the hands of women year-round, like everything else in Long Valley. But the region’s leaders were caught between their ideology of radical separationism on the one hand and biological needs on the other. In order to produce clone-daughters, they must have men around from autumn to spring, to perform the vital “sparking” function. Keeping ample numbers of men occupied between brief sparkings meant giving them work. Here on the high plains, locomotives served the same secondary function as ships along the coast: to keep a small supply of men available, in compact, mobile, easy-to-manage groups.

Hence the dilemma. If the notoriously touchy male engineers took offense over the hiring of summer replacements, they might not return at all next year. Which would be catastrophic, like leaving the orchards unpollinated. So, each summer, the rail clans just made do.

Now, with its young men home from coastal sanctuaries, Rail Runner Guild was coming back to strength. Soon schedules would be met again. But Maia didn’t bother trying to explain any of this. Tizbe seemed smugly certain she and her book had all the answers.

“ ‘The three rail-clans operate competing freight lines, each in partnership with a male guild, with shared ownership of capital approved by an act of the Planetary Council in the year…’ ”

A surprisingly close working relationship between the sexes, Maia pondered. Yet, hadn’t Lamatia Hold once welcomed the same ships and sailors, year after year? Those flying the Pinniped banner? Preserving for them rights of all kinds, ranging from commerce to procreation? Who was she to say what was normal, and what aberration?

Perhaps the heretic in Lanargh is right. These may all be signs of changing times.

The solar-electric locomotive sped along, faster than the swiftest horse or sailing ship. At each stop, out swarmed Rail Runner maintenance boys, toting tools and lubricants, and Musseli girls armed with clipboards and crate hooks, hurrying to service the machines and expedite cargo under the scrutiny of older supervisors. Maia had noticed that many of the orange-clad males bore faces strikingly similar to the female clones in maroon overalls.

Imagine, sisters continuing to know their own brothers, and mothers their sons, long after life has turned them into men. Maia could think of several drawbacks and advantages to such a close relationship. She recalled sweet little Albert, whom she had tutored for a life at sea, and thought how nice it might have been to see how he grew up. The stray thought reminded her of those childish dreams of someday finding her own father. As if happenstance of sperm and egg meant anything in a big, hard world.

A world capable of snapping stronger bonds than those.

Stop it. Maia shook her head vigorously. Let go of the pain. Leie would.

After reading silently for a while, Tizbe looked up from her gunnysack chaise. “Oh, this part’s lovely, Maia. It says, ‘Long Valley retains many quaint features of a frontier region. From your stateroom, be sure to observe the rustic little towns, each with its monotone grain silo and banks of solar cells…’ ”

There was that word quaint again. It seemed to refer patronizingly to anything simple or backward, from the viewpoint of a city-bred tourist. I wonder if Tizbe finds me quaint, too.

“ ‘…between the towns and zones of cultivation, note stretches of native kuourn grass, set aside under ecological rules even stricter than decreed by Caria City…’ ”

They had seen many such oases—great lakes of waving stalks with purple flowers. The Perkinite cult governing this valley worshiped a Stratos Mother whose wrath toward planet abuse was matched only by her distrust of the male gender. Yet, Maia felt sure much of the plains was off-limits for another reason—to prevent competition.

When Long Valley first opened for settlement, young vars must have swarmed in from all over Stratos, forming partnerships to tame the land. Affiliations that became powerful, interclan alliances when successful women settled down to raise daughters and cash crops. That, in turn, meant pitching in to build a railroad, to export surplus and import supplies, comforts.

And men. Despite their slogans, the Perkinite Utopia soon began to resemble the rest of Stratos. You can’t fight biology. Only push at the rules, here and there.

“Oh! Here’s a good part, Maia. Did you know there are more than forty-seven local species of zahu? It’s used for all sorts of things. Like—”

A shrill whistle thankfully interrupted Tizbe’s next eager recounting. It was the ten-minute warning before their next stop. Maia glanced at the wall chart. “Clay Town comin’ up.”

“So soon?” asked the hitcher. Maia threw open her ledger, running a fingertip along today’s bills of lading. “Can’t you hear the whistle blowing? Come on, you read numbers, I’ll fetch boxes.”

She kept her finger by the starting place until Tizbe sauntered over. Then Maia hurried to the single aisle running the length of the car, between tall racks of shelving. “What’s the first number?” she called.

There followed a long pause. “Um. Is it 4176?”

Maia winced. That had been the final entry at their last stop, only an hour ago. “Next one! Start where it says Clay Town on the left.”

“Oh! You mean 5396?”

“Right!” Grabbing a block and tackle that hung from an overhead rail, Maia scanned the shelves. She found the correct box, hooked its leather strap, pulled the chain taut, and swung the package out, hauling it along the track to where she could lower it gently by the door. “Next.”

“That would be … mm, let’s see… 6178?”

Maia sighed and went looking. Fortunately, the awkward Musseli sorting system wasn’t too hard to puzzle out, although it might have been meant to confuse as much as to clarify. “Next?”

“Already? I lost my place. … Ah! Is it 9254?”

Strictly speaking, it should have been Maia at the ledger and her assistant doing the hauling. But Tizbe had whined about having to do work “suited for lugars and men.” She couldn’t get the gliding winch to work. She picked up a sliver. Maia had a theory about this creature. Tizbe must be a var-child from some big-city clan, so rich and decadent they pampered even their summerlings, kissing them on the brow and sending them off unequipped to survive past their first year. Perhaps Tizbe expected to live off appearance and charm alone.

I wonder why she looks familiar, though.

Despite, or maybe because of, Tizbe’s assistance, the pile by the door wasn’t quite finished by the time the second whistle blew. The locomotive’s flywheel audibly changed tone as the train began braking. Maia hurried the pace. Her hands had callused from hard work, yet the rough chain bit her fingers whenever the car jostled. The last, heavy package almost got away, but she managed to lower it down with just an echoing thump.

Short of breath, Maia rolled open the sliding door as rows of towering kilns and brick ovens grew like termite mounds around the train, enveloping it in an aroma of glazed, baked earth. “Welcome to Clay Town, hub of Argil County,” Tizbe sang with false enthusiasm. For a while, everything was red or dun-colored. Stacks and crates of ceramics swam past in a blur.

Abruptly, the aromatic kiln district gave way to residences, row after row of petite houses. Here in Long Valley, important matriarchies built their citadels near their fields or pastures, leaving towns to small homesteads, sometimes derisively called microholds. From the decelerating train, Maia watched a woman stroll by, holding the hand of a little girl who was obviously her clone-daughter. Half the population of the valley apparently lived this way—single women, winter-born but living varlike existences, with jobs that barely paid the bills and let them raise one winter child, exactly the way their mothers had, and grandmothers, and so on. One identical next-self to inherit and carry on. A thin but continuing chain.

It seemed a simpler, less presumptuous sort of immortality than the binge-or-bust cycles of great houses. You could do worse, Maia thought. In fact, there seemed something terribly sweet and intimate about the solitary mother, walking alone with her child. Ever since her own grand dreams shattered, Maia had begun thinking in more modest terms. The Musseli were beneficent toward their employees, treating several score singleton women almost like full members of their commune. Perhaps, if she worked hard at this job, Maia might win a long-term contract. Then, after saving up to build a house…

Even after all that, there remained the problem of men. Or a man. You had to start off with a winter birth. It was rare to be able to conceive any other time of year, till you’d had a clone. But getting pregnant in winter wasn’t as simple as going into the street and calling, “Hey, you!”

Well, don’t think of that now. Take care of things one step at a time.

The train slowed into the Clay Town railyard with a hiss and squeal. Passengers began alighting. From two cars back came bumping sounds as men and lugars wasted no time hauling heavy farm machinery off a flatbed car. Nearer at hand, Maia saw the local Musseli freightmistress approach, clipboard in hand, striding ahead of a towering lugar laden with packages. Smile, Maia told herself. Try not to act like you’re only five.

“Is this all of it?” the woman snapped, pointing to the pile by the door.

“Yes, madam. That’s all.”

As Maia handed over the bills of lading, Tizbe sidled alongside, muttering “Excuse me” in a low voice. The young blonde squeezed past carrying her travel bag. “Think I’ll go have a look around,” she drawled casually.

Maia called after her. “It’s only a forty-minute stop! Don’t get los—” She cut off as Tizbe turned a corner and vanished from sight.

“If it’s convenient for you, right now?”

Maia jerked back to face the freightmistress. Her face flushed. “Sorry, madam. I’m ready when you are.” Bending over the ledger, while carefully cross-checking the packages, Maia chided herself for worrying about a stupid hitchhiker.

She’s just another silly var. None of my concern. Maia, you’ve got to try thinking more like Leie.

Leie certainly wouldn’t have bothered. Leie would have said “good riddance.”

But with the freightmistress grudgingly satisfied, and ten minutes to go before departure, Maia went looking for her errant assistant. She had reached the far end of the platform, with no sign yet of the irritating blonde, when a whistle blew some distance beyond the kiln district—another train approaching the station.

A young man could be seen holding a lever that would magnetically transfer the oncoming locomotive to one of three sets of rails. Several young women stood nearby, giggling, perched on a wooden walkway in front of a tall house with red curtains. As she neared, Maia saw two of them open their blouses and lean over the youth, shaking their well-proportioned torsos. His color, already flushed, grew redder by the minute. Maia wondered why.

“Not now!” He muttered at the women. “Go back inside an’ wait a minute!”

The young man was trying to concentrate on the approaching train, still half a kilometer away, its flywheels squealing as it began to brake. The young women seemed to relish the effect they were having. One pointed in glee, causing the others to laugh uproariously. The youth’s taut trousers barely concealed a stiffening bulge. He looked up, saw Maia watching, and turned away with an embarrassed moan. This only brought more gales of hilarity from the local women.

“Hey, Garn,” one shouted. “You sure yer holdin’ the right stick?”

“Go ’way!” he shouted hoarsely, trying to look over his shoulder at the approaching train. Across the poor fellow’s brow emerged a line of perspiration.

“Aw come on,” another topless var crooned, jiggling at him. “Want another taste?” She proffered a clear bottle. Instead of liquid, it brimmed with a fine, bluish, iridescent powder. One corner of the boy’s mouth bore a similar stain.

“What’s goin’ on here!”

Everyone turned toward the nearby red-curtained house. At the doorway stood a burly older man and—Tizbe!

But not the Tizbe she knew. Maia blinked. Her instant impression was that the var hitchhiker had, in just twenty minutes, changed her clothes, dyed her hair, and gained ten years!

Lysos, Maia thought, realizing how she’d been had. Leie and I planned to travel about, pretending we were clones. I never expected to see the trick pulled in reverse!

“These frills distractin’ you, Garn?” the big man asked, wiping his lips with the back of one hand. Shaking his head vigorously, the youth replied. “N-no, Jacko, they just—”

“Lennie, Rose, get your iced-up perfs inside!” cursed the woman who looked like Tizbe. “No one’s supposed to see that stuff, let alone get free samples!”

“Aw, Mirri, we were just testin’—” one girl whined, dodging a slap. The bottle was snatched out of her hand and she ran for the house.

So, Maia confirmed. Tizbe’s no var. And her type gets meaner with age.

With a cold eye, the older woman turned and glared at Maia. “Who the vrilly hell are you?”

Maia blinked. “Ah… nobody.”

“Then take off, Nobody. You haven’t seen—”

“Garn!” the big man shouted. The youth below, confused by both commotion and his hormones, had forgotten the oncoming train and begun leaning on the lever, perhaps to spare his painful tumescence. There came a deep, electric hum and click. In dismay, he pushed the lever the other way, and shoved too far. Two loud, grinding clicks. He yanked back…

A shrill toot filled the air as an alarmed engineer threw his emergency brakes, watching helplessly as momentum carried the oncoming locomotive along slick, invisible magnetic fields onto a track already occupied by another train.

The boy dove under the platform. Everyone else ran.

Maia knew now why her assistant baggage handler had looked familiar.

Past the crowd that gathered to gawk at the damage, Maia saw once more the woman she had mistaken for the hitchhiker, conversing intently with the real Tizbe. One or both had dyed her hair, but side by side it was obvious. They wore older and younger versions of the same face.

And now Maia recalled where she’d seen that visage before. Several sisters of their clan had been lounging at a cafe on the main square in Lanargh, outside another house equipped with plush curtains. Looking a second time, Maia saw the same emblem above the building overlooking the tracks—a grinning bull, grasping in its jaws a ringing bell.

Most towns possessed houses of ease—enterprises catering to human cravings, especially those of deep winter and high summer. “Escape valves,” Savant Judeth had called them. “Bordellos,” said Savant Claire, with finality that forbade even asking what the latter word meant.

The reality seemed rather ordinary and businesslike. Such houses provided one outlet for seamen who lacked invitations to clanholds when aurorae made their blood run hot. And in deep winter, when men were more interested in game boards than physical recreations, even normally cool Lamai sisters sometimes felt need of “a comfort.” Especially when glory fell from heaven, they would head downtown, to visit one of those elegant palaces catering to richer hives.

Naturally, such profitable establishments were run by specialized clans, although frequent use was made of hired var labor. Maia and Leie had never thought themselves pretty or vapid enough for such a career. Still, they used to speculate what went on inside such places.

Both Tizbe and “Mirri” looked her way, causing Maia to turn quickly, feeling a chill of apprehension. What are such high-class smugs doing out here in the sticks?

It was pure luck of Lysos that no one had been seriously hurt in the wreck, considering how the two trains met in a tangle of sheet metal and spraying lubricants. Medics from the town clinic were still treating scratches and lacerations as the engineer of the second train shouted, pointing at his locomotive, then at the boy, Garn, who looked downcast and miserable.

Garn’s older colleague yelled back, clenching his hands menacingly. In a sudden outburst, Jacko reached out and pushed the aggrieved engineer, who stumbled two paces, blinking in surprise. That only seemed to catalyze Jacko. Although physically no larger, he loomed over the retreating engineer, who now raised both hands placatingly.

Jacko punched him in the face.

Onlookers gasped as the engineer fell down Whimpering, he tried crawling backward, holding a bloody nose. With dismay he saw Jacko follow, bearing down, clearly intent on more mayhem. Reading the engineer’s bewilderment, Maia sensed the fallen man was furiously trying to remember something he had known in the past, but lately forgotten—like how to form a fist.

Abruptly, the woman Maia had mistaken for Tizbe was at Jacko’s side, tugging his arm. It looked impossible, like trying to restrain a berserk sash-horse. Panting hard, Jacko appeared not to notice until Mirri reached up and took his ear, twisting it to get his attention. He winced, paused, started to turn. Gradually, her crooning words penetrated, until he finally nodded jerkily, allowing her to pull his elbow, drawing him about and leading him through the hushed crowd toward the red-curtained house.

Of course. That’s another of their jobs. Despite all the laws and codes and sanctuaries, despite the well-tended hospitality halls of the great clans, there were always troubles in coastal towns during high summer, when aurorae danced and bright Wengel Star called out the old beast in males. Rutting men with nowhere to go, brawling and making enough noise to shame storm-season tempests. Pleasure clans knew sophisticated lore for handling such situations. The house mistress seemed quite skilled, luckily for the poor engineer.

Only it’s not summer! Maia thought, struggling with confusion. This shouldn’t have happened.

Through the dispersing throng, Maia glanced past the wreck at Tizbe—the real one this time—who looked right back at her, eyes filled with a glint of dark speculation.

6

There were no recitations from the travel guide when the journey recommenced. Tizbe read her book in silence, or stared through the dusty window at the monotonous countryside. Maia found the silence unnerving. Her thoughts roiled from all she had seen, and more she suspected lay unseen. Until now, she had attributed many queer incidents to “other ports, other lands.” Now she knew with a sinking feeling. Something’s happening. And I don’t think I’m going to like it.

Back home, one thing always used to make her more aggressive than Leie—curiosity. Even punishment seldom dissuaded Maia from pursuing inquiries that were “none of a summerling’s business,” She had sworn to suppress the trait, especially since the storm. I’m practical now. A lone var has to be. But there was no real option of turning away, this time. Like a loose tooth, the agony of leaving this mystery alone would drive her crazy.

Whenever she felt certain the other woman wasn’t looking, Maia sneaked glances at Tizbe’s carpet-sided valise, which almost certainly held more than just clothing.

Dammit. Can I afford more trouble?

The young blonde yawned, put her book aside, and stretched across the gunnysacks, giving Maia a good look at the dark roots of her dyed hair. After Clay Town, she knew this was no spoiled summerling, wandering in idle search of a cushy niche, but a full daughter-member of a hive with connections stretching far beyond Maia’s own limited experience. Tizbe wasn’t just “looking around.” She was on duty, working for her family business.

Picture a rich, powerful clan. Its chief livelihood is pleasure houses. A complex, profitable enterprise, demanding much more than strong hands and a pretty face.

Although they ran no house in Port Sanger, she had seen the type on occasion, walking proudly in fine traveling robes or riding lugar-borne litters, tending business at the best holds, and even dropping by for visits with the Lamai mothers.

Special, door-to-door massage service? Maia wondered. But that was too simplistic. Few of those visits had been in high summer or winter. Lamais were a self-controlled lot, who never thought of sex at other times of year.

Couriers, then? A door-to-door message service? Their main business would be a perfect cover for a profitable sideline, delivering communiques between allied clans, for example. But what sort of message would be worth the fees they’d charge?

Pretty damn dangerous ones, Maia figured. Or, she added, looking at the valise. Dangerous goods.

That bottle of blue-green powder, glistening and sloshing like liquid … It was something you gave men, apparently. Something linked to one youth’s inconvenient erection, another man’s unseasonal rage. Maia recalled the earlier incident aboard the Wotan, when those sailors seemed aroused by her nakedness, despite it being autumn and she a mere summerling, a virgin, and filthy besides. That time the mysterious courier had been male, but after weeks at sea and on the rails, she now knew groups of women and men were capable of cooperating in complex endeavors.

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 sav-ant. 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.

7

The sun was low when Maia finished helping the big woman load her buckboard. On their way out of town, they paused at the transients’ hostel, where Maia ran inside to store her duffel. Not that it held much of value. Just clothes and a few mementos, including a book of ephemerides Leie had given her as a birthday present. There was also a small, blackened lump of stone. A gift from Old Coot Bennett—before the light left his rheumy eyes—which he had sworn was a true meteorite. Maia didn’t want to leave her possessions, but it made no sense to haul them to Jopland Hold and back for just one night. Stuffing a few items into her jacket pockets, she took a receipt from the Musseli attendant and hurried to catch her ride.

Heavily laden, the horse-drawn wagon moved slowly along the narrow dirt road north of town, jostling over ruts and bumps left untended since the storms of summer. Floating dust tickled the membranes under Maia’s eyelids, causing them to flutter intermittently, dimming vision. “Valley council keeps puttin’ off fixin’ these paths,” the wagon’s owner complained. “The biddies say there’s no money, but always seem to find it b’fore harvest time! Farmers run everything here, virgie. Remember that, an’ you’ll get by.”

Perkinite farmers, Maia added silently. The sect appealed to smaller clans, not long risen above the status of lowly vars. Even the wealthiest clans in Long Valley were modest by coastal standards, unless they were cadet branches of more-extended hives elsewhere.

Maia’s benefactor came from such a branch. She was a Lerner. Maia knew the family, whose scattered offshoots had wedged holdings throughout Eastern Continent, wherever there were ore deposits too meager to attract big mining concerns, and communities with needs a smalltime forging operation could fill. Hard experience had taught Lerner Clan the limits of their talents. Whenever one of their operations grew large enough to draw competition, they would always sell out and move on.

It’s a niche, though, Maia supposed. Few vars established a nameline of their own, let alone one so numerous. She was in no position to judge.

Calma Lerner seemed friendly enough. A woman with man-sized hands nearly as hard as the gritty, reddish ingots Maia had helped load, brought on today’s train from far-off Grange Head. The alloys would be mixed with local iron, using household recipes passed down from mother to daughter for generations, to make unpretentious Lerner Steel.

Back in Port Sanger, the local Lerners did not endure the prairie sun, and so were much paler. Yet, there was a sense of familiarity, as if she and Calma ought to be gossiping about acquaintances they had in common. Of course they had none. The familiarity went one way. Nor would Calma likely recall Maia if they met again. People tended not to bother memorizing, or even much noticing, a face with just one owner.

Still, as tawny countryside rolled slowly by, the older woman began showing some of her clan’s well-known affability, letting herself be drawn out about life on this great, flat, alluvial plain. Calma and her family worked the earth out north of Holly Lock, where faulting had brought to surface a rare fold of bedrock containing a promising mix of elements. Back when settlement at this end of the valley was still new, three young cadets from an established Lerner hold had arrived from the coast to work those narrow seams and set up smithies. Across four generations there had been hard times and some years of prosperity. There were now six adults in the midget offshoot clan, and four clone daughters of various ages. That did not count one summerling boy, plus a dozen or so transient var employees.

When she discovered that Maia’s education included a tape course in chemistry, Calma began warming to her, growing effusive about the challenges and delights of metallurgy on the frontier—shaping and transforming the raw stuff of the planet to satisfy human needs. “You can’t imagine the satisfaction,” she said, waving broad arms toward the horizon, where the setting sun seemed to set fire to a sea of grain. “There’s great opportunities out here for a youngster with the right hardworkin’ attitude. Yes. Fine opportunities indeed.”

Out of courtesy, and because she had taken a liking to her companion, Maia refrained from laughing aloud. Some dead ends weren’t hard to spot, and poor Calma was describing a real loser. “I’ll think about it,” Maia replied carefully, concealing amusement.

With a sudden pang, she realized she had been filing away the Lerner clone’s words. Storing them with the habitual intention of repeating them later … for Leie. She couldn’t help it. Patterns of a lifetime die hard. Sometimes harder than frail human beings.

“You’d think they already had enough wine for a funeral,” she recalled complaining to her twin one winter when they were four, as they labored at a ratcheted crank, operating pulleys to descend into a pit of stone. “Are they gonna have us goin’ up and down all night?”

“Could be,” Leie had replied breathlessly, her voice echoing down the narrow dumbwaiter shaft. Clicking softly, the winch marked each centimeter of descent like the beating of a clock. “There was glory frost on the sills this morning an’ you know that puts ’em in a party mood. I’m bettin’ the Lamais have more in mind than a ceremony to mulch three grandmas.”

Maia recalled wincing at the sarcastic image. Although Lamais were cool toward their var-daughters, they tended to mellow with age, even going as far as showing real affection late in life. Two of the departed grannies had almost been nice. Besides, it was wrong to speak ill of the dead. They say Stratos reuses all the atoms we give back to her, and each piece of us goes on to help new life.

Abstract solace had seemed pallid that day, after Maia’s first direct contact with death. The cramped elevator car had felt stifling, rocking unpleasantly as they turned the crank. Their lanterns set the stone walls glittering where moisture leaked from the poorly caulked kitchens above, and echoes of their heavy breathing had fluttered like trapped souls against the walls of the pit. When the wooden box hit bottom, they stepped out with relief. In one direction, sealed bins contained enough grains and emergency supplies to withstand a siege. Tier upon tier of shelving held kegs and glittering rows of wax-dipped bottles.

Carrying a hand-scrawled list, Leie sauntered toward the wine racks to fetch the vintages they had been sent for. Knowing her sister wouldn’t mind a brief desertion, Maia had walked down another narrow aisle, using her lantern to play light across a stone portal enclosing a door made lavishly of reinforced steel.

The surrounding rock was a maze of deep cuts and grooves. Some incisions were twisty, others straight and wide enough to slip a blade inside. A few knobs would depress a little if you pushed, emitting enticing clicks, hinting at some hidden mechanism.

The one time she had asked a Lamai about the door, Maia had received a slap that left her ears ringing. Leie used to fantasize about what mysterious riches lay beyond, while Maia was seized by the puzzle itself. Smuggling paper and pencil to trace the outlines, she would spend hours contemplating combinations and secret codes. It had to be a tough one, since the Lamai blithely sent unsupervised varlings to the cellar, on errands.

On that day, after finishing loading bottles aboard the dumbwaiter, Leie had come alongside to put an arm around Maia’s shoulder. “Don’t let the vrilly jigsaw get you down. Maybe we can sneak a hydraulic jack down here, one smuggy piece at a time. Bam! No more mystery!”

“It’s not that,” Maia had answered, shaking her head despondently. “I was just thinking about those old women, those grandmas. We knew ’em. They were always around while we were little, like the sun an’ air. Now they’re just lying in the chapel, all stiff and …” She shivered. The funeral had been their first to attend, as four-year-olds. “And all those others in the first row, lookin’ like they knew it was gonna be their turn soon.”

Full-blood Lamais normally lived a ripe twenty-eight or twenty-nine Stratoin years. When one of them went, however, a whole “class” tended to follow within weeks. No one expected this to be the last funeral of the season, or of the month.

“I know,” Leie replied in a voice gone unusually reflective. “It scared me, too.”

Maia had rested her head against her sister’s, comforted by knowing someone understood the questions troubling her soul.

On their way back up the dank elevator shaft, Leie had tried to lighten the mood by relating some gossip picked up that morning from another town varling. It seemed several younger sisters of Saxton Clan had started a ruckus near the harbor, harassing sailors until, in desperation, the men called the Guardia and—

A covey of spiny-fringed pou birds erupted across the road, causing the sash-horses to neigh and prance while Calma Lerner pulled the reins, speaking to soothe the frightened beasts. The birds vanished into a cane brake, pursued by a clutch of pale foxes.

Maia blinked, holding her breath for several seconds. The flood of memory had briefly seemed more vivid than the dusty present. Perhaps the rocking wooden bench seat reminded her of the creaking dumbwaiter. Or some other subconscious cue, a smell, or glitter in the twilight, had triggered the unsought fit of retrospection.

Funny. Now that her train of thought was broken, Maia couldn’t recall what choice bit of hearsay Leie had shared with her that day, while the two of them hung suspended between cellar and scullery. Only that she had guffawed, covering her mouth to keep her squeals from echoing throughout the house. Her sides had hurt for hours afterward, both from laughter and the effort of suppressing it, and Leie had joined in, giggling, barely able to hold the crank still. A wine bottle tipped over, cracking and dribbling red liquid across the wooden floor. The crimson pool had spread and found its way through wooden slats to audibly splatter, after a brief delay, into the tomblike cellar far below.

Why don’t you leave me alone? Maia thought plaintively, shaking her head and fighting tears. Memory wasn’t what she wanted or needed, right now. Poignancy was a bitter tang in her mouth and eyes.

Yet it was a mixed thing. While renewed mourning hurt, the sweetness of that recollected laughter seemed to suffuse a deeper part of her, permeating the wound with a sad pleasure, a tryst solace. Against her will, Maia found herself wearing a faint smile.

Maybe all we get is moments, she thought, and decided not to resist quite so hard if another happy memory came to mind.

Calma Lerner hadn’t spoken in some time, perhaps sensing her passenger’s absorption. So Maia gave a start when the woman abruptly announced, “Your stop’s comin’ up. Jopland Hold. Over past that orchard.”

While Maia’s thoughts had turned inward and the afternoon faded, a dark expanse of fruit trees had appeared just beyond a gurgling watercourse. She peered at the plantation, whose disciplined array of slender trunks made ever-changing row-and-lattice patterns. As the wagon clattered across a plank bridge, the cultivated forest seemed to explode around Maia in an ecstasy of planned geometry, a crystalline study in living wood. The rapidly dimming light only enhanced each viewing angle, trading ease of distance for an impression of infinity.

Soon Maia noticed that the trees came arrayed with an illumination all their own. Dim flickerings along the myriad branches made her blink in surprise. At first they looked like decorations, but then she realized they must be glow beetles, setting the orchard’s columns and intersections glittering with earnest, insectoid mating displays. Shimmering wavelets coursed down the serried avenues. One could trace those ripples, Maia observed, much as one might briefly track the parallel harmonies of a four-part fugue… only by letting go.

It must be a sight later on, she thought, wishing she could stay and swim forever in this pocket galaxy, a swarm of miniature stars.

The road emerged from the forest, leaving the rippling lattice behind. Up ahead, the more stolid light of a lesser moon fell on a cluster of handsome farm buildings, including a two-story house made of adobe or reinforced sod. Antennas aimed toward the sparse array of satellites still functioning in high orbit.

“Jopland Home,” Calma Lerner repeated. “Since it’s late, they’ll put you up in a barn, I figure. Code of hospitality. But if you get on their wrong side, don’t worry. Just follow my wheel ruts northwest three kilos, bank right at the big willow, go two more klicks an’ follow your nose. People say they can smell Lerner Hold long before they get to it. Never noticed, myself.”

“Thanks.” Maia nodded. “Oh, is that easy to do? I mean, getting on their wrong side.”

Calma shrugged. “Everyone around here comes to Jopland for judgments, sooner or later. You learn to be careful how you say things. That’s all.”

The wagon pulled by a tall gate in the slotted fence without slowing. Maia swung out and walked alongside for a few meters. “Thanks for the warning, and the lift.”

“Nothin’ to it. Good luck with your con-sult-ation!” The big woman laughed with an airy wave. Soon the wagon was gone from sight, trailing a low cloud of dust.

Several large carriages filled the drive in front of the main house. A young woman, probably a var servant, curried more horses at a watering trough. This must be the social hub of the county, Maia thought, knocking at the front door. A towering lugar soon answered, dressed in a green-and-yellow-striped vest that had seen better days. The white-furred creature tilted its grizzled head, and an inquiring mew escaped its muzzle.

“A citizen seeks wisdom,” Maia pronounced clearly, slowly. “I ask guidance from the mothers of Jopland Hold.”

The lugar stared at her for several seconds, then made a low, rumbling sound at the back of its throat. It turned, vaguely motioning for Maia to follow.

While the outside walls were adobe, the interior of the mansion was richly lined with veneered hardwood, foreign to these upland plains. Wall sconces gave off pale electric illumination, highlighting a garish emblem over the main stairway—a plow encircled with sheaves of wheat. At least there are no statues, Maia thought.

The lugar spread two heavy, sliding doors and ushered her into a brighter room, presumably the main hall. A drifting haze stung Maia’s eyes. Men, she saw in surprise. There were about a dozen of them, sprawled on somewhat worn sofas and cushions puffing long-stemmed pipes while four young servants hurried from the kitchen carrying steins of brown ale. The male nearest the door was reading quietly under a lamp. Further away, two of them faced a flickering telescreen, watching some faraway sporting competition. Several in the far corner could be seen poring over a miniature Game of Life set, only a meter on a side, its gridlike surface covered with tiny black, white, or purple squares that clicked and throbbed under the players’ concentrated gaze, sweeping mysterious, ever-changing patterns across the board. The rest of the men sat quietly, immersed in their own thoughts. Few had even bothered changing out of their work clothes—red, orange, or black one-piece uniforms of the three railroad guilds. Maia guessed every male within forty miles must be in this room tonight. The clans are starting winter wooing early, just like back home, she thought.

Twice in that first sweep of the room, Maia had seen men yawn. No doubt most had put in a long day’s work before coming out this way. Still, they didn’t appear to be showing fatigue, but ennui.

Looks like I came at a bad time.

No adult women were visible, yet. Except in summer, men generally preferred evenings that started quietly, without pressure. So the chosen Joplands were probably in back somewhere, changing from ranch gear into garments the mail-order catalogs promised would stoke that dormant spark of male desire. Maia glanced at the four serving girls stepping carefully around their guests, trying to be unobtrusive. Two of them, though of different ages, wore identical features—olive of complexion, small-built, but with well-toned muscles. Their proudest adornment was their silky black hair, which they kept long despite the valley’s ever-wafting dust.

Those must be winter daughters, Maia decided, estimating their ages at four and five. The other two girls, older and not as well dressed, were definitely not identical and probably var employees.

Several men glanced up when Maia entered. Most quickly lost interest and went back to what they had been doing, but one young fellow, clean-shaven and tidier than the others, took more than a moment in his perusal, and even smiled faintly when she met his eyes. He shifted in his chair, and Maia felt a fluttering panic that he was about to come over and speak to her! What could she possibly say if he did?

At that moment, a brush of air told Maia of doors opening behind her. The young man looked past her, sighed, and sank down again. With an odd mix of relief and disappointment, Maia turned to see what had caused such a reaction.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

The imperious tone seemed not at all anomalous coming from the short, dowdy figure confronting Maia, arms crossed. Apparently Joplands went to flesh with age, although the woman’s shoulders implied considerable strength, even late in life. The lovely skin tone of the youngsters had gone to leather, but the silken black hair was unchanged. That was another thing about being a var. Unlike normal folk, you had no clear idea what you’d look like when you got older. Maia wasn’t sure she didn’t prefer it that way.

“A citizen comes beseeching aid,” she said, bowing courteously before the elder Jopland. “I’ve seen your uplink, O Mother, and must ask aid in consulting the sages of Caria.”

She hadn’t meant to speak loudly, but her words carried. Suddenly, the room’s relative quiet fell to utter hush. A glimmer of interest seemed to rise beneath the hooded eyelids of the nearby men, much to the irritation of the Jopland matriarch.

“Oh, must you, variant-daughter? You figure on saying something the savants might be interested in?”

“I do, Mother. And I see your system is operational.” She gestured toward the ancient tele. From the look on the old woman’s face, Maia had just given her one more reason to hate the machine, but it was a valued accessory for attracting men to soirees like this one. “By the ancient codes,” Maia concluded, “I ask help arranging my call.”

A deeply pursed frown. The elder obviously hated having codes quoted to her by a statusless stripling. “Hmph. You have lousy timing.” There was a pause. “We aren’t obliged to pay your charges. I expect you can cover them?”

When Maia reached for her purse, the crone hissed. “Not here, witling! Have you no shame?” Maia blinked in confusion. Was there some local Perkinite custom against handling money in front of men? “Forgive me, Mother.” She bowed again.

“Mm. This way, then. And you!” The old woman snapped her fingers at one of the var serving girls. “That gentleman’s glass is empty!” With a sniff, she turned and led Maia down a narrow hallway.

The corridor took them by a room where, in passing, Maia glimpsed several young women making preparations. Jopland fems were handsome creatures in their prime, Maia conceded, between ages six and twelve. Especially if you liked strong jaws and boldly outlined brows. But then, there was no accounting for the tastes of men, who grew increasingly finicky as Wengel Star receded and the aurorae died.

The young Joplands shared mirrors with one pair and a trio of clones from other families—the first type tall, with frizzy hair, and the other broad of shoulder and hip, with breasts ample enough to feed quadruplets. Apparently, Jopland shared the expense of hosting with a couple of allied clans. By the looks of banked enthusiasm Maia had witnessed in the Main Hall, they probably had to throw several such evenings to get just a few winter pregnancies.

Given the size of the house, Maia had expected to see more fecund Joplands, till she realized. There’s talk of a population drop in the valley, just when it’s rising elsewhere.

Of course. The boom along the coast comes mostly from “excess” summer births. But these smugs are Perkinites. Men are kept away in summer, just to avoid that kind of pregnancy! That explained why she had seen no var-daughters, women half-resembling their Jopland mothers.

Maia wanted to linger, curious how these frontier women managed something even rich, attractive, seaside Lamatia found tricky at times. “This way,” the elder Jopland hissed, interrupting her perusal.

“Uh, sorry, ma’am.” Bending her head, Maia hurried after her reluctant hostess.

The communications chamber was spare, barely a cabinet. The standard console lay on a rickety table, bundles of cable exiting through a hole in the wall. Only the chairs looked comfortable, for mothers to use during long-range business calls, but those were pulled away and a bare stool set in front of the table instead. With a gnarled finger, the aged Jopland touched a switch causing the small screen to come alight with a pearly glow.

“Guest call. Accounting on completion,” she told the machine, then turned to Maia. “If you can’t cover the charges, you’ll work it off. One month per hundred. Agreed?”

Maia felt a flare of anger. The offer was outrageous. The rudest Port Sanger summerling has better breeding than you, “mother.” But then, breeding and style weren’t what it took to win and hold a niche out here on the prairie. Once again, Maia recalled—a var’s place wasn’t to judge.

“Agreed,” she bit out. The Jopland smiled.

This had better not cost a lot! Working for clones like these would be patarkal hell.

Maia sat down facing the standard-model console. Somewhere she had heard that it was one of just nine photonic devices still mass-produced in ancient factories on Landing Continent. Others included the all-purpose motors used on the solar railway, and the Game of Life set she had glimpsed minutes before, in the main hall. Maia had never actually used a console in earnest. She tried recalling Savant Judeth’s cursory lessons back at Lamatia. Let’s see … it’s on voice mode, so if I phrase my request—

Maia suddenly realized she hadn’t heard the door close. Turning, she saw the Jopland matriarch leaning against the jamb, arms crossed.

“I ask the courtesy-right of privacy,” Maia said, hating the other woman for making it necessary. The crone smirked. “Clock’s already ticking, virgie. Have fun.” With a click, the door closed behind her.

Damn! Now Maia saw the chronometer display in the upper left corner of the screen, whirling rapidly. It showed charges of eleven credits already! Nervously, she spoke toward the machine. “Uh, I need to talk to someone… a savant? Or someone in the guardia?”

This was going badly. “Oh yes! In Caria City!”

The screen, which had so far remained obtusely blank, at last resolved into a pattern of boxes. A logical array, she recalled from lessons. Along the top it said:

Query Address Zone — City of Caria

generic reference-type sought

Imprecise partial cues — “savant” and/or “guardia”

Suggested clarification — SUBJECT MATTER? _______

Maia perceived it would be a mistake to try parsing her question in the proper formal way. What she saved in processing costs would be more than lost in connection time. Perhaps, if she just talked at it, the machine would extract what it needed.

“I’m not sure. I’ve seen strange things, in Lanargh and in Clay Town. Men acting like it was summer, but it’s not, you know? I think they must’ve eaten or sniffed something. Something people want kept secret. Some kind of blue powder? In glass bottles? …”

The screen flickered several times, with boxes rearranging themselves across the screen, each containing one or more of her spoken words. An array of interlinking arrows kept shifting connections between the boxes as she spoke. Maia had to concentrate to keep the dazzling puzzle from transfixing her. “… there was a girl from one of the pleasure clans, I think they use an emblem with a bull and a ringing bell. She’s carrying the bottles like some sort of courier”

Suddenly the boxes seemed to collapse, as if her thoughts had abruptly resolved in neat cubes, coalescing into a configuration of pristine clarity, a logically consistent whole. The picture lasted just an instant, too brief to read consciously. Maia felt a pang of loss when it vanished.

The pattern was replaced by a human face—a woman wearing her slightly wavy brown hair in a simple fall down one side, kept in place by an elegant gold barrette. In handsome middle age, the woman regarded Maia for a long moment, then spoke with a voice of authority.

“You have reached Planetary Equilibrium Security. State name and nascence affiliation.”

Maia had never heard of the organization before. Nervously, she identified herself. For official purposes a var used the last name of her maternal clan, though it felt strange mouthing the words—“Maia per Lamai.”

“All right, please go back over your story. From the beginning this time, if you please?”

Maia was gnawingly aware that charges had eaten half her meager savings. “It all began when my sister and I took our first var-voyage jobs on the colliers Wotan and Zeus. When we hit Lanargh I saw a man in fancy clothes who wasn’t a sailor come down to the docks and meet three of our sailors who then acted real strange, pinching me and saying summery stuff even though it was autumn and I was filthy and, well, they couldn’t have smelled any, well, you know, I’m just a …”

“A virgin. I understand,” the official said. “Go on,”

“In fact, my sister and I …” Maia swallowed hard, forcing herself to concentrate on bare facts. The Lysos-damned clock seemed to be speeding up! “We saw men acting that way all over town! Then in Grange Head I got this job working on the railroad and I saw the same thing happen in front of a house in Holly Lock that’s run by the same pleasure clan and Tizbe—”

“Hold… hold it!” The woman in the screen shook her head in puzzlement. “Why are you talking so fast?”

In agony, Maia watched the counter take up her last savings. Now she was doomed to a month working for the Joplands. “I … can’t afford to talk to you anymore. I didn’t know it would be so expensive. I’m sorry.”

Downcast, she reached for the cutoff switch.

“Stop! What are you doing?” The woman held up a hand. “Just… hold it a second.”

She turned to her left, leaning out of Maia’s field of view. Maia looked up at the corner of the screen where the counter spun on for a moment and then… stopped! She stared. An instant later, the digits rippled, turning into a row of zeros!

“Is that better?” the woman asked, reappearing. “Can you talk easier now?”

“I … didn’t know you could do that.”

“Your mothers never mentioned reversing charges on important calls to the authorities?”

Maia shook her head. “I guess… they must’ve thought it’d make us spendthrift, or lazy.”

The policewoman let out a snort. “Well, now you know. So. Are we calmer? Yes? Let’s backtrack, then, to where you say you first saw this bottle of blue powder.”

In the end, Maia realized she hadn’t a whole lot to offer.

Her fantasies had ranged from disaster—her story proving to be trivial or stupid—all the way to miraculous. Could this be what that savant on the tele in Lanargh had been talking about, when she offered big rewards for “information”? She had wondered.

The truth seemed to lie somewhere in between. The official, who called herself Research Agent Foster, promised Maia a small but worthwhile fee to come to Grange Head in fourteen days, and tell her story in detail to a magistrate who was scheduled to pass through about then. Her expenses would also be covered, so long as they were modest. Agent Foster did not volunteer any explanations for the events Maia had seen, but from her demeanor of attentive but unbothered interest, Maia got the impression this was one of many leads in a case already long under way.

They seem awfully calm about it, Maia thought. Especially if someone was meddling with the sexual cycle of the seasons. It had already caused one accident, and who knew what chaos might ensue if it got out of hand?

The agent gave her a number to use if she ever had to call again, then signed off, leaving on the screen something else Maia hadn’t heard of before, a requisition on Jopland Clan for one night’s guest lodgings and a meal, at Colony expense.

When she went to the door, Maia found the matriarch standing there, wearing a broad smile. “Did you finish your consultation, daughter?” she asked eagerly.

“Yes. I’m finished now.”

“Good. I’ll have one of the servants show you a pallet in the barn. In the morn we’ll discuss how you’ll work off your debt.”

For the first time in weeks Maia felt a sense of relish, of anticipation. Leie would have loved this.

“Your pardon, Revered Mother, but the barn won’t do. In the morning, after a good breakfast, I’ll be happy to discuss your, um, lending me transportation back to town.”

The Jopland elder blanched, then flushed crimson in a reversal that was surprising, given her dark complexion. She pushed Maia aside and hurriedly read the screen, gargling in rage. “How did you do this! I warn you, if this is some city trick—”

“Lysos, I don’t think so. You’re welcome to call Planetary Equilibrium Security, if you want to verify it.”

Maia did not even know what the words meant, but they had dramatic effect. The old woman swayed as if she had been struck. Only after visible effort did she manage to speak in a harsh whisper. “I’ll take you to your room.”

Out in the hallway, Maia heard distant sounds of music and laughter. Apparently, a decent party had gotten under way, after all. As a var, she was used to not being invited to such affairs, and was unsurprised when the crone led her in the other direction. It was a bit disturbing, though, when they descended steps into the farmyard.

Two dogs came to growl briefly at Maia before sidling away at a sharp command from her host.

“It’s not the barn I’m taking you to, don’t worry. But we’re goin’ around the house. I don’t want you disturbing our guests.”

Through front-facing windows, Maia heard hearty male laughter. Farther along, they passed before several dimly lit rooms from which came breathy, hoarse sounds unmistakable as anything but passion. Well, she thought, feeling her ears grow warm, the Joplands ought to be happy. Seems they’re getting their money’s worth tonight. Odds-on, at least one winter clone would be ignited by the labor of these hardworking men.

At the far end of the southern wing stood several small apartments, each with its own door and plank porch. There were no keys or locks. The matriarch pushed into the last one and stood on tiptoe in order to tighten a bare bulb. Only wan illumination spilled forth, explaining why there was no switch. That bulb would never get too hot to touch. Over in one corner, a pair of folded blankets lay atop a packed-straw mattress. Maia shrugged. She had slept worse.

“Cockcrow for breakfast, or none,” her reluctant host said, departing without another word. Maia closed the door, then set to laying out the bedclothes. Finding a pitcher of water on a rickety table, she washed her face, took a long drink from the spout, and reached up to turn out the light.

Elsewhere in the rambling farm complex, people were vigorously occupied making strong, atonal harmonies. The music of joy, poets sometimes called it. To Maia it sounded much more serious.

Of course, there were different rhythms for each time of year. In summer it was men who eagerly sought, while skeptical women sometimes let themselves be convinced. These were patterns Maia had known all her life. Nature’s way.

Well, the way chosen for us by Lysos and the Founders, Maia pondered, listening in the dark. It’s hard to imagine any other.

Maia had thought about sex—two willing partners coming together, whether by wooing or after being wooingly pursued. It seemed an act partly sublime, but also filled with all the frenetic, damp, clasping after life that came from certain knowledge of it slipping away. A fusion aimed at immortality, some called it.

As a young virgin, Maia would not feel that hormonal rush of desire, if at all, until winter’s deepest nadir. Still, for as much as a year before departing Port Sanger she had begun experiencing sensations she felt must surely be related. A faint longing, a void. She vaguely suspected sex might have a role in filling it. A partial role.

Sighs and murmured cries. The sounds were fascinating, yet again Maia wondered if there wasn’t something more to it than a mere rubbing, release, and a mixing of fluids. A union that enhanced and magnified what each party brought separately.

Or am I just naive? It was a private suspicion she had never dared share, even with Leie. “You want to keep a smelly, scratchy man as a pet?” her twin might have taunted. Even now, Maia had no idea what it was she really desired, as if her desires had any relevance to the world.

It took an hour or two. Then matters settled down, allowing the prairie wind to win by default, rustling the tall cane fields beyond the house and yard. Still, Maia couldn’t sleep. Her feelings were a churn from all that had occurred today. Finally, with a sigh, she threw off the thin blankets, went to the door, and stepped out to inhale the night.

The scents were heavier than she was used to, growing up in the icy north. Yet one musty-pleasant aroma she identified quickly. It accompanied a low, humming rumble, emanating from the open-sided lugar barracks, where those shaggy, obsessively gentle creatures huddled at night, whatever the temperature. Their piquant scent, she had once read, was one of countless features programmed by the founders, who gave the beasts great physical strength to serve womankind, breaking one link of dependency that used to bind females to males.

Certainly the aroma was less pungent than the sweat tang given off by sailors back on Wotan, whenever hard labor brought on that glistening, other-species sheen. Did men also perspire so while making love? The thought added to Maia’s heavy ambivalence of attraction-revulsion.

Walking under the stars, she greeted with a smile her friends Eagle and Hammer. The familiar constellations winked at her. On impulse, Maia snapped two leather catches, opening the brass sextant at her wrist. Unfolding the alignment arms, she took angle sightings on the horizon, on Ophir, the polestar, and the planet Amaterasu. Now, if only she had a decent chronometer…

Dogs barked at some neighboring clanstead. Something winged and swift fluttered a few meters overhead. Wind rustled the trees by the river, where glow beetles were still busy at their mating display, more persistently amorous than humans, casting glittering, ecstatic wavefronts to eerie rhythms. Whole swatches of forest came alight, then winked off in unison. I wonder if there’s a pattern, Maia thought, fascinated by the spectacle of countless individual insects, each reacting only to its nearest neighbors, combining in a life-show of tantalizing intricacy, like the constellations that had always drawn her, or a labyrinthine puzzle…

As she reached the corner of the house, an ebb in the breeze caused the quiet to deepen, abruptly revealing a low murmur of voices.

“… you don’t know what she said to the Pessies?”

“That’s what scares me! I got no clue what she was at them about. But they reversed charges, so it must’ve been more’n a nuisance call. We already heard from cousins on the coast about a police agent nosing around. This stinks. You people promised discretion, complete discretion!”

The fire bugs were forgotten. Maia slipped into shadows and peered toward the rear veranda. She could make out the second speaker. It was the mother Jopland, or one roughly the same age. The other person lay hidden, but when she laughed, Maia felt a shock of recognition.

“I doubt she was calling about our little secret. I know the wench, and I’ll bet tit-squirrels to lugars that she’s no agent. Couldn’t figure her way out of a gunnysack, that one.”

Thank you, Tizbe, Maia thought with a chill. All of a sudden things seemed to make sense. No wonder the Joplands had a successful wooing party, after such a dismal start! While she had been talking to authorities in Caria, Tizbe must have arrived carrying bottles brimming with distilled summer. What wouldn’t the Joplands pay to have their slow population decline turned around in a simple, efficient way? All the more so for devout Perkinites, who didn’t even like men.

They were planning to give up their summer-banishment rule. The valley councils were going to build sanctuaries, like along the coast. But with Tizbe’s powder there’d be no need to compromise their radical doctrine.

Maia had wondered if there was a practical side to the drug. Now she had her answer.

I was bothered by incidents in Lanargh, and the train collision in Clay Town. But those happened because people were fooling around with the stuff, because it’s new. If it’s used carefully, though, to help make winter sparking easier, where’s the harm? I didn’t hear any of the men tonight crying out in misery.

Naturally, the Perkinites’ long-range goal was unattainable. Perkies were crazy to dream, of making men as rare as jacar trees, drug or no drug. Meanwhile, though, if they found a short-term method for having their way in this valley, so what? Even conservative clans like Lamatia tried to stimulate their male guests during winter, with drink and light shows designed to mimic summer’s aurorae. Was this powder fundamentally different?

Maia was tempted to walk up and join the conversation, just to catch the look on Tizbe Beller’s face. Perhaps, after getting over her surprise, Tizbe would be willing to explain, woman to woman, why they were going to such lengths, or why Caria City should give a damn.

The temptation vanished when Maia’s former assistant spoke again.

“Don’t worry about our little var informer. I’ll see to things. It’ll all be taken care of long before she ever makes it back to Grange Head.”

A sinking sensation yawned in Maia’s gut. She backed around the corner of the house as it began dawning on her just how much trouble she was in.

Bleeders! I don’t know anybody. Leie’s gone. And I’m in it now, right up to my neck!

8

Calma had been right. You could zero in on Lerner Hold by sense of smell alone.

That was fortunate. Maia could tell north by the positions of the stars, seen through a gathering overcast. But compass directions are useless when you have no map or knowledge of the territory. Only Iris, the smallest moon, lit Maia’s path as she followed a rutted trail over wavelike prairie knolls until one branch turned and dropped abruptly into a maze of water-cut ravines. A tangy, metallic odor seemed to come from that direction, so with a pounding heart she took the turn.

Plunging into the canyon, Maia had to feel her way at first, her fingers tracing a thick layer of living topsoil that soon gave way to hard laminations of clay. Maia found herself descending a series of hellish rents in the ground, as if the skin of Stratos lay raked open by gigantic claws.

Her pupils adapted, splitting slitwise to let in a maximum of light. Succeeding beds of clay and limestone alternately shone or glittered or simply drank whatever moonbeams reached this deep into the canyon. It all depended, Maia supposed, on what mix of tiny sea creatures had fallen to the ocean bottom during whatever long-ago sedimentary ages laid these beds. Soon even the sinuous bands gave way to hard native rock, twisted and tortured by continental movements that had taken place before protohumans walked on faraway Earth. Interchanging patterns of light and dark stone reminded her of those towering “castle” pillars she had seen in the distance from the railway—rocky remnants of once proud mountains that used to stand here, but had since been all but ground away by rainstorms and rivers and time.

Time was one thing Maia didn’t figure she had a wealth of. Did Tizbe intend to wait till morning to spring a trap on her? Or would the young Beller come during the night to the room Maia had been given, accompanied by a dozen well-muscled Jopland fems? After overhearing those sinister words in the farmyard, Maia had chosen not to stay and find out.

Escaping Jopland Hold was easy enough. Stepping quietly to avoid alerting the dogs, she had crept down to the nearby stream that ran beside the orchard, and then sloshed a kilometer or so through icy water with her shoes tied together, hanging from her neck, until the mansion was well out of sight. Next she had to spend several minutes rubbing sensation back into her half-frozen feet before lacing up again. Shivering, Maia then spent an hour trampling a path across successive wheat fields until at last finding the road.

So far, so good. Thinking through her predicament was much harder. After weeks of depressed numbness, the abrupt effect of all this adrenaline was both dizzying and exhilarating. She couldn’t help comparing her situation to those adventure reels Lamatia let summerlings watch during the high seasons, when the mothers were too busy to be bothered. Or illicit books Leie used to borrow off young vars from more lenient holds. In such tales, the heroine, usually a beautiful, winter-born sixer from an up-and-coming clan, found herself thrown against the dread schemes of some decadent house whose wealth and power was maintained by subversion rather than honest competition. Usually there was a token man, or a shipload of decent, clear-eyed sailors, in danger of being gulled by the evil hive. The ending was always the same. After being saved by the heroine’s insight and courage, the men promised to visit the small virtuous clan each winter for as long as the heroine’s mothers and sisters wanted them.

Virtue prevailing over venality. It seemed exciting and romantic on page or screen. But in real life, Maia had no mothers or sisters to turn to. She was a lone summerling fiver without a friend in the world. Clearly, Tizbe and her Jopland clients could do whatever they pleased to her.

That’s if they catch me, Maia thought, biting her lip to stop a quiver. Clenching her fists also helped. Defiance was a heady anodyne against fear.

Uh oh.

Coming to a dead stop, she swallowed hard. The trail had been meandering along a lip halfway down the canyon wall, but on turning a corner she found it suddenly plunging straight for a precipice. A rickety suspension bridge lay ahead, half of it in shadows and half reflecting painful moonlight to her dark-adapted eyes.

I must’ve taken a wrong turn. Calma could never have taken her wagon across that!

Tracing its spidery outline, Maia saw that the bridge hung over a gulch strewn with heaping mounds of ash and slag, trailing from a row of towering beehive structures on the opposite ridge. Here and there, Maia glimpsed red flickers from coal fires that were banked for the night, but never allowed to go out.

Iron foundries, she recognized with some relief. So this was Lerner Hold after all. Calma must have taken a slower freight route across the canyon floor. This was the more direct way.

Setting foot on the creaky, swaying bridge would have been frightening even by daylight. But what choice had she? I was never very good at this, she thought, remembering camping trips with other summerlings on the steppe near Port Sanger. She and Leie had loved the expeditions, putting up cheerfully with biting bugs and bitter cold. But neither of them had much love for crossing streams on teetering logs or skittish stones.

The bridge was definitely worse. Stepping forward cautiously, Maia took hold of the guide rope, which stretched across the ravine at waist level. She worked her way from handhold to handhold and plank to groaning plank, fearing at any moment to hear a shout of pursuit behind her, or the snap of some cable giving way. Eerie silence added further discomfort, driving home her loneliness.

Finally, on reaching the other side, she leaned against one of the anchor pillars and let out a ragged sigh. From the promontory, Maia surveyed the trail down which she had come. There was no sign of any full-scale search party, whose lights would be visible for kilometers. You’re probably making more of this than it deserves, she thought. To them you’re just a stupid var who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. Lay low for a while and they’ll forget all about you.

It made sense. But then, maybe she was too stupid to know how much trouble she was in. Standing there, Maia felt the wind grow colder. Her fingers were numb, almost paralyzed, even when she blew on them. Shivering, she rubbed her hands and began peering among the furnaces and cliffside warehouses for the mansion where this branch of Lerner Clan dwelled and raised its daughters.

The house was a disappointment when she found it. She had envisioned the industrial Lerners constructing an imposing structure of steel arches, lined with stone or glass. What she came upon was a one-story warren, made of sod bricks, that rambled over half an acre. Just a few windows faced a front courtyard strewn with scrap and reclaimed junk of every description.

The windows were dark. If not for the soft hissing of the idle furnaces—and the odors—Maia might have thought the place deserted.

There was another sound, she realized. A faint one. Maia turned. She stepped carefully through the scrapyard until, rounding a corner of the house, she came in sight of a jumble of low structures, even more ramshackle than the “mansion.” Each had a small chimney from which trailed thin columns of smoke. Housing for the employees, she guessed.

One of these dwellings, set apart from the rest, seemed different. Dim light from the narrow curtained window illuminated a raked gravel path… and a small bed of neatly tended flowers. Approaching, Maia made out soft strains of music coming from within. She also smelled the aromas of cooking.

By the time she reached the door, Maia was shivering too much from the cold to be shy about lifting her hand and knocking.

Since taking jobs with the foundry only a month before, Thalla and Kiel had transformed the little cabin at the far end of the workers’ compound. “You’ll give up that foolishness soon enough,” the other employees had said. But the two young women faithfully set aside an hour each day, even after long, grueling shifts at the furnaces, to tend their garden and put their frayed house in order.

It had been tall, broad-shouldered Thalla who opened the door that night, clucking in concern and drawing Maia inside, putting her with a blanket and steaming teacup by the smoldering peat fire. Kiel, with her almost-pure black complexion and startlingly pale eyes, was the one who went to the Lerner clan mothers the next morning, and returned shortly with word that Maia could stay.

Naturally, she would have to work. “You’ll start in the scrap pile,” Kiel announced the morning after Maia’s flight from Jopland Hold. “Then you’re to spend a week learning how to shovel and ladle with the rest of us. Calma Lerner says if you’re still around after that, she’ll talk to you about an after-hours ’prenticeship in the alloys lab.”

The black woman laughed scornfully. “A ’prentice-ship. Now that’s a good one!”

Laboring for a clan of smiths wasn’t the life path Maia would have chosen. But barring some brilliant strategy to get to Grange Head without crossing paths with Tizbe’s gang, or the Joplands, it would have to do. Anyway, it was honorable work.

“What’s wrong with an apprenticeship,” she asked the older girl. “I thought—”

“You thought it was a way up the ladder, right.” Kiel waved a scarred, callused hand in dismissal. “Maybe in a fancy city, where you can hire a clone from some lawyer hive to go over your contract for you. But here? I guess you don’t know what ‘after hours’ means at Lerner Hold, do you?”

Maia shook her head.

“It means you get no wages for ’prentice time, no room-and-board points. In fact, you pay for the privilege of workin’ extra in their lab. They charge you, for lessons!”

“No quicker way into debtor’s trap,” Thalla agreed. “Except gambling.”

Debtor’s Trap was something Thalla and Kiel talked about all the time, as if they feared falling into bad habits if they ever let the subject drop. Only constant attention and thriftiness would let them prevail. Along with weeding the garden and sweeping the floor, the two young women ritually counted their credit sticks each night.

“It’s possible to come out ahead, even after food an’ lodgings are deducted,” Thalla said on the second evening, while helping Maia gingerly dab where hot cinders had scorched her skin. Heavy leather aprons and goggles had spared her body a worse singeing, but wearing all that armor made more exhausting the work of dragging heavy ladles brimming with molten, sunlike heat. It was labor even harder than working on ships, calling for the strength of a man, the patience of a lugar, and the disciplined diligence of a winter-born clone. Yet, only vars were employed in the furnaces. Only vars in need of work would put up with the miniature, artificial hell.

“Isn’t it required by law?” Maia asked, dipping her washcloth sparingly in a shallow basin of rationed water. “I thought employers had to pay enough so you could save.”

Thalla shrugged. “Sure it’s the law, handed down since the time of Lysos …”

Maia half-raised her hand at mention of the First Mother’s name, but stopped short of drawing the circle sign. Somehow, she didn’t figure Kiel and Thalla were religious.

“It’s close to the edge, though,” the stocky woman went on. “Buy a few luxuries from the company store. Lose a few credits gambling… you see how it goes. Get into debt an’ there’s no escape till Amnesty Day, in late spring! And then where do you go? Me, I don’t plan stayin’ here past my seventh birthday. Got things to do, y’know.”

Maia refrained from pointing out that despite their dedication, Thalla and Kiel spent money on more than bare necessities. They had a little radio, and paid Lerner Hold for electricity to run it, sometimes late into the night. They bought flower and vegetable seedlings for the garden.

But then, maybe those were necessities. As she fell into the routine of labor at the mill, Maia came to see how such trimmings of civilization, slim as they were, made a key difference between holding your heading and losing your way, drifting into the endless half-life that seemed the fate of other var employees. Oh, the vars worked hard. Off hours, they laughed and sang and threw considerable energy into their games of chance. But they weren’t going anywhere. Proof lay in the next vale, upwind and out of sight of the factory, where the creche and playgrounds lay. Children, both winter- and summer-born, were housed and schooled there. Every single one had been born of a Lerner mother. No var’s womb had ripened here for as long as anyone recalled.

Maia, too, began counting her credits each night. Some went toward secondhand work clothes, a bar of soap, and other needs. When the weekly electricity bill came, Maia paid one-third. That left very little. Against all expectation, Maia found herself feeling homesick for the sea.

The policewoman promised me a stipend for showing up at Grange Head, she pondered wistfully. Even a modest reward for testifying would match what she cleared through hard labor here. Almost a week has passed. You could find out if it’s safe to make a break.

Her housemates quickly guessed that Maia was in flight from serious trouble. Though they did not press, and she withheld details, Maia took a chance and told the two women it was the mothers of Jopland Clan who were after her. That seemed to raise her standing with Kiel and Thalla. Kiel volunteered to check things out next Greers-day, when the supply wagon went to town. If it wasn’t too heavily laden, off-duty var employees could hitch a ride, for a small fee. Kiel had shopping to do, anyway. “I’ll look around for you, virgie, and see if the coast is clear.”

“I wish you’d tell us what you did to those biddies,” the dark woman said on her return, dropping her groceries on the rickety table and turning to Maia, wide-eyed. “You’ve sure gotten those Perkies riled. At train time I saw two Joplanders hanging around the station, about as subtle as a plow, pretending to be waiting for someone while they checked every var who came or went. Saw another pair on horseback, patrolling the road. They’re still lookin’ for you, vestal girl.”

Maia sighed. So much for a quick getaway. Make a note. Next time you take on those more powerful than you, pick a place with more than one back door. Holly Lock was about as far into the middle of nowhere as she could have found, and the railroad was the only fast way out of the valley. Even stealing a horse would do no good. The hue and cry would track her down long before she got near the coastal mountains, let alone Grange Head.

“Guess you made a smart choice after all,” Thalla suggested. “Headin’ further inland instead of trying for shore. Last place they’ll look is stinky Lerner Hold.”

Apparently. Or maybe Maia’s pursuers didn’t feel any need to check every hut and farmstead. All they had to do was watch all exits, and wait.

“Were they asking questions? Putting out my description?” she asked Kiel, who shrugged.

“Now, what var would tattle another var to a Perkinite? They know better than to ask.”

That sounded a bit facile to Maia. Antagonism between clones and summerlings was pretty intense in Long Valley. But she didn’t have much faith in var solidarity. More likely the other Lerner workers would sell her in a trice, for a big enough reward. Fortunately, only Thalla and Kiel seemed to much notice her existence. The renowned Jopland trait of stinginess was her chief hope. Plus the fact that Lerners themselves weren’t Perkinites, and had a tradition of staying at arm’s length from local politics.

We’ll see if I’m still hot in a week or so. If they lose interest, I could try walking out in stages, traveling by night and doing hobo labor for meals along the way …

Maia felt deeply the loss of her bag, left with the station-keepers in Holly Lock. The duffel contained her last mementos of Leie. Thinking about losing them made her feel even more lonely and sad.

At least she had two new friends. They were no substitute for Leie, but the sisterly warmth shown by Thalla and Kiel was the biggest reason Maia felt reluctant to go. The work was hard and the little cottage wasn’t much more than a hut, but it felt closer to “home” than anywhere she’d been since departing her attic room in Port Sanger, ages ago.

Days passed. The rhythm of the furnaces, the stench of local brown lignite, the rumbling of the metal rollers … even the heat ceased bothering her quite as much. The day set for her appointment at Grange Head came and went, but Maia didn’t figure the magistrate missed her much. She had told the officer in Caria all she knew. She had done her duty.

Besides, listening to Kiel and Thalla talk each night, Maia began to wonder. What did she owe to a power structure that offered so little to vars like her, while other women flourished simply because of a twist of birth timing? Her roommates didn’t seem to think it was heretical to ask questions about the way things worked. It was a frequent topic of conversation.

Sometimes at night they tuned their radio to a strange station, twisting dials to catch tinny voices reflected off high, magnetic layers. “No one can count on justice from corrupt officials in Caria City, who are bought an’ sold by the great hive-dam of Landing Continent. It’s up to the oppressed classes themselves to take a bold hand and change things. …”

Maia suspected the station was illegal. The words were angry, even rebellious, but more surprising to Maia was her own reaction. She wasn’t shocked at all. She turned to Kiel and asked if “oppressed classes” referred to summerlings like them.

“Sure does, virgie. Nowadays, with every niche sewn up by one clan or another, what chance do poor vars like us have to get something of our own started? Only way things will change is if we get together and change them ourselves.”

The voice on the radio echoed these sentiments. “…The tools used for suppression are many. We have seen a tradition of apathy promulgated, so that the nonclone turnout in elections on Eastern Continent hardly reached seven percent last year, despite intense efforts by the Radical Party and the Society of Scattered Seeds …”

That was how Savant Claire used to refer to the var-children Lamatia Hold cast forth each autumn. Scattered seeds. In theory, summerlings were supposed to search for and eventually find that special occupation they were born to be good at, then take root and flourish. Yet so many wound up in dead ends, either taking vows and sheltering in the church, or laboring like the Lerner employees, for room, board, and enough coinsticks to buy a few cheap pleasures.

Maia thought about all she had witnessed since leaving Port Sanger. “Some say there’ve been a lot more summer births, lately. That’s why there are so many of us.”

“Blood-spotting propaganda crap!” Thalla cursed. “They always complain there’s too many vars for open niches. But it’s just an excuse for poor pay. Even if you get a job, there’s no tenure. And usually it’s work no better than fit for a man.”

That answered Maia’s next question, whether males were also included under the classification of “oppressed classes.” Kiel had a point, though. Sure, the Lerners were good at what they did. In the furnaces and forges they always seemed to know where the next problem would arise, and watching a Lerner work metal was like seeing an artist in action. Still, did that give them the right to monopolize this kind of enterprise, wherever small-time foundries made economic sense?

“Perkinites are the worst,” Thalla muttered. “They’d rather have no summerlings at all. Would reopen the old gene labs if they could, fix things so there’d just be winter brats. Nothing but clones, all the time.”

Maia shook her head. “They may get their way without reopening the labs.”

“What do you mean?” Both young women asked. Looking up quickly, Maia realized she had almost let the secret slip.

What secret? she pondered. The agent never exactly told me not to speak. Besides, Thalla and Kiel are my kind, not like some faraway clone of a policewoman.

“Um,” she began, lowering her voice. “You know that trouble I got in at Jopland Hold?”

“The mess you didn’t want to talk about?” Thalla leaned forward eagerly. “I been putting one an’ three together and have got a theory. My guess is you tried crashing that party they held a couple weeks back, sneaking in to get yourself a man without payin’!” Thalla guffawed until Kiel pushed her arm and shushed her. “Go on, Maia. Tell us if you feel ready.”

Maia took a deep breath. “Well, it seems at least some of the Perkinites have found a way to get what they want. …”

She went on to tell the whole story, feeling a growing satisfaction as her companions’ eyes widened with each revelation. They had categorized her as some sweet, helpless young thing to be given sisterly protection, not an adventuress who had already been through more excitement and danger than most saw in a lifetime. When she finished, the other two turned to look at each other. “Do you think we should—” Thalla began.

Kiel shook her head curtly. “Maybe. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Right now it’s late. Past a fiver’s bedtime, no matter what a born pirate she’s turned out to be.” Kiel gave Maia’s ragged haircut a friendly tousle, one that conveyed newfound respect in an offhand way. “Let’s all kick in,” she concluded, and reached over to turn off the radio.

When the light was out and all three of them had settled into their cots, Maia lay still for a long time, thinking.

Me? A born pirate?

Yet, why not? With her tender muscles starting to throb less and tauten more each passing day, Maia was toughening more than she had ever thought possible. And now, listening to rebel radio stations? Sharing police business with homeless, radical vars?

What next? she wondered. If only Leie could see me now.

Suddenly, all her newfound toughness was no bulwark against resurgent grief. Maia had to bear down in order not to sniffle aloud. Damn, she thought. Damn it all to patarkal hell. The kindness of her housemates only made her more vulnerable, it seemed, by easing the numbness she had wrapped herself in since leaving the temple at Grange Head. Maybe I’d be better off alone, after all.

From neighboring cottages could be heard the rattle of dice and hoarse laughter, even a snatch of bawdy song. But it was quiet in their hut until Thalla began snoring, low and rhythmically. A while later, Maia heard Kiel get up. Although Maia kept her eyes closed, she felt eerily certain the older woman was watching her. Then there came the creaking of the front door as Kiel slipped outside. Half-asleep, Maia presumed the dark girl had gone to visit the outhouse, but by morning she had still not returned.

Thalla didn’t seem worried. “Business in town,” she explained tersely. “Greersday wagon’ll be full of wrought iron, so no passengers, but we got a couple of investments to look after, the two of us. Places we put our money so’s it won’t evaporate out here. That happens, y’know. Coin-sticks just vanish. I wouldn’t leave mine under my pillow, if I was you.”

Maia blinked, wondering how Thalla knew. Had she looked? Suppressing an urge to rush back to the cot and check her tiny stash, Maia also took note how deftly the older var had managed to change the subject. None of my business, I suppose, she thought with a sniff.

Work continued at the same steady, numbing pace. On her eighteenth day at Lerner Hold, Maia and most of the other workers were assigned to haul barrowloads of preprocessed iron ore from a mine two miles away, staffed entirely by a clan of albino women whose natural pallor had become tinted by rusty oxides, permeating their skin.

The next day, a caravan of huge dray-llamas arrived, carrying charcoal for refining the ore. Tall gaunt-eyed women tended the beasts, but took no part in unloading which, apparently, was beneath their dignity. Maia joined the team of vars lugging bag after heavy bag of sooty black chunks to a shed by the furnaces, while an elderly Lerner paid off the teamsters in new-forged metal. Within a few hours, the caravan was heading back up country. Their journey would take them past three distant, stony pillars that gave the northeast horizon its character, and onward toward barely visible peaks where yet another clan filled a small but thriving niche—cutting trees and cooking them into ebony-colored, log-shaped, carbon briquettes. It was a simpleminded rustic economy. One that functioned, though, with no space left for newcomers.

Afterward, while sponging away layers of grime, Maia patiently endured another of Calma Lerner’s daily visits. The clanswoman “dropped by” each evening, just before supper, with an obstinacy Maia was starting to respect. She would not take no for an answer.

“Look, I can tell you have an educated background for a summer child. Come from a classy line of mothers, I reckon. Ought to do something with your life, you really should.”

I plan to, Maia answered in her thoughts. I’m planning to run, not walk, out of this valley just as soon as it’s safe, and never again set foot near a piece of coal, ever!

But Calma was likable enough, and Maia had no wish to offend. “I’m just saving up to move on,” she explained.

The Lerner shook her head. “I thought you came here ’cause of what we talked about that day in the wagon. You know, studyin’ metallurgy? If that wasn’t it, why’re you here?”

This line of inquiry Maia didn’t want to encourage. So far there had been no sign of Tizbe or the Joplands looking for her here. They must have figured she’d head west, toward the sea. But inquiries by Calma, or even loose gossip, could change that.

“Um. Look, maybe I’ll think about that apprenticeship. I’m just not sure about the arrangements, that’s all.”

Calma’s expression transformed and Maia could almost read the older woman’s thoughts.

Aha! The little one is just staking a bargaining position, hoping for a better deal. Maybe I can drop the lesson fee a bit. In exchange for what? A term contract?

“Well,” the older woman said aloud. “We can talk about it whenever you’re ready.” Which Maia immediately translated as meaning Let her slave at the forge another week. By then she’ll accept if we give a point or two.

In fact, Calma’s face was so easy to read, Maia felt she understood how such a talented family never amounted to much in the world of commerce. They might go far in partnership with a businesslike clan. But some families just couldn’t work closely with groups other than themselves.

Especially over generations, which was how long many interclan alliances lasted.

Although Maia filed this insight away for future reference, she no longer contemplated sharing such tidbits. Leie’s loss still felt like a cavity within her, but the ache dulled with each passing day. Through it all, she had begun to see the outlines of her future, unwarped by the inflated dreams of childhood.

If she was clever and hardheaded, she might manage to be like Kiel and Thalla, slowly saving and searching, not for some fabled niche, or anything so grandiose as establishing her own clan, but to find a tiny chink in the wall of Stratoin society. A place to live comfortably, with a little security. You could do worse. You’ve seen people who have done much worse.

To pass the second and third evenings Kiel was away, Thalla enlightened Maia on strange customs practiced in the seaports of the. Southern Isles. The stocky young woman seemed equally amazed when Maia described mundanities of Port Sanger life she herself had long taken for granted. Then they listened to the radio awhile—to a station playing music, not political commentary—until sleep time came.

Maybe when Kiel returns, she’ll say the coast is clear, Maia thought as she drifted off. She felt no ties to Lerner Hold, but would she be able to tear herself away from her new friends? For the sake of this comradeship, she felt tempted to stay.

Work, and recovery from work, took up nearly all of the next day, from dawn to dusk. Mealtime was a fragrant lentil stew with onions and spices, a supper Maia felt sure Thalla had prepared in expectation of Kiel’s return. But the dark woman did not show. Thalla only laughed when Maia worried aloud. “Oh, we got plans, we do. Sometimes she’s away a week or more. Lerners got to put up with it ’cause nobody’s better’n Kiel at cold-rollin’ flat sheet. Don’t you worry, virgie. She’ll be back presently.”

All right, I won’t worry. It was surprisingly easy to do. In a few short weeks, Maia had learned the knack of letting go and living from day to day. Not even the priestess at the temple had been able to teach her that. Physical exhaustion, she admitted, was a good instructor.

That evening, Maia took their small oil lantern into the ebbing twilight to visit the toilet before going to bed. For privacy, it had become her habit to wait until all the other vars finished. Along the way to the outhouse, she liked to watch the stars, which were beginning to show winter constellations to good advantage. Stratos was slowing in its long outward ellipse, although the true opening of cool season still lay some weeks ahead.

Turning a corner in the warren of laborers’ bungalows, Maia saw someone leaning against the tilted door of the outhouse, facing the other way. Oh, well, she thought. Everyone has to take turns.

She approached and set the lantern down. “They been in there long?” she asked the woman waiting ahead of her, who shook her head.

“No one’s inside.”

“But then, why are you …”

Maia stopped. Something was wrong. That voice.

“Why am I waiting?” The woman turned around. “Why, for you of course, my meddlesome young friend.”

Maia gaped. “Tizbe!”

The pleasure-clan winterling smiled and gave an offhand salute. “None other than your loyal assistant baggage handler, in person. Thought it was time you and I had a talk, boss.”

Despite her racing heart, Maia felt proud not to show a quaver in her voice. “Talk away,” she said, spreading her hands. “Choose a subject. Anything you like.”

Tizbe shook her head. “Not here. I have a place in mind.”

“All right. Where—”

Maia stopped suddenly, sensing movement. She whirled just in time to glimpse several identical black-clad women bearing down upon her, holding fuming cloths.

Joplands, Maia recognized the instant before they seized her. She felt their brief surprise at her strength. But the farm women were stronger still. Struggling, Maia managed to dodge the damp rags long enough to catch sight of one more figure, standing a short distance away.

Calma Lerner watched with tight lips pressed together as Maia was taken to the ground and her mouth and nose covered. Black fabric cut off vision. A cloying, sweet aroma choked her, invading her brain and smothering all thoughts.

She roused through a cloudy, anesthetic haze to see stars jouncing about like busy glow beetles high in the sky, and dimly recalled that stars weren’t supposed to do that. Only vaguely in her delirium did it occur to Maia that this might be a matter of perception. It was hard to focus while lying supine, tied to the bottom of a rattling, horse-drawn wagon.

Through the night, Maia drifted in and out of drugged slumber, punctuated by intervals when someone would lift her head to dribble water down a cloth into her parched mouth. She sucked like a newborn baby, as if that primal reflex were the only one left her. Dreams confronted Maia with memories drawn randomly from storage, twisted, and made vivid with embellishments by her unrestrained subconscious.

She had been a little over three Stratoin years old… nine or ten by the old calendar. It was Mid-Winter’s Day and Lamatia’s summerlings had been fed and told to go to their rooms, to stay there till the gong rang for evening meal. But the twins had been making plans. At noontime, Maia and Leie knew all full-Lamai folk would be in the great hall to take part in the Ceremony of Initiation. For weeks, the six-year-old class of Lamais had been excitedly wagering which of them would receive ripening, and which would have to await another winter, maybe two. Among clones, with little to distinguish between them, whoever managed to conceive during her first mature solstice had an advantage over her peers, rising in status as her generation matured, perhaps eventually taking a leading role in running the clan.

Maia and Leie were as one in not wanting to miss this, despite rules putting the rites off-limits to mere half daughters. They had spent many furtive hours discovering the route to use—which entailed first slipping out their bedroom window, then around a dormer and down a rain gutter, along a wall lined with decorative, crenelated fortifications, through a loose window into an attic, and down a rope ladder that they had prehung inside a sealed-off, abandoned chimney…

In Maia’s dream, each phase of the adventure loomed as vivid and immediate as it had to her younger self. The possibility of falling to her death was terrifying, but less awful than the thought of getting caught. Capture and punishment were, in turn, negligible deterrents next to the ghastly possibility that she and Leie might not get to see.

Reaching their final vantage point was the most dangerous part. It meant worming their way along the steep, sloping dome of the great hall itself, whose arching ribs of reinforced concrete held in place huge mottled lenses of colored glass. Crawling the lip so that no shadows would cast into the hall, Maia and her sister finally gathered the courage to poke their heads over a section of tinted window, to catch their first glimpse of the ceremony under way below.

The interior was a swirling confusion of brightness and shadow. The glassy roof poured winter daylight into the chamber, transformed into a brilliance reminiscent of summer nights. Colored panels cast clever imitations of aurorae against the walls below, while others glinted and flashed as gaudily as Wengel Star, when the sun’s small, bitterly bright companion shone high in the summer sky. A roaring fire in one corner of the room gave off heat the twins could feel outside. The flames were colored with additives guaranteed to simulate the spectrum of the northern lights.

It was a spectacle worth every pain taken to get there. Neither Leie nor Maia would have had the courage to come alone.

Still, it took a while to stifle the tremulous certainty that someone was going to look their way. The kids spent more time nudging each other and giggling than stealing quick glances through the burnished lenses. Finally they realized that nobody below was interested in the ceiling at a time like this.

Dancers wove rippling patterns as they undulated before the central dais, waving filmy fabrics that also mimicked ionic displays. The troupe had been hired from Oosterwyck Clan, famed for their beauty and sensuality. Their success rate was well-advertised and only rich clans could afford their services at this time of year.

Censers emitted spirals of smoke, whose aroma was supposed to simulate the pheromones that best aroused males. Behind a veiled curtain, silhouettes told of the assembled mothers and full sisters of Lamatia Hold, watching discreetly offstage so as not to put off their guests.

Maia nudged Leie and pointed. “Over there!” She whispered unnecessarily. Since the music only reached them as a faint murmur, it was doubtful anything they said would be heard below. Leie turned to peer in the direction she had indicated. “Yeah, it’s the Penguin Guild captain, and those two young sailors. Exactly the ones I predicted. Pay up!”

“I never betted! Everybody knew Penguin Guild owes Lamatia for that big loan the mothers gave ’em last year.” Leie ignored the rejoinder. “Come on, let’s get a better look,” she urged, pulling Maia’s arm, causing her to teeter precariously on the steeply tilted wall of the dome. “Hey, watch it!”

But Leie had already slithered to where a great piece of convex glass bulged from the arching roof. Maia heard her sister take in a sudden gasp, then titter nervously.

“What is it?” Maia exclaimed, sliding over.

Leie held up a hand. “No. Don’t look yet! Get a good hold an’ set your feet good. Got it? Don’t look yet.”

“I’m not looking!” Maia whined.

“Good, now close your eyes. Move a little closer and I’ll move your head to see best. Don’t open till I say so!”

It was one of those rituals that seemed so natural when you were three. Maia felt her sister’s hand take her braid and maneuver her until she brushed cool glass with the tip of her nose. “Okay, you can look now,” Leie said, suppressing a giggle.

Maia cracked one eye, and at first saw only a blur. The glass had several thin layers, separated by air pockets. She pulled back a bit and an image fell into focus. At least it seemed focused, remarkably magnified from this great height. Still, what she saw appeared more a jumble of fleshy colors—peppered with short black fur that was patchy in most places, but thick where one small pink appendage joined the intersection of two large ones. The latter, she realized, must be somebody’s legs. The small one in between …

“Oh!” she cried, rocking back until she had to flail for balance. Leie grabbed her, laughing at her surprise. Almost instantly Maia was back against the glass, trying again to bring the scene back into focus. “No, let me in now. It’s my turn!” Leie importuned. But Maia held fast and her twin grudgingly moved on to find another place, which she quickly declared to be “even better.” Maia was too intent to notice.

So that’s what a man looks like without clothes, she thought. The magnifying effects of the glass were confusing, and she found it hard to get any sense of proportion, let alone relate what she was seeing to those sterile diagrams she had studied in school. Where do they keep it while they’re walking around? I’d of thought it’d get in the way, hanging like that.

Maia was too embarrassed by her next thoughts to voice them even subvocally. Fascination won a hard-fought battle over revulsion and she peered eagerly, hoping to see when the thing changed. Does it really get bigger than that?

A hand entered her field of view, and reached past the limp appendage to scratch a hairy thigh. Maia drew back so her field of view encompassed the arm and torso and head of the reclining man, resting on silk pillows as he watched the dancers. He turned to say something to another man, lounging to his right, who laughed, then straightened and leaned forward with a more sober expression on his face, as if trying to pay close attention to the show. By their elbows lay piles of food and drink. The first man picked up a wineglass, draining it. He did not seem to notice the enticingly clad woman who moved to his side to refill it, nor others waiting nearby, prepared to move in with privacy curtains, at need.

“C’mere and see the sixers!” Leie called urgently. With some reluctance, Maia tore herself away, leaving her perch to sidle near her sibling. “Over by the north wall,” Leie suggested.

This pinkish pane was flawed by ripples, and the magnification wasn’t as good as back at the clear lens. It took a while to find the right viewing position, but Maia at last perceived a covey of girls waiting off to one side, dressed in pale, filmy gowns. They were made up to look less virginal—and no doubt doused liberally to fool the male sense of smell. Naturally, men were more attracted to older women who had already birthed once or twice. But this ceremony was for sixers alone. It was their special day and the mothers had spared no expense.

Maia did not have to count. There were thirteen of them, she knew. An entire class of Lamai winterlings, all primly, delectably identical, but each one hoping she would be the one reached for, when and if the moment came.

They’d be lucky if two or three made it this year. You didn’t expect much from sixers. At that age, whether you were a lowly var or haughty cloneling, your body only produced the right chemistry for reproduction during the height of winter. Even at seven, your fecund season wasn’t broad. Most women, even when they had the full backing of their clan, never got a ripening until they were eight or more. By then their season was wide enough to overlap some of the summer passion left in males during autumn, or starting to bud in springtime.

Lamatia wasn’t counting on much out of today’s solstice ceremony, but it was important anyway. A rite of passage for newly adult members of the clan. An omen for the coming year.

Now, as Maia watched, Lamai sixers began joining the Oosterwycks in the dance, slipping in one by one with their meticulously practiced steps. Somehow—probably by design—the smoother movements of the dusky professionals seemed to cause attention to flow toward the lighter-haired neophytes. The sixers had studied their moves with typical Lamai care. The dance was choreographed to give each one equal time, sweeping in controlled stages ever closer to their audience, yet Maia saw how eagerly each tried in little ways to upstage her sisters. Somehow, it only served to make them look more alike.

Leaning back to take a wide view of the proceedings, it struck Maia how the men below were in a situation they would possibly have killed for, only half a year ago, when all city gates were locked and guardia patrols kept a fierce eye on those few males allowed passes from nearby sanctuaries. In summer, men howled to get in.

Now, with womenfolk at their peak of receptivity, the male sailors lay there looking as if they’d rather have a good book, or something diverting on the tele. Perched on the edge of the dome, watching things she had only heard vaguely described before, Maia felt a sense of wonder mixed with jarring insight.

Irony. It was a word she had learned just recently. She liked the sound it made, as well as its slippery unwillingness to be pinned down or defined. One learned its meaning by example. This was a fine example of irony.

I wonder why Lysos made it this way … so nobody ever gets exactly what she or he wants, except when she or he doesn’t want it?

“Maia, psst!” Leie waved from the clear, convex section. “Come look!”

“Has one of them gotten big?” Maia asked breathlessly as she hurried over, almost losing her footing along the way. She quivered with an eerily enticing mixture of repugnance and excitement as she put her head next to her twin’s.

What swam into focus was not the mysterious appendage, after all. It was the bearded face of a man Maia recognized—the handsome, virile captain of the freighter Empress whose hearty laugh and thundering voice were such a delight to hear whenever the mothers had him and his officers to dinner. Half of Lamatia’s summerling boys wanted to ship out with him; half the summer girls fantasized he was their father.

But the sixers below weren’t seeking fathers for their children. Not this time of year. The same physical act was more valuable in winter than in summer, because fathering had nothing to do with it.

What the sixers sought was sparking, insemination as catalyst to start a placenta forming. Triggering a clonal ripening within. And this captain was said to have sparked seven, sometimes eight or more winterlings some years, all by himself! Like in the nursery rhyme…

The captain’s eyes narrowed as he followed the movements of the dancers, now gyrating around him, almost in arm’s reach. His oiled, powerfully muscled body reminded Maia not so much of a lugar’s as that of a perfect race horse, rippling with more power than any human ought ever need. His face, hirsute yet full of that strange masculine intelligence, seemed to concentrate on a thought, tracking it intensely. As one Lamai sixer whirled close, he squinted, working his jaw in what appeared to be the start of a smile, a dawning eagerness. He lifted his hand… And used it to cover his mouth, trying gallantly but in vain to stifle a gaping yawn.

It was dawn before the muddle of dreams and warped recollections gave way to a foggy sense of reality. Dawn of which day, Maia could not tell, since her body ached as if she had been wrestling fierce enemies night after endless night. Only in stages did she come to realize her hands were bound in black cloth, and so were her legs. She was in the back of a jouncing buckboard, triced up like a piece of cargo.

Blearily, Maia managed to wrestle her torso up against what felt like several sacks of grain, so the level of her eyes, came even with the sideboards of the wagon. Above her loomed the backs of two women driving the team. From behind, they didn’t look much like Joplands. They said nothing, and did not look back at her.

Turning her head was painful, but it brought some of the countryside into view—a high, rolling steppe covered with sparse grass, apparently too dry for farming. Red-and orange-tinted cirrus clouds laced a rich blue sky, still lustrous with latent night. There was a faint cawing of some large bird, perhaps a raven or native mawu.

I remember now. They were waiting for me at the toilet. They grabbed me. That awful smell … It still filled her nostrils, as the fading tendrils of her dreams reluctantly vacated recesses of her foggy brain. Thought came sluggishly, like heavy syrup from a jar.

A wagon. They’re taking me someplace. North, from the looks of things.

That much was simple enough from the angle of the rising sun. To see more meant struggling to a sitting position, which took several increments in order to keep from fainting. When at last she craned around to see what lay ahead, the wagon took a turn in the road, bringing a tower of monumental proportions into abrupt view. It spired into the sky, columnar and prismoidal, light and dark bands alternating along its height. Without being able to bring all faculties to bear, Maia guessed it must be over two hundred meters high and a third of that across.

The spire was scarred in places. Scaffolding told of recent excavations that had gouged the natural obelisk, leaving piles of rocky debris around its base. A series of arched window-openings followed one pale band of stone, girdling the periphery halfway up. A second row of smaller perforations paralleled the first, a few meters below.

Near the base of the stone monolith, a broad, steep ramp came into view, leading upward toward a gaping portal.

Maia’s captors were taking her straight toward it.

9

An extensive cavity had been drilled into the mountain monolith, creating a network of rooms and corridors. Perhaps the workwomen had taken advantage of preexisting caves or fissures. By the time they finished with their machines and explosives, however, the warren of tunnels and storage chambers owed little to nature. The man sanctuary had been near completion when all further work was abruptly canceled, leaving an empty shell, inhabited only by echoes.

Maia’s glimpse of the outside was brief and harried as her captors drove their wagon up a long earthen ramp leading to a massive wooden portal. One of them leaped off to knock on the door, sending deep, resonant booms reverberating within. The other clambered back to untie Maia’s ankles. Peering through a drugged daze, Maia saw the ramp was surrounded by dusty rock tailings, dumped from openings that girdled the stone tower halfway up. The upper row consisted of airy galleries, broad enough to let in summer breezes when the sanctuary was meant to have its largest population. The lower circumference of windows were mere slits in comparison.

None of this had come cheaply. It was one hell of an investment to write off.

That was among her few lucid, observational thoughts while being dragged off the wagon and through the gate at a pace almost too brisk for her wobbly feet to manage. Maia stumbled behind the two massive, harsh-faced fems, who had left her arms bound in front to use as a kind of leash. They did not speak, but nodded to a third representative of their kind, who locked the outer door and accompanied them inside. Maia did not know the name of their clan.

It was hard to give more than a cursory look around, as her captors pulled her up endless flights of stairs, along deserted, empty corridors, then through a central hall equipped with wooden dining trestles and a massive fireplace. Farther down one of the main tunnels—lit by strings of dimly powered glow bulbs—they passed an indoor arena capable of seating several hundred spectators, overlooking a vast grid of intersecting lines.

Maia obtained only glimpses, as more passageways went by in a blur, followed by more tiring stairs, until at last they reached a heavy wooden door set in the stone wall with iron hinges and a stout padlock. Still blinking through a fog of unreality, Maia felt a peculiar sense of misplaced pride on recognizing that the hardware, and even the iron key the guard pulled from her vest, were all products of the forges at Lerner Hold.

“Look,” she said to the women with a mouth as dry as sand. “Can’t you tell me—”

“Ye’ll jest have t’wait,” one of the stolid clones answered gruffly, pulling back the door as Maia’s other custodian sent her whirling into the dark room. Maia couldn’t even spread her arms for balance. A few meters inside, she tripped and fell amid what felt like scattered bundles of rough, scratchy fabric.

“Atyps! Bleeders!” she screamed from the floor, her voice breaking. Maia’s curse was punctuated by the door slamming shut, and a clank as the bolt was thrown. It was a desolating sound that hurt her ears and savaged her already bruised soul.

Silence and darkness settled all around. She tried to rise, but a wave of nausea made that impractical, so she lay still for several minutes with her head down, breathing deeply. At last, the dizziness and drugged stupor seemed to ease a bit. When she tried sitting up, waves of pain swarmed her aching arms and along her sides. Maia felt a sob rise in her throat and suppressed it savagely. I won’t give them any satisfaction!

Weeks ago, the physical sensations coursing her body would have left her a quivering, fetal ball. Now she found inner resources to fight back just as fiercely, overcoming pain’s tyranny by force of will. It would be another matter dealing with the pit of hopeless depression yawning before her. Later, she thought, putting off that rendezvous with despair. One thing at a time.

As her eyes adapted, Maia began to make out details of her prison. A single spear of daylight penetrated through a high, narrow opening in the stone wall opposite the door. Other walls were lined with wooden crates, and burlap-covered bundles lay strewn across the floor. The ones Maia had landed on seemed to contain bedding or curtain material… fortunately, since they had cushioned her fall.

A storage chamber, she thought. The builders must have already begun stocking supplies for the intended sanctuary, when the project was called off. Were they now trying to recoup some of their investment by turning the place into a brig? Maia hadn’t seen signs of other occupants. What a joke if all this were set aside just for her! A big, expensive jail for one unimportant varling who knew too much.

Maia pushed to her knees, swayed, and managed awkwardly to stand. Not allowing herself a pause that might break her momentum, she at once began casting about for some way to extricate herself from her bonds.

Fine crystalline dust wafted from freshly cut stone, sparkling in the narrow window’s angled shaft of sunlight. A whitish gray patina covered every surface, including broom tracks where the floor had last been swept. Looking up, Maia saw that a rail ran down the center of the barrel-vaulted ceiling, reminding her of the cargo crane she had used in the Musseli Line baggage car. Only here the winch had not been installed.

She searched among the stencil-lettered boxes. CLOTHING-MALE, one crate displayed along its side. Another contained DISHES and two announced WRITING MATERIALS. She had never thought of men as being particularly literate, but there were many crates of the latter.

Maia tried to think. Broken dishes might be useful to cut the layers of fabric wrapped around her forearms. Unfortunately, all the boxes were nailed firmly shut. She could feel her little portable sextant, still strapped to her left arm. One of its appendages might be sharp enough, but its bulge was out of reach beneath the same cloth fetters.

Sitting on a crate, Maia bent to examine the bindings more closely. She blinked, then sighed in disgust. “Oh! Of all the patarkal …”

Just under her wrists, where she had been least likely to notice, the fabric was simply laced together, finishing in a simple slipknot.

“Bleeders and rutters!” Maia muttered as she lifted her arms and twisted to grab the loose ends with her teeth. After some tugging, the knot gave way, and soon she was picking the laces free one by one. Relapses of dizziness kept interrupting, forcing her to pause and breathe deeply. By the time she finished, Maia had reevaluated her first impression—the bindings weren’t so dumb after all. No doubt the jailers had meant for her to free herself eventually, but this wasn’t something she could have managed earlier, with guards nearby.

At last she flung the cloths aside with a curse. Her hands tingled painfully as full circulation returned. Rubbing them, Maia stretched, waving her arms and walking to get the kinks out.

Near the door, she found a small table she hadn’t noticed before, on which stood a pitcher of water and a dented cup. Forcing her trembling hands to master the movements, she poured and drank ravenously. When the pitcher was half-empty, she put the cup down and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat?

There was no food, but underneath the table she found a large ceramic pot with a lid. Glazed depictions of sailing ships battled high seas along its side. She removed the cover and squatted on the cold porcelain to relieve yet another of her body’s cataloged complaints.

As immediate concerns were satisfied, more afflictions came to the fore, awaiting attention. Despair, her old nemesis, seemed to rise up and politely ask, “Now?”

Maia shook her head firmly. I’ve got to keep busy. Not think for a while.

She set to work struggling to push heavy boxes together and then levering one on top of another. Strenuous labor set off renewed waves of dizziness, which she waited out before recommencing. Finally, a makeshift pyramid lay beneath the high window. Clambering onto the ultimate pile of folded carpets, she was at last able to bring her eyes level with the narrow slit, to peer out upon a vast expanse of prairie that began right below her at the foot of a steep, vertical drop. The hole looked pretty narrow to worm through, but even if she managed, it would take a warehouse full of rugs and curtains, tied together, to make a rope long enough to reach the valley floor. This room might not have been designed as a prison, but it would do.

To think I used to dream of seeing the inside of a man sanctuary, Maia thought sardonically, and climbed down.

She tried prying at a couple of crates, but nothing persuaded them to open. Maia did manage to get some of the rugs unrolled to make a bed of sorts—more like a nest—over in one corner. Her stomach growled. She drank and used the chamber pot again. Beyond that, there seemed nothing left to do…

“Now,” the voice of despair said with assertion, unwilling to brook further delay, and Maia buried her face in her hands.

Why me? she wondered. Loneliness, her arch enemy, never seemed content. Its return visits were each more brutal than the last, ever since that awful storm tore the ships Wotan and Zeus apart from one another, and she from her twin. Maia had thought that tragedy her nadir. What more could the world possibly do to her?

Apparently, a whole lot more.

Maia lay down with a length of soft blue curtain material wrapped around her shoulders, and waited for her keepers to come with food … or word of her fate. Thalla and Kiel will worry about me, she thought, trying to raise an image of friendship for whatever tenuous comfort it offered. She had sunk too low to fantasize that anyone might actually search for her. The solace she sought was simply to imagine somebody on Stratos cared enough to notice she was gone.

The dour-faced guardians returned soon after Maia fell into an exhausted, fitful slumber. Their noise roused her, and she rubbed her eyes as one of them dropped a clattering tray onto the rickety table. Maia could not tell if it was the same pair that had freighted her from Lerner Hold, or if those two had rotated duties with others exactly like them. Stepping back to the door, the sisters watched her with eyes as round and brown and innocent as a doe’s.

They had brought food, but little news. When she asked between ravenous spoonings of nondescript stew what was to become of her, their monosyllable answers conveyed that they neither knew nor cared. About the only information Maia was able to pry loose was their family name—Guel—after which they fell into taciturn silence.

What talent or ability had enabled the original ancestress of such broody, beetle-browed women to establish a parthenogenetic clan? What niche did they fill? Surely none requiring affability or great intelligence. Yet, for all Maia knew, the trio she had seen were part of a specialized hive with thousands of individual members, all descended from an original Guel mother who had proved herself excellent at …

She wondered. At driving prisoners crazy with sheer sullenness? Perhaps Guel Clan operated jails for local towns and counties across three continents! Maia could hardly disprove it from past experience, this being her first time in prison.

Watching them carry off the dishes, shuffling awkwardly and muttering to each other as they fumbled with the key, Maia contemplated an alternate theory—that these were the sole clone offspring of one farm laborer whose strength and curt obtuseness were qualities some local clan of employers had found useful. Useful enough to subsidize producing more of the same.

Now that hunger was abated, Maia recalled other discomforts. “Hey!” she cried, hurrying to the door and pounding until a querulous voice answered from the opposite side. Maia shouted through the jamb, asking her keepers for soap and a washcloth. And oh yes! Some of the dried takawq leaves all but the rich in this valley used as toilet paper. There came a low grunt in response, followed by the sound of heavy, receding footsteps.

Come to think of it, unless the idea was to torture her with minor annoyances, this lack of amenities indicated her jailers were indeed amateurs. Just a trio of bullies hired locally for a special assignment. Recalling some of the radical declarations she’d heard over Thalia’s radio, Maia made herself a promise. She would not show her keepers any of the habitual respect a unique was supposed to offer those fortunate enough to be born even low-caste clones.

They can’t keep me here forever, can they? she wondered plaintively.

Try as she might, Maia could not think of a single reason why they couldn’t.

There were other, hurtful questions, such as why Calma Lerner had turned her in to the Joplands. How much did they pay? Not very much, I bet. Her heart felt heavy thinking about the betrayal. Although there had been no fealty between them, she had been so sure Calma liked her.

Like has nothing to do with it, when rich clans are involved.

Clearly this was about the drug that made males rut out of season. The clan mothers of this valley had an agenda for its use, and weren’t about to brook interference. Perkinites dream of a nice, predictable world, where everyone grows up knowing who and what she is. Every girl a cherished member of her clan, knowing her future. No muss or fuss from gene mixing. No vars and as few men, as seldom, as possible.

According to Savant Judeth, the aristocracies of ancient Earth used to justify suppressing those below them on the basis of “innate differences,” an assumption that almost never survived scrutiny, once opportunity came to children of rich and poor alike. But there would be no need for oppression or false assumptions in a Perkinite world. Each family and type would find its own level and niche based on talents well-proven by time. Each clan would do what it did best, what it liked doing best, in a changeless atmosphere of reliable and mutual respect. Perkinite preachers spoke of a utopic end to all violence, uncertainty, chaos. A stratified world, but a fair one.

Men and vars, even as minorities, irritated this serene equation.

Back in Port Sanger, Perkinism was a mere fringe heresy. Each summer, the clans would invite chosen sailors to come up from the Lighthouse Sanctuary, partly in order to have some var and boy children, but mostly for good, neighborly relations. It kept the shipping guilds happy, and helped make men feel duty-bound to try their best, half a year later. Besides, even in summer, it was sometimes nice to have men around, so long as they behaved.

But opinions varied on that. The Long Valley Perkies just wanted to see men when clones had to be sparked.

But the summer ban robs men of what they look forward to all the other seasons. No wonder they lack enthusiasm in winter.

Men had another reason to feel cheated in the Perkinite equation—of the sons they needed to replenish their guilds. It didn’t take genius to see the trap the radical separationists had fallen into. With a low birthrate, the labor shortage draws outsider fems like me, seeking work but also disrupting the peace with our strange faces and voices, our unpredictability.

It was a cycle the Perkinites couldn’t win, as shown by the decision to build this sanctuary, where men might live inland year-round. The thin edge of the wedge. Change would gain momentum as more vars were born, and Perkinite mothers learned to like, or even love them a little. The Orthodox church would gain members. Things would grow more like elsewhere on Stratos.

Then came the Bellers’ shiny blue powder—offering the Perkies a way out. All they’ll need is a few dozen doped-up males. Work ’em from clanhold to clanhold like drone bees, till they collapse. They may die smiling, but it’s still cruel and stupid.

Maia shuddered to think what kind of male would put up with more than a week or two in such a role. The kind who’d father low-quality variants, if you took one to bed during summer.

But the Perkinites weren’t looking for “fathers” at all! In winter, any sperm would do. It might work, Maia saw. No need to keep the railroad men around, with their stiff, easily provoked pride. No summerlings to mess your tidy predictabilities. Producing clones at will, the valley’s population could fill to exact specifications, set by the richest clans. Even var laborers could be replaced at society’s lowest rung. Simply choose a few with the strongest backs and weakest minds, and make them clone mothers. A tailor-made working class.

It wasn’t what the Founders had in mind, long ago. The priestesses of Caria wouldn’t approve. Guilds of men and ad hoc societies of vars would fight it … especially radicals like Thalla and Kiel. Clearly, the Perkinites wanted time to establish a fait accompli before facing this inevitable opposition from a position of strength.

Earlier, Maia had nursed hopes that Tizbe’s backers might let her go with a stern lecture and admonishment to keep silent. That possibility seemed less likely, the more she pondered all the implications.

She tracked time by the progress of a narrow trapezoid of light, cast through the window onto the opposite wall. Her jailers returned with an evening meal just as the oblong shape climbed halfway toward the ceiling and took a rosy tint. They brought the takawq leaves but had forgotten the other items. Listening to her repeated request, they responded with sullen nods and departed, leaving Maia to deal with her loneliness and the oncoming night.

Enforced inactivity brought forth all the aches and strains that had come from weeks laboring in furnaces at Lerner Hold—not to mention the aftermath of being drugged, tied, and bounced around the back of a wagon. Maia’s muscles had gradually stiffened during the course of the day, and her tendons throbbed. Stretching helped, but with the coming of darkness she quickly fell into a doze that alternated between comatose slumber and shallow restlessness, exacerbated by her never-absent fears.

In the middle of the night she dreamed the water tap in the corner of her bedroom was dripping. She wanted to bury her head under her pillow to cut off the sound. She wanted Leie, whose cot lay closer to the faucet, to get up and turn it off! It stopped just as she floundered toward wakefulness.

Had she dreamed it? “Leie…?” she began, about to tell her twin about the absurd, awful nightmare of imprisonment.

In a rush, Maia recalled. She threw her arm over her eyes and moaned, wishing with all her might to go back into the dream, as irritating as it had seemed. To be back in her aggravating little attic room, with her aggravating sister safely in bed nearby. She groaned, “Oh… Lysos,” and prayed desperately that it were so.

When her keepers came with breakfast, they brought a small bundle wrapped in cord. Before sitting down to eat, Maia opened it and found all the items she had asked for, including a new shirt and set of breeches sewn from scratchy but clean homespun. By the sheepish expressions on the warders’ faces, she guessed they were supposed to have provided the basics from the start, and had just let it slip what they used for minds. Perhaps they had even gotten a dressing-down from their bosses. So much for the notion that they were hereditary, professional jailers.

She felt more alert today. By lunchtime, Maia had explored every meter of her prison. There were no secret passageways she could find, though most castles in fairy tales seemed replete. Of course, palaces of fable tended to be far older than this shiny new fortress on the high steppe.

New in one sense, ancient in others, as revealed by looking at the walls. The stone, which from miles away looked like layers of some grand confection, was up close a complex agglomerate of many textures and embedded crystals. A few looked vaguely familiar from ancient, blurry, color plates Savant Mother Claire had passed around, too faded to be used any longer in the upper school, but good enough to teach summerlings a dollop of geology. Unfortunately, the only minerals Maia could recognize were biotite, for its gray flecks, and dark, glossy hornblende. Too bad these were granitic rocks, not sedimentary. It might have been diverting to scan the walls for fossils of ancient life-forms that had thrived on Stratos long before the planet’s ecosystem was forced to compromise with waves of modified Terran invaders.

Maia exercised for a while, washed up, tried again futilely to pry open some of the crates, and made a decision not to wait for her keepers to warm toward her. It was time to take initiative.

“From now on,” she told one of them over lunch. “Your name shall be Grim. And yours,” she said, pointing at the other, “will be Blim.”

They looked at her with expressions of surprise and dismay that pleased her no end. “Of course, I may choose better names for you, if you’re good.”

They were grumbling unhappily when they took the dishes away. Later, over dinner, she switched names on them, confusing them further still. Why not? Maia pondered. It was only fair to share the discomfort.

Sunset, day number two, she thought, using a nail she found to scrape a second mark on the inside of the wooden door. The sun’s spot on the wall climbed higher, dimmed, and went out. Shadows of crates and stacked bundles grew progressively more eerie and intimidating as dusk fell. Last night, she had been too stupefied to notice, but with the arrival of full darkness, the shapes around her seemed to take on frightening gremlin forms. Outlines of unsympathetic monsters.

Don’t be a baby. Maia chided herself for reacting like a bedwetting two-year-old. With a pounding heart, she forced herself to stand and approach the most fearsome of the silhouettes, the teetering pyramid of boxes and carpets she herself had stacked below the little window. See? she thought, touching the scratchy side of a crate. You can’t let this drive you crazy.

Nervously, she fondled her sole possession, the little sextant. A glitter of stars could be seen through the stone opening, tempting her. But to climb up there in the dark…?

Maia screwed up her courage. Piss on the world, or it’ll piss on you. That was how Naroin, her old bosun, would have put it. She had to do this.

Moving carefully from foothold to handhold, Maia climbed the artificial hill, sometimes stopping to hold on tightly as a creak or abrupt teetering set her pulse racing. The ascent took several times as long as it would have in daylight, but Maia persevered until at last she was able to peer through the slit opening. A breeze chilled her face, bringing scents of wild grass and rain. Between patches of glowering cloud, Maia could just make out the familiar contours of the constellation Sappho glittering above the dark prairie.

Okay. We go back down now? her body seemed to ask.

Trembling, Maia forced herself to stay long enough to take a sighting, although the horizon was vague and she could not read the dial of the sextant. I’ll do better tomorrow night, she promised herself. Gratefully, but with a sense of having won a victory over her fears, she carefully clambered down again.

As she lay upon her makeshift bed, exhausted but stronger in spirit, the clicking sound resumed. The one from last night, which she had associated with a dripping faucet. It was real, apparently, not a figment of her dreams. Another irritant among many.

Maia shrugged aside the distant noise and the looming figures her imagination manufactured out of shadows. Oh, shut up, she told them all, and rolled over to go to sleep.

“I’m going to lose my mind without something to do!” she shouted at her jailers the next morning. When they blinked at her in confusion, she demanded. “Haven’t they got books here? Anything to read?”

The jailers stared, as if uncertain what she was talking about. They’re probably illiterate, she realized. Besides, even if the sanctuary architects designed in a library, shelves and all, it still would have been up to the men themselves to bring books and disks and tapes.

So she was surprised when Blim (or was it Grim?) returned after a while and laid four dog-eared paper-paged books on the table. In the stocky woman’s eyes Maia saw a flicker of entreaty. Don’t be hard on us, and we won’t be hard on you. Maia picked up the volumes, probably abandoned here by the construction workers. She nodded thanks and played no name games with her warders when they carried off her tray.

Rationing herself to a book a day, she decided to start with the one bearing the most lurid cover. It depicted a young woman, armed with bow and arrows, leading a band of compatriots and a few protected men through the vine-encrusted ruins of a demolished city. Maia recognized the genre—var-trash—printed on cheap stock to sell for the delectation of poor summerlings like herself. A fair number of nonclone women loved reading fantasies about civilization’s collapse, when all of society’s well-ordered niches would be overturned and a young woman might win her way to founder status by quick thinking and simple heroics alone.

In this book, the premise was a sudden, unexplained shift in the planet’s orbit. Not only did this cause melting of the great ice sheets of Stratos, toppling all the stolid clans and opening the way for newer, hardier types, but in a stroke the inconvenient behavior patterns of men were solved, since now, by a miracle of the author’s pen, the aurorae appeared in winter!

It really was trash, but wonderfully diverting trash. By the end of the story, the young protagonist and her friends had everything nicely settled. Each of them seemed destined to have lots of lovely, look-alike daughters, and live happily ever after. Thalla and Kiel would love this, Maia thought when she put the novel aside. It must have been left by some var on the construction crew. No winter-born clanling would enjoy the scenario, even in fantasy.

She scraped another mark on the door. That evening Maia climbed the pyramid with more confidence. Through the narrow window, she watched the steady west wind push sluggish, red-tinted clouds toward distant mountains, where steeply angled sunlight also caught a double row of tiny luminescent globes—a small swarm of migrating zoor-floaters, she realized. Their airy sense of freedom made her heart ache, but she watched until dusk grew too dim to see the colorful living zep’lins any longer.

By then the constellations had come out. Her hand was steady as she peered closely through her portable sextant, noting when specific stars touched the western horizon. Recalling the date, this gave her a fairly good way to keep track of time without a clock—as if there were any need. Maybe next I can figure a latitude, she thought. That, at least, would partly pin down where her prison lay.

Knowing the time told her one thing. The clicking resumed that night, almost exactly at midnight. It went on for about half an hour, then stopped. For some time afterward, Maia lay in the darkness with her eyes open, wondering.

“What do you think, Leie?” she whispered, asking her sister.

She imagined Leie’s response. “Oh, Maia. You see patterns in every smuggy thing. Go to sleep.”

Good advice. Soon she was dreaming of aurorae flickering like gauzy curtains above the white glaciers of home. Meteors fell, pelting the ice to a staccato rhythm, which transformed into the cadence of a gently falling rain.

The second book was a Perkinite tract, which showed that the work crew must have been mixed—and rather tense.

The line of reasoning was too convoluted for Maia to follow closely, but the book’s author seemed to be saying that male humans were better defined as domestic animals, useful, but dangerous to let run around loose. The only mistake made long ago, on the Perkinites’ beloved, lamented Herlandia, had been not going far enough.

This was heresy, of course, defying several of the Great Promises sworn by Lysos and the Founders, when they made men small in number, but preserved their rights as citizens and human beings. In theory, any man might aspire to heights of individual power and status, equal to even a senior mother of a high clan. Maia knew of no examples, but it was supposed to be possible.

The writer of this tract wanted no shared citizenship with lower life-forms.

Another Great Promise had ordained that heretics must be suffered to speak, lest rigor grasp women’s minds. Even loony stuff like this? Maia wondered. To try understanding another point of view, Maia kept reading. But when she came to a part that proposed breeding males to be docilely milked on special farms, like contented cows, she reached her limit. Maia threw the book across the room and went into a flurry of exercise, doing pushups and situps until pounding sounds of pulse and breath drowned out all remnants of the author’s hateful voice.

Dinner came and went. Darkness fell. This time, she tried to be ready just before midnight, lying on her back with eyes closed. When the clicking started, she listened carefully for the first ten seconds, and tried to note if there was a pattern. It followed a rhythm, all right, made of repeated snapping sounds interspersed with pauses one, two, or more beats in duration.

click click, beat, click, beat, beat, click click click…

Maybe she was letting her imagination run away with her. It sounded like no code she had ever heard. There were no obvious spaces that might go between words, for example. Was there any reason for the clicking to happen at the same time each night?

It might just be a faulty timepiece in one of the great halls, or something equally mundane. I wonder how the sound carries through the walls.

Sleep came without any resolution. She dreamed of brasswork clocks, ticking with the smooth, just rhythms of natural law.

The third book was even riper than the prior two—a romance about life in the old Homino-Stellar Phylum, before Lysos and the Founders set forth across the galaxy to forge a new destiny. Such accounts, dealing with an archaic, obsolete way of life, ought to be fascinating and instructive. But Maia had read widely in the genre as a four-year-old, and been disappointed.

Like so many others, this tale was set on Florentina, the only Phylum world familiar to most schoolgirls, since that was where the Founders’ expedition began. The story even featured a cameo appearance by Perseph, a chief aide to Lysos. But for the most part, the exodus was seen in glimpses, being planned offstage. Meanwhile, the poor heroine, a sort of everywoman of Florentina, suffered the trials of living in a patriarchal society, where men were so numerous and primitive that life could only have been a kind of hell.

Maia could only take it half a chapter at a time. The writing was execrable, but that wasn’t what made her stomach queasy. The incessant violence repulsed her. What kind of masochist reads this kind of stuff? she wondered.

If the point was to show how different another society could be, the book was successful, in a gut-churning way. On Stratos, it was virtually unheard-of for a man to lift his hand against a woman. The Founders had laid an aversion at the chromosome level, which was reinforced from one generation to the next. Summer matings were a man’s only chance to pass on his genes, and clan mothers had long memories when the time came to send out invitations during aurora season.

On Florentina, though, there had been a different arrangement. Marriage. One man. One woman. Stuck together forever. Apparently, women even preferred quasi-slavery to a single life, because vast numbers of other men patrolled outside, in ceaseless rut, always eager to pounce. The brutal consequences depicted on page after page of the historical novel left Maia nauseated by the time she finished.

Of course she had no way of knowing how accurate the depiction was, of Old Order life on a Phylum world. Maia suspected just a little authorial exaggeration. There might have been specific cases like the one described, but if things were this bad for all women, all the time, they surely would have poisoned their husbands and sons long before gene-molding came along with alternate solutions.

Still, it was enough to give a girl religion again. Bless the wisdom of Lysos, Maia thought, drawing a circle over her breast. Again that evening she exercised hard, running in place, doing pushups and step workouts, on and off crates. At dusk, she went back to the window and found that she could just manage to squeeze into the long, narrow passage. Thoughts of escape blossomed, until she reached the far end where it was possible to look straight down at the valley floor … a hundred meters below.

I might be able to come up with a plan. Find a way to get some of these crates open. Maybe start weaving a rope from yarn taken from the carpets? There were possibilities, each of them dangerous. It would take some mulling over. Anyway, she obviously had plenty of time.

There were no majestic zoor-floaters to watch as night fell, though several birds fluttered past, pausing on their way to roost long enough to taunt her, squawking at this silly, flightless human, crammed within her cleft of stone.

Maia felt too agitated to try using the sextant. She climbed back down, fell asleep early, and had strange dreams most of the night. Dreams of escape. Dreams of running. Dreams of ambivalence. Of wanting/not wanting the company of someone for the rest of her life. Leie? Clone-daughters? A man? Images of a fictional but still vivid Florentina World confused her with combined revulsion and fascination.

Later, when she clawed her way, moaning, out of a dream about being buried alive, Maia awakened to find herself tangled in the rough, heavy drapes she used for blankets, forced to struggle just to extricate herself. I don’t like this place, she thought, when at last she was breathing freely again. She sagged back. I wonder how you go about unweaving a carpet.

The narrow window showed a sliver of the constellation Anvil, so the night was more than half over. Missed the clicking, this time, one part of her commented. The rest didn’t give a damn. When sleep reclaimed her, there were no more nightmares.

She had saved for last what seemed the best book of the four. It was printed on good paper and came with the imprint of a Horn City publishing company. “A literary classic,” proclaimed the flashing microadvert on its binding, when turned to the light. On the copyright page, Maia read that the novel was over a hundred years old. She had never heard of it, but that came as no surprise. Lamatia Hold was fanatic in preferring to teach its var-daughters practical skills over the arts.

Certainly the writing was better than any of the other books. Unlike the historical fantasy, or the var-trash romance, it was set in the Stratos of everyday life. The story opened with a young woman on a voyage, accompanied by a fellow cloneling her own age. They were carrying commercial contracts from town to town, arranging deals, making money for their faraway hold and clan. The writer delightfully conveyed many hassles of life on the road, dealing with bureaucrats and senior mothers who, as broad and amusing caricatures, brought to Maia’s lips her first faint smile in a long time. Below these picaresque encounters, the author laid a current of underlying tension. Things were not as they seemed with the two protagonists. Maia discovered their secret early in chapter three.

The pair weren’t clonelings at all. Their “clan” was a fiction. They were just a couple of vars. Twins…

Maia blinked, startled to the quick. But… that was our idea! It’s what Leie and I planned to do.

She stared at the page, outrage turning swiftly to embarrassment. How many people must have read this book by now? Flipping to the title page, she saw that paper printings alone were in the hundreds of thousands. And that left out versions on disk, or floating access…

We would’ve been laughingstock, the first place we tried it, Maia realized with horrified chagrin. In retrospect, she saw with abrupt clarity how the idea must have occurred to others, countless times, even before this novel was written. Probably lots of var twins fantasized about it. At least some of the Lamai mothers should have known, and been able to warn us!

Maia paused. Wait a minute! She flipped pages and looked again at the names of the protagonists… Reie and Naia? No wonder they had sounded familiar. She shook her head in numb disbelief. We … were NAMED after characters in this Lysos-damned storybook?

Maia saw purple, thinking about the petty joke Mother Claire and the others had pulled on the two of them. At least Leie had been spared ever knowing what fools they’d been.

She hurled the book across the room and flung herself onto her dusty bed, crying out of loneliness and a sense of utter abandonment.

For two days she was listless, spending most of her time sleeping. The late night clicking was no longer of interest. Not much of anything was.

Still, after a while boredom began penetrating even the self-pitying bleakness Maia had crafted for herself. When she could stand it no longer, she asked her jailers once more for something to help pass the time. They looked at each other, and responded that they were sorry, but there were no more books.

Maia sighed and went back to picking at her meal. Her warders watched morosely, clearly affected by her mood. She did not care.

At first, Maia used to fantasize about rescue by some authority, like the Planetary Equilibrium officer she had spoken to, or the priestess of the temple at Grange Head, or even a squadron of Lamai militia, wearing bright-plumed helmets. But she nursed no illusions about her importance in the grand scheme of things. Nor did any word arrive from Tizbe. Maia now saw that there was no need for the drug messenger or anyone else to come visit or interrogate her.

Hope had no place in her developing picture of the world. Even the Lerners are so high above you, they have to bend over to spit.

She remembered Calma, standing in the moonlight while Tizbe and the Joplands took her prisoner. Until that moment, Maia had thought of her as an individual, a decent person—a little awkward and transparent, but sweet in her way. Now I know better … a clone is a clone. Thalla and Kiel were right. The whole system stinks!

It was sacrilege, and Maia didn’t care. She missed her friends. Even if she had only known them for a few weeks, they had shared with her the curse of uniqueness, and would understand the feelings of betrayal and desolation that swept over her now.

Desperate for some way out of her funk, Maia reread the escapist, var-trash novel, and found it more satisfying the second time. Perhaps because she identified more with the implied wish, to see everything come crashing down. But then it was finished. A third reading would be pointless. None of the other books was worth even a second look.

Lethargically, she spent the afternoon atop her makeshift pyramid, staring across the desert plain. It was a sea of grass you could get lost on, if you didn’t know what you were doing. Here and there she thought she could trace outlines of regular features, like the footprints of vanished buildings. But no one had ever lived on this arid plateau, as far as she knew.

The next morning, along with her breakfast, Maia’s jailers brought something new. It was a large shiny box with a handle, like one of those hard suitcases rich travelers sometimes carried. “Got lots o’ these stacked in ’nother room,” one of them told her. “Hear it’s a way to pass th’ time. Y’might try it.” The woman shrugged, as if such a long speech had used up her allotment of words for the day.

After they left, Maia took the case over to where there was a good patch of light, and released the simple catch. The box unfolded once, then the two halves unfolded again. More clever hingings invited more unlayering until she had in front of her a wide, flat surface of pale material covered with finely etched vertical and horizontal lines.

Life, she realized. Maia had never before seen a board quite like this, obviously an expensive model, too good to take to sea. It must be the kind men used while trapped in sanctuary, to help distract themselves during hot-season quarantine.

They brought me a patarkal game of bleeding Life!

It was too rich. Maia guffawed with a touch of hysterical release. She laughed and laughed, until at last she wiped tears from her eyes and sighed, feeling much better.

Then, for lack of anything better to do, she felt along the front panel for the power switch and turned the machine on.

10

Maia already knew the basic rules. Lamatia Clan wanted all its daughters, winter and summer alike, to know about the “peculiar male obsession with games.” Such familiarity could be useful any season, in maintaining good relations with some mannish guild.

Games came in a wide range. Many, like Poker, Dare, and Distaff, were as popular among females as males. And although Chess was traditionally more well-liked by men, four generations of planetary supreme grandmasters had come from the small, intellectual lineage of Terrille clones. Which might help explain why ever more male aficionados had switched to the Game of Life, during the last century or so.

Technically, any Life match was over before it began. Two men—or teams of men—faced off at opposite ends of a board consisting of anywhere from two score to several hundred intersecting horizontal and vertical lines. During the crucial preparation phase, each side took turns strategically laying rows of game pieces in the squares between the lines—choosing to place them either white or black side up—until the board was full. Simple rules were programmed into the pieces, or sometimes into the board itself, depending on how rich the players were and what kind of set they could afford.

As a little girl, Maia used to watch in fascination as sailors from docked freighters spent hours winding up old-fashioned watch-spring game pieces, or collecting the solar-powered variety after soaking on rooftops by the piers. Each team might spend up to ten minutes between turns huddled, arguing strategy until the referee called time and they had to lay down another row on their side of the playing field. After which they would watch, arms crossed, contemptuously sneering as their opponents fussed and laid a layer of their own, on the other side. The teams would continue alternating, laying new rows of white or black pieces, until the halfway boundary was reached, and all empty squares were filled. Then everyone stepped back. After proclaiming an ancient invocation, the referee would then stretch out his staff toward the timing square.

Most women found all of the arguments and arm waving leading up to this point profoundly tedious. Yet, whenever a major match was finally about to get under way, people would start arriving—from poor var laborers to haughty clanfolk descending from castles on the hill—all gathering to stand and watch, awaiting the tap of the referee’s stick…

When, suddenly, the quiescent pieces wakened!

Maia especially loved the times when players used the spring-wound disks, which, on sensing the condition of their neighbors, would respond by buzzing and flipping their louvers with each beat of the game clock—white giving over to black, black becoming white, or mysteriously remaining motionless with the same face up until the next round.

The process was controlled by preset rules. In the classic version of Life, these were absurdly simple. A square with a black piece was defined as “alive.” White side up meant “unliving.” Its state during an upcoming round would depend on its neighbors’ status the round before. A white piece would “come alive,” turning black next turn, if exactly three of its eight neighboring squares (including corners) were black this turn. If a site was already black, it could remain so next round if it currently had two or three living neighbors. Any more or less, and it would switch back to white again.

Someone once told Maia that this simulated living ecosystems. “Among plant and animal species, whenever population density climbs too high in a neighborhood, there often follows a collapse. Everything dies. Similarly, death also reigns if things get too sparse.” Ecology thrives on moderation, or so the game seemed to say.

To Maia, that just sounded like rationalization. The game got its name, she was sure, from the patterns that surged across the board just as soon as the referee gave his starting rap. From that moment, each individual game piece remained on the same spot, but its abrupt changes of state contributed to waves of black and white that crisscrossed the playing area with great speed and hypnotic complexity. Even Perkinite missionaries, standing on their portable pedestals, would lapse in their denigrations of all things male long enough to stare and sigh at the entrancing, rippling waves.

Certain initial patterns appeared to animate on their own. A compact “glider” would, if left alone, cruise from one end of the board to the other, changing shape in a four-stage pattern that repeated over and over as it inched along. Another grouping might throb in place, or send out branching limbs that budded, like flowers sending forth seeds that sprouted in their turn.

Sometimes pattern was the sole objective. There were form-generating contests, with prizes going to the most intricate final design, or to the purest image obtained after twenty, fifty, or a hundred beats. Variants using more complex rules and multicolored pieces produced even more sophisticated displays.

More often, though, the game was played as a battle between two teams. Their objective: to lay down starting conditions such that when play commenced, the sweep of shapes would carry their way, wiping clear their opponents’ territory, so that the last oases of “life” would be on their side of the board.

The contests could appear brutal at times, just like nature. Besides gliders and other benign forms, there were “eaters,” which consumed other patterns, then rebounded off the edge to sweep back across the playing field as voracious as ever. More sophisticated designs passed harmlessly off most patterns, but devoured any other eater they came across!

Ship crews and guilds hoarded techniques, tricks, and rules of thumb for generations, yet the strategy of laying down initial rows before the game was still more art than science. Frequently both teams wound up staring in surprise at what they’d wrought … patterns surging back and forth for a good part of an hour in ways unexpected by either side. Draws were frequent. During summers, occasional fistfights erupted over accusations of cheating, though Maia was at a loss how one could cheat in Life.

She had to admit there was something aesthetic about the game’s essential simplicity and the intricate, endless variety of forms it produced. As a child she had found it alluring, in an eerie sort of way, and had even tried asking questions. It took some time getting over the taunting and humiliation that had brought on, more from her own peers than from men. Anyway, by age four she found herself reaching the same conclusion as so many other women on Stratos.

So what?

Yes, the patterns were interesting up to a point, beyond which the passion males poured into the game became symbolic of the gulf separating the sexes. Other pastimes, like card games, at least involved people looking at or talking to each other, for instance. It was hard to comprehend treating little bits—things—as if they were really alive.

Yet here she was, in prison, without anyone else to look at or talk to, with all the books read and nothing to do but stare at the unfolded game board. Maia pondered. I’ve already tried a thing or two girls don’t usually do—like studying navigation.

That was merely unusual, though. Not unheard-of. This game was another matter. If there were women on Stratos who had ever achieved expert status at Life, they were almost certainly labeled terminally strange.

Well, better strange than batty, she decided. Anger and loneliness waited on the wings, like unwelcome aunts, ready to drop in at the slightest invitation, provoking useless, unproductive tears. I’ll go crazy without something to keep my mind busy.

The board felt smooth. There were no physical pieces. Instead, each tiny white square would turn ebony at the command of an electro-optic controller buried in the machine itself. She recalled the old-time clatter and clack with fondness. This system felt chill and remote.

Let’s see if I can figure it out.

A couple of small lights winked on the display. She had no idea what PROG MEM or PREV.GAME.SAV meant. Those could be explored later, when she had mastered the simplest level. As soon as she turned on the machine, half of the squares along the four edges of the game board had gone black, so that an alternating checker sequence snaked around the perimeter. She recalled that this was one of several ways of dealing with the edge problem, or what to do when moving Life patterns reached the limits of the playing field.

Ideally, in the perfect case, there wouldn’t be an edge at all, just an endless expanse to give the patterns room to grow and interact. That was why big tournament games featured immense boards, and took days, even weeks, to set up. Maia recalled how, one day at Lamatia Hold, Coot Bennett had told her a secret. Sophisticated electronic versions of Life, such as the one in front of her, could actually keep track of patterns even after they had “left the stage,” pretending that the artificial entities continued existence even several board-lengths away, in some sort of imaginary space! At first, Maia had been convinced he was having her on. Then she felt thrilled, wondering if any other woman knew about this.

Later she realized—of course the Caria savants knew, since they controlled the factories that made the game sets. They just didn’t care. For a machine to go on pretending that imaginary objects existed in some fictitious realm the player couldn’t even see was like the unreal multiplying with itself, manipulating tokens of replicas of symbols, which in turn stood for make-believe things, which were themselves emblems… Some of the mathematician clans at Caria University probably studied such abstractions, but Maia doubted they ever made the man-error of mistaking them for real.

Solving the edge problem was another matter when teams were forced to use simple lines scratched on a dock or cargo hatch, playing with wind-up or sun-powered pieces. As a partial solution, men sometimes laid rows of static, unpowered black or white pieces along the rim of the playing field, to try constraining the action. Maia knew the slang term for the alternating checker border was “the mirror,” although only a few life patterns would actually reflect off the fixed boundary back into the game arena. Others would simply be absorbed or destroyed.

An edge pattern also made starting the game easier, since any square in the first playing row already had either one or two “living” neighbors, just below it.

Removing the thin writing stylus from its slot on the control panel, she stroked a square on the first row, turning it black.

The solitary “living” square was born with two black neighbors on the fixed boundary row below, touching it at the corners. Now Maia gave it another black neighbor, to its left. With three black, or living, neighbors now, the first activated square should remain “alive” … at least through the second round.

Maia sighed. All right. Let’s see if I can make a simple ladder.

She worked her way across the first row, turning a few squares dark, leaving some blank, and so on. Maia did not feel ready to take on more complicated starting conditions quite yet, so after touching about forty squares she called it enough. The rest of the board was left pale, untouched.

Knowing the rules, Maia could guess what might happen to a particular square next round, by carefully counting the number of black neighbors it had now. It didn’t take much effort to project the fates of up to a dozen squares, one or two rounds into the future. Then she lost track. To find out what would happen after that, she must set the game in motion.

Peering at the control panel, she found a button embossed with a figure of a cowled man holding a long staff. The symbol for a referee, Maia decided, and pressed the button. A low note pulsed slowly, the traditional countdown. At the eighth beat the game commenced, and change abruptly rippled along the active row. Wherever a square had precisely the right number of neighbors, that square flickered. Then all those squares turned, or remained, black. Those that failed the test turned, or remained, white. The checker pattern along the boundary stayed the same.

Now there were some black squares on the second active row, as well as the first. A few spots on the formerly all-white expanse had met the conditions for coming alive.

With the next timing pulse, more squares died than were born, and it was only with the fourth round that any positions came alive on the third row. Maia saw with mild chagrin that she had chosen a losing sequence for her initial condition. Ah, well. She waited till the last, gasping cluster of dark points expired, and immediately tried again with a new pattern along the first row.

This time pretty much the same thing happened, except near the far left, where an entity took shape—a small group of cells that winked on and off in a repeating pattern, over and over. Oh, yes, Maia remembered. That’s a “microbe.”

While its individual parts flickered with different rhythms, each unit choosing a different tempo to flip from dark to pale or back again, the isolated configuration as a whole kept renewing itself. After twenty beats, the rest of the board lay empty, but this small patch remained stable, repetitiously persistent. Maia felt a flush of pleasure at having reinvented one of the simplest Life-forms on just her second go. She wiped the board and tried again, creating microbes all across the bottom edge. If left alone, they would whirl and gyre in place until the batteries ran out.

That was the extent of her beginner’s luck. Maia spent much of the next hour experimenting without finding another self-sustaining form. It was frustrating, since she recalled that some of the classics were absurdly simple.

A metallic clanking behind her announced the guards’ arrival with lunch. Maia got up, spreading her arms and stretching a crick in her back. Only when she went over to sit down at the table, and felt the stout women staring at her, did it come to her attention that she was humming, and must have been doing so for some time.

Huh! Maia thought. But then, it wasn’t surprising to be glad something had drawn her from her troubles for a while. We’ll see if this diversion lasts as long as those books did. To which she added, Just don’t count on my being too distracted to notice, my fat Guel keepers, if you ever relax your guard, or stop coming in pairs. Someday you’ll slip up. I’m watching.

After the bland meal, she purposely avoided the game board and went instead to her “gymnasium,” contrived out of rugs and boxes. Running in place, stretching, doing situps and pullups, Maia drove herself until a warm, pleasant ache spread from her shoulders to her toes. Then she removed her clothes and used water from the pitcher to take a sponge bath. Fortunately there was a small drain in the floor to carry away the effluent.

While drying herself, she looked over her body. After months of hard labor, it was only natural she should find muscles where none had shown before. Nor did she mind the fine scars that laced her hands and forearms—all earned by honest labor. What did surprise her was a pronounced development of her breasts. Since her last inspection, they had gone from petite to appreciable—or ample—enough to be a bit sore from being jounced, the last hour or so. Of course, it was common knowledge that Lamai mothers passed on a dominant gene for this. They seldom left their var-daughters unendowed. Still, predictable or not, it was an event. One Maia had not expected to celebrate in jail.

She had, in fact, always envisioned someday sharing it with Leie.

Shaking her head, she refused to be drawn into bleakness. For distraction, Maia walked back to the carpet and sat down in front of the electronic Life simulator.

If only there were a manual, or some teaching program to go with this damn game, she pondered. Maia had glimpsed men at dockside carrying around heavy reference books, which they pored over between matches. There would also be treatises on the subject, written by female anthropologists, filed at Caria University and big-city libraries. None of which helped her here.

Those two little lights attracted her notice again. PROG MEM, one label read. Some sort of memory? For storing preplanned programs, I suppose.

The other button said PREV.GAM.STOR.

“Previous game storage?” She had presumed this board was new, having been shipped in for men who would now never arrive. But the light winked, so maybe there was an earlier game stored in memory.

Guess I could replay it and pick up a pointer or two, she thought, then noticed nearby a tiny window with a string of code letters displayed VARIANT RULE: RVRSBL CA 897W, it said mysteriously. Maia made a guess. Sometimes men changed the rules of the game, as if Life itself weren’t complicated enough. It might take five living neighbors for a black square to stay alive. Or the program made squares to the left more influential than those on the right. The possibilities were endless, which helped the whole thing seem all the more pointless to most women.

Oh, this is idiotic. I’ll never learn anything from this. Maia paused, then impulsively pressed the button to see what the memory cache contained. Immediately the game board swirled into action. First the checkered boundary contracted inward from all sides till it enclosed a much smaller number of squares. She counted fifty-nine across and fifty-nine lengthwise. Surrounding the restricted game area was a border much more complex than the simple mirror pattern of before. The board flickered another time, and all at once the zone within the new boundary filled with chaos. A splotchy scattering of black dots covered the first nine rows, like choca-bits strewn across a birthday cake.

Lysos! This was completely over Maia’s head. The WIPE button beckoned… but curiosity stayed her hand. After all, this represented a lot of labor by the game’s previous owner. If nothing else, the patterns might be pretty to watch.

Sighing, she touched the referee symbol. The clock ticked down, eight, seven, six, five, four…

The dots began to dance. Wherever an open space had the right number of neighbors, next round there was a black, or living square at that location. Others that had been black, but failed the programmed criteria, turned white the following round. With each clock throb, the patterns changed in whirling waves, some fragmenting or scattering upon touching the boundary, while others reflected back, adding to the maelstrom within. Ephemeral shapes appeared and vanished like bubbles passing through the plane of the board. Maia could only breathe a sigh as waves crashed against stable entities, transforming them. She saw gliders and noted their simple, crushed-triangular form. In one corner appeared a “glider gun,” which spat out little flapping arrows at regular intervals, sending them whizzing across the board. There were spectacular collisions.

It was enthralling to watch. Maia wondered if this would turn out to be one of those programs that became self-sustaining, with the whole board in a state of perpetual flux for as long as the machine was left on, each moment’s array unlike any that had come before.

Then, the pace began to slacken. Rapidly zipping entities started merging into complex but stationary units, arrayed in five deep columns across the board. Each of these underwent further evolution, slowing the rate of change still further as they converged on what she guessed must be a preplanned, final form.

She could see it happening. Each step grew out of the one preceding it. Still, it took her by surprise when the patterns coalesced into individual letters.

Words.

The letters flickered, as if seen through turbid water, their component dots still blindly switching on and off, obeying set rules, unaware of anything more than two rows or columns away. Only collectively did they carry meaning, and that began dissolving as stern, mathematical laws tore fleeting cogency into swirls of returning chaos. Some driving force was spent. Blank patches spread, devouring the brief patterns.

In seconds it was over. Maia stared at the pale game board—now empty, featureless—trying to convince herself she’d seen it: meaning, startling and unforeseen.

11

Around midnight, the star-filled patterns of the winter sky rose over the high mountains crowning the eastern horizon, casting glittering reflections across glaciers tucked in alpine dales. Summertime’s celestial rash was over, tapering to a planetary glide as Stratos climbed its elliptic track toward the longest season. More than two Earth years would pass before the great plummet into spring. Till then, the Pelican of Euphrosyne, Epona, and the Dancing Dolphin would be regular occupants of night’s high throne.

Maia often used to wonder what it might be like to live on Florentina, or even Old Earth. Very strange, she imagined, and not just due to the primitive breeding patterns still followed there. She had read that on most habitable worlds, seasons were due to axial tilt, rather than orbital position. And winter was a time of bad weather.

Here, under the thick atmosphere of Stratos, summer’s necessary but brief disruptions passed quickly and were soon forgotten, while winter brought a long time of placid predictability. Rainclouds arrived in periodic, sweeping fronts, showering their moist loads across the continents, then replenishing over humid seas. For protracted intervals between storms, the sun nourished gently bowing, light-hungry crops, outshining its companion, Wengel Star, so overpoweringly that the white dwarf was no more than a faint glitter in the daytime sky, too dim to provoke even a sailor on leave. At night, no aurorae blared, only sprinkled constellations, twinkling like mad above the restless jet stream.

It will be Autumn-End Day soon, Maia thought, watching the constellation Thalla climb slowly toward zenith. They’ll be putting up decorations in Port Sanger. All the pleasure houses will close till midwinter, and men from the sanctuaries will stroll through wide-open gates, making paper airplanes of their old visitor passes. They’ll get sweets and cider, and children will ride their shoulders, pulling their beards, making them laugh.

Although rutting time had been effectively over before she and Leie departed on their ill-starred voyage, Autumn-End Day would mark the true start of winter’s extended time of peace, lasting for nearly half of the long, uneven track of seasons, during which males were as harmless as lugars and the biggest problem was getting them to look up from their books, or whittling, or game boards. Half of the City Watch would disband till springtime. What need for patrols, with the streets as safe as houses?

Maia had known she would probably never again celebrate Autumn-End in Port Sanger. But she hadn’t figured on spending a festival day in prison. Would she still be here at Farsun Time, as well? Somehow, she doubted her jailers would throw a gala then, either—offering hot punch and luck tokens to passersby. (What passersby?) Nor were any of the Guel guards likely to dress up as the Frost Lady, carrying her magic ladder, waving a wand of plenty, and giving treats and noisemakers to good little girls.

No, dammit! By Farsun Day, I’m going to be far away from here! She quashed a wave of homesickness.

Maia shook away distracting thoughts and lifted her miniature sextant, concentrating on the immediate problem. She could not be sure of the exact time, let alone the date. Without an accurate clock, it was impossible to fix her east-west position accurately, even if the instrument was in perfect working order. Longitude was going to be fuzzy.

But you don’t need the exact time to figure latitude. You just have to know the sky.

I wish I had my book of ephemerides, she thought, wondering if the stationmistress at Holly Lock had thrown out her duffel yet, along with her meager possessions. The slim volume carried the positions of major sighting stars to all the accuracy she’d ever need. Without it, memory would have to do.

Maia rested her elbows on the sill of the narrow opening in the wall, and took another reference on Taranis, a compact stellar cluster where it was said the Enemy long ago laid waste to two planets before coming here to meet defeat on Stratos. Twisting a dial moved the image in her cross-hairs till it kissed the south horizon’s prairie-sharp edge in the sextant’s tiny mirror. She lowered the device in order to peer at the dial, and jotted another figure in her notebook.

At least there had been a ready solution to the problem of writing implements. Near the base of her makeshift observing pyramid, awkwardly covered by piled-up rags, lay the broken rain of a storage box. Maia had struggled for over an hour, soon after sunset, to heave the crate all the way up here by the window. Then, just half a second after she pushed it off, the box lost all that altitude, hitting the stone floor edge-on.The crash made a horrible racket, bringing guards to the door with muttered inquiries. But she had managed to appease the Guels, shouting that she’d only fallen while exercising. “I’m all right, though. Thank you for being concerned!”

After a long pause, the Guels finally went away, grumbling. Maia dared not count on their incuriosity surviving a repetition. Fortunately, the crash had loosened several slats, spilling paper and writing utensils onto the floor. By then, the stars were out. For the next hour, she applied her rusty navigation skills to fixing the location of this high-plains prison.

Maia lifted the notebook into Durga’s wan light and added up the final result. Longitude is close to the one in the message, she thought. And latitude’s nearly identical!

At first, contemplating the communique that had appeared so astonishingly on the Game of Life board, she concluded it must be a bad joke. Someone at the factory must have inserted the plea—the way, as kids, she and Leie used to carefully pry open petu nuts and replace the meat with slips of paper saying, “Help! Squirrels are holding us in a petu tree!”

Now she knew better. The message had not been coded before shipment. Whoever logged the memorandum had done so in a location very close to here. Within tens of kilometers. Yet she had seen no sign of any towns or habitations near this stone monolith. It was doubtful the countryside could support any.

In effect, that could only mean the writer dwelt in this same tower, perhaps just meters away. Maia felt a bit guilty that another person’s predicament could bring such joy. I’m not happy you’re in jail, she thought of her fellow prisoner. But Lysos! It’s good not to be alone anymore!

They must be in similar situations—locked in storage chambers not designed as jail cells, but effective nonetheless. Yet, the other prisoner had proved resourceful. Finding herself in a storeroom filled with male-oriented recreation devices, she had managed to see in them a way to send the equivalent of messages in bottles.

Maia pondered the other inmate’s ingenious plan. These electronic game sets were costly, and the matriarchs of Long Valley weren’t spendthrifts. Sooner or later, they would order the games and other amenities shipped off for resale …. perhaps to some sanctuary on the coast, or a seafarers’ guild… eventually falling into the hands of someone able to read the programmed message. Any sailor would then know at once where a person was being held against her will.

There were assumptions, of course. The Perkinite clan mothers might not act to cut their losses in the unfinished sanctuaries until absolutely sure the new drugs were working. That might take some time. Nor was that all, Maia thought cynically. Even if the games do get shipped, and assuming the messages aren’t erased or read by wrong parties along the way… Even if someone believes the plea, and reports it, then what?

It wasn’t as though the planetary authorities had swarms of mighty aircraft, or armies to send round the world at a moment’s notice, just to correct far-off injustices. What forces Caria City had, it hoarded for emergencies. More likely, some lone investigator or magistrate would be sent the long way—by sea, then by train and horseback, taking the best part of a year to arrive, if ever.

Assuming we’re still here by then.

Maia wasn’t sure she could hold out that long. The other prisoner had a lot more patience.

Still, it’s a better plan than anything I came up with. Imagine figuring out how to do all this with a Game of Life set! Lacking a lifetime of practice, who could have created a message like that from scratch?

A man? Maia snorted disdainfully. Someone with a savant’s skills, surely.

I wish I could meet her. Talk to her. Maybe there’s a way.

Maia guessed it must be close to midnight. She was about to poke her head out the window again, to check the progress of the stars, when suddenly she heard it start. The nightly clicking.

Hastily, she angled her notebook into the moonlight and started making marks. A slash for every click, a dash for each beat that a pause lasted. After about twenty seconds, she stopped and read over the initial portion.

“Click, click, pause, click,” she recited slowly. “Click, click, pause, pause… yes. I’m sure it’s the same as the other night!”

Maia crammed the notebook in her belt and scrambled down the pyramid of boxes so quickly the unsteady construct teetered. Near bottom, her toe caught a fold of carpet, and she sprawled onto her hands and knees. Ignoring her scrapes, Maia came to her feet running.

“Where is it?” she whispered, concentrating. Peering through the darkness, she followed her ears to the east wall. Crouching, tracing her hand along the cool stone, she had to creep to her right, pushing bundles and boxes aside. Reaching past a pile of stiff cushions, her fingers met what felt like a small metal plate, set low near the floor. The clicking sounded very close now!

Feeling the outlines of the plate, Maia’s hand brushed a tiny button in its center, which abruptly lit the area with stabbing blue electricity. With a reflexive yelp, she flew backward, landing hard. For six or eight heartbeats, Maia sat numb on the cold floor, sucking tingling fingertips before finally recovering enough to scramble up again, throwing cushions in all directions, clearing space until she saw that smaller sparks accompanied each audible click, momentarily illuminating the plate in the wall.

Funny how I never noticed that before. Probably because I was looking for secret passages and trapdoors! Just goes to show, you never learn anything useful from fantasy novels.

Until today, she hadn’t imagined there might be ways to receive messages in this cell, or that those irritating clicks might really contain a code. But what else could they be? Would anything purely random, like a short circuit, repeat similar patterns two nights in succession?

Still trembling, she pulled out her notebook and pencil and returned to copying down intermittent flashes in front of her. Even with dark-adapted eyes, Maia could hardly see the marks she made. We’ll worry about that by daylight, she told herself when the clicking stopped, about five minutes later. Luck is definitely taking a tack my way.

She knew there was little evidence to support such a broad conclusion. But hope was a heady brew, now that she had tasted some. Slipping the notebook under a pile of bedding, Maia wrapped herself in her makeshift blankets and tried to settle her mind for sleep.

It wasn’t easy. Her thoughts collided with fantasies and improbable scenarios of rescue, such as the policewoman from Caria, arriving in a grand zep’lin, waving seal-encrusted writs. Other images were less cheering. Memories of Leie beckoned Maia back toward despondency. Drifting sporadically toward full consciousness, she wondered if the clickings were really a message. If so, was it aimed at her, specifically?

Idiot, she thought while passing through layers of half-slumber. How could anybody know you were here?

Eventually, Maia dreamed of Lysos.

The Founder was dressed in a flowing gown, and sat with piles of molecules to one side, adding one at a time to a string, like pearls on a necklace, or wooden balls on an abacus. The molecular chains clacked each time another joined the queue. Laying DNA codons in an endless chain, Lysos hummed sweetly as she worked.

It took two more nights to copy the entire message and confirm she had it right, an exercise in patience unlike any Maia had known since she and Leie worked to solve the secret gate in Lamatia’s wine cellar. Taking the time was necessary, though. Only on the third day did Maia feel ready to load the entire code string onto the Game of Life board.

She began by making sure the board was set up with the same special rules as before, when it had played that “message in a bottle.” The little window said RVRSBL CA 897W. Maia hoped the program would make sense of the clicks in the night. As before, the game area contracted to a square just fifty-nine units on a side, surrounded by a complex border.

Okay, let’s get started. Maia commenced laboriously turning each transcribed click into a black square, and leaving a space blank where there had been a second’s worth of pause. On finishing one row of fifty-nine, she continued marking the next level, wrapping the presumed message back and forth like a snake climbing a brick wall. After what felt like hours, she finished fitting the entire sequence into the assigned space. The match couldn’t be a coincidence! The resulting jumble of dots offered no meaning perceptible to the eye.

Exhausted, she was relieved to hear the rattle of keys at the door. Maia covered the game board, though it probably made no difference if the Guels saw. Her muscles and joints hurt from spending so much time bent over the machine. This had better be worth it, she thought while silently eating under her keepers’ dull gaze.

If I was off by even one space, it could ruin the whole thing. What’ll I do if it doesn’t work?

The answer was obvious. I’ll just try again. What else is there to do?

The guards took away her tray and slid the bolt. Breathlessly, Maia got back to the game board and double-checked her transcription. She crossed her arms and tugged both earlobes for luck, then pressed the start button.

Swirling cyclones of pulsing Life forms instantly told her she was right. The nightly clickings had been meant for this! They were a recipe. A complex set of starting conditions for this weird game. Despite the variant rules, most of the patterns were once again recognizable. Two glider guns fired fluttering wedge shapes across a terrain strewn with microbes and eaters, beacons and dandelions. Scores of other shapes merged and separated. An “ecology” expanded to fill the entire fifty-nine-by-fifty-nine array. Maia poised over the board, pencil in hand, but the patterns were so enthralling, she was almost caught short when the chaotic forms coalesced suddenly into rows of rippling letters.

Once more, the message began dissolving almost as soon as it took form. Maia hurriedly scribbled it down before it vanished, along with all other “living” remnants on the board. Soon the board lay pale and empty before her. She stared at the copied version of the four-line missive, reading it over and over again.

Clearly, it hadn’t been meant for her, after all. Several of her favorite fantasies evaporated. No matter. There was more than enough here to keep her speculating about the sender’s intent. Could “CY” stand for a friend or clanmate of the other prisoner? Is “GRVS” a group or clan powerful enough to come and set her free? Maia’s imagination would come up with the wildest notions if she let it, so she firmly stayed down to earth. The other prisoner might be a business rival of the local Perkinites, perhaps kept here by the Joplands and their allies to coerce a better deal.

The last, self-sacrificial phrase in the message, demanding to be abandoned, if necessary, bespoke somber stuff. Or was she wrong assuming that it meant “Leave if necessary”?

Could it have to do with the drug that makes men rut in winter?

Possibly the other prisoner was no more virtuous than Tizbe or the Joplands, merely a competitor. That hardly mattered at this point. Right now Maia couldn’t be choosy about her allies.

The strangest thing about this eavesdropped message, as opposed to the one Maia had read earlier, was that it seemed directed not at some random person who might later pick it up, as she had picked up the game board, but at a specific individual. Using resold games to send notes “in a bottle” could have been but a side venture. A backup plan. These nightly clicking episodes seemed aimed at something more immediate, as if the prisoner intended her messages to get through much sooner and more directly.

Maia recalled the metal plate in the wall. Sparks in the night.

The place must be wired for telephone, or some low-level commlink, Maia speculated. Having never been in a sanctuary before, she had no reason to be surprised by this, yet she was. Maybe men demand it in the design before they’ll move in. I wonder what they need it for?

Whatever the cable’s original purpose, the other prisoner was clearly using it for something… sending electrical pulses. But to where? As far as Maia could figure, the wires weren’t attached to anything.

A possibility struck her. Is the other prisoner using the wire as … an antenna? Trying to send a radio message? Maia knew in abstract that you generated radio waves by pushing electrons rapidly back and forth down a wire. But household comm sets and the ones used aboard ships—countless generations removed from their ancient origins—were grown in solid blocks out of vats, and sold in units smaller than the palm of your hand. Probably only a scattering of individuals in universities understood how they were, made anymore.

She must be a savant. They’re holding a savant prisoner here!

Maia recalled the evening in Lanargh, when she and Leie had watched the news broadcast, and heard the mysterious offer of a “reward for information.” Maybe it was about this!

I’ve got to get in touch with her. But how?

She decided. First I’ll have to write a message.

There was no question of doing it the way the savant had, by coding starting conditions the Game of Life rules would turn into written words after a thousand complex gyrations. And with a little contemplation, Maia realized she didn’t have to. After all, the trick of sending a message in a bottle, or a message by radio, involved coding it so that, hopefully, only the right recipient would decipher it. But Maia wasn’t trying to communicate with anyone beyond these sanctuary walls. She could send regular block letters!

With the stylus, she blackened squares on the game board until it read

Regarding what she’d written, she reconsidered. The first line was obvious. As for the second, perhaps the savant didn’t know she was making noise elsewhere in the citadel, each time she transmitted, but it would be apparent once Maia’s reply got through.

There was another reason to simplify. She must translate her message into rows of dots and dashes, unraveling the words like peeling layers off a cake. Three lines of letters took twenty-one rows of game squares to produce, each fifty-nine squares wide, she calculated a total of 1,239 intersections that had to be labeled black or white with an on or off pulse. Over a thousand! True, the other prisoner had sent even more, but not with such long pauses as Maia’s approach called for. Extend a pause for five beats or more and the recipient will surely lose count. Finally, she settled on a much simpler first effort.

It was still 413 pulses long, after the rows were unwrapped into a linear chain. That seemed manageable, though, especially since it would be rhythmical.

Now how to send it.

She had considered pounding on the walls, or perhaps the drainpipe..But those sounds probably wouldn’t carry far. If they did, it would alert the guards.

I’ll have to do it the same way, she concluded. Through the wire.

There was just one possible source for the electricity required, and one mistake would cut off her only contact with the outside world. Maia didn’t hesitate. Gingerly, she turned the Life set over and pried open the cover to the battery case.

She decided to wait until this evening’s midnight transmission was over. Huddled under unwrapped curtains, she watched the savant’s message create a staccato of sparks against the wall, verifying that it was the same as before. The series of clicking arcs stopped at the usual time, leaving her to peer through dim moonlight, cast by the slit window. Expecting this, Maia had practiced her moves earlier. Still, it took several awkward tries to grasp loose wires extracted from the back of the game set and bring them to the plate in the wall.

Before her lay the message she planned to send. Maia had used big, blocky squares and spaces, intended to be read even by dim light.

Well, here goes, she thought.

Touching one wire to the nub on the wall had no effect. But placing one against the nub and the other on the plate caused a spark that startled her briefly. Setting her teeth, Maia leaned forward to better see the paper sheets, and started tapping—creating a spark for each black square and resting a beat for each white one.

She had no idea whether this was doing anything but draining the batteries. Theoretically, she should be able to restore them by putting the game board in the window, to absorb sunlight. But in fact, she might be ruining them for nothing.

It was hard keeping track of her place, staring closely at row after row of hand-blackened squares. Despite the cold, she soon had to blink away beads of sweat, and at one point saw that she had skipped an entire line! There was nothing to be done about it. One error like that ought to leave the message readable, but she could not afford to let it happen again.

Finally reaching the end of the last row, Maia sighed in relief and sat back, stretching her arms. A break in time would let the other party know a termination had been reached. But the savant probably had been taken by surprise. So after a short breather, Maia bent forward to repeat the entire exercise.

Is anything getting through? she wondered. I’ve forgotten what little I knew about voltages and such. Maybe I needed to make a resistor, or a capacitor. Maybe I’m just pouring electricity into the ground, without creating sparks anywhere else.

Click, click, pause, pause, pause, click… She tried to concentrate, keeping a steady rhythm as the savant had. This was especially important counting the long pauses making up margins on both sides of her simple message. Talking aloud seemed to help. Inside she kept hearing the message she was trying to send, as if part of her was broadcasting by force of will.

I’m Maia… I’m Maia… I’m Maia …

This second time was much harder. Her fingers felt on the verge of cramping, her neck ached from leaning forward, and her eyes stung from sweat-salt. Still she kept at it stubbornly. Comfort held no attraction. What mattered was the slim chance of talking to someone.

Please hear me … I’m Maia … oh, please…

By the time she finished the second transmission, her hands were too numb even to let go of the insulated wires, so she just sat there, staring at the blank stone wall, listening to the tension in her spine slowly unwind. There would be no third attempt. Even if she and the batteries had the stamina, it would be too risky. The guards might be accustomed to one set of clicks in the night, like a friendly cricket. But too big a change in routine just wouldn’t do.

A sudden spark made her jump. It took a moment to realize she hadn’t caused it by misplacing the wires. No, it came from the wall! More sparks followed. Maia scrambled for her pencil and pad.

Each tiny arc illuminated her accompanying slash-mark. Darkness she noted with a dash. It was easier work than sending, though her eyes now hurt worse than ever. With rising excitement, Maia realized this was no repetition, but an entirely new message. She had gotten through!

Then, as abruptly as before, it ended, and she was left in silence, staring at several sheets of mysterious code.

Frustration made her already tense muscles quiver. Even if she carried the game board up to the window, there would not be enough light to reassemble it properly. Not until morning.

I can’t wait till morning. I can’t! Maia fought down a strangling wave of impatience. You can do whatever you have to do, she answered herself, and forced her taut body to relax, one muscle at a time. Finally, she was breathing evenly again.

Well, at least I can tidy this up, she thought, looking at her scrawled transcription. Standing, Maia took a few moments to stretch, then carefully climbed her pyramid of boxes toward the slit.

Durga was no longer in sight. A lesser moon, Aglaia, shone barely bright enough for her to work. Gradually, line by line on a fresh page, she drew each “click” as a black square. Each pause translated into a blank one. At the end of the first row of fifty-nine, she moved up to the next and began snaking backward again. This way, if she succeeded in repairing the game device tomorrow, she’d be able to load the starting conditions right away, and quickly set the game in motion to read the message.

It was hard work. After this she might even be able to sleep.

So intent was she on copying squares in long rows that she failed to notice the difference in the pattern for some time. Finally it occurred to her. Unlike before, the “clicks” seemed to come already clustered in tight groups. Blinking, Maia pulled back, and saw—

Of course. She answered the way I sent, without coding! I can read it tonight!

Maia quickened her pace. Two rows later, the message could be read.

The wind picked up, riffling her papers, sending them tumbling down the makeshift platform like a flurry of discarded leaves. All but the single sheet she clutched in both fists, soon smeared by hot, grateful tears.

12

Over the following days, Maia and her new friend learned to communicate despite the thick walls separating them. From the first, Maia felt stupid and slow, especially when Renna went back to sending coded, compacted messages designed to be deciphered by the Game of Life board. Maia could not blame her, since the method was more efficient, enabling a full screen to be sent in just a few minutes. Yet it made Maia’s responses seem so clumsy in comparison. One line of text was all she could manage after a day’s work, and sending it left her exhausted, frustrated.

Gratefully, Maia copied down the system Renna transmitted, one called Morse. She had heard of it, she was sure. Some clans based their commercial ciphers on variants of very ancient systems. Another item that should have been in the Lamatia curriculum, she thought grimly.

The code seemed simple enough, with each plus sign standing for a long stroke and each dash for a short one. It greatly speeded Maia’s next effort, though she remained awkward, and kept making mistakes.

To this question, Renna answered,

And to Maia’s astonishment, the game board proceeded to shake her friend’s letters into coruscating patterns, like a fireworks show on Founders Day.

Maia found even more amazing the next message Renna sent. Though compacted, it was long, taking up thirty-one rows by the time Maia finished laying down a snaking chain of black and white squares. Pressing the launch button set off a wild, hungry “ecology” of mutually devouring pseudo-entities that finally resolved, after many gyrations, into what looked like a picture … a crude sketch of plains and distant mountains, seen through a narrow window. It was recognizably a scene looking out from this very stone tower—not the view from Maia’s window, but similar.

The other prisoner followed this with

Maia was impressed. Nevertheless she answered

Renna’s reply seemed sheepish.

The game board next rippled to show a slim face with close-cropped hair, eyes rolled upward in embarrassment, shoulders in the act of shrugging. The caricature made Maia giggle in delight.

Thankfully, she hadn’t damaged the Life set during that first experiment. Over the following days, Renna taught her how to connect the machine directly to the wall circuit, so she could send messages directly, instead of laboriously and dangerously touching wires by hand. Renna still made transmissions at high power every midnight, attempting to use crudely generated radio waves to contact friends somewhere out there, beyond the walls. The rest of the time, they communicated using low currents, to avoid arousing the guards.

Renna was so friendly and welcoming, reinforcing Maia’s sense of a warm, maternal presence. Maia soon felt drawn into telling her story. It all came spilling out. The departure from Lamatia. Leie’s loss. Her encounters with Tizbe and involvement in matters far murkier than any young var should have to deal with, newly fledged from her birth clan. Laying it out so starkly brought home to Maia how unfair it was. She’d done nothing to deserve this chain of catastrophes. All her life, mothers and matriarchs had said virtue and hard work were rewarded. Was this the prize?

Maia apologized for stumbling through the story, especially when emotion overcame her at the sending key. THIS IS HARD FOR ME, she transmitted, trying to keep her hand from trembling. Renna’s reply offered reassurance and understanding, along with some confusion.

Sympathy, after so long, brought a lump to Maia’s throat. So many older people forgot there had been a time when they, too, were inexperienced and powerless. She was grateful for the compassion, the shared empathy.

Conversing with her fellow prisoner was an adventure of awkward moments followed by cordial insights. Of double meanings and hilarious misunderstandings, like when they disagreed which moon hung in plain view, in the southern sky. Or when Renna kept misspelling the names of cities, or quotations from the Book of the Founders. Obviously, she was doing this on purpose, to draw Maia out of her funk. And it was working. Challenged to catch her fellow prisoner at intentional inconsistencies, Maia found herself paying closer attention. Her spirits lifted.

Soon she realized something astonishing. Even though they had never met in person, she was starting to feel a special kind of hearth-affection toward this new friend.

It wasn’t so difficult when you were winter-born. Hearth feelings were predictable after many generations.

For instance, three-year-old Lamais almost always passed through a phase when they would tag after a chosen clone-sister just one class ahead of them, doing whatever that older sibling asked and pining at the slightest curt word. Later, at age four, each winter Lamai took her own turn being the adored one, spending the better part of a season taking out on a younger sister the heartbreaks she had received the year before.

During her fifth-year winter, a Lamatia Clan full daughter started looking beyond the walls, often becoming obsessed with a slightly older cloneling from a neighboring hold, usually a Trevor, or a Wheatley. That phase passed quickly, and besides, Trevors and Wheatleys were family allies. Later on, though, came a rough period when Lamai sixers seemed inevitably bound, despite all their mothers’ warnings, to fixate on a woman from the tall, stately Yort-Wong merchant clan… which was awkward, since the Yort-Wongs had been feuding off and on with Lamatia for generations.

Knowing in advance what to expect didn’t keep Lamai sixers from railing and weeping during their autumn of discontent. Fortunately, there was the upcoming Ceremony of Passage to distract them. Yet, when all was said and done, how could the brief attentions of a man ease those pangs of unrequited obsession? Even those lucky sixers chosen for sparking emerged from their unhappy Yort-Wong episode changed, hardened. Thereafter, Lamai women wore emotional invulnerability as armor. They dealt with clients, cooperated with allies, made complex commercial-sexual arrangements with seamen. But for pleasure they hired professionals.

For companionship, they had each other.

It had been different from the very start for Maia and Leie. Being vars, they could not even roughly predict their own life cycles. Anyway, hearth feelings ranged so, from almost rutlike physical passion all the way to the most utterly chaste yearnings just to be near your chosen one. Popular songs and romantic stories emphasized the latter as more noble and refined, though all but a few heretics agreed there was nothing wrong with touching, if both hearts were true. The physical side of hearthness, between two members of the female species, was pictured as gentle, solicitous, hardly like sex at all.

Maia’s own experience remained theoretical, and in this area Leie was no bolder. The twins had certainly felt intimations of warmth toward others—classmates, kids they befriended in town, some of their teachers—but nothing precocious or profound. Since turning five, there had simply been no time.

Now Maia felt something stronger, and knew well what name to use, if she dared admit it to herself. In Renna she had found a soul who knew kindness, who would not judge a girl unworthy, just because she was a lowly var. It hardly mattered that she hadn’t rested eyes on the object of her fixation. Maia created a picture in her mind, of a savant or high civil servant from one of the faraway sophisticated cities on Landing Continent, which would explain Renna’s stiff, somewhat aristocratic way of speaking in text. No doubt she came from a noble clan, but when Maia asked, all Renna said was

Maia found it hard always to tell when Renna was joking or teasing, although clearly she never meant it in a mean way. Renna wasn’t much more forthcoming about how she came to be a prisoner in this place.

Bellers! The family Tizbe belonged to! The pleasure clan that did a profitable side business carrying goods and performing confidential services. So Maia and Renna had a common enemy! When she said as much, Renna agreed with what seemed reluctant sadness. Maia tried asking about “CY” and “GRVS,” who must be Renna’s clanmates or allies, but her fellow prisoner responded there were some things Maia was better off not knowing.

That did not prevent them from talking frequently about escape.

First they must work out their relative positions in the stone tower. Crawling into the stone casement, Maia craned her head around and saw a continuous row of slit windows like this one, presumably illuminating other storerooms, girdling the citadel’s circumference five meters below the grand gallery of columned patios she had glimpsed on arrival, that first day. Comparing the positions of certain landmarks, they ascertained that Renna’s window lay just around the bend, facing due east while Maia’s looked southeastward. Turning in the opposite direction, Maia could just make out the gate-ramp of the unfinished sanctuary, forlorn and covered with prairie dust.

Maia was full of ideas. She told Renna of her experiments unraveling carpets, learning how to weave a rope. While approving her enthusiasm, Renna reminded Maia that the drop was much too far to trust a bundle of twine, amateurly wrapped by hand.

Looking at her handicraft, she was forced to admit Renna was probably right. Still, Maia continued spending part of each day unwinding lengths of tough fiber and retying them into a finger-width strand, trying to imitate by memory the weaving patterns used by sailors aboard the Wotan. It’s something to keep busy, she thought. While Renna kept up her midnight attempts to radio for help, Maia wanted to contribute something, even as futile as winding string.

She was careful to hide all signs—of both ropemaking and talking to Renna—from her jailers. During meals, Maia told them how fascinated she was with the Game of Life, and how grateful to have been introduced to its world of intricacy. Their eyes glazed as she expected. All the Guels wanted was the comfort of routine. She happily let them have it.

So it came as a surprise when she heard the rattle of keys in the middle of one afternoon, hours before dinner-time. Maia barely managed to throw a rug over her work and stand up before the door swung open. On entering, the two Guel guards appeared tense, agitated. Maia saw why when a familiar figure stepped between them.

Tizbe Beller! The former baggage-car assistant looked around the storeroom, hands folded behind her. An expression of faintly amused disgust crossed her young face as she perused the sweat-stained towel hanging by the cracked washbasin, and the covered chamber pot just beyond. Her nose wrinkled, as if meeting odors a coarse var could not be expected to notice.

Maia made herself stand tall. Go ahead and sneer, Tizbe. I’ve kept myself fit and civilized in here. Let’s change places and see you do better!

Her defiance must have shown. Although Tizbe’s amusement continued unabated, her expression did change. “Well, captivity doesn’t seem to have hurt you, Maia. Not where it counts. You’re positively blossoming.”

“Go to Earth, Tizbe. Take your Jopland and Lerner friends with you.”

The cloneling feigned a moue of shock. “Such language! Keep this up, and you’ll be too rough for polite society.”

Maia laughed curtly. “You can shove your polite—”

But Tizbe got the better of her again, simply by stifling a yawn and waving a hand vaguely in front of her. “Oh, not now, if you don’t mind. It’s been a hard ride and I have to leave bright and early. We’ll see though. Before that, I might have a chance to drop in again and say goodbye.”

Then, to Maia’s shock, she turned to go. “But… aren’t you here to—”

Tizbe looked back from the door. “To question you? Torture you? Ah, that would be just the thing for one of those trashy novels I’m told you’ve been reading. Villains are supposed to gloat and rub their hands together, and talk to their poor victims a lot.

“Sorry to disappoint you. I really would try to fit the role if I had the time. Honestly, though, do you have any information I could possibly want? What material benefit would I gain by questioning one more Venturist spy?”

Maia stared at her. “One more what?”

Tizbe reached into one of her sleeves and drew forth a tattered, folded sheet of heavy paper. After a moment, Maia recognized the leaflet she had accepted in Lanargh, from the hand of that earnest young heretic wearing eyeglasses. So, her captors had gone to Holly Lock and sifted through her things. She did not even bother acting offended.

“Venturist… you think I’m one of them, because of that?”

Tizbe shrugged. “It did seem unlikely for a spy to carry around blatant evidence. Throw in your comm call from Jopland, though, and it’s reason enough to take precautions. You’ve turned official eyes this way sooner than expected, for which you’ll pay.” She smiled. “Still, we have things well in hand. If it weren’t for more urgent matters, I’d not bother coming all this way.

“As it is, I felt behooved to check on you, Maia. Glad to see you not all wrapped in self-pity, as I expected. Maybe, when everything’s settled, we’ll have a talk about your future. There may be a place for a var like you—”

Maia cut in. “With your gang of criminals? You…” She searched for phrases she had heard over Thalia’s radio, at Lerner Hold. “Inheretist exploiters!”

Tizbe shook her head, grinning. “Showing our radical colors at last? Well, solitude and contemplation can change minds. I’ll have some books sent to you. They’ll show the sense in what we’re doing. How it’s good for Stratos and all womankind.”

“Thanks,” Maia replied sharply. “Don’t bother including The Perkinite Way. I’ve read it.”

“Oh yes?” Tizbe’s eyebrows lifted. “And?”

Maia hoped her smile conveyed indulgent pity.

“I think Lysos would have liked to study sickies like you under a microscope, to see what she did wrong.”

For the first time, the other woman’s reaction wasn’t another tailored mask. Tizbe glowered. “Enjoy your stay, var-child.”

The guards followed her out, trying not to meet Maia’s eyes as they closed the door, then fastened it with a hard, metallic clank of Lerner steel.

Tizbe didn’t give a damn about me. I’m just an irritant, to be stored away and forgotten.

It was just one more blow to Maia’s pride, confirming what she already knew about her insignificance in the world.

So it wasn’t me that brought her all the way out here, but something “urgent.”

Maia realized with sudden certainty—It’s Renna!

The possibility of danger to her friend terrified Maia. She rushed to the wall, where the game board was already plugged in, but then made herself stop. The distance between their cells was not great. Tizbe could be at Renna’s door by the time Maia tapped a warning, and if Tizbe heard the clicking, it would let on that the prisoners had a way of communicating. Maia imagined what life might be like, if she found herself cut off yet again. The gaping sense of threat and emptiness felt like when she had first come to realize that Leie was gone.

Sitting in front of the game board only enhanced Maia’s feeling of impotence. She got up and climbed her pyramid of boxes to crawl into the window, where she poked her head beyond the rocky lip to peer toward the front gate. There Maia glimpsed several figures tending a string of tethered horses. The Beller’s escorts, presumably.

She clambered down again. To avoid pacing uselessly, Maia sat down and resumed plaiting her rope, keeping her pencil handy nearby and anxiously hoping for the clicking sounds that would tell her Renna was all right. The long, hard quiet stretched on and on, until a rasp of keys caused her to throw a rug over her work once more. She stood up as the guards entered and put her dinner on the rickety table. Maia ate silently, hurriedly, as eager for her jailers to leave as they were to be gone..

When they left, she hated the return of solitude.

What if Tizbe has already taken Renna away?

Several times, Maia interrupted her work to go to the window. The third time she looked, the horses and escorts were gone. A panicky chill arrested when she saw no traffic on the road. As twilight settled and temperatures dropped, they must have all gone inside, where the empty halls offered plenty of room for women and mounts.

Maia climbed down and resumed worrying, while her fingers plaited fibers together. Tizbe said they’d be leaving tomorrow, but she never said whether or not they—

The first clicks from the wall plate sent her heart leaping.

Renna! She’s safe!

Maia threw her weaving aside and picked up her notebook. Soon it was clear that Renna wasn’t sending any ornately planned Game of Life scenario, but a rushed series of simple Morse dots and dashes. The message ended. Concentrating, Maia had to guess at meanings for several of the letters and words. Finally, she cried out. “No!”

It can get bitterly cold on the high plains, especially on early winter evenings, to one lying perched up high along a precipice, exposed to the wind.

There was barely room to stretch prone in the window niche, whose gritty, chill surface rubbed Maia’s shoulders on both sides. Using a plank from the broken box as a sort of fishing rod, Maia still had to lean out so the rope hung properly, to keep its burden from scraping against the rough cliff face. The leverage helped as she rocked the plank gently left to right, back and forth, pumping gradually until the rope began to swing like a pendulum.

It took concentration not to let her shivering interfere. Nor was the shaking due entirely to the cold. By moonlight, the ground looked awfully far away. Even if she had a rope long enough—one made by master craftswomen, not hand-twined by an inexperienced fiver—she would never have been able to get herself to climb down all that distance.

Yet, look what you’re trying to do, instead!

After getting Renna’s message, there had passed over Maia a wave of utter panic. It wasn’t just envisioning months, perhaps years, stretching ahead in loneliness. The loss of this new friend, when she had still not gotten over Leie, felt like a physical blow. Her first impulse was to curl up under piles of curtain material and let depression take her. There was a sick, sweet-sour attraction to melancholy, as an alternative to action.

Maia had been tempted for all of thirty seconds. Then she got to work, searching for some way to solve her problem, reevaluating every possibility, even those she had previously discarded.

The door and walls? They would take explosives to breach. She turned over in her mind ways of calling the guards and overpowering them, but that fantasy was also absurd, especially with them at their wariest, and Tizbe’s escorts to back them up.

That left the window. She could just barely manage to squeeze through, but to what purpose? The ground was impossibly far. Turning left, she could make out more storerooms, visible as slit-windows stretching away on both sides. They seemed almost as out of reach as the prairie floor. Besides, why trade one prison cell for another?

Looking about desperately, she had finally twisted around to look upward, and saw the pillared loggia overhead, part of a grand patio girdling the sanctuary, five or six meters higher.

If only somebody would drop a rope down, she had fantasized ironically.

Desperation led to inspiration.

Could I send one up?

It would be a gamble at best. Even if it was possible to swing a rope and bob the way she had in mind, she’d still need something to act as a grappling hook. Yet, it mustn’t interfere as she oscillated the rope back and forth along the wall, giving it momentum to rise and—if all went well—catch on the railing overhead.

She refused to think about the last drawback—trusting her weight to the makeshift contraption. Cross that bridge when we come to it, Maia thought.

Back inside, she had started by ripping apart her supply of notebooks for the springlike clips that bound loose pages inside. Maybe I can rig some of these to pop open when they hit…

It was difficult to put into practice. First she had to tear the clips out and then use a wooden plank to lever them into the shape she wanted. Tying several together at the end of her rope, she practiced on the sill of the window until she felt sure the improvised hook would catch two times out of three. The short section of cable used in the trial held her weight, though trusting her life to the improvised gimmickry seemed lunatic, or desperate, or both.

Maia wrapped a single loop of thread around the clips to bind them into a compact bundle, to keep the cluster from clattering and rattling as she swung it back and forth. Ideally, it would come apart on impact with the balcony, and not at some inopportune moment before. Finally, she had crawled back into the window carrying some curtain material for padding, and a plank with a notch in one end, to use as a fishing pole. Once settled in, she commenced laying out rope.

It was hard to even see the cable’s end when it was hanging straight down. Once she set the pendulum in motion, however, she could make out the makeshift grapnel whenever it passed before a small patch of snow on the ground. Soon it rose high enough to occult a low white cloud bank, veiling one of the moons to the east.

Back and forth … rocking back and forth. Despite her arrangements to let the plank take most of the weight, Maia’s arms were tiring by the time the swinging rope rose high enough to point horizontal, level with the row of storeroom windows. Her heart caught each time the bundle of clips tapped or snagged against some protuberance, forcing her to lean even farther to avoid catching it on the backswing.

“Come on, you can hold better than that!” she remembered Leie used to say, back when they were both four and a half, and would sneak out at night to paint mothers blue. After the third time a statue in the Summer Courtyard had been defaced, the clan matriarchs had locked all doors leading to the yard, and sprinkled marker dust around the monuments, to trace anyone who stepped in it. That did not stop the incidents.

“I’m doing as best I can!” she had hissed back at Leie on the night of that final foray, gripping one end of a rope made of bedsheets, the other wrapped around her sister’s feet. Lowering Leie from the roof, with paintbrush and bucket in hand, had been easier on prior occasions because there were crenelated battlements Maia could use for leverage. But that last time it had been just her own, preadolescent muscles, battling the insistent pull of gravity.

Now, over a year later, as she struggled to control a distant weight that jerked and fought like a fish caught at the end of her line, Maia moaned, “I’m… doin’… as best I … can!” Her breath whistled as she held on, letting out and taking up slack, trying to force momentum into a pendulum that seemed reluctant to rise much past horizontal and kept yanking at her burning shoulders on each downward swing.

Under questioning the next day, Leie had insisted she was acting alone. She refused to implicate Maia, even though it was clear she could not have done it without help. Everyone knew Maia had been the one with the rope. Everyone knew she had been the one unable to hold on when a tile broke, loosening her grip, causing Leie to go crashing in a clatter of paint and tracer dust and chipped plaster.

After taking her punishment stoically, Leie never brought up the subject, not even in private. It was enough that everybody knew.

Grimly, Maia held on. Renna, she thought, gritting her teeth and ignoring the pain. I’m coming…

The grapnel had now reached the stone balustrade in its highest rise. Frustratingly, it would not go over the protruding lip, though it touched audibly several times. Maia tried twisting the plank so that the rope would come closer to the wall at the top of each swing, but the curve of the citadel defied her.

Obviously the idea was workable. Some combination of twists and proddings would make it. If she took her time and practiced several evenings in a row …

“No!” she whispered. “It’s got to be tonight!”

Two more times, the grapnel just clipped the balcony, making a soft, scraping sound. In agony, Maia realized she had only a couple more attempts before she would have to give up.

Another touch. Then a clean miss.

That’s it, she realized, defeated. Got to rest. Maybe try again in a few hours.

Resignedly, with numbness spreading across her shoulders, she began easing off on the rhythmic pumping action, letting the pendulum motion start to die down. On the next swing, the bundle did not quite reach the level of the balustrade. The one after that, its peak was lower still.

The next cycle, the grapnel paused once more… just high enough and long enough for someone to quickly reach over the balcony and grab it, in a one-handed catch.

The surprise was total. Throbbing with fatigue, shivering from the cold, for a moment Maia could do nothing else but lay in the stone opening and stare along the rough face of the citadel, looking upward toward an unexpected dark silhouette, leaning outward, holding onto her rope, eclipsing a portion of winter’s constellations.

Maia’s first thought was that Tizbe or the guards must have heard something, come to investigate, and caught her in the act. Soon they would arrive to take away her tools, boxes, even the curtains she had unraveled to make rope, leaving her worse off than before. Then she realized the figure on the loggia was not calling out, as a guard might. Rather, it began making furtive hand motions. Maia could make no sense of them in the dark, but understood one thing. The person gesturing at her was as concerned for silence as she was.

Renna? Hope flashed, followed by confusion. Her friend’s cell lay some distance beyond and lower down. Unless her fellow inmate had also come up with an inspired, last-minute plan…

The shadowy figure began moving westward along the balustrade, handing Maia’s rope around pillars along the way. On reaching a spot directly overhead, the silhouette made hand gestures indicating Maia should wait, then vanished for a few moments. When it returned, something started snaking downward along Maia’s hand-woven cable toward her.

Ah, Maia realized. She didn’t like the looks of my workmanship. Well, fine. I’ll use her store-bought one instead. See if I care.

In fact, Maia was relieved. She paused to consider going back inside her cell to get … what? There were only four books and the Game of Life set, none of which she cared much about. Except for the sextant, strapped to her wrist, she was free of the tyranny of possessions.

After tying the new rope under her shoulders, Maia inched outward until most of her weight hung from the taut cable. At that point it occurred to her that this could be a trap. Tizbe might be toying with her, while arranging for her death-fall to appear part of an escape attempt.

The thought passed as Maia realized, What choice do I have?

She braced her feet against the wall, legs straight, and prepared to start climbing, stepping upward while pulling hand over hand. Then, to her surprise, the rope tautened rapidly and she found herself being hauled straight up, directly and swiftly. There must be a whole gang of them up there, Maia thought. Or a block and tackle.

As the balcony drew near, she composed her face so as not to show the slightest chagrin if it turned out to be Tizbe and the guards, after all. I’ll fight, she vowed. I’ll break free and take them on a chase they’ll never forget.

Arms reached down to haul her over the side… and Maia’s composure broke when she saw who had helped her.

“Kiel! Thalla!”

Her former cottage-mates at Lerner Hold beamed while freeing her of the rope. Kiel’s dark features split with a broad, white grin. “Surprised?” she said in a whisper. “You didn’t think we’d leave you to rot in this Perkinite hole, did you?”

Maia shook her head, overwhelmed that she had been remembered after all. “How did you know where I—”

She cut off, upon seeing that they weren’t alone. Standing behind the two var women, coiling rope over one shoulder, stood … a man! Beardless and slim for one of his kind, he smiled at her with an intimacy she found rather forward and disconcerting.

A man’s participation helped explain how just three of them could lift her so quickly, while it raised other questions even more perplexing… like what one of his race was doing so far upland, involving himself in disputes among women.

Thalla chuckled lowly, patting Maia’s shoulder. “Let’s just say we’ve been searching some time. We’ll explain later. Now it’s time to scoot.” She turned to lead the way. But Maia shook her head, planting her feet and pointing the other direction.

“Not yet! There’s someone else we’ve got to rescue. Another prisoner!”

Thalla and Kiel looked at each other, then at the man. “I thought there were just two,” Thalla said.

“There were,” the man answered. “Maia—”

“No! Come on, I know where she is. Renna—”

“Maia. I’m here.”

She had turned and already taken several steps down the dark corridor when the words cut her short. Maia swiveled, peering past Thalla and Kiel, who stood grinning in amusement. The man moved toward her, on his face a gentle look of irony. He lifted his gaze and shrugged in a gesture and expression she abruptly recognized. Her jaw dropped.

“I should have said something,” he told her in a voice that came across queerly accented. “It slipped my mind that men are the gendered class, here. That you’d naturally assume I was female unless told otherwise. Sorry to have shocked you. …”

Maia blinked. In her astonishment, she could barely speak. “You’re … a man.”

Renna nodded. “That’s how I’ve always seen myself. Though here on—”

Kiel hissed. “Come on! Explain later!”

Maia would not move. “What are you talking about?” She demanded. “How could you have-—”

Renna reached out and took one of Maia’s hands. “Truth is, by your standards I’m probably not even human at all. You may have heard of me. In Caria City they call me the Visitor. Or the Outsider.”

A cloud moved out of the way—or a moon chose that moment to suddenly cast pale light upon his face, showing its odd proportions. Not so extreme you would have stopped and stared, on seeing him at a dockside cafe. Still, when you looked for it, the effect was striking, a lengthiness of jaw and a breadth of brow that seemed somehow unworldly. Nostrils shaped to take in different air. A stance learned walking on a different world. Maia shivered.

“Now or never!” Thalla urged, taking both of them in tow while Kiel skulked ahead, scouting for danger in the shadows. Maia stumbled at first, but soon they picked up the pace and were running past ghostly, empty halls, united by a need to leave this place of stillborn silences. That’s right, Maia realized. Explanations can wait. For the moment, she let a rising exhilaration drive out all other feelings. All that mattered now was the taste of freedom!

Later. Later would be soon enough to worry this puzzle—that her first adult love had turned out to be an alien from the stars.