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 Thalia 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.