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.
We were lucky to find a habitable world in such an odd binary-star system, of a type seldom visited. Its orbital peculiarities, as well as size and dense atmosphere, should keep our colony hidden for a long time.
Those same features mean genetic tinkering will be required, before the first settlers step outside these domes. While making ambitious changes in such fundamentals as sex, we shall also have to modify humans to live and breathe in the air of Stratos. As on other colony worlds, carbon dioxide tolerance and visual-spectrum sensitivities must be adjusted. Moreover, shortly before departing the Phylum, we acquired recent designs for improved kidneys, livers, and sensoria, and shall certainly incorporate them.
This planet’s slow, complex orbit presents special challenges, such as ultraviolet excess whenever the dwarf companion, Waenglen’s Star, is near. We may find this seasonal variation useful, providing environmental cues for our planned two-phase reproductive cycle. But first we must make sure the humans and other animals we plant here will be rugged enough to thrive.
—from the Landing Day Address, by Lysos
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—”
“Yell 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 th
e 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 Thalla’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.