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. Thalia 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.

". . . it is therefore obvious that the seat of the human soul can lie only in the mitochondria, which are the true life-motivators within each living cell. Now, of course, even men have mitochondria, which they inherit from their mothers. But sperm-heads are too small to contain any, so no summer baby, whether female or male, gets any of its essential soul-stuff from the male 'parent.' Only motherhood is therefore truly a creative act.

"Now we have already seen that continuity and growth of the soul takes place via the miracle of cloning, which enhances the soul-essence with each regeneration and renewal of the clonal self. This gradual amplification is only possible with repetition. Just one lifespan leaves a woman's soul barely formed, unenlightened, which is one reason why equal voting rights for vars makes no sense, biologically.

"For a man, of course, there is not even a beginning of soulness. Fatherhood is an anachronism, then. The true role of the soul-less male can only be to serve and spark …"

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.