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. Thalia 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.

Why, in nature, is the male-female ratio nearly always one to one? If wombs are costly while sperm is cheap, why are there so many sperm producers?

It is a matter of biological economics. If a species produces fewer females than males, daughters will be more fruitful than sons. Any variant individual who picks up the trait of having more female offspring will have advantages, and will spread the mutant trait through the gene pool until the ratio evens out again.

The same logic will hold in reverse, if we planners try to simply program-in a birth ratio sparse in males. Early generations would reap the benefits of peace and serenity, but selection forces will reward son-production, favoring its occurrence with rising frequency, eventually annulling the program and landing us right back where we started. Within mere centuries, this planet will be like any other, a swarm with men and their accompanying noise and strife.

There is a way to free our descendants from this bio-economic cul-de-sac. Give them the option of self-cloning. Reproductive success will then reward women who manage to have offspring both sexually and especially non-sexually. In time, a desire to have like-self daughters will saturate the gene pool. It will be stable and self-reinforcing.

The option of stimulated self-cloning lets us at last design a world with the problem of too many males permanently solved.

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. . . .