It was hard to know what would happen to these boys, for, in terms of population percentage, there were very few of them, and this was really only the first generation that had been brought up in the city. As gulden men in Geldricht, of course, they would be reared as kings; they were strong voices in their ancestral households from the time they were very young. A gulden man had absolute power over his wife and, if she was unmarried, his sister—and, if she was widowed and he was over twelve, his mother. It was a right so basic, a law so inherent, that even women who had run to the city when their sons were infants watched their boys fearfully as they began to grow to adulthood. What buried trigger, what race memory, would remind these young men that they were the lords and these women merely chattels? No city guldwoman taught her son these principles, of course, at least not deliberately, but somehow the knowledge seemed to be there, instinctual and fully formed. As a boy edged to manhood, he changed. Kit had seen it. So had the women of the ghetto.

And so they sent the boys to the community center and worried about what would happen next.

Some of the young men, of course, took jobs in the city, drifted into the more affluent gulden neighborhoods, tried to make a life for themselves that had nothing to do with their heritage. Some of them continued to hang around in the women’s ghetto, aimless and angry and harder by the year to control. Some packed their possessions and boarded the train for Gold Mountain, to seek their fathers and their fortunes. Most of them were never heard from again.

They were better off staying in the city. Their mothers tried to tell them that. But these were men who had somehow divined that their mothers’ opinions did not matter much in the world they came from, the world in which they belonged; and they were determined to discover what they were worth in the only sphere worth inhabiting. And so they left the ghetto, and they never returned.

Kit had spent some energy trying to convince Del and the other women that they should make a huge effort to reclaim these gulden boys. Inculcated with a whole new set of beliefs and perceptions, she argued, these city guldmen could reshape the history of the race. They could be taught to value their mothers, cherish their sisters, consider their wives their equals, and disdain their forefathers. To this end, she had said, what was needed was not a dilapidated gymnasium where the gulden teens could work off their aggressions in unsupervised sports, but a school, a cultural center, a place where they could learn and grow. She was willing to draft the plans and look for the instructors. She was willing to set the curriculum and teach the classes herself.