Later she realized—of course the Caria savants knew, since they controlled the factories that made the game sets. They just didn’t care. For a machine to go on pretending that imaginary objects existed in some fictitious realm the player couldn’t even see was like the unreal multiplying with itself, manipulating tokens of replicas of symbols, which in turn stood for make-believe things, which were themselves emblems.… Some of the mathematician clans at Caria University probably studied such abstractions, but Maia doubted they ever made the man-error of mistaking them for real.
Solving the edge problem was another matter when teams were forced to use simple lines scratched on a dock or cargo hatch, playing with wind-up or sun-powered pieces. As a partial solution, men sometimes laid rows of static, unpowered black or white pieces along the rim of the playing field, to try constraining the action. Maia knew the slang term for the alternating checker border was “the mirror,” although only a few life patterns would actually reflect off the fixed boundary back into the game arena. Others would simply be absorbed or destroyed.
An edge pattern also made starting the game easier, since any square in the first playing row already had either one or two “living” neighbors, just below it.
Removing the thin writing stylus from its slot on the control panel, she stroked a square on the first row, turning it black.
The solitary “living” square was born with two black neighbors on the fixed boundary row below, touching it at the corners. Now Maia gave it another black neighbor, to its left. With three black, or living, neighbors now, the first activated square should remain “alive” … at least through the second round.
Maia sighed. All right. Let’s see if I can make a simple ladder.
She worked her way across the first row, turning a few squares dark, leaving some blank, and so on. Maia did not feel ready to take on more complicated starting conditions quite yet, so after touching about forty squares she called it enough. The rest of the board was left pale, untouched.
Knowing the rules, Maia could guess what might happen to a particular square next round, by carefully counting the number of black neighbors it had now. It didn’t take much effort to project the fates of up to a dozen squares, one or two rounds into the future. Then she lost track. To find out what would happen after that, she must set the game in motion.
Peering at the control panel, she found a button embossed with a figure of a cowled man holding a long staff. The symbol for a referee, Maia decided, and pressed the button. A low note pulsed slowly, the traditional countdown. At the eighth beat the game commenced, and change abruptly rippled along the active row. Wherever a square had precisely the right number of neighbors, that square flickered. Then all those squares turned, or remained, black. Those that failed the test turned, or remained, white. The checker pattern along the boundary stayed the same.
Now there were some black squares on the second active row, as well as the first. A few spots on the formerly all-white expanse had met the conditions for coming alive.
With the next timing pulse, more squares died than were born, and it was only with the fourth round that any positions came alive on the third row. Maia saw with mild chagrin that she had chosen a losing sequence for her initial condition. Ah, well. She waited till the last, gasping cluster of dark points expired, and immediately tried again with a new pattern along the first row.
This time pretty much the same thing happened, except near the far left, where an entity took shape—a small group of cells that winked on and off in a repeating pattern, over and over. Oh, yes, Maia remembered. That’s a “microbe.”
While its individual parts flickered with different rhythms, each unit choosing a different tempo to flip from dark to pale or back again, the isolated configuration as a whole kept renewing itself. After twenty beats, the rest of the board lay empty, but this small patch remained stable, repetitiously persistent. Maia felt a flush of pleasure at having reinvented one of the simplest Life-forms on just her second go. She wiped the board and tried again, creating microbes all across the bottom edge. If left alone, they would whirl and gyre in place until the batteries ran out.
That was the extent of her beginner’s luck. Maia spent much of the next hour experimenting without finding another self-sustaining form. It was frustrating, since she recalled that some of the classics were absurdly simple.
A metallic clanking behind her announced the guards’ arrival with lunch. Maia got up, spreading her arms and stretching a crick in her back. Only when she went over to sit down at the table, and felt the stout women staring at her, did it come to her attention that she was humming, and must have been doing so for some time.
Huh! Maia thought. But then, it wasn’t surprising to be glad something had drawn her from her troubles for a while. We’ll see if this diversion lasts as long as those books did. To which she added, Just don’t count on my being too distracted to notice, my fat Guel keepers, if you ever relax your guard, or stop coming in pairs. Someday you’ll slip up. I’m watching.
After the bland meal, she purposely avoided the game board and went instead to her “gymnasium,” contrived out of rugs and boxes. Running in place, stretching, doing situps and pullups, Maia drove herself until a warm, pleasant ache spread from her shoulders to her toes. Then she removed her clothes and used water from the pitcher to take a sponge bath. Fortunately there was a small drain in the floor to carry away the effluent.
While drying herself, she looked over her body. After months of hard labor, it was only natural she should find muscles where none had shown before. Nor did she mind the fine scars that laced her hands and forearms—all earned by honest labor. What did surprise her was a pronounced development of her breasts. Since her last inspection, they had gone from petite to appreciable—or ample enough to be a bit sore from being jounced, the last hour or so. Of course, it was common knowledge that Lamai mothers passed on a dominant gene for this. They seldom left their var-daughters unendowed. Still, predictable or not, it was an event. One Maia had not expected to celebrate in jail.
She had, in fact, always envisioned someday sharing it with Leie.
Shaking her head, she refused to be drawn into bleakness. For distraction, Maia walked back to the carpet and sat down in front of the electronic Life simulator.
If only there were a manual, or some teaching program to go with this damn game, she pondered. Maia had glimpsed men at dockside carrying around heavy reference books, which they pored over between matches. There would also be treatises on the subject, written by female anthropologists, filed at Caria University and big-city libraries. None of which helped her here.
Those two little lights attracted her notice again. PROG MEM, one label read. Some sort of memory? For storing preplanned programs, I suppose.
The other button said PREV.GAM.STOR.
“Previous game storage?” She had presumed this board was new, having been shipped in for men who would now never arrive. But the light winked, so maybe there was an earlier game stored in memory.
Guess I could replay it and pick up a pointer or two, she thought, then noticed nearby a tiny window with a string of code letters displayed. VARIANT RULE: RVRSBL CA 897W, it said mysteriously. Maia made a guess. Sometimes men changed the rules of the game, as if Life itself weren’t complicated enough. It might take five living neighbors for a black square to stay alive. Or the program made squares to the left more influential than those on the right. The possibilities were endless, which helped the whole thing seem all the more pointless to most women.
Oh, this is idiotic. I’ll never learn anything from this. Maia paused, then impulsively pressed the button to see what the memory cache contained. Immediately the game board swirled into action. First the checkered boundary contracted inward from all sides till it enclosed a much smaller number of squares. She counted fifty-nine across and fifty-nine lengthwise. Surrounding the restricted game area was a border much more complex than the simple mirror pattern of before. The board flickered a
nother time, and all at once the zone within the new boundary filled with chaos. A splotchy scattering of black dots covered the first nine rows, like choca-bits strewn across a birthday cake.
Lysos! This was completely over Maia’s head. The WIPE button beckoned … but curiosity stayed her hand. After all, this represented a lot of labor by the game’s previous owner. If nothing else, the patterns might be pretty to watch.
Sighing, she touched the referee symbol. The clock ticked down, eight, seven, six, five, four …
The dots began to dance. Wherever an open space had the right number of neighbors, next round there was a black, or living square at that location. Others that had been black, but failed the programmed criteria, turned white the following round. With each clock throb, the patterns changed in whirling waves, some fragmenting or scattering upon touching the boundary, while others reflected back, adding to the maelstrom within. Ephemeral shapes appeared and vanished like bubbles passing through the plane of the board. Maia could only breathe a sigh as waves crashed against stable entities, transforming them. She saw gliders and noted their simple, crushed-triangular form. In one corner appeared a “glider gun,” which spat out little flapping arrows at regular intervals, sending them whizzing across the board. There were spectacular collisions.
It was enthralling to watch. Maia wondered if this would turn out to be one of those programs that became self-sustaining, with the whole board in a state of perpetual flux for as long as the machine was left on, each moment’s array unlike any that had come before.
Then, the pace began to slacken. Rapidly zipping entities started merging into complex but stationary units, arrayed in five deep columns across the board. Each of these underwent further evolution, slowing the rate of change still further as they converged on what she guessed must be a preplanned, final form.
She could see it happening. Each step grew out of the one preceding it. Still, it took her by surprise when the patterns coalesced into individual letters.
Words.
HELP! PRISONER – 39° F8 16’ N, 67° F8 54’ E
The letters flickered, as if seen through turbid water, their component dots still blindly switching on and off, obeying set rules, unaware of anything more than two rows or columns away. Only collectively did they carry meaning, and that began dissolving as stern, mathematical laws tore fleeting cogency into swirls of returning chaos. Some driving force was spent. Blank patches spread, devouring the brief patterns.
In seconds it was over. Maia stared at the pale game board—now empty, featureless—trying to convince herself she’d seen it: meaning, startling and unforeseen.
Many species use environmental cues to trigger reproduction at certain times of year, leaving the rest peaceful and quiet. Humans have lost this ancient linkage with the calendar, resulting in our incessant obsession with, and subjugation to, sex.
The time has come to restore wisdom to our rhythm of life, reestablishing serenity and predictability to the cycle of our years. Stratos seems ideal for this purpose, with its distinctive, planet-wide seasons. The birth ratio we foresee—of clones to old-style, sexually-derived offspring—need not be programmed-in. It will arise naturally out of two uneven periods of potential impregnation, separated by long stretches of relative calm.
There are plenty of environmental effects we can utilize as cues, to trigger desire at appropriate times. Take the incredible, world-wide aurorae of high summer, during the planet’s closest approach past tiny, fierce Waenglen’s Star. If male chimpanzees are visually aroused by a mere flash of pink female swelling seen at long range through a forest, how difficult can it be for us to program a similar color-response in our males, triggered by these startling blue sky displays? Similarly, winter’s special frost will signal changes in our women descendants, preparing them for amazonogenic cloning.
There will be side-effects we cannot now predict, but the possibility of error should not deter us. We are only replacing one rather arbitrary set of stimuli and impulses with another. The new rules will, in fact, be more flexible and varied than the monotone lusts of old.
One thing will remain constant. No matter what changes we make, the drama of birth and life will remain a matter of choice, of mind. We are not animals, after all. The environment may suggest. It may provoke. But in the end, our descendants will be thinking beings.
It is by their thoughts and sentiments and strong wills that their way of life will be decided.
11
Around midnight, the star-filled patterns of the winter sky rose over the high mountains crowning the eastern horizon, casting glittering reflections across glaciers tucked in alpine dales. Summertime’s celestial rush was over, tapering to a planetary glide as Stratos climbed its elliptic track toward the longest season. More than two Earth years would pass before the great plummet into spring. Till then, the Pelican of Euphrosyne, Epona, and the Dancing Dolphin would be regular occupants of night’s high throne.
Maia often used to wonder what it might be like to live on Florentina, or even Old Earth. Very strange, she imagined, and not just due to the primitive breeding patterns still followed there. She had read that on most habitable worlds, seasons were due to axial tilt, rather than orbital position. And winter was a time of bad weather.
Here, under the thick atmosphere of Stratos, summer’s necessary but brief disruptions passed quickly and were soon forgotten, while winter brought a long time of placid predictability. Rainclouds arrived in periodic, sweeping fronts, showering their moist loads across the continents, then replenishing over humid seas. For protracted intervals between storms, the sun nourished gently bowing, light-hungry crops, outshining its companion, Wengel Star, so overpoweringly that the white dwarf was no more than a faint glitter in the daytime sky, too dim to provoke even a sailor on leave. At night, no aurorae blared, only sprinkled constellations, twinkling like mad above the restless jet stream.
It will be Autumn-End Day soon, Maia thought, watching the constellation Thalia climb slowly toward zenith. They’ll be putting up decorations in Port Sanger. All the pleasure houses will close till midwinter, and men from the sanctuaries will stroll through wide-open gates, making paper airplanes of their old visitor passes. They’ll get sweets and cider, and children will ride their shoulders, pulling their beards, making them laugh.
Although rutting time had been effectively over before she and Leie departed on their ill-starred voyage, Autumn-End Day would mark the true start of winter’s extended time of peace, lasting for nearly half of the long, uneven track of seasons, during which males were as harmless as lugars and the biggest problem was getting them to look up from their books, or whittling, or game boards. Half of the City Watch would disband till springtime. What need for patrols, with the streets as safe as houses?
Maia had known she would probably never again celebrate Autumn-End in Port Sanger. But she hadn’t figured on spending a festival day in prison. Would she still be here at Farsun Time, as well? Somehow, she doubted her jailers would throw a gala then, either—offering hot punch and luck tokens to passersby. (What passersby?) Nor were any of the Guel guards likely to dress up as the Frost Lady, carrying her magic ladder, waving a wand of plenty, and giving treats and noisemakers to good little girls.
No, dammit! By Farsun Day, I’m going to be far away from here! She quashed a wave of homesickness.
Maia shook away distracting thoughts and lifted her miniature sextant, concentrating on the immediate problem. She could not be sure of the exact time, let alone the date. Without an accurate clock, it was impossible to fix her east-west position accurately, even if the instrument was in perfect working order. Longitude was going to be fuzzy.
But you don’t need the exact time to figure latitude. You just have to know the sky.
I wish I had my book of ephemerides, she thought, wondering if the stationmistress at Holly Lock had thrown out her duffel yet, along with her meager possessions. The slim volume carried the positions of major sighting stars to all the acc
uracy she’d ever need. Without it, memory would have to do.
Maia rested her elbows on the sill of the narrow opening in the wall, and took another reference on Taranis, a compact stellar cluster where it was said the Enemy long ago laid waste to two planets before coming here to meet defeat on Stratos. Twisting a dial moved the image in her cross-hairs till it kissed the south horizon’s prairie-sharp edge in the sextant’s tiny mirror. She lowered the device in order to peer at the dial, and jotted another figure in her notebook.
At least there had been a ready solution to the problem of writing implements. Near the base of her makeshift observing pyramid, awkwardly covered by piled-up rugs, lay the broken ruin of a storage box. Maia had struggled for over an hour, soon after sunset, to heave the crate all the way up here by the window. Then, just half a second after she pushed it off, the box lost all that altitude, hitting the stone floor edge-on.
The crash made a horrible racket, bringing guards to the door with muttered inquiries. But she had managed to appease the Guels, shouting that she’d only fallen while exercising. “I’m all right, though. Thank you for being concerned!”
After a long pause, the Guels finally went away, grumbling. Maia dared not count on their incuriosity surviving a repetition. Fortunately, the crash had loosened several slats, spilling paper and writing utensils onto the floor. By then, the stars were out. For the next hour, she applied her rusty navigation skills to fixing the location of this high-plains prison.
Maia lifted the notebook into Durga’s wan light and added up the final result. Longitude is close to the one in the message, she thought. And latitude’s nearly identical!