Then, as abruptly as before, it ended, and she was left in silence, staring at several sheets of mysterious code.
Frustration made her already tense muscles quiver. Even if she carried the game board up to the window, there would not be enough light to reassemble it properly. Not until morning.
I can’t wait till morning. I can’t! Maia fought down a strangling wave of impatience. You can do whatever you have to do, she answered herself, and forced her taut body to relax, one muscle at a time. Finally, she was breathing evenly again.
Well, at least I can tidy this up, she thought, looking at her scrawled transcription. Standing, Maia took a few moments to stretch, then carefully climbed her pyramid of boxes toward the slit.
Durga was no longer in sight. A lesser moon, Aglaia, shone barely bright enough for her to work. Gradually, line by line on a fresh page, she drew each “click” as a black square. Each pause translated into a blank one. At the end of the first row of fifty-nine, she moved up to the next and began snaking backward again. This way, if she succeeded in repairing the game device tomorrow, she’d be able to load the starting conditions right away, and quickly set the game in motion to read the message.
It was hard work. After this she might even be able to sleep.
So intent was she on copying squares in long rows that she failed to notice the difference in the pattern for some time. Finally it occurred to her. Unlike before, the “clicks” seemed to come already clustered in tight groups. Blinking, Maia pulled back, and saw—
… HI MAIA. T’MORO. – RENNA …
Of course. She answered the way I sent, without coding! I can read it tonight!
Maia quickened her pace. Two rows later, the message could be read.
… HI MAIA. T’MORO. – RENNA …
The wind picked up, riffling her papers, sending them tumbling down the makeshift platform like a flurry of discarded leaves. All but the single sheet she clutched in both fists, soon smeared by hot, grateful tears.
Some of our expedition’s more radical members claim that I am not angry enough to lead this effort. That I do not hate or fear males enough to design a world where their role is minimized. To these accusations I reply—what hope has any endeavor which is based on hate and fear? I admit, I proudly avow, to having liked and admired certain men during my life. What of it? Although our sons and grandsons will be few, the world we create should have a place for them as well.
Other critics declaim that what really interests me is the challenge of self-cloning, and expanding the range of options for human reproduction. They say that if males were physically able to bear copies of themselves without machines, I would have given them the power, too.
That is possibly true. But then, what is a man whom you have equipped with a womb? A womb-man would necessarily take on other traits of woman, and cease being identifiable as male at all. That is not an appealing or practical innovation.
In the end, all of our clever gene designs, and corresponding plans for cultural conditioning, will come to nought if we are smug or rigid. The heritage we give our children, and the myths we leave to sustain them, must work with the tug and press of life, or they will fail. Adaptability has to be enshrined alongside stability, or the ghost of Darwin will surely come back to haunt us, whispering in our ears the penalty of conceit.
We wish our descendants happiness. But over time one criterion alone will judge our efforts.
Survival.
12
Over the following days, Maia and her new friend learned to communicate despite the thick walls separating them. From the first, Maia felt stupid and slow, especially when Renna went back to sending coded, compacted messages designed to be deciphered by the Game of Life board. Maia could not blame her, since the method was more efficient, enabling a full screen to be sent in just a few minutes. Yet it made Maia’s responses seem so clumsy in comparison. One line of text was all she could manage after a day’s work, and sending it left her exhausted, frustrated.
… DON’T. FRET. MAIA …
… I’LL TEACH ANOTHER CODE …
… FOR SIMPLE LETTERS … WORDS …
Gratefully, Maia copied down the system Renna transmitted, one called Morse. She had heard of it, she was sure. Some clans based their commercial ciphers on variants of very ancient systems. Another item that should have been in the Lamatia curriculum, she thought grimly.
O= +++, P= −++−, Q= ++−+
The code seemed simple enough, with each plus sign standing for a long stroke and each dash for a short one. It greatly speeded Maia’s next effort, though she remained awkward, and kept making mistakes.
IF YOU KNOW MORSE WHY USE LIFE CODING ISN’T IT HARDER
To this question, Renna answered,
HARDER. SUBTLER. WATCH
And to Maia’s astonishment, the game board proceeded to shake her friend’s letters into coruscating patterns, like a fireworks show on Founders Day.
Maia found even more amazing the next message Renna sent. Though compacted, it was long, taking up thirty-one rows by the time Maia finished laying down a snaking chain of black and white squares. Pressing the launch button set off a wild, hungry “ecology” of mutually devouring pseudo-entities that finally resolved, after many gyrations, into what looked like a picture … a crude sketch of plains and distant mountains, seen through a narrow window. It was recognizably a scene looking out from this very stone tower—not the view from Maia’s window, but similar.
The other prisoner followed this with
LIFE IS UNIVERSAL COMPUTER CAN DO MORE THAN MORSE & HARDER TO EAVESDROP
Maia was impressed. Nevertheless she answered
I DID. Y NOT OTHERS?
Renna’s reply seemed sheepish.
NOT AS CLEVER AS I THOUGHT
The game board next rippled to show a slim face with close-cropped hair, eyes rolled upward in embarrassment, shoulders in the act of shrugging. The caricature made Maia giggle in delight.
Thankfully, she hadn’t damaged the Life set during that first experiment. Over the following days, Renna taught her how to connect the machine directly to the wall circuit, so she could send messages directly, instead of laboriously and dangerously touching wires by hand. Renna still made transmissions at high power every midnight, attempting to use crudely generated radio waves to contact friends somewhere out there, beyond the walls. The rest of the time, they communicated using low currents, to avoid arousing the guards.
Renna was so friendly and welcoming, reinforcing Maia’s sense of a warm, maternal presence. Maia soon felt drawn into telling her story. It all came spilling out. The departure from Lamatia. Leie’s loss. Her encounters with Tizbe and involvement in matters far murkier than any young var should have to deal with, newly fledged from her birth clan. Laying it out so starkly brought home to Maia how unfair it was. She’d done nothing to deserve this chain of catastrophes. All her life, mothers and matriarchs had said virtue and hard work were rewarded. Was this the prize?
Maia apologized for stumbling through the story, especially when emotion overcame her at the sending key. THIS IS HARD FOR ME, she transmitted, trying to keep her hand from trembling. Renna’s reply offered reassurance and understanding, along with some confusion.
AT 16 YOU OUGHT TO BE HAPPY SUCH A ROTTEN SHAME
Sympathy, after so long, brought a lump to Maia’s throat. So many older people forgot there had been a time when they, too, were inexperienced and powerless. She was grateful for the compassion, the shared empathy.
Conversing with her fellow prisoner was an adventure of awkward moments followed by cordial insights. Of double meanings and hilarious misunderstandings, like when they disagreed which moon hung in plain view, in the southern sky. Or when Renna kept misspelling the names of cities, or quotations from the Book of the Founders. Obviously, she was doing this on purpose, to draw Maia out of her funk. And it was working. Challenged to catch her fellow prisoner at intentional inconsistencies, Maia found herself paying closer atten
tion. Her spirits lifted.
Soon she realized something astonishing. Even though they had never met in person, she was starting to feel a special kind of hearth-affection toward this new friend.
It wasn’t so difficult when you were winter-born. Hearth feelings were predictable after many generations.
For instance, three-year-old Lamais almost always passed through a phase when they would tag after a chosen clone-sister just one class ahead of them, doing whatever that older sibling asked and pining at the slightest curt word. Later, at age four, each winter Lamai took her own turn being the adored one, spending the better part of a season taking out on a younger sister the heartbreaks she had received the year before.
During her fifth-year winter, a Lamatia Clan full-daughter started looking beyond the walls, often becoming obsessed with a slightly older cloneling from a neighboring hold, usually a Trevor, or a Wheatley. That phase passed quickly, and besides, Trevors and Wheatleys were family allies. Later on, though, came a rough period when Lamai sixers seemed inevitably bound, despite all their mothers’ warnings, to fixate on a woman from the tall, stately Yort-Wong merchant clan … which was awkward, since the Yort-Wongs had been feuding off and on with Lamatia for generations.
Knowing in advance what to expect didn’t keep Lamai sixers from railing and weeping during their autumn of discontent. Fortunately, there was the upcoming Ceremony of Passage to distract them. Yet, when all was said and done, how could the brief attentions of a man ease those pangs of unrequited obsession? Even those lucky sixers chosen for sparking emerged from their unhappy Yort-Wong episode changed, hardened. Thereafter, Lamai women wore emotional invulnerability as armor. They dealt with clients, cooperated with allies, made complex commercial-sexual arrangements with seamen. But for pleasure they hired professionals.
For companionship, they had each other.
It had been different from the very start for Maia and Leie. Being vars, they could not even roughly predict their own life cycles. Anyway, hearth feelings ranged so, from almost rutlike physical passion all the way to the most utterly chaste yearnings just to be near your chosen one. Popular songs and romantic stories emphasized the latter as more noble and refined, though all but a few heretics agreed there was nothing wrong with touching, if both hearts were true. The physical side of hearthness, between two members of the female species, was pictured as gentle, solicitous, hardly like sex at all.
Maia’s own experience remained theoretical, and in this area Leie was no bolder. The twins had certainly felt intimations of warmth toward others—classmates, kids they befriended in town, some of their teachers—but nothing precocious or profound. Since turning five, there had simply been no time.
Now Maia felt something stronger; and knew well what name to use, if she dared admit it to herself. In Renna she had found a soul who knew kindness, who would not judge a girl unworthy, just because she was a lowly var. It hardly mattered that she hadn’t rested eyes on the object of her fixation. Maia created a picture in her mind, of a savant or high civil servant from one of the faraway sophisticated cities on Landing Continent, which would explain Renna’s stiff, somewhat aristocratic way of speaking in text. No doubt she came from a noble clan, but when Maia asked, all Renna said was
MY FAMILY MADE CLOCKS, BUT I HAVEN’T SEEN THEM IN A WHILE SEEM TO HAVE LOST TRACK OF TIME
Maia found it hard always to tell when Renna was joking or teasing, although clearly she never meant it in a mean way. Renna wasn’t much more forthcoming about how she came to be a prisoner in this place.
THE BELLERS TOOK ADVANTAGE OF A LONELY TRAVELER
Bellers! The family Tizbe belonged to! The pleasure clan that did a profitable side business carrying goods and performing confidential services. So Maia and Renna had a common enemy! When she said as much, Renna agreed with what seemed reluctant sadness. Maia tried asking about “CY” and “GRVS,” who must be Renna’s clanmates or allies, but her fellow prisoner responded there were some things Maia was better off not knowing.
That did not prevent them from talking frequently about escape.
First they must work out their relative positions in the stone tower. Crawling into the stone casement, Maia craned her head around and saw a continuous row of slit windows like this one, presumably illuminating other storerooms, girdling the citadel’s circumference five meters below the grand gallery of columned patios she had glimpsed on arrival, that first day. Comparing the positions of certain landmarks, they ascertained that Renna’s window lay just around the bend, facing due east while Maia’s looked southeastward. Turning in the opposite direction, Maia could just make out the gate-ramp of the unfinished sanctuary, forlorn and covered with prairie dust.
Maia was full of ideas. She told Renna of her experiments unraveling carpets, learning how to weave a rope. While approving her enthusiasm, Renna reminded Maia that the drop was much too far to trust a bundle of twine, amateurly wrapped by hand.
Looking at her handicraft, she was forced to admit Renna was probably right. Still, Maia continued spending part of each day unwinding lengths of tough fiber and retying them into a finger-width strand, trying to imitate by memory the weaving patterns used by sailors aboard the Wotan. It’s something to keep busy, she thought. While Renna kept up her midnight attempts to radio for help, Maia wanted to contribute something, even as futile as winding string.
She was careful to hide all signs—of both ropemaking and talking to Renna—from her jailers. During meals, Maia told them how fascinated she was with the Game of Life, and how grateful to have been introduced to its world of intricacy. Their eyes glazed as she expected. All the Guels wanted was the comfort of routine. She happily let them have it.
So it came as a surprise when she heard the rattle of keys in the middle of one afternoon, hours before dinner-time. Maia barely managed to throw a rug over her work and stand up before the door swung open. On entering, the two Guel guards appeared tense, agitated. Maia saw why when a familiar figure stepped between them.
Tizbe Beller! The former baggage-car assistant looked around the storeroom, hands folded behind her. An expression of faintly amused disgust crossed her young face as she perused the sweat-stained towel hanging by the cracked washbasin, and the covered chamber pot just beyond. Her nose wrinkled, as if meeting odors a coarse var could not be expected to notice.
Maia made herself stand tall. Go ahead and sneer, Tizbe. I’ve kept myself fit and civilized in here. Let’s change places and see you do better!
Her defiance must have shown. Although Tizbe’s amusement continued unabated, her expression did change. “Well, captivity doesn’t seem to have hurt you, Maia. Not where it counts. You’re positively blossoming.”
“Go to Earth, Tizbe. Take your Jopland and Lerner friends with you.”
The cloneling feigned a moue of shock. “Such language! Keep this up, and you’ll be too rough for polite society.”
Maia laughed curtly. “You can shove your polite—”
But Tizbe got the better of her again, simply by stifling a yawn and waving a hand vaguely in front of her. “Oh, not now, if you don’t mind. It’s been a hard ride and I have to leave bright and early. We’ll see though. Before that, I might have a chance to drop in again and say goodbye.”
Then, to Maia’s shock, she turned to go. “But … aren’t you here to—”
Tizbe looked back from the door. “To question you? Torture you? Ah, that would be just the thing for one of those trashy novels I’m told you’ve been reading. Villains are supposed to gloat and rub their hands together, and talk to their poor victims a lot.
“Sorry to disappoint you. I really would try to fit the role if I had the time. Honestly, though, do you have any information I could possibly want? What material benefit would I gain by questioning one more Venturist spy?”
Maia stared at her. “One more what?”
Tizbe reached into one of her sleeves and drew forth a tattered, folded sheet of heavy paper. After a moment, Maia recogn
ized the leaflet she had accepted in Lanargh, from the hand of that earnest young heretic wearing eye-glasses. So, her captors had gone to Holly Lock and sifted through her things. She did not even bother acting offended.
“Venturist … you think I’m one of them, because of that?”
Tizbe shrugged. “It did seem unlikely for a spy to carry around blatant evidence. Throw in your comm call from Jopland, though, and it’s reason enough to take precautions. You’ve turned official eyes this way sooner than expected, for which you’ll pay.” She smiled. “Still, we have things well in hand. If it weren’t for more urgent matters, I’d not bother coming all this way.
“As it is, I felt behooved to check on you, Maia. Glad to see you not all wrapped in self-pity, as I expected. Maybe, when everything’s settled, we’ll have a talk about your future. There may be a place for a var like you—”
Maia cut in. “With your gang of criminals? You …” She searched for phrases she had heard over Thalla’s radio, at Lerner Hold. “Inheretist exploiters!”
Tizbe shook her head, grinning. “Showing our radical colors at last? Well, solitude and contemplation can change minds. I’ll have some books sent to you. They’ll show the sense in what we’re doing. How it’s good for Stratos and all womankind.”
“Thanks,” Maia replied sharply. “Don’t bother including The Perkinite Way. I’ve read it.”
“Oh yes?” Tizbe’s eyebrows lifted. “And?”
Maia hoped her smile conveyed indulgent pity.
“I think Lysos would have liked to study sickies like you under a microscope, to see what she did wrong.”
For the first time, the other woman’s reaction wasn’t another tailored mask. Tizbe glowered. “Enjoy your stay, var-child.”
The guards followed her out, trying not to meet Maia’s eyes as they closed the door, then fastened it with a hard, metallic clank of Lerner steel.