“And sometimes not at all?” Maia asked, feeling suddenly uneasy.
“Indeed. That’s a danger in craft societies. Sometimes the trend is negative.”
She looked down, suddenly feeling something like shame. “We’ve forgotten so much.”
“Mm,” Renna’s dark eyebrows came together. “Not so much, perhaps. I’ve seen your Great Library, and spoken with your savants. This isn’t a dark age, Maia. What you see around you is the result of deliberate planning. Lysos and the Founders carefully considered costs and alternatives. As products of a scientific era, they were determined to prevent another one happening here.”
“But—” Maia blinked. “Why would scientists want to stop science?”
His smile was warm, but something in Renna’s eyes told Maia this was a topic fraught with personal pain.
“Their aim wasn’t to stop science as such, but to prevent a certain kind of scientific fever. A cultural madness, if you will. The sort of epoch in which questioning becomes almost a devotional act. In which all of life’s certainties melt, and folk compulsively doubt old ways, heedless of whatever validity those ways once had. Ego and ‘personal fulfillment’ take precedence over values based on community and tradition. Such times bring terrible ferment, Maia. Along with increased knowledge and power comes ecological danger, from expanding populations and misuse of technology.”
No pictures formed in Maia’s head to accompany his words. The content was entirely abstract, without reference to anything she knew. Yet, she felt appalled. “You make it sound … terrible.”
His exhalation was heavy. “Oh, there are benefits. Art and culture flourish. Old repressions and superstitions shatter. New insights illuminate and become part of our permanent heritage. A renaissance is the most romantic and exciting of times, but none lasts very long. Way back, before the Phylum Diaspora, the first scientific age barely got us off the homeworld before collapsing in exhaustion. It came as close to killing as liberating us.”
Maia watched Renna and felt positive he spoke from more than historical erudition. She saw an ache in his dark eyes. He was remembering, with both regret and deep longing. It was a kind of homesickness, one more final and irredeemable than her own.
Renna cleared his throat, briefly looking away.
“It was during another such age—the Florentina Revival—that your famous Lysos grew convinced that stable societies are happier ones. Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they’ll understand their children, and their children will understand them. Lysos wanted to create such a world. One with net contentment maximized not for a brilliant few, but over time for the maximum number.”
“That’s what we’re taught.” Maia nodded. Though once again, it was a different way of phrasing familiar things. Different and disturbing.
“What you aren’t taught, and my private theory, is that Lysos only adopted sexual separatism because Perkinite secessionists were the strongest group of malcontents willing to follow her into exile. They provided the raw material Lysos used to make her stable world, isolated and protected from the ferment of the hominid realm.”
Never had Maia heard the Founder spoken of like this. With respect, but of an almost-collegial sort, almost as if Renna had known Lysos personally. Anyone hearing this would have to believe one basic truth—the man was, indeed, from another star.
For a long time, Renna looked out across the sea, contemplating vistas Maia couldn’t begin to picture. Then he shrugged. “I ramble too much. We started talking about how sailors are taught to scorn a man who relies on tools he doesn’t understand. It’s the major reason they despise me.”
“You? But you crossed interstellar space! Wouldn’t sailors—”
“Respect that?” Renna chuckled. “Alas, they also know my ship is the product of vast factories, built mostly by robots, and that I couldn’t control the least part of it without machines almost smarter than I am, whose workings I barely comprehend. You know what that makes me? The savants have spread mocking fairy tales. Ever hear of the Wissy-Man?”
Maia nodded. It was a name boys called each other when they wanted to be cruel.
“That’s me,” Renna finished. “Helpless Wissy-Man. Dispatched by fools, slave to his tools. Rescued by vars after crossing the stars.”
Renna gave a short laugh, almost a snort. It did not sound amused.
That evening’s Life match was a disaster.
Sixteen hundred game pieces, fully wound, had been divided into two sets of stacks on each side of a cargo hatch grooved with forty vertical lines crossed by forty horizontal. Maia and Renna joined the other passengers for dinner, eating from chipped porcelain bowls, looking out over choppy seas. Then, with an hour of daylight remaining, they went back to await their opponents. The junior cook and a cabin boy arrived a few minutes later, the former still wiping his hands on his apron. They don’t take us very seriously, Maia guessed. Not that she blamed them.
As the visiting team, she and Renna were invited to make the first move. Maia swallowed nervously, almost dropping the pieces she carried, but Renna grinned and whispered, “Remember, it’s just a game.”
She smiled back tentatively, and handed him the first tightly-wound piece. He put it in the extreme lower right corner of the board, white side up.
They had talked over strategy earlier. “We’ll keep it simple,” Renna had said. “I learned a few tricks while sitting around in jail. But I was mostly trying to write messages or paint pictures. I’ll bet it’s lots different with someone opposing you, trying to wreck what you create.”
Renna had sketched on a notepad what he called a “very conservative” pattern. Maia recognized some of the primitive forms. One cluster of black tokens in the left corner would sit and “live” forever if left untouched by any other moving pattern of black dots. Their strategy would be to try to defend this oasis of life until the time limit, concentrating on defense and making only minimal forays into enemy territory with gliders, wedges, or slicers. A tie would do nicely.
While Renna laid down that first row, the boys nudged each other, pointing and laughing. Whether they already saw naïveté in the design, or were just trying to goad the neophytes, it was unnerving. Worse, from Maia’s perspective, were the jibes of women spectators. Especially Baltha and the southlanders, who clearly thought this exercise profoundly male-silly. A female crew member named Inanna whispered in a comrade’s ear, and they both laughed. Maia felt sure the joke was about her.
She was doing herself no good, nor was it clear what Renna was going to learn.
Then why are we doing it?
The first row was finished. At once, the cook and cabin boy began laying down forty pieces of their own. They used no notes, although Maia saw them confer once. A few seamen observed idly from the quarterdeck stairs, whittling sticks of soft wood into lacy, finely curled sculptures of sea animals.
When the boys signaled their turn finished, Renna took a long look and then shrugged. “Looks just like our first row. Maybe it’s coincidence. Might as well continue with our plan.”
So they laid another forty, mostly white side up, seeding enough strategically located black pieces so that when the game commenced and all the wound-up springs were released, a set of pulsing geometric patterns would embark on self-sustaining lifespans, setting forth to take part in the game’s brief ecology.
At least, we hope so.
It went on that way for some time as the sun set beyond the billowing, straining jib. Each side took turns laying forty disks, then watching and trying to guess what the other team was up to. There came one interruption when the wind shifted and the chief bosun called all hands to the rigging. Dashing to their tasks, sailors hauled lanyards and turned cranks in a whirl of straining muscles. The tack maneuver was accomplished with brisk efficiency, and all was calm again before Maia finished forty breaths. Naroin leaped down from the sheets, landing in a cr
ouch. She grinned at Maia and gave thumbs-up before sauntering back to a spot along the port rail favored by the female crew members, who smoked pipes and gossiped quietly as game preparations resumed.
“Those devils,” Renna said after eight rows had been laid. Maia looked where he pointed, and momentarily saw what he meant. Apparently, their opponents had copied the same static “oasis” formation to sit in their most protected corner. In fact, she realized. They’re mimicking us right along! Only slight variations could be seen along the left-hand side. What’s the purpose of that? Are they making fun of us?
Differences began to creep in after the tenth row. Suddenly, the cook and cabin boy began laying down a completely different pattern. Maia recognized a glider gun, which was designed to fire gliders across the board. She also saw what could only be a cyclone—a configuration with the attribute of sucking to its doom any moving life pattern that came nearby. She pointed out the incipient design to Renna, who concentrated, and finally nodded.
“You’re right. That’d put our guardian in danger, wouldn’t it? Maybe we should move him to one side. To the right, do you think?”
“That would interfere with our short fence,” she pointed out. “We’ve already laid two rows for that pattern.”
“Mm. Okay, we’ll shift the guardian leftward, then.”
Maia tried to visualize what the game board would look like when completed. Already she could see how entities now in place would evolve during the first two, three, even five or six rounds. This particular area of hatch cover would be crossed by a newly launched mother ship. That area over there would writhe in alternating black and white swirls as a mustard seed turned round and round … a pretty but deceptively potent form. When she tried to follow the path of projectiles from the other side, Maia came to a horrified realization—one set of gliders would carom off the mirror-edge and come back spearing obliquely toward the very corner they had worked and planned so hard to protect!
Renna scratched his head when she pointed out the incipient disaster. “Looks like we’re cooked,” he said with a frown. Then he winced as Maia’s fingernails bit his arm.
“No, look!” she said, urgently. “What if we build our own glider gun … over there! We could set it to fire back into our own territory, intercepting their—”
“What?” Renna cut in, and Maia was briefly afraid she’d overstepped, injecting her own ideas into what was essentially his design. But he nodded in growing excitement. “Ye-e-s, I think it might … work.” He reached out and squeezed her shoulders, leaving them tingling. “That’d do it if we got the timing right. Of course, there’s the problem of debris, after the gliders collide.…”
There was hardly enough room in the last few rows to lay down the improvised modifications. Fortunately, their opponents didn’t place another cyclone near the boundary. Maia’s new glider gun lay right along the border, with no room to spare. She was exhausted by the time the last piece had been set. And I thought this was a lazy man’s game. I guess spectators never know until they try a sport for themselves.
It was long past sunset. Lanterns were lit. Thalla arrived with a pair of coats. Slipping hers on, Maia realized everyone else had already dressed for the chill of evening. She must have been putting out too much nervous energy to notice.
Captain Poulandres approached, dressed in a cowled robe and carrying a crooked staff in his role as master and referee. Behind him, all the ship’s company save the helmsman, lookout, and sailmaster found perches from which to watch. They lounged casually, many wearing amused expressions. Maia saw none of the usual laying of bets.
Probably no takers for our side, whatever the odds.
Silence fell as the captain stepped forward to the edge of the game board, where the timing square was ready to send synchronized pulses to all pieces. At a set time, each of the sixteen hundred tiny units would either flip its louvers or rest quiet, depending on what its sensors told it about the state of its neighbors. The same decision would be made a few seconds later, when the next pulse arrived. And so on.
“Life is the continuation of existence,” the captain intoned. Perhaps it was the cowl that lent his voice a deep, vatic tone. Or maybe it was part of being captain.
“Life is the continuation of existence,” the ship’s company responded, echoing his words, accompanied by a background of creaking masts and flapping sails.
“Life is the continuation of existence, yet no thing endures. We are all patterns, seeking to propagate. Patterns which bring other patterns into being, then vanish, as if we’ve never been.”
Maia had heard the invocation so many times, recited in countless accents at dockside arenas in Port Sanger and elsewhere. She knew it by heart. Yet this was her first time standing as a contestant. Maia wondered how many other women had. No more than thousands, she felt sure. Maybe only hundreds.
Renna listened to the ancient words, clearly entranced.
“… We cannot control our progeny. Nor rule our inventions. Nor govern far consequences, save by the foresight to act well, then let go.
“All is in the preparation, and the moment of the act.
“What follows is posterity.”
The captain held out his staff, hovering above the winking timing square.
“Two teams have prepared. Let the act be done. Now … observe posterity.”
The staff struck down. The timing square began chiming its familiar eight-count. Even though she was prepared, Maia jumped when the flat array of sixteen hundred black and white pieces seemed all at once to explode.
Not all at once. In fact, fewer than half flipped their louvers, changing state because of what they sensed around them. But the impression of sudden, frantic clattering set Maia’s heart racing before a second wave of sound and motion suddenly crossed the board. And another.
Fortunately, she did not have to think. Any Game of Life match was already over the moment it began. From now on, they could only stand and watch the consequences unfold.
Peripatetic’s Log: Stratos Mission: Arrival + 43.271 Ms
I found it hard overcoming prejudices, during my first visit to a Stratoin home.
It wasn’t the concept of matriarchy, which I’ve met in other guises on Florentina and New Terra. Nor the custom that men are another species, sometimes needed, often irksome, and fortunately rare. I was prepared for all that.
My problem arises from growing up in an era obsessed with individuality.
Variety was our religion, diversity our fixation. Whatever was different or atypical won favor over the familiar. Other always came before self. An insane epoch, say psychohistorians … even if its brief glory produced ideal star travelers.
In voyaging, I’ve encountered many stabilized societies, but none more contrary to my upbringing than Stratos. The unnerving irony of this world’s fascinating uniqueness is its basis in changelessness. Generations are not rent by shifting values. Sameness is no curse, variety no automatic friend.
It’s just as well we never met. Lysos and I would not have gotten along.
Nonetheless, I was delighted when Savant Iolanthe asked me to spend some days at her family’s castlelike estate, in the hilly suburbs of Caria. The invitation, a rare honor for a male in summer, was surely a political statement. Her faction is the least hostile toward restored contact. Even so, I was cautioned that my visit was to be “chaste.” My room would have no windows facing Wengel Star.
I told Iolanthe to expect no problems in that regard. I will avert my gaze, though not from the sky.
Nitocris Hold is an ancient place. Iolanthe’s clone-line has occupied the sprawling compound of high walls, chimneys, and dormered roofs for most of six hundred years. Related lineages dwelled on the site almost back to the founding of Caria.
Our car swept through an imposing gate, cruised along a garden-rimmed drive, and halted before a finely sculpted marble entrance. We were formally greeted by a trio of graceful Nitocri who, like Iolanthe, were of stately middle age, dressed in
shimmering yellow silken gowns with high collars. My bag was carried off by a younger clan-sister. More siblings bearing distinctive Nitocris features—soft eyes and narrow noses—rushed silently to move the car, seal the gate, and usher us inside.
So, for the first time, I entered the sanctum of a parthenogenetic clan, prime unit of human life on Stratos. “They aren’t bees or ants,” I thought silently, suppressing facile comparisons. Within, I repeated the motto of my calling—
“Let go of preconceptions.”
The savant cheerfully showed me courtyards and gardens and grand halls, unperturbed by a crowd of children who whispered and giggled in our wake. The Nitocri keep no domestic employees, no hired vars to carry out unpleasant tasks beneath the dignity of wealthy clones. No Nitocris resents taking her turn at hard or dirty chores, such as scouring fire grates, or scrubbing lavatories, or laying down roof tiles. All is well-timed according to age, with each girl or woman alternating between onerous and interesting tasks. Each individual knows how long a given phase will last. After a set interval, a younger sister will be along to take over whatever you are doing, while you move on to something else.
No wonder even children and youths move gracefully, with such assurance. Each clone-daughter grows up watching elders just like her, performing their tasks with a calm efficiency derived from centuries of practice. She knows the movements unconsciously before ever being called upon to do them herself. No one hurries to take on power before her time. “My turn will come,” appears to be the philosophy.