"Just a minim!" the ship's physician commanded as he finished tying strips of torn cloth around her gashed knee. "There, that's the worst of it. As for the rest o' your dings ..."
"They'll have to wait," Maia peremptorily finished the sentence, shaking her head in a way that cut short protest. "Thanks, Doc," she finished, and hurried, limping, out of the arena-prison. At the doorway, she turned left toward the second large room, where she had earlier glimpsed Baltha and the other reaver commanders, arguing. One male accompanied her—the cabin boy who had been part of the opposing Game of Life team, back on the Manitou. It was his self-chosen job to bring Maia up to date on what had happened since she was marooned with Naroin and the women crew, on Grimke Island.
"At first the starman was kept with us," the boy explained. "We was all put together in a different part o' the sanctuary, nearer the gate. But he kept makin' a fuss about needin' the game. Always the game! S'prised the scutum outta us, 'specially as he still had that 'lectric game board o' his! Claimed it wasn't good enough, tho. He needed more. Wouldn't eat nor talk to the reavers less'n they moved us all down here, where the old tournament courts were."
Maia stopped at the entrance to the second room. She had expected another chamber like the first—a large oval amphitheater surrounding an expanse of crisscrossing lines. But this volume was different. There were benches all right, descending in ever-smaller, semicircular arcs from where she stood. Only this time their ranks faced one huge bare wall with a platform and dais in front of it. The chamber reminded her of a lecture or concert hall, like in the Civic Building, in Port Sanger.
"We all thought he was crazy," the cabin boy continued with his story about Renna. "But we played along, on account of his act vexed the guards. So the cap'n told 'em we also needed the game, for religious reasons." The boy giggled. "So they fetched our books an' game pieces off the ship, an' brought us all down to the arena where you found us."
"But then Renna was taken over here," Maia prompted.
"Yeah. After a couple days, he started complainin' again—about our snorin', about our company. Actin' like a real wissy-boy whiner. So he got put next door. Heard no trouble after that, so we figured he must be happy."
"I see."
Inwardly, Maia cursed. Upon hearing that Renna had vanished in a fashion none of the reavers could fathom or duplicate, her first thought was that he must have found another of the red-metal sculptures, covered with arcane, hexagon symbols. Such a puzzle door would fit the bill—just the sort of thing to stump pirates, yet allow Renna to escape. And, naturally, her own experience would give her an edge, as well.
But there was no red-metal. No riddle of movable symbols. Just row after row of benches. The only other noticeable feature was more of the carved phrases, covering every wall save the one behind the dais, carrying mysterious epigrams in the liturgical dialect of the Fourth Book of Lysos. Otherwise, it was just a damn, deserted lecture hall. Maia looked around as she descended the aisle between the benches, wondering why Renna went to so much effort to get himself transferred here.
"What is this place?" the cabin boy asked, somewhat awestruck. "Ain't no Life arena. No playin' field. Did they pray here?"
Maia shook her head, puzzled. "Maybe, with all this scripture on the walls . . . though not all of these lines are holy text, I'm sure."
"Then what—?"
"Hush now, please. Let me think."
The boy lapsed into silence, while Maia's brow knotted in concentration.
Renna escaped from here. That's the key piece of data. We can assume the reavers searched high and low for hidden doors and secret passages, so don't bother duplicating that effort. Instead, try to follow Renna's reasoning.
First, how did he know to get himself moved here? He went to great lengths to manage it.
Although Renna, like Maia, had been imprisoned in a sanctuary before, nothing in that earlier experience could have led him to anticipate a place like this. Maia herself would have found it hard to credit, had she not already seen the nearby, separate defense catacomb.
I've got to figure this out, and quicker than it took him. The reavers will be crazed when they find out what we've done.
Another pang increased her anxiety.
With every hand on war alert, they're sure to spot Brod when he tries coming down. They'll drop him like a helpless wing-hare.
Concentrating, Maia tried to view this room with unbiased eyes, to see what Renna must have seen. She spent a few minutes poking through the blankets and piled straw where he must have made his bed, long since torn apart by others searching for clues. Maia moved on, finding nothing else of interest until her gaze once more stroked the chiseled epigrams, running the length and breadth of each side and rear wall. Some she knew well, having learned them by heart during long, tedious hours spent in Lamatia Chapel, singing heavy paeans to Stratos Mother.
.... i©fin3 wHaT is HiDDen under strange
Which, transforming into normal letters, translated to ... to find what is hidden . . . under strange, lost stars
Maia grimaced at the thought. It was an appropriate-enough image, as she might not live to ever again see stars. I wonder what time of day it is, she pondered idly while turning, scanning the walls. Then she stopped, resting her gaze on one anomalous patch. Despite her throbbing wounds, Maia hurried downstairs, then edged past the raised semicircular center stage. Where lines of incised symbols neared the unadorned forward wall, she had spotted what looked like orderly arrangements of brown smudges. They weren't writing. To Maia's eye they connoted something much more interesting.
"What does that look like to you?" she asked the cabin boy, pointing at a cluster of stains, just below one of the arcane symbols in the liturgical alphabet. The youth squinted, and Maia wished fervently that Brod were here, instead.
"Dunno, ma'am. Looks like a feller tossed his food. Same guk we been gettin', I reckon."
"Look closer," Maia urged. "Not tossed. Dabbed. See? Carefully painted dots—a cluster of them, under one syllabary letter. And here's another grouping." Maia counted. There were a total of eighteen little clusters of spots, none of them alike. "See? No letter is repeated. Each symbol in the alphabet has its own, unique associated cluster! Interesting?"
"Uh ... if you say so, ma'am."
Maia shook her head. "I wonder how long it took him to figure it out."
She considered Renna's situation. Imprisoned for a second time on an alien world, bored half to death, despairing and exhausted, he must have stared at the riddle phrases till they blurred with the floating speckles underneath his drooping eyelids. Only then might it have occurred to him to play out a game, using the incised words as starting points. But first, they must be transformed from written letters into—
Sudden shouts floated in from the hallway. Maia turned, and seconds later a man appeared at the back of the arena, waving vigorously.
"Three o' the bitchies just strolled round the corner, right into our hands! The bad news is, they yelled 'fore we could get 'em gagged. There's a ruckus brewin' back at the stairs. Cap'n says there'll be trouble soon."
Maia acknowledged with a curt nod, and returned to contemplating the primitive markings on the wall. Renna must have used them as a reference cipher, while working in this room.
But working on what? He still had his electronic game board with him—which the reavers would have seen as no more than a toy—so he could have experimented with countless combinations of point-clusters and rules for manipulating them. All right, picture him fiddling around with the symbols in the room where he and the prisoners were first kept. Let's assume that from the wall writing he learned something. He learned that, somewhere else within the sanctuary, there was a better place to be ... and he managed to wheedle himself into being taken to that place.
Okay, then what?
That still left the question of modality. An intellectual game was one thing. Moving through walls was another matter, entirely. Even the red-metal puzzle door, loomi
ng adamantly before Maia and Brod back in the sea-cave, had been an enigma with a clear purpose, a combination lock to open a gate. Scanning this room, she saw nothing like a gate. No way to leave, other than the one she had entered through. Nothing at all.
"Agh!" Maia cried, clenching her fists. Her left side and leg hurt and her head was starting to ache. Yet, somehow she must retrace mental steps taken by a technologically advanced alien, without even having access to the same tools he had possessed.
Groaning, she sat down on one of the benches in the first row, and laid her head in her hands. Even when a savage boom of gunfire rattled the walls above, causing ancient dust to float in soft hazes, she did not lift her tired, salty eyes.
"I've got it so Poulandres understands, I think. For the time being he'll shoot to miss, one bullet at a time. That's kept 'em back so far. If it does come to a charge, I think he'll do what's needful."
Leie sat down next to Maia, about half a meter away. Her voice was hesitant, as if she felt uncertain of her welcome. Twice Leie started to speak, and Maia felt sure it would be about what had passed between them—about their long separation, and regret over the cavalier way Leie had treated their bond. No actual words emerged, yet the strangled effort alone conveyed enough to ease some of the tension. In her heart, Maia knew it was as much apology as she was likely to get. As much as she should demand.
"So," Leie resumed in a strained voice. "What'll it take to figure out what happened here?"
Maia exhaled heavily, at a loss where to start.
She began by summarizing the cipher key Renna had drawn upon the wall, how each cluster of dots probably represented an array of living figures on a Game of Life board. Or, more likely, a variant game, differing in its detailed ecology. Maia could perceive that each configuration dabbed on the wall might be self-sustaining given the right rule system, though it was hard to explain how she knew it.
While she told Leie about this, they were interrupted twice more by loud reports—single warning shots, fired to keep the reavers at bay. There were no cries of full-scale attack, so neither of them moved. Leie's rapt attention encouraged Maia to accelerate her story, rapidly skimming over the violence, tedium, and danger of the last few months, but revealing her astonishing discovery of a talent—one bearing on a strange, intellectual-artistic realm.
"Lysos!" Leie whispered when the essentials were out. "And I thought my time was strange! After I heard you were ashore at Grange Head, and had a safe job in Long Valley, I decided to stay awhile at sea with—" She stopped and shook her head. "But that can wait. Go on. Does this Life stuff help us figure how Renna got out of a sealed room with no exits?"
Maia shrugged. "I told you, it doesn't! Oh, the game can carry data, like a language transformed into another kind of symbol system. Renna must've translated something out of these phrases on the walls . . . maybe in context of stuff he learned at the Great Library, in Caria.
"But even when you have information, and know how to read it, you still need a way to act! To apply that data to the real world. To cause physical events to take place."
"Like breaking out of jail."
"Exactly. Like breaking out of jail."
Leie stood up and stepped before the first row of benches, onto the semicircular stage where lay a rectangular dais-podium made of polished stone. "After he vanished, most of us took turns looking over this room," she said. "Hoping to find secret panels and such. It wasn't that I was trying to be helpful, not since they killed Captain Corsh and his men . . . and especially after I thought you'd been blown up. . . ." Leie briefly closed her eyes, memory of pain written on her face. "Mostly, I was searching for a way to follow Renna, to make my own getaway. That's how I can tell you there aren't any secret panels. At least none I could recognize. Still, I did notice a thing or two."
Maia's dour mood kept her looking down at her hands. "What did you notice?" she asked, sullenly unresponsive.
"Get your butt up here and see for yourself." Leie rejoined, with a hint of the old sharpness. Maia frowned, then stood and hobbled closer. Leie waited beside the broad dais, where she stooped and pointed at a row of tiny objects embedded in the side of the giant stone block. Some of them looked like buttons. Others were little metal-rimmed holes.
"What are they for?" Maia inquired.
"I was hoping you'd tell me. Each of us tried pushing them. The buttons click as if they're supposed to do something, but nothing happens."
"Maybe they were for turning on lights. Too bad there's no power in the sanctuary."
For lack of time, Maia hadn't given any details about the military catacombs that she and Brod had explored, and which still hummed with titanic energies. Maia assumed the two networks of artificial caves were completely severed, so that hermits and treasure-hunters using this part would never stumble across the hidden defense facility, just next door.
"I said nothing happens," Leie replied. "That doesn't mean there's no power."
Maia stared at her sister. "What do you mean?"
At that moment, another gunshot pealed, echoing down the hallway to resonate within the chamber, setting Maia's teeth rattling. Both girls waited in suspense, and sighed when no more shots followed. With the tip of a finger, Leie pointed to a pair of tiny metal rings, about a centimeter apart, set into the edge of the dais near the buttons. The rings surrounded thin, deep holes. Maia pressed her finger against one, and looked up, perplexed. "I don't feel anything."
"Have you got a piece of metal?" Leie asked. "Like a coinstick? A half-credit will do."
Maia shook her head. Then she recalled. "Maybe I do have something." Her right hand went to her left forearm and unstrapped the leather cover of her portable sextant. Gingerly, she drew the tiny instrument from its padded case.
"Where'd you get that?" Leie commented, watching the brass engraving of a zep'lin pop open. Maia shrugged. "It's complicated. Let's just say I found it useful, on occasion."
She unfolded the sighting arms. One of them terminated in a pointed prong—normally used as an indicator for reading numbers against a measuring wheel—that could be rotated outward. It seemed narrow enough to use as a probe.
"Good," Leie said. "Now, I don't claim to be the only one who had the idea, inspecting for electricity. Others tried, and felt nothing. But I figured, maybe the current was too low to detect by hand. Remember how we used to check those pitiful, weak saline batteries Savant Mother Claire had us make, back in silly-ass chem class? Well, I did the same thing here. When no one was looking, I inserted a coinstick and touched the metal with my tongue."
"Yes?" Maia asked, growing more interested as she slipped the narrow prong into one of the tiny holes.
"Yes indeed! I swear you can taste a faint tickle of . . ."
Leie's voice trailed off as she stopped and stared. Maia, too, looked down in astonishment at the little sextant..
Across the center of its scratched, pitted face, a blank window had come alight, perhaps for the first time in centuries. Tiny, imperfect letters, missing corners and edges, flickered, then steadied into a constant glow.
.... T© fin3 wHat is Hiioen ...
"Great Mother of life!"
The exclamation made both girls look up from the transfixing sight. Still blinking in surprise, Maia saw that Captain Poulandres and one of his officers stood in the doorway at the top of the aisle, staring with dumfounded expressions.
Maia's initial thought was pragmatic. How are they able to see the sextant from all that way up there?
"I . . ." Poulandres swallowed hard. ". . . came to tell you. The pirates say they want to talk. They say . . ." He shook his head, unable to concentrate on his urgent message. "By Lysos and the sea, how did you two manage to do that!"
It dawned on Maia that the captain couldn't see the tiny letters glowing on the sextant's face. He must be looking at something else. Something above and behind her back. Together, as if pulled by the same string, she and Leie turned around, and gasped in unison.
Th
ere, spread across the huge, formerly pale front wall of the hall, now lay an immense grid of faint, microscopic lines, upon which danced myriad, multihued particles, innumerable, smaller than specks. An orgiastic, colorful spectacle of surging, flowing patterns panoplied in whirling currents, eddies, teeming jungles of simulated structure and confusion . . . ersatz chaos and order . . . death and life.
Despite all trials and experience, some aspects of character might be too deep ever to change. Once more, it was Leie who recovered first to comment.
"Uh," she said in a dry, hoarse voice, glancing sideways at Maia. "Eureka ... I think . . . ?"
The effect was even more spectacular when, a while later, the pirates tried to intimidate the escapees by cutting off the lights. Power no longer flowed to the string of electric bulbs. By then, however, those of the Manitou crew not on guard had already gathered in Renna's former cell, under the storm of pigmented, convoluted shapes that slowly twisted across the "Life Wall," as they called it. The men sat in huddled groups, or knelt below the dancing display, spreading open their treasured reference books, riffling pages by the soft, multispectral glow and arguing. Although they had confirmed that the eighteen simple patterns were components of this particular pseudo-world, not even the most expert player seemed able to make any more sense of the vista of swirling shapes.
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 57