"It's magic," the chief cook concluded, in awe.
"No, not magic," the ship's doctor replied. "It's much more. It's mathematics."
"What's the difference?" asked the young ensign Maia had met on the Manitou, speaking with an upper-clan accent, trying to be blase. "They're both just symbol systems. Hypnotizing you with abstractions."
The elderly physician shook his head. "No, boy, that's wrong. Like art an' politics, magic consists of persuadin' others to see what you want 'em to see, by makin' incantations and wavin' your arms around. It's always based on claims that the magician's force of will is stronger than nature."
The colors overhead laid lambent, churning reflections across the old man's pate as he laughed aloud. "But nature doesn't give a fart about anybody's force of will! Nature's too strong to coerce, an' too fair to play favorites. She's just as cruel an' consistent to a clan mother as to the lowliest var. Her rules hold for ever'body." He shook his head, sighing. "And She has a dear-heart love of math."
They watched the awesome gyrating figures in silence. Finally, the young ensign complained angrily. "But men aren't any good at math!"
"So we're told," the doctor answered in a heavy voice. "So we're told."
Overhearing the conversation, Maia realized the crewmen would be of little help. Like her, they were untrained in the high arts on which this wonder must be based. Their beloved game was a fine thing, as far as it went. But the simple Life simulations they played on ships and in modern sanctuaries were no more than an arcana of accumulated tricks and intuition. It was like a bowl of water next to the great sea now in front of them.
She had tried peering at individual dots, in order to decipher the position-by-position rules of play. At first, she had thought she could make out a total of nine colors, which responded four times as powerfully to nearest neighbors as to next-nearest, and so on. Then she looked more closely, and realized that every dot consisted of a swarm of smaller specks, each interacting with those around it, the combination blending at a distance to give the illusion of one solid shade.
"Maia." It was Leie's voice, accompanied by a tap on her shoulder. She drew back and turned as her twin gestured toward the back of the hall, where a messenger could be seen hurriedly picking his way down the stair-aisle. It was a tricky task in the shifting, ever-changing illumination. The cabin boy arrived short of breath. He had only three words for Maia.
"They're comin', ma'am."
It wasn't easy to tear herself away from the dazzling wall display. She felt sure she'd be more useful here. But after several fits and starts, the reavers were apparently sending their delegation, at last. Poulandres insisted Maia join him to speak for the escapees.
"Why can't you do it yourself?" she had asked earlier, to which he replied enigmatically. "No voyage lands without a captain. No cargo sells without an owner. It is necessity."
Poulandres met her at the doorway. Slowly, allowing for her limp, they walked toward the strategic corner. The shifting colors followed and Maia kept glancing backward, as if drawn by a palpable force. It took effort to shake free of the contemplative frame of mind. Their prospects for successful negotiation did not look good, and she said as much to the officer.
"Aye. Neither side can charge the other without taking heavy losses. For now, it's a stalemate, but with us stuck at the wrong end of a one-way hole. Given enough time, they can flush us out several ways."
"So it's a death sentence. What is there to talk about?"
"Enough, lass. The pirates can tell something's happened down here. They won't rush us till after trying persuasion."
Maia and the captain found the ship's navigator prone at the corner, nursing the rifle, peering along its sights toward a faint glow that hinted the distant flight of stairs. That much light remained so that the reavers could detect any assault staged by the men. Otherwise, a surprise melee in the dark might cost them their advantages of arms, numbers, and position. The impasse held, for now.
Two faint blobs moved against that remote grayness. Even at maximum dark-adaptation, it took Maia's eyes time to clearly discern twin female silhouettes, approaching at a steady walk.
"Ready?" Poulandres asked. Maia nodded reluctantly, and they set off together with the navigator aiming carefully past them. Now that it was a matter of protecting comrades, she felt certain the officer could overcome his queasiness, if necessary. At the other end, markswomen were just as surely drawing bead past their own emissaries.
The blurry forms took shape, resolving into arms, legs, heads, faces. Maia almost stopped in her tracks when she recognized Baltha. The other delegate was the assistant to the reaver leader, Togay. Maia swallowed and managed to keep walking, half a pace to the captain's right.
The two groups stopped while still several meters apart. Baltha shook her head, a swish of short, blonde hair. "So. What d'you curly-pecs think you're accomplishin'?" she asked.
"Not much," Poulandres replied in a lazy drawl. "Stayin' alive, mostly. For a while."
"For a while's right. You're still here, so don't pretend you've found a secret way out. What's your pleasure, Cap'n? Want to see your men die by fire? Or water?"
Maia overcame her dry mouth. "I don't think you'll be using either right away."
"Stay outta this, snip!" Baltha snarled. "No one asked you."
Poulandres replied in a low voice, icy calm. "Be polite to our adopted factor-owner."
Maia fought her natural reaction, to swivel and stare at the man, who spoke as if this were a negotiation over some contested cargo. Clearly, his feint was meant to shake up the enemy.
"This?" Baltha asked, pointing at Maia, as incredulous as Poulandres might have wished. "This unik summer trash? She's even lamer than her dead prissy-sis."
"Baltha, use your eyes," Maia said evenly. "I'm not quite dead. Anyway, where does a shit-stealer like you get on, calling others names?"
". . . Shit-stealer . . . ?" Strangling on the words, Baltha abruptly stopped and stared. Moving involuntarily forward she breathed, "You?"
Pleasure overcame Maia's reticence. "Always a fast learner, Baltha. Congratulations."
"But I saw you blown to—"
"Shall we get back to the subject at hand?" Poulandres interjected, with graceful timing. "Each of our respective sides has certain needs that are urgent, and others it can afford to give up. I, for instance, have a personal need to see every last one of you bitchies put in chains, workin' like lugars on a temple rehab farm. But I admit that's a lower priority than, say, gettin' out of this mess with all my men alive." He grinned without humor. "Tell me, what is it you people desire most, and what'll you give up to get it?"
Baltha continued staring at Maia. So it was the other woman who answered in a prim, Mediant Coast accent.
"We seek the Outsider. Less than his recovery is unacceptable. All else is negotiable."
"Hm. There would have to be assurances, of course."
"Of course." The Medianter seemed used to bargaining. "Perhaps an exchange of—"
Baltha visibly shook herself free of the quandaries implied by Maia's presence. The big var interrupted acidly. "This is crazy. If they knew where the alien was, they would of followed. I'm callin' your bluff, Cap'n. You got nothin' to trade."
The sailor shrugged. "Take a look behind us. See the strange light? Even from here, you can tell we've accomplished more than you did in almost two days of searching."
Baltha glanced past their shoulders at the faint, shifting, multihued glows reflecting off the distant wall. Frustration wrote across her hard features. "Help us get him back, and we'll leave you livin', with the Manitou, when we sail."
Poulandres sucked his lower lip. Then, to Maia's surprise, he nodded. "That'd be all right ... if we thought we could trust you. I'll put it to the men. Meanwhile, you'd help your case by turning the lights back on. We'll talk in a little while about food and water. Is that all right with you for now, Maia?"
The hell it is! she thought. Still, she answered
with a curt nod. Surely the captain was only buying time.
Baltha started to respond with a snarl, but the other woman cut her off. "We'll talk it over among ourselves and send word in an hour." The two reavers turned and departed, Baltha glancing poison over her shoulder as Poulandres and Maia began their own walk back..
"Would you really turn Renna in?" Maia asked the man, in a low voice.
"You're a varling. You know nothing about what it's like to have many lives depending on you." Poulandres paused for several seconds. "I don't plan on making such a devil's deal, if it can be avoided. But don't take it as a promise, Maia. That's why you had to come on this palaver, so you'd know. Guard your own interests. They mayn't always be the same as ours."
Sailor's honor, Maia thought. He's bound to warn me that he may have to turn on me, later. It's a strange code.
"You know they can't afford to let you go," she said, pressing the point. "You've seen too much. They can't let their personal identities be known."
"That, too, depends," Poulandres said cryptically. "Right now, the important thing is that we've won a little time."
But what happens when no time remains? When the reavers run out of patience? "Fire or water," Baltha said. And if those don't work—if they can't pry us out by themselves—I wouldn't put it past them to send for help. Perhaps even calling their enemies.
It wasn't farfetched to imagine the gang striking a deal with their political opposites, the Perkinites, in exchange for whatever it might take to tear this rocky citadel apart. In the end, both extremes had more in common with each other than either did with the middle.
The navigator's dark young features relaxed in relief when they rounded the corner, and he put the weapon back on safety. Leie embraced Maia, and she felt her shoulders relax a fierce tightness that had gone unnoticed till now. "Come on," Maia told her twin. "Let's get back to work."
But it was hard concentrating at first, when Maia stood once more before the massive stone dais, looking alternately at the little sextant and the vast, ever-changing world-wall. Her task was to find a miracle, some way to follow Renna out of here. Yet, Baltha's offer and Poulandres's disturbing answer unnerved her. Suppose she did manage to solve the problem. Might that only doom Renna, and in the end prove futile for them all?
Soon, the fascinating vista of ever-changing patterns overcame her resistance, drawing her in. So much so that she hardly noticed when the string of faint bulbs came on again at the back of the room, evidence that the reavers were at least considering further discussion.
It was Leie who made the next breakthrough, when she discovered that the sextant could be used to change the wall scene. Fiddling with the finely graded dials, which Maia normally used to read the relative angles of stars, Leie turned one while the little tool was attached to the data plug. At once the patterns shifted, left and right! They moved up when she twisted the other wheel, disappearing off the top edge of the display, while new forms crowded in from below.
"Terrific!" Maia commented, trying for herself. This verified what she had suspected, that the great wall-screen was only a window onto something much vaster—a simulated realm extending far past the rectangular edges before them. Its theoretical limits might stretch hundreds of figurative meters beyond this room. Perhaps there were no limits at all.
The eye kept grasping for analogies amid the swirling patterns. One instant, they were intertwining hairy fingers. The next, they collided ecstatically like frothy waves breaking on a seashore. Rolling, convoluted configurations writhed without hindrance across the borders of the display. By turning a little wheel on the sextant, the humans might follow, but only in abstract, as observers. Only the shapes themselves knew true liberty. They appeared to have no needs, to fear no threats, to admit no physical bounds. The thought conveyed to Maia a sense of untold freedom, which she envied.
Did Renna somehow change himself? She wondered. Did he know a secret way to join the world in there, leaving this one of rock and flesh behind? It was a fantastic notion. But who knew what powers the Phylum had developed during the millennia since the Founders established a world of pastoral stability on Stratos, turning away from the "madness" of a scientific age.
On a hunch, Maia tried pushing the buttons they had found earlier, near the little holes in the massive podium. But they proved as useless as before. Perhaps they really had once controlled something as mundane as the room lights.
Then Leie made another discovery. By bending one of the sextant's sighting arms, another kind of simulated movement became possible. Of the men who had been watching, transfixed, several moaned aloud in awe as the shared point of view suddenly appeared to dive forward, plunging past billowing foreground simulacra, plowing through objects as intangible as clouds.
Maia felt it, too. A wave of vertigo, as if they were all falling together through an infinite sky. Gasping momentarily, she had to turn her eyes away and found that her hands were gripping the stone podium like vices. A glance at the others showed she wasn't alone. The earlier breakthroughs had been stunning, but not like this. Never had she heard of a Life-like simulation in three dimensions! The rate of "fall" appeared to accelerate. Shapes that had dominated the scene grew larger, revealing minutia of their convoluted forms. The centermost structures ballooned outward, while those at the fringes vanished over the edge.
The falling sensation was an illusion, of course, and with a little concentration, Maia was able to make it evaporate in a sudden mental readjustment. Moving "forward" seemed now to be an exercise in exploring detail. Any object centered before them was subject to expanding scrutiny, revealing ever-finer structures within . . . and then finer still. There seemed no limit to how minutely a formation could be parsed.
"Stop . . ." Maia worked hard to swallow. "Leie, stop. Go the other way."
Her sister turned and grinned at her. "Isn't this great? I never imagined men had such things! Did you say something?"
"I said, stop and back up!"
"Don't be afraid, Maia. As you explained to me, it's just simulated—"
"I'm not afraid! Just reverse the controls and back away. Do it now."
Leie's eyebrows raised. "As you say, Maia. Reversing course." She stopped pushing and started pulling gently at the little metal arm. The appearance of a forward plunge slowed, arrested, and began to withdraw. Now curling patterns in the middle receded, diminishing toward a central vanishing point while more and more bright, complex objects swarmed in from the periphery. The visceral sensation was one of pulling away, of rising up, so that each passing second meant they attained a larger, more godlike view.
It was a briefly glorious sensation, as Maia imagined it might be like to fly. Moreover, she felt a sense of restored contact with Renna, if only by sharing this thing he must also have delighted in.
At the same time, another part of her felt overwhelmed. Renna had explained that the Game of Life was only among the simplest of a vast family of pattern-generating systems, called cellular automata. When the big wall first came alight, Maia had hoped the sailors and their books might help solve this vastly more complex "ecosystem," despite none of them being savants. But if the men had been as baffled as she by the former intricacy, this addition of a third dimension shattered all hopes of easy analysis.
In her heart, Maia felt certain there were comprehensible rules. Something in the patterns—their diverging yet oddly repetitious sweeps and curls—called this intuition to her. I could solve it, she was sure. If I had the computer-cd game board to work with, instead of this balky little sextant, and as many hours as Renna had in here, alone. And some of his knowledge of math.
Alas, her list of deficits exceeded assets. In frustration, she pounded the table, jiggering the little tool. "Hey!" Leie shouted, and went on to complain that it wasn't easy piloting gently enough to keep it all from becoming a vast blur, the sextant's wheels and arms were old, loose, in need of ample mechanical repair. Someone had let the poor machine go straight to pot, Leie insinuated o
ver her shoulder. It's a wonder it still works at all, Maia thought. At first, she had been awed by the coincidence, that her old, secondhand navigation tool could be used in this way. But then, many older instruments she had seen on shipboard featured diminutive blank windows. In former times, it must have been customary to hook up to the Old Network frequently . . . although Maia doubted spectacular wonder-walls were ever common, even before the Great Defense. Or the Founding, for that matter.
She leaned forward. Something had changed. Till now, the new shapes swarming in from the periphery had always appeared roughly similar to the smaller patterns vanishing into the center. But now, fingers of blackness crowded from the wings. The curling shapes seemed to roll up ever tighter, taking the form of giant balls that streamed inward as discrete units, not cloudlike swirls. Spheroids flew in from top and bottom, left and right, growing more compact, more numerous, bouncing and scattering off one another while the front wall grew blacker overall.
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 58