Glory Season (27 page)

Sometimes pattern was the sole objective. There were form-generating contests, with prizes going to the most intricate final design, or to the purest image obtained after twenty, fifty, or a hundred beats. Variants using more
complex rules and multicolored pieces produced even more sophisticated displays.

More often, though, the game was played as a battle between two teams. Their objective: to lay down starting conditions such that when play commenced, the sweep of shapes would carry their way, wiping clear their opponents’ territory, so that the last oases of “life” would be on their side of the board.

The contests could appear brutal at times, just like nature. Besides gliders and other benign forms, there were “eaters,” which consumed other patterns, then rebounded off the edge to sweep back across the playing field as voracious as ever. More sophisticated designs passed harmlessly off most patterns, but devoured any
other
eater they came across!

Ship crews and guilds hoarded techniques, tricks, and rules of thumb for generations, yet the strategy of laying down initial rows before the game was still more art than science. Frequently both teams wound up staring in surprise at what they’d wrought … patterns surging back and forth for a good part of an hour in ways unexpected by either side. Draws were frequent. During summers, occasional fistfights erupted over accusations of cheating, though Maia was at a loss how one could cheat in Life.

She had to admit there was something aesthetic about the game’s essential simplicity and the intricate, endless variety of forms it produced. As a child she had found it alluring, in an eerie sort of way, and had even tried asking questions. It took some time getting over the taunting and humiliation that had brought on, more from her own peers than from men. Anyway, by age four she found herself reaching the same conclusion as so many other women on Stratos.

So what?

Yes, the patterns were interesting up to a point, beyond which the passion males poured into the game became
symbolic of the gulf separating the sexes. Other pastimes, like card games, at least involved people looking at or talking to each other, for instance. It was hard to comprehend treating little bits—
things
—as if they were really alive.

Yet here she was, in prison, without anyone else to look at
or
talk to, with all the books read and nothing to do but stare at the unfolded game board. Maia pondered.
I’ve already tried a thing or two girls don’t usually do—like studying navigation.

That was merely unusual, though. Not unheard-of. This game was another matter. If there were women on Stratos who had ever achieved expert status at Life, they were almost certainly labeled terminally strange.

Well, better strange than batty
, she decided. Anger and loneliness waited on the wings, like unwelcome aunts, ready to drop in at the slightest invitation, provoking useless, unproductive tears.
I’ll go crazy without something to keep my mind busy.

The board felt smooth. There were no physical pieces. Instead, each tiny white square would turn ebony at the command of an electro-optic controller buried in the machine itself. She recalled the old-time clatter and clack with fondness. This system felt chill and remote.

Let’s see if I can figure it out.

A couple of small lights winked on the display. She had no idea what
PROG MEM
or
PREV.GAME.SAV
meant. Those could be explored later, when she had mastered the simplest level. As soon as she turned on the machine, half of the squares along the four edges of the game board had gone black, so that an alternating checker sequence snaked around the perimeter. She recalled that this was one of several ways of dealing with the edge problem, or what to do when moving Life patterns reached the limits of the playing field.

Ideally, in the perfect case, there wouldn’t be an edge
at all, just an endless expanse to give the patterns room to grow and interact. That was why big tournament games featured immense boards, and took days, even weeks, to set up. Maia recalled how, one day at Lamatia Hold, Coot Bennett had told her a secret. Sophisticated electronic versions of Life, such as the one in front of her, could actually keep track of patterns even after they had “left the stage,” pretending that the artificial entities continued existence even several board-lengths away, in some sort of imaginary space! At first, Maia had been convinced he was having her on. Then she felt thrilled, wondering if any other woman knew about this.

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.