Glory Season (29 page)

Maia pondered the other inmate’s ingenious plan. These electronic game sets were costly, and the matriarchs of Long Valley weren’t spendthrifts. Sooner or later, they would order the games and other amenities shipped off for resale … perhaps to some sanctuary on the coast, or a seafarers’ guild … eventually falling into the hands of someone able to read the programmed message. Any sailor would then know at once where a person was being held against her will.

There were assumptions, of course. The Perkinite clan mothers might not act to cut their losses in the unfinished sanctuaries until absolutely sure the new drugs were working. That might take some time. Nor was that all, Maia thought cynically.
Even if the games do get shipped, and assuming the messages aren’t erased or read by wrong parties along the way.… Even if someone believes the plea, and reports it, then what?

It wasn’t as though the planetary authorities had swarms of mighty aircraft, or armies to send round the world at a moment’s notice, just to correct far-off injustices. What forces Caria City had, it hoarded for emergencies. More likely, some lone investigator or magistrate would be sent the long way—by sea, then by train and horseback, taking the best part of a year to arrive, if ever.

Assuming we’re still here by then.

Maia wasn’t sure she could hold out that long. The other prisoner had a lot more patience.

Still, it’s a better plan than anything I came up with. Imagine figuring out how to do all this with a Game of Life set!
Lacking a lifetime of practice, who could have created a message like that from scratch?

A man? Maia snorted disdainfully. Someone with a savant’s skills, surely.

I wish I could meet her. Talk to her. Maybe there’s a way.

Maia guessed it must be close to midnight. She was about to poke her head out the window again, to check
the progress of the stars, when suddenly she heard it start. The nightly clicking.

Hastily, she angled her notebook into the moonlight and started making marks. A slash for every click, a dash for each beat that a pause lasted. After about twenty seconds, she stopped and read over the initial portion.

“Click, click, pause, click,” she recited slowly. “Click, click, pause, pause … yes. I’m sure it’s the same as the other night!”

Maia crammed the notebook in her belt and scrambled down the pyramid of boxes so quickly the unsteady construct teetered. Near bottom, her toe caught a fold of carpet, and she sprawled onto her hands and knees. Ignoring her scrapes, Maia came to her feet running.

“Where is it?” she whispered, concentrating. Peering through the darkness, she followed her ears to the east wall. Crouching, tracing her hand along the cool stone, she had to creep to her right, pushing bundles and boxes aside. Reaching past a pile of stiff cushions, her fingers met what felt like a small metal plate, set low near the floor. The clicking sounded very close now!

Feeling the outlines of the plate, Maia’s hand brushed a tiny button in its center, which abruptly lit the area with stabbing blue electricity. With a reflexive yelp, she flew backward, landing hard. For six or eight heartbeats, Maia sat numb on the cold floor, sucking tingling fingertips before finally recovering enough to scramble up again, throwing cushions in all directions, clearing space until she saw that smaller sparks accompanied each audible click, momentarily illuminating the plate in the wall.

Funny how I never noticed that before. Probably because I was looking for secret passages and trapdoors! Just goes to show, you never learn anything useful from fantasy novels.

Until today, she hadn’t imagined there might be ways to receive messages in this cell, or that those irritating clicks might really contain a code. But what else could
they be? Would anything purely random, like a short circuit, repeat similar patterns two nights in succession?

Still trembling, she pulled out her notebook and pencil and returned to copying down intermittent flashes in front of her. Even with dark-adapted eyes, Maia could hardly see the marks she made.
We’ll worry about that by daylight
, she told herself when the clicking stopped, about five minutes later.
Luck is definitely taking a tack my way.

She knew there was little evidence to support such a broad conclusion. But hope was a heady brew, now that she had tasted some. Slipping the notebook under a pile of bedding, Maia wrapped herself in her makeshift blankets and tried to settle her mind for sleep.

It wasn’t easy. Her thoughts collided with fantasies and improbable scenarios of rescue, such as the police-woman from Caria, arriving in a grand zep’lin, waving seal-encrusted writs. Other images were less cheering. Memories of Leie beckoned Maia back toward despondency. Drifting sporadically toward full consciousness, she wondered if the clickings were really a message. If so, was it aimed at her, specifically?

Idiot
, she thought while passing through layers of half-slumber.
How could anybody know you were here?

Eventually, Maia dreamed of Lysos.

The Founder was dressed in a flowing gown, and sat with piles of molecules to one side, adding one at a time to a string, like pearls on a necklace, or wooden balls on an abacus. The molecular chains
clacked
each time another joined the queue. Laying DNA codons in an endless chain, Lysos hummed sweetly as she worked.

It took two more nights to copy the entire message and confirm she had it right, an exercise in patience unlike any Maia had known since she and Leie worked to solve the secret gate in Lamatia’s wine cellar. Taking the time was
necessary, though. Only on the third day did Maia feel ready to load the entire code string onto the Game of Life board.

She began by making sure the board was set up with the same special rules as before, when it had played that “message in a bottle.” The little window said
RVRSBL CA 897W.
Maia hoped the program would make sense of the clicks in the night. As before, the game area contracted to a square just fifty-nine units on a side, surrounded by a complex border.

Okay, let’s get started.
Maia commenced laboriously turning each transcribed click into a black square, and leaving a space blank where there had been a second’s worth of pause. On finishing one row of fifty-nine, she continued marking the next level, wrapping the presumed message back and forth like a snake climbing a brick wall. After what felt like hours, she finished fitting the entire sequence into the assigned space. The match couldn’t be a coincidence! The resulting jumble of dots offered no meaning perceptible to the eye.

Exhausted, she was relieved to hear the rattle of keys at the door. Maia covered the game board, though it probably made no difference if the Guels saw. Her muscles and joints hurt from spending so much time bent over the machine.
This had better be worth it
, she thought while silently eating under her keepers’ dull gaze.

If I was off by even one space, it could ruin the whole thing. What’ll I do if it doesn’t work?

The answer was obvious.
I’ll just try again. What else is there to do?

The guards took away her tray and slid the bolt. Breathlessly, Maia got back to the game board and double-checked her transcription. She crossed her arms and tugged both earlobes for luck, then pressed the start button.

Swirling cyclones of pulsing Life forms instantly told her she was right. The nightly clickings
had
been meant for this! They were a recipe. A complex set of starting conditions for this weird game. Despite the variant rules, most of the patterns were once again recognizable. Two glider guns fired fluttering wedge shapes across a terrain strewn with microbes and eaters, beacons and dandelions. Scores of other shapes merged and separated. An “ecology” expanded to fill the entire fifty-nine-by-fifty-nine array. Maia poised over the board, pencil in hand, but the patterns were so enthralling, she was almost caught short when the chaotic forms coalesced suddenly into rows of rippling letters.

CY, TELL GRVS IMAT 49° 16’ 67° 54’ NO DEAL W/ ODO! LV IF NEC

Once more, the message began dissolving almost as soon as it took form. Maia hurriedly scribbled it down before it vanished, along with all other “living” remnants on the board. Soon the board lay pale and empty before her. She stared at the copied version of the four-line missive, reading it over and over again.

Clearly, it hadn’t been meant for her, after all. Several of her favorite fantasies evaporated. No matter. There was more than enough here to keep her speculating about the sender’s intent.
Could “CY” stand for a friend or clanmate of the other prisoner? Is “GRVS” a group or clan powerful enough to come and set her free?
Maia’s imagination would come up with the wildest notions if she let it, so she firmly stayed down to earth. The other prisoner might be a business rival of the local Perkinites, perhaps kept here by the Joplands and their allies to coerce a better deal.

The last, self-sacrificial phrase in the message, demanding
to be abandoned, if necessary, bespoke somber stuff. Or was she wrong assuming that it meant “Leave if necessary”?

Could it have to do with the drug that makes men rut in winter?

Possibly the other prisoner was no more virtuous than Tizbe or the Joplands, merely a competitor. That hardly mattered at this point. Right now Maia couldn’t be choosy about her allies.

The strangest thing about this eavesdropped message, as opposed to the one Maia had read earlier, was that it seemed directed not at some random person who might later pick it up, as she had picked up the game board, but at a specific individual. Using resold games to send notes “in a bottle” could have been but a side venture. A backup plan. These nightly clicking episodes seemed aimed at something more immediate, as if the prisoner intended her messages to get through much sooner and more directly.

Maia recalled the metal plate in the wall. Sparks in the night.

The place must be wired for telephone, or some low-level commlink, Maia speculated. Having never been in a sanctuary before, she had no reason to be surprised by this, yet she was.
Maybe men demand it in the design before they’ll move in. I wonder what they need it for?

Whatever the cable’s original purpose, the other prisoner was clearly using it for something … sending electrical pulses. But to where? As far as Maia could figure, the wires weren’t attached to anything.

A possibility struck her.
Is the other prisoner using the wire as … an antenna? Trying to send a radio message?
Maia knew in abstract that you generated radio waves by pushing electrons rapidly back and forth down a wire. But household comm sets and the ones used aboard ships—countless
generations removed from their ancient origins—were grown in solid blocks out of vats, and sold in units smaller than the palm of your hand. Probably only a scattering of individuals in universities understood how they were made anymore.

She must be a savant. They’re holding a savant prisoner here!

Maia recalled the evening in Lanargh, when she and Leie had watched the news broadcast, and heard the mysterious offer of a “reward for information.” Maybe it was about this!

I’ve got to get in touch with her. But how?

She decided.
First I’ll have to write a message.

There was no question of doing it the way the savant had, by coding starting conditions the Game of Life rules would turn into written words after a thousand complex gyrations. And with a little contemplation, Maia realized she didn’t have to. After all, the trick of sending a message in a bottle, or a message by radio, involved coding it so that, hopefully, only the right recipient would decipher it. But Maia wasn’t trying to communicate with anyone beyond these sanctuary walls. She could send regular block letters!

With the stylus, she blackened squares on the game board until it read

FELLOW PRISONER! HEARD CLICKS IN WIRE MY NAME IS MAIA

Regarding what she’d written, she reconsidered. The first line was obvious. As for the second, perhaps the savant didn’t know she was making noise elsewhere in the citadel, each time she transmitted, but it would be apparent once Maia’s reply got through.

There was another reason to simplify. She must translate
her message into rows of dots and dashes, unraveling the words like peeling layers off a cake. Three lines of letters took twenty-one rows of game squares to produce, each fifty-nine squares wide, she calculated a total of 1,239 intersections that had to be labeled black or white with an on or off pulse. Over a thousand! True, the other prisoner had sent even more, but not with such long pauses as Maia’s approach called for. Extend a pause for five beats or more and the recipient will surely lose count.

Finally, she settled on a much simpler first effort.

I’M MAIA I’M MAIA I’M MAIA

It was still 413 pulses long, after the rows were unwrapped into a linear chain. That seemed manageable, though, especially since it would be rhythmical.

Now how to send it.

She had considered pounding on the walls, or perhaps the drainpipe. But those sounds probably wouldn’t carry far. If they did, it would alert the guards.

I’ll have to do it the same way
, she concluded.
Through the wire.

There was just one possible source for the electricity required, and one mistake would cut off her only contact with the outside world. Maia didn’t hesitate. Gingerly, she turned the Life set over and pried open the cover to the battery case.

She decided to wait until this evening’s midnight transmission was over. Huddled under unwrapped curtains, she watched the savant’s message create a staccato of sparks against the wall, verifying that it was the same as before. The series of clicking arcs stopped at the usual time, leaving her to peer through dim moonlight, cast by the slit window. Expecting this, Maia had practiced her moves
earlier. Still, it took several awkward tries to grasp loose wires extracted from the back of the game set and bring them to the plate in the wall.