Glory Season (43 page)

Maia felt for a moment as if she were listening to Renna rehearse a report he planned to give at some future time and place, describing the customs of an obscure tribe, located at the fringes of civilization.
Which is what we are, I guess.
She inhaled, suddenly acutely conscious of the weight of air in her lungs. Was it really heavy, compared to other worlds? Despite Renna’s remarks, the round, red sun didn’t look feeble. It was so fierce, she could only look straight at it for a few seconds without her eyes watering.

Renna went on. “I find it interesting that such elaborate
skills get passed on so attentively, far beyond what officers need to teach in order to get good crew.”

Maia folded the sextant away. “I hadn’t thought of it that way before. We’re taught that men don’t have …” She searched for the right word. “They don’t have
continuity.
The middies adopted by sailing masters are rarely their own sons, so there’s no long-range stake in the boys’ success. Yet, you make it sound almost like the way it is in clans. Personal teaching. Close attention over time. Passing on more than a trade.”

“Mm. You know, the more I think about it, the more I’m sure it was designed this way. Sure a family of clones does it more efficiently, one generation training the next. But at base, it’s just a variation on an old theme. The master-apprentice system. For most of human history, such systems were the rule. Progress came through incremental improvements on tried-and-true designs.”

Maia recalled how, as children, she and Leie used to peer into the workshop of the Yeo leatherworkers, or Samesin clockmakers, watching older sisters and mothers instruct younger clones, as they themselves had been taught. It was how young Lamais learned the export-import business. You wouldn’t imagine such a process to be possible among men, no two of whom ever shared the same exact talents or interests. But Renna implied there was less difference than similarity. “It’s a traditional system, perfect for maintaining stability,” the star voyager said, putting a wound-up game piece aside and lifting another. “There is a price. Knowledge accumulates additively, almost never geometrically.”

“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 crouch. 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.