Glory Season (74 page)

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 computerized 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 simple mechanical repair.
Someone
had let the poor machine go straight to pot, Leie insinuated over 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.

The last and largest swarm of balls coalesced into a new entity—a thick slab of phosphorescence. The slice of shimmering color seemed to strum like a bowstring as it crossed into sight from the lower right. As their point of view continued its apparent climb, the slab shrank in dimension. More such membranes entered the scene, linking to form a thrumming, vibrating, many-sided
cell
, like that of a quivering honeycomb. More cells thronged into view, becoming a multitude, then a foam, of iridescent color.

Leie was perspiring, tugging gently at the tiny sighting arm while Maia leaned forward to see the foam scintillate, fade, and in an instant, vanish!

The wall was a terrible, empty blankness. “Uh!” Maia’s twin grunted in dismay, her features glistening by the faint light of the electric bulbs behind them. “Did I break it?”

“No.” Maia assured. “The wall was pale before. The machine’s still on. Keep going.”

“You’re sure? I can go back the other way.”

“Keep going,” Maia repeated, this time firmly.

“Well, I’ll pull a little faster, then,” Leie said. Before Maia could respond, she yanked harder at the little arm. The blackness lasted another fraction of a second, just long enough for an eyeblink swarm of pinpoint sparkles to flash. Then, all at once, the colors were back! Again, the simulated point of view fell backward, climbing imperiously as waves of convoluted rainbow brightness crowded in from the borders. All of this happened in the moment it took Maia to shout, “No! Stop!”

Motion ceased, save the slow, coiling dance of patterns and their constituent particles, merging and separating like entities of smoke. “What?” Leie inquired, turning to stare at her sister. “It’s working again …”

“It never stopped working. Go back,” Maia insisted, suppressing the impatient urge to push her sister aside and do it herself. Leie’s marginally better coordination might make all the difference. “Go back to the black part.”

Sighing, Leie turned around and delicately pushed the tiny lever. Once more, there was the sense of plunging forward, downward … of getting smaller while everything around them grew and loomed outward.

The blackness resumed in a blur, and was gone again, even faster than the first time. They were already across it and amid the foamy, lambent honeycombs before Leie could arrest the motion of her hand. “It’s not easy, dammit!” Maia’s sister complained. “The levers move jerkily.
I
wouldn’t ever let a machine get in such disrepair.”

Maia almost retorted that
Leie
never had to carry a tiny device on horseback, trains, ships, while drowning, crashing, climbing cliffs, and fighting for her life.… But she let it go while Leie bent over the tool, trying to pull the balky arm in microscopic units. As before, the cell structures became foam and then vanished into blackness.
Blackness that was unrelieved, save for an occasional, sudden blur that crossed the scene too quickly to follow.

“Do you … mind tellin’ me …” Leie grunted. “… what it is we’re looking for?”

“Just keep going,” Maia urged. All around her, she sensed the confusion of the men. Put off by the disappearance of the transfixing patterns, but awed by her intensity, they crowded forward, staring at the blank wall as if peering through dense fog for some miracle light of harbor. Their company was welcome, especially when one of them cried out “Stop!” before she could form words.

This time, Leie reacted quickly. The brush of illumination the man had noticed still lay in the upper left corner. At first glance, it was almost pure white, although there were pale dustings of blue and reddish yellow. Leie moved over to the finely knurled measuring wheels, which controlled lateral motion. Nudging them gently, she coaxed the object into view.

It was a bright, pinwheel shape. A “cyclone,” one sailor identified. A hurricane, or whirlpool, suggested others.

But Maia knew better. Old Bennet would have identified its species on sight. Renna would perceive a friend and signpost.

She stared in wonder at the majesty that spread across the forward wall, a galactic wheel, its spiral splendor filled with shining stars.

C
aptain Poulandres sent word for her to come. There was to be another parley with the foe. Maia’s curt message of reply, carried by the hesitant cabin boy, suggested irritably that the captain choose someone else.

“I need time!” she snapped over her shoulder, when Poulandres came in person. “I was just there for show, last time. All I ask is that you buy us more time!”

Maia barely heard his muttered promise to try. “And send your navigator down here, will you?” she added, calling after him. “We can use help from a professional!”

Relieved from guard duty with the rifle, the young, dark-complexioned officer arrived as Leie and Maia managed to pull back from the spiral nebula, revealing its membership in a cluster of gauzy galaxies. And that cluster proved to be but one glittering ripple in a sinuous arch that lay draped across the void, shimmering like a cosmic aurora. The navigator exclaimed upon seeing the wondrous display.

Maia agreed it was a sight, but what did it mean? Was this a clue to whatever path Renna had taken? She had to assume so, since nothing else in the vast game-simulation seemed to make the slightest sense. Were they supposed to
find a particular destination amid this macrocosm, and “go” there? Or were the whirlpool entities meant to be guideposts in another sense?

Problems barred progress at many levels. Nudging the controls was like trying to pilot a coal barge through a narrow, twisty channel, a trial of fits and starts and overcompensations. Inertia and mechanical backlash kept jerking the image too large in scale, then too small. Moreover, Maia soon realized that nobody, not even the navigator, had any idea where in the sky they “were.”

“We don’t use galaxies to chart our way at sea,” he started to explain. “They’re too fuzzy and you need a telescope. Now, if you could show me
stars
 …”

Unable to keep her frustration from spilling out, Maia muttered, “You want stars? I’ll show you smuggy stars!” She took the controls and with a yank caused the point of view to dive straight toward one of the galactic wheels. It ballooned outward at frightful speed, causing some of the onlookers behind them to moan. Suddenly, the wall was filled with sharp, individual pinpoints, spreading out to fill the artificial sky with constellations.

But what constellations? Among the patterns sifted by her mind, no familiar friends leaped forth. No well-known markers flashed out longitude, latitude, and season to a practiced eye.

“Oh,” the navigator murmured slowly. “I get it. They’d be different, dependin’ on … which way we looked, an’ from where …” He paused, struggling with new notions implied by the wall. “It’s prob’ly not even our galaxy, is it?”

“Great insight!” Leie snorted, while Maia’s own irritable mood shifted toward sympathy. These concepts were probably difficult for a man rooted in traditional arts. “We don’t know that
any
of these galaxies is ours,” she commented. “They may all be just artificial models, arising out of a complicated game, having nothing to do with the real
universe. We better hope not, if my idea’s to mean anything. Back up again, Leie. We’ve got to try finding something familiar.”

As the island starscape receded to take its place once more among the others, Maia knew the search might prove impossible. The only intergalactic object she had much hope of recognizing was Andromeda, nearest neighbor to the Milky Way. What were the odds against catching sight of that particular spiral, from just the right angle, however long they searched?

All of this assumes my hunch is right … that maneuvering around inside this fancy pretend reality has something to do with how Renna escaped.