Glory Season

"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.