Brin, David - Glory Season

by Glory Season (mobi)

The option of stimulated self-cloning lets us at last design a world with the problem of too many males permanently solved.

  10

  Maia already knew the basic rules. Lamatia Clan wanted all its daughters, winter and summer alike, to know about the "peculiar male obsession with games." Such familiarity could be useful any season, in maintaining good relations with some mannish guild.

  Games came in a wide range. Many, like Poker, Dare, and Distaff, were as popular among females as males. And although Chess was traditionally more well-liked by men, four generations of planetary supreme grandmasters had come from the small, intellectual lineage of Terrille clones. Which might help explain why ever more male aficionados had switched to the Game of Life, during the last century or so.

  Technically, any Life match was over before it began. Two men—or teams of men—faced off at opposite ends of a board consisting of anywhere from two score to several hundred intersecting horizontal and vertical lines. During the crucial preparation phase, each side took turns strategically laying rows of game pieces in the squares between the lines—choosing to place them either white or black side up—until the board was full. Simple rules were programmed into the pieces, or sometimes into the board itself, depending on how rich the players were and what kind of set they could afford.

  As a little girl, Maia used to watch in fascination as sailors from docked freighters spent hours winding up old-fashioned watch-spring game pieces, or collecting the solar-powered variety after soaking on rooftops by the piers. Each team might spend up to ten minutes between turns huddled, arguing strategy until the referee called time and they had to lay down another row on their side of the playing field. After which they would watch, arms crossed, contemptuously sneering as their opponents fussed and laid a layer of their own, on the other side. The teams would continue alternating, laying new rows of white or black pieces, until the halfway boundary was reached, and all empty squares were filled. Then everyone stepped back. After proclaiming an ancient invocation, the referee would then stretch out his staff toward the timing square.

  Most women found all of the arguments and arm waving leading up to this point profoundly tedious. Yet, whenever a major match was finally about to get under way, people would start arriving—from poor var laborers to haughty clanfolk descending from castles on the hill—all gathering to stand and watch, awaiting the tap of the referee's stick. . . .

  When, suddenly, the quiescent pieces wakened!

  Maia especially loved the times when players used the spring-wound disks, which, on sensing the condition of their neighbors, would respond by buzzing and flipping their louvers with each beat of the game clock—white giving over to black, black becoming white, or mysteriously remaining motionless with the same face up until the next round.

  The process was controlled by preset rules. In the classic version of Life, these were absurdly simple. A square with a black piece was defined as "alive." White side up meant "unliving." Its state during an upcoming round would depend on its neighbors' status the round before. A white piece would "come alive," turning black next turn, if exactly three of its eight neighboring squares (including corners) were black this turn. If a site was already black, it could remain so next round if it currently had two or three living neighbors. Any more or less, and it would switch back to white again.

  Someone once told Maia that this simulated living ecosystems. "Among plant and animal species, whenever population density climbs too high in a neighborhood, there often follows a collapse. Everything dies. Similarly, death also reigns if things get too sparse." Ecology thrives on moderation, or so the game seemed to say.

  To Maia, that just sounded like rationalization. The game got its name, she was sure, from the patterns that surged across the board just as soon as the referee gave his starting rap. From that moment, each individual game piece remained on the same spot, but its abrupt changes of state contributed to waves of black and white that crisscrossed the playing area with great speed and hypnotic complexity. Even Perkinite missionaries, standing on their portable pedestals, would lapse in their denigrations of all things male long enough to stare and sigh at the entrancing, rippling waves.

  Certain initial patterns appeared to animate on their own. A compact "glider" would, if left alone, cruise from one end of the board to the other, changing shape in a four-stage pattern that repeated over and over as it inched along. Another grouping might throb in place, or send out branching limbs that budded, like flowers sending forth seeds that sprouted in their turn.

  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.

  Row Two—Row One—Boundary Row—(permanent)

  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.

  •• IB H ••••••• I ••••

  I I I I I I I I I I I I • I I I I I

  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.

  While drying herself, she looked over her body. After months of hard labor, it was only natural she should find muscles where none had shown before. Nor did she mind the fine scars that laced her hands and forearms—all earned by honest labor. What did surprise her was a pronounced development of her breasts. Since her last inspection, they had gone from petite to appreciable—or ample—enough to be a bit sore from being jounced, the last hour or so. Of course, it was common knowledge that Lamai mothers passed on a dominant gene for this. They seldom left their var-daughters unendowed. Still, predictable or not, it was an event. One Maia had not expected to celebrate in jail.

  She had, in fact, always envisioned someday sharing it with Leie.

  Shaking her head, she refused to be drawn into bleakness. For distraction, Maia walked back to the carpet and sat down in front of the electronic Life simulator.

  If only there were a manual, or some teaching program to go with this damn game, she pondered. Maia had glimpsed men at dockside carrying around heavy reference books, which they pored over between matches. There would also be treatises on the subject, written by female anthropologists, filed at Caria University and big-city libraries. None of which helped her here.

  Those two little lights attracted her notice again. PROG MEM, one label read. Some sort of memory? For storing preplanned programs, I suppose.

  The other button said PREV.GAM.STOR.

  "Previous game storage?" She had presumed this board was new, having been shipped in for men who would now never arrive. But the light winked, so maybe there was an earlier game stored in memory.

  Guess I could replay it and
pick up a pointer or two, she thought, then noticed nearby a tiny window with a string of code letters displayed VARIANT RULE: RVRSBL CA 897W, it said mysteriously. Maia made a guess. Sometimes men changed the rules of the game, as if Life itself weren't complicated enough. It might take five living neighbors for a black square to stay alive. Or the program made squares to the left more influential than those on the right. The possibilities were endless, which helped the whole thing seem all the more pointless to most women.

  Oh, this is idiotic. I'll never learn anything from this. Maia paused, then impulsively pressed the button to see what the memory cache contained. Immediately the game board swirled into action. First the checkered boundary contracted inward from all sides till it enclosed a much smaller number of squares. She counted fifty-nine across and fifty-nine lengthwise. Surrounding the restricted game area was a border much more complex than the simple mirror pattern of before. The board flickered another time, and all at once the zone within the new boundary filled with chaos. A splotchy scattering of black dots covered the first nine rows, like choca-bits strewn across a birthday cake.