Had the first officer mentioned it having to do with the rads? Did Thalia and the other prisoners break out? The possibility gladdened Maia, but in a dry and hopeless way, for anything that made the pirates upstairs more desperate only provoked more dire threat down here.
Maia suppressed her worries as she let the navigator help her toward glimpses of starlight. For a moment, it made a fine illusion. As if the screen were just a great big opening in the wall, she wished. Leading straight into a winter night.
On arriving at the doorway, she and her companion cried out at the same time, in joyful recognition. Before them, splayed across a twinkling firmament like a great blot, lay the multitendriled nebulosity known as the Claw. It grew smaller, incrementally, until familiar patterns of stars crowded in along each side.
"Took you long enough!" Leie chided as they approached. "Look, I just can't get it any closer than this."
Maia glanced at the tiny window and saw that the display was greatly changed. The numbers to the right of each letter "E" were much closer to zero.
ACQ0 -94E-1
13E+0 - 69E+1
"It is a coordinate system!" the navigator cried. "And it's got to be centered on Stratos. Can't you get them any smaller?"
Leie snapped, "If you're so smart, you try it!"
"Good idea, Leie." Maia nodded. "He's worked with tools like this all his life. Go ahead," she told the young man, who frowned uncertainly as he took over Leie's position. Maia's sister stretched, trying to stand up straight. "Careful, vril," she said. "It's touchy as a—"
She yelped as the scene shifted abruptly. The simulated image of the dark nebula swarmed forward, engulfed the scene in blackness, and then swept aside in a blur that made both twins briefly dizzy. The numbers on the display increased. Leie laughed derisively, as the young man grimaced. "It's a little balky," he commented. Then he bent closer, concentrating. "I always find I can prevent the wheels jerkin' if I twist a little while I turn. Cuts down on the backlash."
Numbers stopped growing and reversed. The constellations, which had started to warp from altered perspective, gradually resumed forms Maia knew. The Claw nebula passed again, taking up its familiar position.
Then, from the left, an object entered the view so huge and radiant the whole room lit up. "It's our sun!" the navigator called. A moment later, he gasped as another, smaller entity merged from the right. Its sharp, biting hue of blue-tinged white stabbed Maia's eyes, triggering a tingle that flowed straight down her spine. The effect was doubtless minor next to what it did to the young lieutenant. He staggered, shading his eyes with one hand, and softly moaned. "Wengel Star!"
The light spread past them, through the open door and into the hall. There was no uproar, so perhaps no one consciously noticed. Still, Maia wondered if remnant traces of wintry male indecision washed away under that shine, to be replaced by a hormonal certitude of summer. Conceivably, the stream would energize the men for what was to come.
Maia watched the sextant's diminutive display whirl rapidly as the navigator moved back and forth among the three controls.
ACQ® - 42E-0 17E-0 - 12E-0
"We're gettin' close to the limit of what I can manage," he grunted, concentrating on the glowing digits. Suddenly, the sextant emitted an unexpected sound, an audible click. The tiny numbers froze in place and the window winked.
ACQ® 10E-0 10E-0 - 10E-0
The midget number display went blank for an instant. When it lit again, the old symbols were replaced by a new set. . . .
P(ZR® - 1103.095 SIDEREAL.
"What does it mean—?" Leie began, only to be cut off as the navigator shouted. "Hey! Something's changed in the controls, too!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean the response is different. I touch 'em, and the stars barely budge now. Watch." He pushed one of the knurled wheels, and the constellations moved, but only slightly. A minute earlier, such a turn would have sent them reeling across the galaxy. Maia looked down at the sextant screen, and saw that the new reading was utterly unchanged. Realization came in a flash.
"I get it!" she cried. "It's a test!"
"A what?"
Maia spread her arms. "A test. You have to pass each phase to get to the next. First we had to figure out how to turn the machine on. Then how to find a model universe inside the huge Life game. Next step was to find our own solar system. Now we must figure out how to maneuver within the system." She didn't add that these were all skills currently rare on Stratos. At any point they might run into a barrier beyond their meager abilities.
The navigator was breathing hard, despite the hand he kept upraised to block the cutting light of Wengel Star. "Well ... in that case," he said. "The next stage oughta be easy. We both know these stars. It's Farsun time right now. Midwinter. So Wengel's on the opposite side of the sun from where we want to be." He started to bend over the sextant again.
"Let me," Maia said, realizing the light had him distracted. He stepped back to give her access to the controls. Maia took her little astronomical tool in hand and made a few tentative turns. The sun's tiny blue-white companion slipped aside, vanishing over the screen boundary. The young man breathed a ragged sigh, half regretful, half relieved.
They commenced a steep dive straight toward the larger, familiar fireball, which loomed outward in a rush, its reddish surface growing in both apparent size and mottled minutia with each passing second. A thrill coursed Maia's body as a sense of swooping motion overcame her.
Imagined heat flushed her cheek as the sun blazed by to the right, seemingly close enough to reach out and touch. Leie gasped.
In an instant it was gone, vanished "behind" them. At nearest passage, Maia had noticed that the level of detail seemed washed out, as if the simulation was never meant to represent every flicker in the star's chromosphere. That fit with her best guess, that the universe within the wall computer wasn't a perfect copy of reality.
Close enough, though. As if suddenly unleashed, constellations burst forth across the simulated heavens. Hello, friends, Maia greeted them. While seeking the known patterns of winter, she kept watch for the blue glitter of a planet, her homeworld. Soon all star positions were proper. She slowed, circled, and performed a spiral sweep. But however she hunted, no blue marble swam into view. "I don't get it. Stratos should be somewhere about here."
They stared together at the empty patch of sky. Maia dimly heard a messenger come and mutter to Leie that the tense status quo was holding in the hallway, but signs of bustling activity at the far end were making the men nervous and worried. Clearly, something was going to happen, soon.
Meanwhile Maia struggled with frustration and pride. Once upon a time, at least some folk on her world had felt comfortable enough with spaceflight to simulate it, use it in games and tests. Probably, now and then, they even ventured out—at least in order to remain able. It meant that Lysos never insisted that her heirs stay forever grounded. That must have been a later innovation.
The navigator, too, seemed puzzled, thwarted. Then, suddenly, he pointed. "There! A planet!" He frowned. "But that's not Stratos. It's Demeter."
Maia saw he was correct. The gas giant was a familiar sight, dominant member of the planetary system. "It's Demeter, all right. Sitting smack dab in the middle of the Fishtail. Oh, Lysos," she groaned.
"What's wrong?" Leie asked. "Can't you use Demeter to fine-tune—"
"It's in the wrong part of the sky!" Maia cut in. "As of a few days ago, Demeter was in the Trident. That must mean—"
"Time," the navigator agreed, looking at Maia. "We're displaced in time." His eyes widened, apparently sharing Maia's thought. They almost knocked heads bending to look again at the sextant's little display. "Sidereal? That's a word used by astronomers, isn't it?"
"Yeah," Maia replied. "It has to do with measuring time by the stars. Then the number must be—"
"A coordinate," he finished. "A date? But it's a negative number."
"The past, then. With a date set in decimal
s, instead of years and months. Let's say it's based on the same calendar. There's only a small fraction after the decimal, which implies—"
"—that the date's just after New Year, with the sun at the vernal equinox."
"So we're a quarter of an orbit and ninety degrees off! We should be looking for a springtime sky!"
This time the man took the controls, while Maia guided him. They were getting the hang of it, and things sped quickly. "Steady . . . steady . . . Port ten degrees . . . down five . . ." Stars and planets swept by, until Leie cried out in joy. The sun and Wengel Star were gone from sight, but their combined light was seen once more, reflecting off a blue-, brown-, white-, and green-hued globe that swelled rapidly into view, its continents and seas punctuated by polar caps and gauzy films of stratospheric clouds. A retinue of silvery moons swept past as the scene drove steadily toward the great azure ball.
This must be what Renna saw, when he approached in his starship, Maia realized. Envy had never flowed so strongly within her veins. I never imagined it so beautiful. My homeworld.
For the soul, it was a feast that satisfied hungers more yearning than the one in her belly. Despite the preachings of orthodox and heretic temples alike, the maternal deity, Stratos Mother, was but a lovely abstraction in comparison. How, Maia wondered, could anyone know or appreciate a world without looking on its face? One didn't ask such absurdity of human lovers.
How could we ever have abandoned this? Maia marveled, recognizing features from globes and atlases, minus all the lines and labels that made human presence seem so urgent. In fact, the vast reaches of mountain and forest and desert seemed barely touched. The view was an instant cure for vain conceit.
The approach slowed as a subjective transition took place. Formerly, they had seemed to move horizontally, heading toward the planet. Now, with ocean and islands covering the entire scene, all sensation of motion abruptly turned vertical. They were falling.
The outline of Landing Continent enlarged, sweeping to the left. The Mediant Coast gleamed. Maia briefly caught sight of checkerboard farmlands and silver rivers arched by spidery bridges, before the landmass fled at an angle and southern seas filled the scene, scintillating with profuse sunlight reflections, brushed by phalanxes of heavy clouds. To the southeast loomed a chain of narrow, pinpoint peaks which, from a distance, were detectable more by how great currents split into a thousand ruffled streamers in their wake. The combed sea changed color downstream from those jutting spires.
Maia recognized the outline of this very archipelago—the Dragons' Teeth—from the chart she and Brod had used to sail from Grimke Isle.
"How can you control the approach so fine?" Leie asked the navigator. In reply, he stepped back from the dais, raising his hands. "I felt another click, a few seconds ago. Since then, it's not been me at all. Maybe we set off a homing program, or something."
Maia sought Grimke, at the northern tip of the island chain. That monolith, where she and Naroin and others had been interned, fought, and escaped, showed no sign of a crater. No blasted, glazed hole in its center. Rather, she briefly glimpsed buildings, shimmering in a morning glow just before the isle fell off the upper border of the screen. In the center, meanwhile, a great cluster of connected stony towers loomed toward them.
Jellicoe.
And yet, not Jellicoe. Not the Jellicoe of today. What surged larger with each passing second was a thing of unmarred beauty. A hollow star-shaped glory of both nature and artifice. Every spire was adorned with edifices of polished stone or the metallic glitter of sleek, tethered airships. Within the lagoon, she counted three great cruisers, with sails not of dingy canvas but some black, filmy material that seemed to drink in sunlight, reflecting none.
All three watchers quailed as one of Jellicoe's easternmost teeth plunged toward them. There was a breathtaking rash of rock and vegetation, and instantly the scene was enveloped in a blurry stream of dark stone, flowing past like rushing fluid. "Ack!" Leie commented. No one exhaled. This is some damn simulation, Maia thought numbly.
Someone shouted terse words that were tense and excited, from the back of the room. But she had only regard for the swarming motion, decelerating in front of them.
Light returned and motion ceased with an abruptness that caused them all to stagger. The youths found themselves staring, as if through a window, into a room that was a clone to this one. A younger, better-attired clone. Reddish-colored cushions graced the benches, and the walls were uncracked, polished to a glistening sheen and rimmed with cheery banners.
"Long ago," Maia said. "It's showing what this place was like, a long time ago." She coughed behind her fist, and leaned over the sextant.
PCZR0 - 1103.095 SIDEREAL.
"The fourth coordinate." The navigator cleared his throat. "Time must be the next step."
Leie spoke hastily. "If we could move forward to the present, would it be possible to see what's going on outside, right now?"
"Might it show what happens in the future!" the man added, in a hushed tone.
Maia's thoughts whirled. Leie's question implied a machine that kept records, and was still monitoring events, as they spoke. To tap such real-time inputs would be a huge asset, in their present straits. Yet she doubted it was like that. What about all those galaxies and such? She couldn't imagine a machine capable of monitoring the universe, constantly, over thousands of years.
The navigator's idea was even wilder. Yet, in a weird way it made more sense. Maia still believed this was all a simulation, a vast, godlike cousin to the Game of Life. If so—if the facsimile took into account every variable—might it be able to project likely events, into the future? The implications were staggering, affecting everything from their present predicament to the temple's teachings about free will.
"Let's try to do something about that fourth coordinate," Maia suggested, rubbing her scratchy eyes.
The young navigator coughed twice and bent over. "We've already been usin' all the obvious movin' parts." Gently, delicately, he touched pieces of the sextant, until his hand stroked the eyepiece, where one normally looked to sight horizon and stars. The image ahead of them jiggered slightly, and the number in the little indicator screen shifted just a little. "Of course," he said, with another cough. "It's the depth-of-focus adjustment. Give me room, please."
Maia stepped back. Her eyes itched and she sniffed a smoky smell. Abruptly, at the exact same moment, she and Leie sneezed. They looked at each other, and for the first time in several minutes surveyed the room. The air had changed noticeably. There was a sooty, hazy quality.
Shouts came from the back. Maia turned to see the cabin boy hurry downstairs, calling and waving. Around his nose, he wore a torn strip of cloth.
"Ensign an' doctor want t'know . . . you havin' any luck?"
"That depends," Maia replied. "We're getting some exciting philosophical insights, but not many practical applications."
The boy looked puzzled by her reply, and anxious. "We're gettin' smoke, ma'am. Doc says it'll take a while, since we're below the pirates, but the good air's gonna get sucked out, in time. They may attack before that, when it gets hard to see."
Maia had figured as much, from the evidence stinging her nose and lungs. This time she spoke earnestly. "Please tell the doctor and the ensign ..." She turned to point at the forward wall—and instantly forgot what she had been about to say.
The image of the room's past was changing moment by moment. What had looked like an elegant, well-appointed lecture hall began deteriorating rapidly. First the banners and cushions vanished. Then, in a single, abrupt instant, cracks propagated across the walls. The artificial light, which had bathed the chamber until now, went out, leaving the depicted room visible only by a strange, luminous glow, apparently given off by the rocks themselves.
In the speeded time frame, dust could be seen settling and spreading in thin, advancing ripples, like wavelets washing ashore. Then even the dust froze in place.
"That's it," the man said, stan
ding up. On the sextant dial, the number read,
PCR© +0000.761 SIDEREAL.
There was another .click. The display went blank for two seconds, and relit.
.... i®fina what is HiDDen ...
Maia exhaled a tense breath. She had half expected, when the simulation caught up to its "present," to come face to face with images of themselves, staring back as if from a mirror. But the room ahead of them lay dark and empty. "It won't go any farther forward, in case you're wondering," the navigator said, with a note of disappointment.
Leie coughed. "This is all very interesting. But how's it helping us get out of here?"
Maia's lips pressed together. "I'm thinking!"
She glanced back and saw that the messenger boy had departed. The haze, which had already lessened visibility, caused things to get even worse when scratchiness in her eyes triggered the nictitating inner lids. From the hallway, she overheard harsh coughs and frantic mutterings.
Brin, David - Glory Season Page 60
