“The plates seem to always go back where they started,” Brod commented. “Come, Maia. Let’s see if we can push two at once.”
“Airright,” she sighed. “I’ll try this one with a horse etched on it. Ready? Go.”
At first she thought her chosen plate was one of those that wouldn’t budge, then it began gliding under her hand, building up momentum in response to her constant pushing. She let go after it had crossed three of its own body lengths, but it drifted onward, now slowing with each passing second, until it collided at an angle with the hexagon Brod had pushed, carrying the image of a sailing ship. The two caromed off each other, moving in new directions for several more seconds before coming to a stop. Then each of them reversed course, and the pair went through a negative version of the same collision. Finally both of the plates drifted back to rest at their starting positions. Two minutes after starting the experiment, the wall was back as they had found it, a jumble of hexagons laid out in a pattern that made no immediate sense. Maia exhaled heavily.
Unfortunately, there was a problem inherent in her “shared context” insight. For all she and Brod knew, the puzzle might be based on some fad current a thousand years ago, and now long forgotten. Perhaps a certain drinking song had been popular at the time, featuring most of these symbols. Almost any man of that era might have known the relationship between, say, the bee rendered in one plate and the house etched on another. One clever inscription seemed to show a slice of bread dripping globs of butter or jam. Another showed an arrowhead, trailing fire.
Maia changed her mind. It had to be based on something longer lasting.
Clearly, all rules had exceptions.
A growling sound distracted Maia, accompanied by an unpleasant churning in her stomach. Her bruised body wanted to be fed, the sooner the better. Yet, in order to have a chance of doing so, she must ignore it. Somehow, she and Brod would have to make it through what had apparently stymied countless interlopers before them. The only difference being that those others—hermits, tourists, explorers, pirates—had presumably come by boat in peace, able to leave again. For Maia and Brod, the motivation was stronger than greed or curiosity. Their only chance of surviving lay in getting beyond this wall.
“Sorry there’s no sauce, or fire to cook it, but it’s fresh. Eat up!”
Maia stared down at the creature that lay on the ground in front of her crossed legs, still flopping slightly. Emerging from a trance of concentration, she blinked at the unexpected sight of a fish, where none had been before. Turning to look at Brod, she saw new lacerations that bled fine lines across his chest and legs and arms. “You didn’t climb back
The boy nodded. “Low tide. Saw some stranded critters on the bar. Anyway, we needed water. Here, tip your head back and open wide.”
Maia saw that he carried in the crook of one arm a sodden ball of fabric, made of bits of canvas and his own rolled-up shirt. These he held out, dripping. With sudden eagerness arising from a thirst she hadn’t recognized till now, Maia did as told. Brod wrung a stream of bitter saltwater, tanged with a faint hint of blood, into her mouth. She swallowed eagerly, overlooking the unpleasant taste. When finished drinking, she picked up the fish and bit into it ravenously, as she had seen sailors do.
“Mm… fank you, Broth… Mm del-ishush …”
Sitting beside her, Brod chewed a fish of his own. “Pure self-interest. Keep up your strength, so you can get me outta here.”
His confidence in her safecracking abilities was inspiring. Maia only wished it were well-founded. Oh, there had been progress, the last ten hours or so. She now knew which plates would move and which wouldn’t. Of the stationary ones, some served as simple barriers, or bumpers against which moving tokens might bounce or reflect. A few others, by a process she was never able to discern clearly, seemed to
Unfortunately, there weren’t direct shots from movable hexagons to all the rigid ones. Nor would all combinations produce the absorbtion plus gong. Maia soon realized the solution must entail getting several plates going at the same time, arranging multiple collisions so that pieces would enter certain specific slots during the brief interval allowed.
There she counted on Brod. He knew many of the emblems from their use as labels in shipboard life.
Refreshed by food and drink, though not fully sated, they resumed experimenting for as long as the dim light lasted. That wasn’t very long, unfortunately. Outside, it might remain day for several more hours. But even with their irises slitted wide, too little illumination pierced cracks in the cave wall to allow work past late afternoon, when Maia and Brod had to stop.
In darkness, huddled together for warmth, they listened to the tide return. Lying with her head on Brod’s chest, Maia worried about Renna. What were the reaver folk doing to him? What purpose did they have in mind for the man from the stars?
Baltha and her crowd definitely had reason to make common cause with Kiel’s Radicals, back when Renna languished in Perkinite hands. Perkinism preached taking Stratoin life much farther along the track designed by Lysos, toward a world almost void of variation, completely dedicated to self-cloning and stability. It suited the interests of both groups of vars to fight that.
Rads wanted the opposite, a
Ironically, Baltha’s cutthroat gang of reavers had a goal far less broad in scope, more aimed at self- interest. As Baltha hinted back on the Manitou, she and her group wanted no change in the way of life Lysos had ordained, only to shake things up a little.
Maia recalled the var-trash romance novel she had read back in prison, about a world spun topsy-turvy, in which stodgy clans collapsed along with the stable conditions that had made them thrive, opening fresh niches to be filled by upstart variants. She also remembered. Renna’s comments on Lysian biology—how it had been inspired by certain lizards and insects, back on Old Earth.