Glory Season

Maia grimaced at the thought. It was an appropriate-enough image, as she might not live to ever again see stars. I wonder what time of day it is, she pondered idly while turning, scanning the walls. Then she stopped, resting her gaze on one anomalous patch. Despite her throbbing wounds, Maia hurried downstairs, then edged past the raised semicircular center stage. Where lines of incised symbols neared the unadorned forward wall, she had spotted what looked like orderly arrangements of brown smudges. They weren’t writing. To Maia’s eye they connoted something much more interesting.

“What does that look like to you?” she asked the cabin boy, pointing at a cluster of stains, just below one of the arcane symbols in the liturgical alphabet. The youth squinted, and Maia wished fervently that Brod were here, instead.

“Dunno, ma’am. Looks like a feller tossed his food. Same guk we been gettin’, I reckon.”

“Look closer,” Maia urged. “Not tossed. Dabbed. See? Carefully painted dots—a cluster of them, under one syllabary letter. And here’s another grouping.” Maia counted. There were a total of eighteen little clusters of spots, none of them alike. “See? No letter is repeated. Each symbol in the alphabet has its own, unique associated cluster! Interesting?”

“Uh … if you say so, ma’am.”

Maia shook her head. “I wonder how long it took him to figure it out.”

She considered Renna’s situation. Imprisoned for a second time on an alien world, bored half to death, despairing and exhausted, he must have stared at the riddle phrases till they blurred with the floating speckles underneath his drooping eyelids. Only then might it have occurred to him to play out a game, using the incised words as starting points. But first, they must be transformed from written letters into—

Sudden shouts floated in from the hallway. Maia turned, and seconds later a man appeared at the back of the arena, waving vigorously.

“Three o’ the bitchies just strolled round the corner, right into our hands! The bad news is, they yelled ’fore we could get ’em gagged. There’s a ruckus brewin’ back at the stairs. Cap’n says there’ll be trouble soon.”

Maia acknowledged with a curt nod, and returned to contemplating the primitive markings on the wall. Renna must have used them as a reference cipher, while working in this room.

But working on what? He still had his electronic game board with him—which the reavers would have seen as no more than a toy—so he could have experimented with countless combinations of point-clusters and rules for manipulating them. All right, picture him fiddling around with the symbols in the room where he and the prisoners were first kept. Let’s assume that from the wall writing he learned something. He learned that, somewhere else within the sanctuary, there was a better place to be … and he managed to wheedle himself into being taken to that place.

Okay, then what?

That still left the question of modality. An intellectual game was one thing. Moving through walls was another matter, entirely. Even the red-metal puzzle door, looming adamantly before Maia and Brod back in the sea-cave, had been an enigma with a clear purpose, a combination lock to open a gate. Scanning this room, she saw nothing like a gate. No way to leave, other than the one she had entered through. Nothing at all.

“Agh!” Maia cried, clenching her fists. Her left side and leg hurt and her head was starting to ache. Yet, somehow she must retrace mental steps taken by a technologically advanced alien, without even having access to the same tools he had possessed.

Groaning, she sat down on one of the benches in the first row, and laid her head in her hands. Even when a savage boom of gunfire rattled the walls above, causing ancient dust to float in soft hazes, she did not lift her tired, salty eyes.

* * *

“I’ve got it so Poulandres understands, I think. For the time being he’ll shoot to miss, one bullet at a time. That’s kept ’em back so far. If it does come to a charge, I think he’ll do what’s needful.”

Leie sat down next to Maia, about half a meter away. Her voice was hesitant, as if she felt uncertain of her welcome. Twice Leie started to speak, and Maia felt sure it would be about what had passed between them— about their long separation, and regret over the cavalier way Leie had treated their bond. No actual words emerged, yet the strangled effort alone conveyed enough to ease some of the tension. In her heart, Maia knew it was as much apology as she was likely to get. As much as she should demand.

“So,” Leie resumed in a strained voice. “What’ll it take to figure out what happened here?”

Maia exhaled heavily, at a loss where to start.

She began by summarizing the cipher key Renna had drawn upon the wall, how each cluster of dots probably represented an array of living figures on a Game of Life board. Or, more likely, a variant game, differing in its detailed ecology. Maia could perceive that each configuration dabbed on the wall might be self-sustaining given the right rule system, though it was hard to explain how she knew it.

While she told Leie about this, they were interrupted twice more by loud reports—single warning shots, fired to keep the reavers at bay. There were no cries of full-scale attack, so neither of them moved. Leie’s rapt attention encouraged Maia to accelerate her story, rapidly skimming over the violence, tedium, and danger of the last few months, but revealing her astonishing discovery of a talent—one bearing on a strange, intellectual-artistic realm.

“Lysos!” Leie whispered when the essentials were out. “And I thought my time was strange! After I heard you were ashore at Grange Head, and had a safe job in Long Valley, I decided to stay awhile at sea with—” She stopped and shook her head. “But that can wait. Go on. Does this Life stuff help us figure how Renna got out of a sealed room with no exits?”

Maia shrugged. “I told you, it doesn’t! Oh, the game can carry data, like a language transformed into another kind of symbol system. Renna must’ve translated something out of these phrases on the walls… maybe in context of stuff he learned at the Great Library, in Caria.

“But even when you have information, and know how to read it, you still need a way to act! To apply that data to the real world. To cause physical events to take place.”

“Like breaking out of jail.”

“Exactly. Like breaking out of jail.”

Leie stood up and stepped before the first row of benches, onto the semicircular stage where lay a rectangular dais-podium made of polished stone. “After he vanished, most of us took turns looking over this room,” she said. “Hoping to find secret panels and such. It wasn’t that I was trying to be helpful, not since they killed Captain Corsh and his men… and especially after I thought you’d been blown up…” Leie briefly closed her eyes, memory of pain written on her face. “Mostly, I was searching for a way to follow Renna, to make my own getaway. That’s how I can tell you there aren’t any secret panels. At least none I could recognize. Still, I did notice a thing or two.”

Maia’s dour mood kept her looking down at her hands. “What did you notice?” she asked, sullenly unresponsive.

“Get your butt up here and see for yourself.” Leie rejoined, with a hint of the old sharpness. Maia frowned, then stood and hobbled closer. Leie waited beside the broad dais, where she stooped and pointed at a row of tiny objects embedded in the side of the giant stone block. Some of them looked like buttons. Others were little metal- rimmed holes.

“What are they for?” Maia inquired.

“I was hoping you’d tell me. Each of us tried pushing them. The buttons click as if they’re supposed to do something, but nothing happens.”

“Maybe they were for turning on lights. Too bad there’s no power in the sanctuary.”

For lack of time, Maia hadn’t given any details about the military catacombs that she and Brod had explored, and which still hummed with titanic energies. Maia assumed the two networks of artificial caves were completely severed, so that hermits and treasure-hunters using this part would never stumble across the hidden defense facility, just next door.

“I said nothing happens,” Leie replied. “That doesn’t mean there’s no power.”

Maia stared at her sister. “What do you mean?”