“I’m going into the Arena?”
“Where else? It’s the logical progression. Now your viewpoint will be entirely limited to one participant in the game-yourself.”
“Get it over with.”
“You’ll still have the ability to intervene in the ecology, just as before-the commands will be interpreted by your suit and transmitted to the controlling computer. The added complexity, of course, is that you’ll have to structure your game around your own survival at each step.”
“And if-when-I win?”
“You’ll be reunited with Risa, I promise. Free to go. All the rest. You can even sell your story, if you can find anyone who’ll believe you.”
“Know a good ghostwriter?”
He’d winked at me then. “Enjoy the game, Nozomi. I know I will.”
Now I stood on my designated spot and waited.
The lights went out.
I had a sense of rapid subliminal motion all around me. The drones were whisking out and positioning the inert Strobelife creatures in their initial formations. The process lasted a few seconds, performed in total silence. I could move, but only within the confines of the suit, which had now become rigid apart from my fingers.
Unguessable minutes passed.
Then the first stammering pulse came, bright as a nuclear explosion, even with the visor’s shielding. My suit lost its rigidity, but for a moment I didn’t dare move. On the faceplate’s head-up display I could see that I was surrounded by Strobelife creatures, rendered according to their electrical field properties. There were grazers and predators and all the intermediates, and they all seemed to be moving in my direction.
And something was dreadfully wrong.
I’d never asked myself whether the creature we’d examined on the yacht was an adult. Now I knew it wasn’t.
The afterflash of the flash died from my vision, and as the seconds crawled by, the creatures’ movements became steadily more sluggish, until only the smallest of them were moving at all.
Then they, too, locked into immobility.
As did my suit, its own motors deactivating until triggered by the next flash.
I tried to hold the scene in my memory, recalling the large predator whose foreclaw might scythe within range of my suit, if he was able to lurch three or four steps closer to me during the next pulse. I’d have to move fast, when it came-and on the pulse after that, I’d have another two to contend with, nearing me on my left flank.
The flash came-intense and eye-hurting.
No shadows; almost everything washed out in the brilliance. Maybe that was why Strobelife had never evolved the eye: it was too bright for contrast, offering no advantage over electrical field sensitivity.
The big predator-a cross among a tank, armadillo, and lobster-came three steps closer and slammed his foreclaw into a wide arc that grazed my chest. The impact hit me like a bullet.
I fell backward, into the dirt, knowing that I’d broken a rib or two.
The electrical field overlay dwindled to darkness. My suit seized into rigidity.
My hand grasped something. I could still move my fingers, if nothing else. The gloves were the only articulated parts of the suit that weren’t slaved to the pulse cycle.
I was holding something hard, rocklike. But it wasn’t a rock. My fingers traced the line of a carapace; the pielike fluting around the legs. It was a small grazer.
An idea formed in my mind. I thought of what Icehammer had said about the Strobeworld system; how there was nothing apart from the planet, the pulsar, and a few comets.
Sooner or later, one of those comets would crash into the star. It might not happen very often, maybe only once every few years, but when it did it would be very bad indeed: a massive flare of X rays as the comet was shredded by the gravitational field of the pulsar. It would be a pulse of energy far more intense than the normal flash of light; too energetic for the creatures to absorb.
Strobelife must have evolved a protection mechanism.
The onset of a major flare would be signaled by visible light, as the comet began to break up. A tiny glint at first, but harbinger of far worse to come. The creatures would be sensitized to burrow into the topdirt at the first sign of light, which did not come at the expected time…
I’d already seen the reaction in action. It was what had driven the thrashing behavior of our specimen before it dropped to its death on the cabin floor. It had been trying to burrow; to bury itself in topdirt before the storm came.
The Arena wasn’t Strobeworld, just a clever facsimile of it-and there was no longer any threat from an X-ray burst. But the evolved reflex would remain, hardwired into every animal in the ecology.
All I had to do was trigger it.
The next flash came, like the brightest, quickest dawn imaginable. Ignoring the pain in my chest, I stood up-still holding the little grazer in my gloved hand.
But how could I trigger it? I’d need a source of light, albeit small, but I’d need to have it go off when I was completely immobile.
There was a way.
The predator lashed at me again, gouging into my leg. I began to topple, but forced myself to stay upright, if nothing else. Another gouge, painful this time, as if the leg armor was almost lost.
The electrical overlay faded again, and my suit froze into immobility. I began to count aloud in my head.
I’d remembered something. It had seemed completely insignificant at the time; a detail so trivial that I was barely conscious of committing it to memory. When the specimen had shattered, it had done so in complete darkness. And yet I’d seen it happen. I’d seen glints of light as it smashed into a million fragments.
And now I understood. The creature’s quartz deposits were highly crystalline. And sometimes-when crystals are stressed-they release light; something called piezoluminescene. Not much; only the amount corresponding to the energy levels of electrons trapped deep within lattices-but I didn’t need much, either. Not if I waited until the proper time, when the animals would be hypersensitized to that warning glint. I counted to 35, what I judged to be halfway between the flash intervals. And then let my fingers relax.
The grazer dropped in silence toward the floor.
I didn’t hear it shatter, not in vacuum. But in the total darkness in which I was immersed, I couldn’t miss the sparkle of light.
I felt the ground rumble all around me. Half a minute later, when the next flash came from the ceiling, I looked around.
I was alone.
No creatures remained, apart from the corpses of those that had already died. Instead, there were a lot of rocky mounds, where even the largest of them had buried themselves under topdirt. Nothing moved, except for a few pathetic avalanches of disturbed dirt. And there they’d wait, I knew-for however long it was evolution had programmed them to sit out the X-ray flare.
Thanks to the specimens on the yacht, I happened to know exactly how long that time was. Slightly more than four and a half hours.
Grinning to myself, knowing that Nozomi had done it again-cheated and made it look like winner’s luck-I began to stroll to safety, and to Risa.
SYNTHETIC SERENDIPITY by Vernor Vinge
