Instead, Maia turned to the back flyleaf of the book, made of a slick, synthetic material meant to protect the paper pages from moisture during long voyages. She had discovered another use for the wrapping sheet. By spreading it open and weighting the corners with stones, she acquired a flat surface that she'd scribed with thin, perpendicular lines. Between these, with a stick of charcoal taken from the fire, Maia marked arrays of tiny dots, separated by many empty spaces. Wetting a rag with spit, she wiped away the old pattern and redrew a different version.
It's more than just a matter of shapes, she thought, trying to recapture insights from last night's fireside contemplation. It had all seemed so clear, then.
There's another level than just thinking about how an individual group of dots mutates, and moves across the board. There's a relationship of some sort between the number of living dots per area — the density — and whatever next-neighbor rule you're using. If you change the number of neighbors needed for survival, you also change . . .
It was a struggle. Sometimes concepts came at her, like glowing baubles winking at the boundaries of vision, of comprehension. But crippling her was lack of vocabulary. The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she'd been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.
It gets even more beautiful if you let the rules include cells farther than next-neighbors, she thought, trying to concentrate. Experimenting in her head was a wild process, hard to keep up for long. Yet, she had briefly succeeded in picturing a Game of Life set in three dimensions, whose products had been lattice structures of enticing, complex splendor, not merely marching crystalline rows, but forms that curled into smoky, twisting patterns, impossible to visualize save for bare instants at a time.
Maia closed the book and sank back, laying a forearm across her eyes, drifting in a tidal flux somewhere between pure abstraction and memories of hopelessness. The nearby scraping sounds of Naroin, grinding stone against wood, reminded her of something long ago. Of Leie, grunting and levering a device against a huge, ornate door. Then, too, there had been the sounds of wood and metal rubbing rock.
"It's my turn to try," Leie had said, a long year ago and far away, deep under the cellars of Lamatia Hold. "Your subtle stuff didn't work, so now we'll try getting in my way!"
Maia recalled the twined snake figures. Rows of mysterious symbols. A star-shaped knob of stone that ought to have turned, clockwise, if the puzzle made any sense at all. . . .
There was a rustle of footsteps. Real noise, not recollection. A shadow occulted the sun. Maia lifted her arm and looked up to see a trim figure blocking one quarter of the sky. "I found something up there in the ruins," said a voice, reedy and young. It might have been that of a girl, except that every now and then, it cracked, briefly shooting down a whole octave to a lower register. "You ought to come, Maia. I have never seen anything like it."
She sat up, shading her eyes. A gangling boy stood looking down at her. "The reavers' practical joke," Naroin had called him, and others agreed. Young Brod was a nice enough kid. He was nearly her age, although at five, boys fresh from their mother-clans were childish, almost unformed. This one shouldn't be here at all.
Officially, Brod was a hostage, taken by the women reavers to ensure cooperation by the sailors of the ship they had hired, the Reckless. But Naroin surely had it right. The young midshipman had been left partly in jest, showing someone's warped sense of humor. "Enjoy yer next glory fall!" one raider in a red bandanna had taunted as the last winch-load lifted away, leaving the "low threat" prisoners stranded together on this lonely spire.
Maia slowly stood up, sighing because the boy had chosen her to befriend, when she would have preferred solitude. I do need the exercise, she told herself. Aloud, she said, "Lead on."
The youth's puppy-eager smile was sweet and winter-harmless. She felt sorry for the kid when spectral frost next coated the grass and trees, when the rough sailor women would surely take their frustrations out on him. Even if by chance he was able, that wouldn't relieve the tension. There wasn't a scrap of ovop leaf among the supplies.
"This way. Come on!" Brod said impatiently, hurrying ahead of her into the trees. Maia took a deep breath, sighed, and followed.
