The contests could appear brutal at times, just like nature. Besides gliders and other benign forms, there were "eaters," which consumed other patterns, then rebounded off the edge to sweep back across the playing field as voracious as ever. More sophisticated designs passed harmlessly off most patterns, but devoured any other eater they came across!
Ship crews and guilds hoarded techniques, tricks, and rules of thumb for generations, yet the strategy of laying down initial rows before the game was still more art than science. Frequently both teams wound up staring in surprise at what they'd wrought … patterns surging back and forth for a good part of an hour in ways unexpected by either side. Draws were frequent. During summers, occasional fistfights erupted over accusations of cheating, though Maia was at a loss how one could cheat in Life.
She had to admit there was something aesthetic about the game's essential simplicity and the intricate, endless variety of forms it produced. As a child she had found it alluring, in an eerie sort of way, and had even tried asking questions. It took some time getting over the taunting and humiliation that had brought on, more from her own peers than from men. Anyway, by age four she found herself reaching the same conclusion as so many other women on Stratos.
So what?
Yes, the patterns were interesting up to a point, beyond which the passion males poured into the game became symbolic of the gulf separating the sexes. Other pastimes, like card games, at least involved people looking at or talking to each other, for instance. It was hard to comprehend treating little bits — things — as if they were really alive.
Yet here she was, in prison, without anyone else to look at or talk to, with all the books read and nothing to do but stare at the unfolded game board. Maia pondered. I've already tried a thing or two girls don't usually do — like studying navigation.
That was merely unusual, though. Not unheard-of. This game was another matter. If there were women on Stratos who had ever achieved expert status at Life, they were almost certainly labeled terminally strange.
Well, better strange than batty, she decided. Anger and loneliness waited on the wings, like unwelcome aunts, ready to drop in at the slightest invitation, provoking useless, unproductive tears. I’ll go crazy without something to keep my mind busy.
The board felt smooth. There were no physical pieces. Instead, each tiny white square would turn ebony at the command of an electro-optic controller buried in the machine itself. She recalled the old-time clatter and clack with fondness. This system felt chill and remote.
Let's see if I can figure it out.
A couple of small lights winked on the display. She had no idea what PROG MEM or PREV.GAME.SAV meant. Those could be explored later, when she had mastered the simplest level. As soon as she turned on the machine, half of the squares along the four edges of the game board had gone black, so that an alternating checker sequence snaked around the perimeter. She recalled that this was one of several ways of dealing with the edge problem, or what to do when moving Life patterns reached the limits of the playing field.
Ideally, in the perfect case, there wouldn't be an edge at all, just an endless expanse to give the patterns room to grow and interact. That was why big tournament games featured immense boards, and took days, even weeks, to set up. Maia recalled how, one day at Lamatia Hold, Coot Bennett had told her a secret. Sophisticated electronic versions of Life, such as the one in front of her, could actually keep track of patterns even after they had "left the stage," pretending that the artificial entities continued existence even several board-lengths away, in some sort of imaginary space! At first, Maia had been convinced he was having her on. Then she felt thrilled, wondering if any other woman knew about this.
Later she realized — of course the Caria savants knew, since they controlled the factories that made the game sets. They just didn't care. For a machine to go on pretending that imaginary objects existed in some fictitious realm the player couldn't even see was like the unreal multiplying with itself, manipulating tokens of replicas of symbols, which in turn stood for make-believe things, which were themselves emblems. . . . Some of the mathematician clans at Caria University probably studied such abstractions, but Maia doubted they ever made the man-error of mistaking them for real.
