Glory Season

"What you aren't taught, and my private theory, is that Lysos only adopted sexual separatism because Perkinite secessionists were the strongest group of malcontents willing to follow her into exile. They provided the raw material Lysos used to make her stable world, isolated and protected from the ferment of the hominid realm."

Never had Maia heard the Founder spoken of like this. With respect, but of an almost-collegial sort, almost as if Re

For a long time, Re

"You? But you crossed interstellar space! Wouldn't sailors res—"

"Respect that?" Re

Maia nodded. It was a name boys called each other when they wanted to be cruel.

"That's me," Re

Re

That evening's Life match was a disaster.

Sixteen hundred game pieces, fully wound, had been divided into two sets of stacks on each side of a cargo hatch grooved with forty vertical lines crossed by forty horizontal. Maia and Re

As the visiting team, she and Re

She smiled back tentatively, and handed him the first tightly-wound piece. He put it in the extreme lower right corner of the board, white side up.

They had talked over strategy earlier. "We'll keep it simple," Re

While Re

The first row was finished. At once, the cook and cabin boy began laying down forty pieces of their own.

They used no notes, although Maia saw them confer once. A few seamen observed idly from the quarterdeck stairs, whittling sticks of soft wood into lacy, finely curled sculptures of sea animals.

When the boys signaled their turn finished, Re

So they laid another forty, mostly white side up, seeding enough strategically located black pieces so that when the game commenced and all the wound-up springs were released, a set of pulsing geometric patterns would embark on self-sustaining lifespans, setting forth to take part in the game's brief ecology.

At least, we hope so.

It went on that way for some time as the sun set beyond the billowing, straining jib. Each side took turns laying forty disks, then watching and trying to guess what the other team was up to. There came one interruption when the wind shifted and the chief bosun called all hands to the rigging. Dashing to their tasks, sailors hauled lanyards and turned cranks in a whirl of straining muscles. The tack maneuver was accomplished with brisk efficiency, and all was calm again before Maia finished forty breaths. Naroin leaped down from the sheets, landing in a crouch. She gri

"Those devils," Re

Differences began to creep in after the tenth row. Suddenly, the cook and cabin boy began laying down a completely different pattern. Maia recognized a glider gun, which was designed to fire gliders across the board. She also saw what could only be a cyclone — a configuration with the attribute of sucking to its doom any moving life pattern that came nearby. She pointed out the incipient design to Re

"You're right. That'd put our guardian in danger, wouldn't it? Maybe we should move him to one side. To the right, do you think?"

"That would interfere with our short fence," she pointed out. "We've already laid two rows for that pattern."

"Mm. Okay, we'll shift the guardian leftward, then."

Maia tried to visualize what the game board would look like when completed. Already she could see how entities now in place would evolve during the first two, three, even five or six rounds. This particular area of hatch cover would be crossed by a newly launched mother ship. That area over there would writhe in alternating black and white swirls as a mustard seed turned round and round . . . a pretty but deceptively potent form. When she tried to follow the path of projectiles from the other side, Maia came to a horrified realization — one set of gliders would carom off the mirror-edge and come back spearing obliquely toward the very corner they had worked and pla

Re

"No, look!" she said, urgently. "What if we build our own glider gun . . . over there! We could set it to fire back into our own territory, intercepting their—"

"What?" Re