David Brin - Glory Season

“Terrific!” Maia commented, trying for herself. This verified what she had suspected, that the great wall-screen was only a window onto something much vaster—a simulated realm extending far past the rectangular edges before them. Its theoretical limits might stretch hundreds of figurative meters beyond this room. Perhaps there were no limits at all.

The eye kept grasping for analogies amid the swirling patterns. One instant, they were intertwining hairy fingers. The next, they collided ecstatically like frothy waves breaking on a seashore. Rolling, convoluted configurations writhed without hindrance across the borders of the display. By turning a little wheel on the sextant, the humans might follow, but only in abstract, as observers. Only the shapes themselves knew true liberty. They appeared to have no needs, to fear no threats, to admit no physical bounds. The thought conveyed to Maia a sense of untold freedom, which she envied.

Did Renna somehow change himself? She wondered. Did he know a secret way to join the world in there, leaving this one of rock and flesh behind? It was a fantastic notion. But who knew what powers the Phylum had developed during the millennia since the Founders established a world of pastoral stability on Stratos, turning away from the “madness” of a scientific age.

On a hunch, Maia tried pushing the buttons they had found earlier, near the little holes in the massive podium. But they proved as useless as before. Perhaps they really had once controlled something as mundane as the room lights.

Then Leie made another discovery. By bending one of the sextant’s sighting arms, another kind of simulated movement became possible. Of the men who had been watching, transfixed, several moaned aloud in awe as the shared point of view suddenly appeared to dive forward, plunging past billowing foreground simulacra, plowing through objects as intangible as clouds.

Maia felt it, too. A wave of vertigo, as if they were all falling together through an infinite sky. Gasping momentarily, she had to turn her eyes away and found that her hands were gripping the stone podium like vices. A glance at the others showed she wasn’t alone. The earlier breakthroughs had been stunning, but not like this. Never had she heard of a Life-like simulation in three dimensions! The rate of “fall” appeared to accelerate. Shapes that had dominated the scene grew larger, revealing minutia of their convoluted forms. The centermost structures ballooned outward, while those at the fringes vanished over the edge.

The falling sensation was an illusion, of course, and with a little concentration, Maia was able to make it evaporate in a sudden mental readjustment. Moving “forward” seemed now to be an exercise in exploring detail . Any object centered before them was subject to expanding scrutiny, revealing ever-finer structures within… and then finer still. There seemed no limit to how minutely a formation could be parsed.

“Stop…” Maia worked hard to swallow. “Leie, stop. Go the other way.”

Her sister turned and grinned at her. “Isn’t this great? I never imagined men had such things! Did you say something?”

“I said, stop and back up!”

“Don’t be afraid, Maia. As you explained to me, it’s just simulated—”

“I’m not afraid! Just reverse the controls and back away. Do it now.”

Leie’s eyebrows raised. “As you say, Maia. Reversing course.” She stopped pushing and started pulling gently at the little metal arm. The appearance of a forward plunge slowed, arrested, and began to withdraw. Now curling patterns in the middle receded, diminishing toward a central vanishing point while more and more bright, complex objects swarmed in from the periphery. The visceral sensation was one of pulling away, of rising up, so that each passing second meant they attained a larger, more godlike view.

It was a briefly glorious sensation, as Maia imagined it might be like to fly. Moreover, she felt a sense of restored contact with Renna, if only by sharing this thing he must also have delighted in.

At the same time, another part of her felt overwhelmed. Renna had explained that the Game of Life was only among the simplest of a vast family of pattern-generating systems, called cellular automata. When the big wall first came alight, Maia had hoped the sailors and their books might help solve this vastly more complex “ecosystem,” despite none of them being savants. But if the men had been as baffled as she by the former intricacy, this addition of a third dimension shattered all hopes of easy analysis.

In her heart, Maia felt certain there were comprehensible rules. Something in the patterns—their diverging yet oddly repetitious sweeps and curls—called this intuition to her. I could solve it, she was sure. If I had the computerized game board to work with, instead of this balky little sextant, and as many hours as Renna had in here, alone. And some of his knowledge of math.

Alas, her list of deficits exceeded assets. In frustration, she pounded the table, jiggering the little tool. “Hey!” Leie shouted, and went on to complain that it wasn’t easy piloting gently enough to keep it all from becoming a vast blur, the sextant’s wheels and arms were old, loose, in need of ample mechanical repair. Someone had let the poor machine go straight to pot, Leie insinuated over her shoulder.

It’s a wonder it still works at all, Maia thought.

At first, she had been awed by the coincidence, that her old, secondhand navigation tool could be used in this way. But then, many older instruments she had seen on shipboard featured diminutive blank windows. In former times, it must have been customary to hook up to the Old Network frequently… although Maia doubted spectacular wonder-walls were ever common, even before the Great Defense. Or the Founding, for that matter.

She leaned forward. Something had changed. Till now, the new shapes swarming in from the periphery had always appeared roughly similar to the smaller patterns vanishing into the center. But now, fingers of blackness crowded from the wings. The curling shapes seemed to roll up ever tighter, taking the form of giant balls that streamed inward as discrete units, not cloudlike swirls. Spheroids flew in from top and bottom, left and right, growing more compact, more numerous, bouncing and scattering off one another while the front wall grew blacker overall.

The last and largest swarm of balls coalesced into a new entity—a thick slab of phosphorescence. The slice of shimmering color seemed to strum like a bowstring as it crossed into sight from the lower right. As their point of view continued its apparent climb, the slab shrank in dimension. More such membranes entered the scene, linking to form a thrumming, vibrating, many-sided cell , like that of a quivering honeycomb. More cells thronged into view, becoming a multitude, then a foam, of iridescent color.

Leie was perspiring, tugging gently at the tiny sighting arm while Maia leaned forward to see the foam scintillate, fade, and in an instant, vanish!

The wall was a terrible, empty blankness. “Uh!” Maia’s twin grunted in dismay, her features glistening by the faint light of the electric bulbs behind them. “Did I break it?”

“No.” Maia assured. “The wall was pale before. The machine’s still on. Keep going.”

“You’re sure? I can go back the other way.”

“Keep going,” Maia repeated, this time firmly.

“Well, I’ll pull a little faster, then,” Leie said. Before Maia could respond, she yanked harder at the little arm. The blackness lasted another fraction of a second, just long enough for an eyeblink swarm of pinpoint sparkles to flash. Then, all at once, the colors were back! Again, the simulated point of view fell backward, climbing imperiously as waves of convoluted rainbow brightness crowded in from the borders. All of this happened in the moment it took Maia to shout, “No! Stop!”