When, suddenly, the quiescent pieces wakened!

Maia especially loved the times when players used the spring-wound disks, which, on sensing the condition of their neighbors, would respond by buzzing and flipping their louvers with each beat of the game clock — white giving over to black, black becoming white, or mysteriously remaining motionless with the same face up until the next round.

The process was controlled by preset rules. In the classic version of Life, these were absurdly simple. A square with a black piece was defined as "alive." White side up meant "unliving." Its state during an upcoming round would depend on its neighbors' status the round before. A white piece would "come alive," turning black next turn, if exactly three of its eight neighboring squares (including corners) were black this turn. If a site was already black, it could remain so next round if it currently had two or three living neighbors. Any more or less, and it would switch back to white again.

Someone once told Maia that this simulated living ecosystems. "Among plant and animal species, whenever population density climbs too high in a neighborhood, there often follows a collapse. Everything dies. Similarly, death also reigns if things get too sparse." Ecology thrives on moderation, or so the game seemed to say.

To Maia, that just sounded like rationalization. The game got its name, she was sure, from the patterns that surged across the board just as soon as the referee gave his starting rap. From that moment, each individual game piece remained on the same spot, but its abrupt changes of state contributed to waves of black and white that crisscrossed the playing area with great speed and hypnotic complexity. Even Perkinite missionaries, standing on their portable pedestals, would lapse in their denigrations of all things male long enough to stare and sigh at the entrancing, rippling waves.

Certain initial patterns appeared to animate on their own. A compact "glider" would, if left alone, cruise from one end of the board to the other, changing shape in a four-stage pattern that repeated over and over as it inched along. Another grouping might throb in place, or send out branching limbs that budded, like flowers sending forth seeds that sprouted in their turn.

Sometimes pattern was the sole objective. There were form-generating contests, with prizes going to the most intricate final design, or to the purest image obtained after twenty, fifty, or a hundred beats. Variants using more complex rules and multicolored pieces produced even more sophisticated displays.

More often, though, the game was played as a battle between two teams. Their objective: to lay down starting conditions such that when play commenced, the sweep of shapes would carry their way, wiping clear their opponents' territory, so that the last oases of "life" would be on their side of the board.

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.

Solving the edge problem was another matter when teams were forced to use simple lines scratched on a dock or cargo hatch, playing with wind-up or sun-powered pieces. As a partial solution, men sometimes laid rows of static, unpowered black or white pieces along the rim of the playing field, to try constraining the action. Maia knew the slang term for the alternating checker border was "the mirror," although only a few life patterns would actually reflect off the fixed boundary back into the game arena. Others would simply be absorbed or destroyed.