I wish I had my book of ephemerides, she thought, wondering if the stationmistress at Holly Lock had thrown out her duffel yet, along with her meager possessions. The slim volume carried the positions of major sighting stars to all the accuracy she'd ever need. Without it, memory would have to do.
Maia rested her elbows on the sill of the narrow opening in the wall, and took another reference on Taranis, a compact stellar cluster where it was said the Enemy long ago laid waste to two planets before coming here to meet defeat on Stratos. Twisting a dial moved the image in her cross-hairs till it kissed the south horizon's prairie-sharp edge in the sextant's tiny mirror. She lowered the device in order to peer at the dial, and jotted another figure in her notebook.
At least there had been a ready solution to the problem of writing implements. Near the base of her makeshift observing pyramid, awkwardly covered by piled-up rags, lay the broken rain of a storage box. Maia had struggled for over an hour, soon after sunset, to heave the crate all the way up here by the window. Then, just half a second after she pushed it off, the box lost all that altitude, hitting the stone floor edge-on.The crash made a horrible racket, bringing guards to the door with muttered inquiries. But she had managed to appease the Guels, shouting that she'd only fallen while exercising. "I'm all right, though. Thank you for being concerned!"
After a long pause, the Guels finally went away, grumbling. Maia dared not count on their incuriosity surviving a repetition. Fortunately, the crash had loosened several slats, spilling paper and writing utensils onto the floor. By then, the stars were out. For the next hour, she applied her rusty navigation skills to fixing the location of this high-plains prison.
Maia lifted the notebook into Durga's wan light and added up the final result. Longitude is close to the one in the message, she thought. And latitude's nearly identical!
At first, contemplating the communique that had appeared so astonishingly on the Game of Life board, she concluded it must be a bad joke. Someone at the factory must have inserted the plea — the way, as kids, she and Leie used to carefully pry open petu nuts and replace the meat with slips of paper saying, "Help! Squirrels are holding us in a petu tree!"
Now she knew better. The message had not been coded before shipment. Whoever logged the memorandum had done so in a location very close to here. Within tens of kilometers. Yet she had seen no sign of any towns or habitations near this stone monolith. It was doubtful the countryside could support any.
In effect, that could only mean the writer dwelt in this same tower, perhaps just meters away. Maia felt a bit guilty that another person's predicament could bring such joy. I'm not happy you're in jail, she thought of her fellow prisoner. But Lysos! It's good not to be alone anymore!
They must be in similar situations — locked in storage chambers not designed as jail cells, but effective nonetheless. Yet, the other prisoner had proved resourceful. Finding herself in a storeroom filled with male-oriented recreation devices, she had managed to see in them a way to send the equivalent of messages in bottles.
Maia pondered the other inmate's ingenious plan. These electronic game sets were costly, and the matriarchs of Long Valley weren't spendthrifts. Sooner or later, they would order the games and other amenities shipped off for resale …. perhaps to some sanctuary on the coast, or a seafarers' guild . . . eventually falling into the hands of someone able to read the programmed message. Any sailor would then know at once where a person was being held against her will.
There were assumptions, of course. The Perkinite clan mothers might not act to cut their losses in the unfinished sanctuaries until absolutely sure the new drugs were working. That might take some time. Nor was that all, Maia thought cynically. Even if the games do get shipped, and assuming the messages aren't erased or read by wrong parties along the way. . . . Even if someone believes the plea, and reports it, then what?
It wasn't as though the planetary authorities had swarms of mighty aircraft, or armies to send round the world at a moment's notice, just to correct far-off injustices. What forces Caria City had, it hoarded for emergencies. More likely, some lone investigator or magistrate would be sent the long way — by sea, then by train and horseback, taking the best part of a year to arrive, if ever.
Assuming we're still here by then.
Maia wasn't sure she could hold out that long. The other prisoner had a lot more patience.
Still, it's a better plan than anything I came up with. Imagine figuring out how to do all this with a Game of Life set! Lacking a lifetime of practice, who could have created a message like that from scratch?
A man? Maia snorted disdainfully. Someone with a savant's skills, surely.
I wish I could meet her. Talk to her. Maybe there's a way.
Maia guessed it must be close to midnight. She was about to poke her head out the window again, to check the progress of the stars, when suddenly she heard it start. The nightly clicking.
Hastily, she angled her notebook into the moonlight and started making marks. A slash for every click, a dash for each beat that a pause lasted. After about twenty seconds, she stopped and read over the initial portion.
"Click, click, pause, click," she recited slowly. "Click, click, pause, pause . . . yes. I'm sure it's the same as the other night!"
Maia crammed the notebook in her belt and scrambled down the pyramid of boxes so quickly the unsteady construct teetered. Near bottom, her toe caught a fold of carpet, and she sprawled onto her hands and knees. Ignoring her scrapes, Maia came to her feet running.
"Where is it?" she whispered, concentrating. Peering through the darkness, she followed her ears to the east wall. Crouching, tracing her hand along the cool stone, she had to creep to her right, pushing bundles and boxes aside. Reaching past a pile of stiff cushions, her fingers met what felt like a small metal plate, set low near the floor. The clicking sounded very close now!
Feeling the outlines of the plate, Maia's hand brushed a tiny button in its center, which abruptly lit the area with stabbing blue electricity. With a reflexive yelp, she flew backward, landing hard. For six or eight heartbeats, Maia sat numb on the cold floor, sucking tingling fingertips before finally recovering enough to scramble up again, throwing cushions in all directions, clearing space until she saw that smaller sparks accompanied each audible click, momentarily illuminating the plate in the wall.
Funny how I never noticed that before. Probably because I was looking for secret passages and trapdoors! Just goes to show, you never learn anything useful from fantasy novels.
Until today, she hadn't imagined there might be ways to receive messages in this cell, or that those irritating clicks might really contain a code. But what else could they be? Would anything purely random, like a short circuit, repeat similar patterns two nights in succession?
Still trembling, she pulled out her notebook and pencil and returned to copying down intermittent flashes in front of her. Even with dark-adapted eyes, Maia could hardly see the marks she made. We'll worry about that by daylight, she told herself when the clicking stopped, about five minutes later. Luck is definitely taking a tack my way.
She knew there was little evidence to support such a broad conclusion. But hope was a heady brew, now that she had tasted some. Slipping the notebook under a pile of bedding, Maia wrapped herself in her makeshift blankets and tried to settle her mind for sleep.
It wasn't easy. Her thoughts collided with fantasies and improbable scenarios of rescue, such as the policewoman from Caria, arriving in a grand zep'lin, waving seal-encrusted writs. Other images were less cheering. Memories of Leie beckoned Maia back toward despondency. Drifting sporadically toward full consciousness, she wondered if the clickings were really a message. If so, was it aimed at her, specifically?