We wish our descendants happiness. But over time one criterion alone will judge our efforts.

Survival.

JL

12

Over the following days, Maia and her new friend learned to communicate despite the thick walls separating them. From the first, Maia felt stupid and slow, especially when Renna went back to sending coded, compacted messages designed to be deciphered by the Game of Life board. Maia could not blame her, since the method was more efficient, enabling a full screen to be sent in just a few minutes. Yet it made Maia's responses seem so clumsy in comparison. One line of text was all she could manage after a day's work, and sending it left her exhausted, frustrated.

. . . DON'T . . FRET . . MAIA . . .

. . . I'LL TEACH ANOTHER CODE . . .

… FOR SIMPLE LETTERS . . . WORDS . . .

Gratefully, Maia copied down the system Renna transmitted, one called Morse. She had heard of it, she was sure. Some clans based their commercial ciphers on variants of very ancient systems. Another item that should have been in the Lamatia curriculum, she thought grimly.

O= –, P= – + + –, Q= + +

The code seemed simple enough, with each plus sign standing for a long stroke and each dash for a short one. It greatly speeded Maia's next effort, though she remained awkward, and kept making mistakes.

IF YOU KNOW MORSE WHY USE LIFE CODING ISNT IT HARDER

To this question, Renna answered,

HARDER. SUBTLER. WATCH

And to Maia's astonishment, the game board proceeded to shake her friend's letters into coruscating patterns, like a fireworks show on Founders Day.

Maia found even more amazing the next message Renna sent. Though compacted, it was long, taking up thirty-one rows by the time Maia finished laying down a snaking chain of black and white squares. Pressing the launch button set off a wild, hungry "ecology" of mutually devouring pseudo-entities that finally resolved, after many gyrations, into what looked like a picture … a crude sketch of plains and distant mountains, seen through a narrow window. It was recognizably a scene looking out from this very stone tower — not the view from Maia's window, but similar.

The other prisoner followed this with

LIFE IS UNIVERSAL COMPUTER

CAN DO MORE THAN MORSE

& HARDER TO EAVESDROP

Maia was impressed. Nevertheless she answered I DID. WHY NOT OTHERS?

Renna's reply seemed sheepish.

NOT AS CLEVER AS I THOUGHT

The game board next rippled to show a slim face with close-cropped hair, eyes rolled upward in embarrassment, shoulders in the act of shrugging. The caricature made Maia giggle in delight.

Thankfully, she hadn't damaged the Life set during that first experiment. Over the following days, Renna taught her how to connect the machine directly to the wall circuit, so she could send messages directly, instead of laboriously and dangerously touching wires by hand. Renna still made transmissions at high power every midnight, attempting to use crudely generated radio waves to contact friends somewhere out there, beyond the walls. The rest of the time, they communicated using low currents, to avoid arousing the guards.

Renna was so friendly and welcoming, reinforcing Maia's sense of a warm, maternal presence. Maia soon felt drawn into telling her story. It all came spilling out. The departure from Lamatia. Leie's loss. Her encounters with Tizbe and involvement in matters far murkier than any young var should have to deal with, newly fledged from her birth clan. Laying it out so starkly brought home to Maia how unfair it was. She'd done nothing to deserve this chain of catastrophes. All her life, mothers and matriarchs had said virtue and hard work were rewarded. Was this the prize?

Maia apologized for stumbling through the story, especially when emotion overcame her at the sending key. THIS IS HARD FOR ME, she transmitted, trying to keep her hand from trembling. Renna's reply offered reassurance and understanding, along with some confusion.

AT 16 YOU

OUGHT TO BE HAPPY

SUCH A ROTTEN SHAME

Sympathy, after so long, brought a lump to Maia's throat. So many older people forgot there had been a time when they, too, were inexperienced and powerless. She was grateful for the compassion, the shared empathy.

Conversing with her fellow prisoner was an adventure of awkward moments followed by cordial insights. Of double meanings and hilarious misunderstandings, like when they disagreed which moon hung in plain view, in the southern sky. Or when Renna kept misspelling the names of cities, or quotations from the Book of the Founders. Obviously, she was doing this on purpose, to draw Maia out of her funk. And it was working. Challenged to catch her fellow prisoner at intentional inconsistencies, Maia found herself paying closer attention. Her spirits lifted.

Soon she realized something astonishing. Even though they had never met in person, she was starting to feel a special kind of hearth-affection toward this new friend.

It wasn't so difficult when you were winter-born. Hearth feelings were predictable after many generations.

For instance, three-year-old Lamais almost always passed through a phase when they would tag after a chosen clone-sister just one class ahead of them, doing whatever that older sibling asked and pining at the slightest curt word. Later, at age four, each winter Lamai took her own turn being the adored one, spending the better part of a season taking out on a younger sister the heartbreaks she had received the year before.

During her fifth-year winter, a Lamatia Clan full daughter started looking beyond the walls, often becoming obsessed with a slightly older cloneling from a neighboring hold, usually a Trevor, or a Wheatley. That phase passed quickly, and besides, Trevors and Wheatleys were family allies. Later on, though, came a rough period when Lamai sixers seemed inevitably bound, despite all their mothers' warnings, to fixate on a woman from the tall, stately Yort-Wong merchant clan . . . which was awkward, since the Yort-Wongs had been feuding off and on with Lamatia for generations.

Knowing in advance what to expect didn't keep Lamai sixers from railing and weeping during their autumn of discontent. Fortunately, there was the upcoming Ceremony of Passage to distract them. Yet, when all was said and done, how could the brief attentions of a man ease those pangs of unrequited obsession? Even those lucky sixers chosen for sparking emerged from their unhappy Yort-Wong episode changed, hardened. Thereafter, Lamai women wore emotional invulnerability as armor. They dealt with clients, cooperated with allies, made complex commercial-sexual arrangements with seamen. But for pleasure they hired professionals.

For companionship, they had each other.

It had been different from the very start for Maia and Leie. Being vars, they could not even roughly predict their own life cycles. Anyway, hearth feelings ranged so, from almost rutlike physical passion all the way to the most utterly chaste yearnings just to be near your chosen one. Popular songs and romantic stories emphasized the latter as more noble and refined, though all but a few heretics agreed there was nothing wrong with touching, if both hearts were true. The physical side of hearthness, between two members of the female species, was pictured as gentle, solicitous, hardly like sex at all.

Maia's own experience remained theoretical, and in this area Leie was no bolder. The twins had certainly felt intimations of warmth toward others — classmates, kids they befriended in town, some of their teachers — but nothing precocious or profound. Since turning five, there had simply been no time.

Now Maia felt something stronger, and knew well what name to use, if she dared admit it to herself. In Renna she had found a soul who knew kindness, who would not judge a girl unworthy, just because she was a lowly var. It hardly mattered that she hadn't rested eyes on the object of her fixation. Maia created a picture in her mind, of a savant or high civil servant from one of the faraway sophisticated cities on Landing Continent, which would explain Renna's stiff, somewhat aristocratic way of speaking in text. No doubt she came from a noble clan, but when Maia asked, all Renna said was