"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 Renna had known Lysos personally. Anyone hearing this would have to believe one basic truth — the man was, indeed, from another star.

For a long time, Renna looked out across the sea, contemplating vistas Maia couldn't begin to picture. Then he shrugged. "I ramble too much. We started talking about how sailors are taught to scorn a man who relies on tools he doesn't understand. It's the major reason they despise me.

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

"Respect that?" Renna chuckled. "Alas, they also know my ship is the product of vast factories, built mostly by robots, and that I couldn't control the least part of it without machines almost smarter than I am, whose workings I barely comprehend. You know what that makes me? The savants have spread mocking fairy tales. Ever hear of the Wissy-Man?'

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

"That's me," Renna finished. "Helpless Wissy-Man. Dispatched by fools, slave to his tools. Rescued by vars after crossing the stars."

Renna gave a short laugh, almost a snort. It did not sound amused.

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 Renna joined the other passengers for dinner, eating from chipped porcelain bowls, looking out over choppy seas. Then, with an hour of daylight remaining, they went back to await their opponents. The junior cook and a cabin boy arrived a few minutes later, the former still wiping his hands on his apron. They don't take us very seriously, Maia guessed. Not that she blamed them.

As the visiting team, she and Renna were invited to make the first move. Maia swallowed nervously, almost dropping the pieces she carried, but Renna grinned and whispered, "Remember, it's just a game."

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," Renna had said. "I learned a few tricks while sitting around in jail. But I was mostly trying to write messages or paint pictures. I'll bet it's lots different with someone opposing you, trying to wreck what you create." Renna had sketched on a notepad what he called a "very conservative" pattern. Maia recognized some of the primitive forms. One cluster of black tokens in the left tier would sit and "live" forever if left untouched by other moving pattern of black dots. Their strategy would be to try to defend this oasis of life until the time limit, concentrating on defense and making only minimal forays into enemy territory with gliders, wedges, or slicers. He would do nicely.

While Renna laid down that first row, the boys nudged each other, pointing and laughing. Whether they actually saw naivete in the design, or were just trying to rib the neophytes, it was unnerving. Worse, from Maia's perspective, were the jibes of women spectators. Especially the and the southlanders, who clearly thought this exercise profoundly male-silly. A female crew member named Inanna whispered in a comrade's ear, and they both laughed. Maia felt sure the joke was about her. She was doing herself no good, nor was it clear what Renna was going to learn. Then why are we doing it?

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, Renna took a long look and then shrugged. "Looks just like our first row. Maybe it's coincidence. Might as well continue with our plan."

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 grinned at Maia and gave thumbs-up before sauntering back to a spot along the port rail favored by the female crew members, who smoked pipes and gossiped quietly as game preparations resumed.

"Those devils," Renna said after eight rows had been laid. Maia looked where he pointed, and momentarily saw what he meant. Apparently, their opponents had copied the same static "oasis" formation to sit in their most protected corner. In fact, she realized. They're mimicking us right along! Only slight variations could be seen along the left-hand side. What's the purpose of that? Are they making fun of us?

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 Renna, who concentrated, and finally nodded.

"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 planned so hard to protect!

Renna scratched his head when she pointed out the incipient disaster. "Looks like we're cooked," he said with a frown. Then he winced as Maia's fingernails bit his arm.

"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?" Renna cut in, and Maia was briefly afraid she'd overstepped, injecting her own ideas into what was essentially his design. But he nodded in growing excitement. "Ye-e-s, I think it might . . . work." He reached out and squeezed her shoulders, leaving them tingling. 'That'd do it if we got the timing right. Of course, there's the problem of debris, after the gliders collide. . . ."