There's another level than just thinking about how an individual group of dots mutates, and moves across the board. There's a relationship of some sort between the number of living dots per area — the density — and whatever next-neighbor rule you're using. If you change the number of neighbors needed for survival, you also change . . .

It was a struggle. Sometimes concepts came at her, like glowing baubles winking at the boundaries of vision, of comprehension. But crippling her was lack of vocabulary. The notions she fought with needed more than the simple algebra she'd been grudgingly taught at Lamai Hold. More and more she resented how they had robbed her of this, arguably her one talent, driving her from math and other abstractions by the simple expedient of making them seem boring.

It gets even more beautiful if you let the rules include cells farther than next-neighbors, she thought, trying to concentrate. Experimenting in her head was a wild process, hard to keep up for long. Yet, she had briefly succeeded in picturing a Game of Life set in three dimensions, whose products had been lattice structures of enticing, complex splendor, not merely marching crystalline rows, but forms that curled into smoky, twisting patterns, impossible to visualize save for bare instants at a time.

Maia closed the book and sank back, laying a forearm across her eyes, drifting in a tidal flux somewhere between pure abstraction and memories of hopelessness. The nearby scraping sounds of Naroin, grinding stone against wood, reminded her of something long ago. Of Leie, grunting and levering a device against a huge, ornate door. Then, too, there had been the sounds of wood and metal rubbing rock.

"It's my turn to try," Leie had said, a long year ago and far away, deep under the cellars of Lamatia Hold. "Your subtle stuff didn't work, so now we'll try getting in my way!"

Maia recalled the twined snake figures. Rows of mysterious symbols. A star-shaped knob of stone that ought to have turned, clockwise, if the puzzle made any sense at all. . . .

There was a rustle of footsteps. Real noise, not recollection. A shadow occulted the sun. Maia lifted her arm and looked up to see a trim figure blocking one quarter of the sky. "I found something up there in the ruins," said a voice, reedy and young. It might have been that of a girl, except that every now and then, it cracked, briefly shooting down a whole octave to a lower register. "You ought to come, Maia. I have never seen anything like it."

She sat up, shading her eyes. A gangling boy stood looking down at her. "The reavers' practical joke," Naroin had called him, and others agreed. Young Brod was a nice enough kid. He was nearly her age, although at five, boys fresh from their mother-clans were childish, almost unformed. This one shouldn't be here at all.

Officially, Brod was a hostage, taken by the women reavers to ensure cooperation by the sailors of the ship they had hired, the Reckless. But Naroin surely had it right. The young midshipman had been left partly in jest, showing someone's warped sense of humor. "Enjoy yer next glory fall!" one raider in a red bandanna had taunted as the last winch-load lifted away, leaving the "low threat" prisoners stranded together on this lonely spire.

Maia slowly stood up, sighing because the boy had chosen her to befriend, when she would have preferred solitude. I do need the exercise, she told herself. Aloud, she said, "Lead on."

The youth's puppy-eager smile was sweet and winter-harmless. She felt sorry for the kid when spectral frost next coated the grass and trees, when the rough sailor women would surely take their frustrations out on him. Even if by chance he was able, that wouldn't relieve the tension. There wasn't a scrap of ovop leaf among the supplies.

"This way. Come on!" Brod said impatiently, hurrying ahead of her into the trees. Maia took a deep breath, sighed, and followed.

The sheer island prominence had once been settled. That much had been clear as soon as the last load of internees arrived atop the plateau, hearing the black winch box shut down with an electronic buzz and booby-trapped clank. Early exploration uncovered tumbled, vine-encrusted ruins, remnants of ancient walls. The fringes of extensive edifices could be seen before the summit of the ridgetop was obscured by dense forest.

Brod had taken it upon himself to continue surveying the interior, especially since Maia and Naroin lost the raft dispute. He had tried to cast his vote along with them, only to learn that a boy's opinion wasn't solicited or welcome. The women crewfolk figured they knew enough about sailing to dispense with the advice of a raw, city-bred midshipman. At the time, Maia had thought it a needless slight.

"It's some distance up this way, into the thicket," Brod told her, pushing and occasionally hacking a path with a stick. "I wanted to find the center of all this devastation. Did it happen all at once, or was this settlement abandoned slowly, to let nature do the work?"

Walking just behind him, Maia felt free to smile. When they had first met, he had introduced himself as "Brod Starkland," carelessly still appending the name of his motherclan. Naroin knew of the house, prominent in the city of Enheduanna, near Ursulaborg. Still, it was a kid's mistake to let it slip.. The boy was going to have to shuck his posh, Mediant Coast accent and learn man-dialect, real quick.

On further thought, perhaps Brod had been left here with the full agreement and approval of his crewmates, to take some starch out of him, or simply to get him out of their hair. Somehow, Maia doubted he was prime pirate material. Maybe he and I are alike in that way. Nobody particularly wants or needs us around.

The trail continued past tall, gnarly trees and tangled roots, mixed with broken stonework. Brod spoke over his shoulder. "We're almost there, Maia. Get ready for an eye-opener."

Still smiling indulgently, Maia noted that a clearing was about to open a short distance ahead. Probably a very big ruin, filled with stones so large that trees could not grow. She had seen some like that, during the horseback flight across Long Valley. Perhaps Lamatia Hold would look that way, centuries from now. It was something to contemplate.

Just as the trees ended, Brod stepped to the right, making room for Maia. At the same time, he thrust out a protective arm. "You don't want to get too close …"

At that moment, Maia stopped listening. Stopped hearing much of anything. A soundless roar of vertigo swelled as she halted, staring over a sudden, sheer precipice.

Steepness, all by itself, wouldn't have stunned her. The cliffs surrounding this island-prison were as abrupt, and higher still. But they lacked the texture of this deep bowl in front of her, which had been gouged with violence out of the peak's very center. The surface of the cavity was glassy smooth, as if rock had flowed until abruptly freezing in place, like cooling molasses.

What happened? Was it a volcano? Might it still be active? The material was darkly translucent, reminding her of northern Glacier's ancient ice, back in the remote northlands.

There and there, Maia thought she could perceive blocky fautlines, as if the rock just behind the fused layer was rendered by levels or strata, subdivided into partitions, catacombs, parallel geologic features from the planet's ancient crust.

Such surfacial contemplations were just how her foremind kept busy while the rest jibbered. "Ah . . . ah . . ." she commented succinctly.

"Exactly what I said at first sight," Brod nodded, agreeing solemnly. "That sums it in a kedger's egg."

Maia wasn't sure why neither she nor Brod mentioned his discovery to the others. Perhaps the unspoken consensus came from their being the two youngest, least-influential castaways, both recently jettisoned by those they were supposed to think of as "family." Anyway, it seemed doubtful any of the castaways would be able to shed light on the origins of the startling crater. The women seemed intimidated by the thicket, and avoided going any deeper than necessary to cut wood.