Maia shrugged. "I told you, it doesn't! Oh, the game can carry data, like a language transformed into another kind of symbol system. Renna must've translated something out of these phrases on the walls . . . maybe in context of stuff he learned at the Great Library, in Caria.

"But even when you have information, and know how to read it, you still need a way to act! To apply that data to the real world. To cause physical events to take place."

"Like breaking out of jail."

"Exactly. Like breaking out of jail."

Leie stood up and stepped before the first row of benches, onto the semicircular stage where lay a rectangular dais-podium made of polished stone. "After he vanished, most of us took turns looking over this room," she said. "Hoping to find secret panels and such. It wasn't that I was trying to be helpful, not since they killed Captain Corsh and his men . . . and especially after I thought you'd been blown up. . . ." Leie briefly closed her eyes, memory of pain written on her face. "Mostly, I was searching for a way to follow Renna, to make my own getaway. That's how I can tell you there aren't any secret panels. At least none I could recognize. Still, I did notice a thing or two."

Maia's dour mood kept her looking down at her hands. "What did you notice?" she asked, sullenly unresponsive.

"Get your butt up here and see for yourself." Leie rejoined, with a hint of the old sharpness. Maia frowned, then stood and hobbled closer. Leie waited beside the broad dais, where she stooped and pointed at a row of tiny objects embedded in the side of the giant stone block. Some of them looked like buttons. Others were little metal-rimmed holes.

"What are they for?" Maia inquired.

"I was hoping you'd tell me. Each of us tried pushing them. The buttons click as if they're supposed to do something, but nothing happens."

"Maybe they were for turning on lights. Too bad there's no power in the sanctuary."

For lack of time, Maia hadn't given any details about the military catacombs that she and Brod had explored, and which still hummed with titanic energies. Maia assumed the two networks of artificial caves were completely severed, so that hermits and treasure-hunters using this part would never stumble across the hidden defense facility, just next door.

"I said nothing happens," Leie replied. "That doesn't mean there's no power."

Maia stared at her sister. "What do you mean?"

At that moment, another gunshot pealed, echoing down the hallway to resonate within the chamber, setting Maia's teeth rattling. Both girls waited in suspense, and sighed when no more shots followed. With the tip of a finger, Leie pointed to a pair of tiny metal rings, about a centimeter apart, set into the edge of the dais near the buttons. The rings surrounded thin, deep holes. Maia pressed her finger against one, and looked up, perplexed. "I don't feel anything."

"Have you got a piece of metal?" Leie asked. "Like a coinstick? A half-credit will do."

Maia shook her head. Then she recalled. "Maybe I do have something." Her right hand went to her left forearm and unstrapped the leather cover of her portable sextant. Gingerly, she drew the tiny instrument from its padded case.

"Where'd you get that?" Leie commented, watching the brass engraving of a zep'lin pop open. Maia shrugged. "It's complicated. Let's just say I found it useful, on occasion."

She unfolded the sighting arms. One of them terminated in a pointed prong — normally used as an indicator for reading numbers against a measuring wheel — that could be rotated outward. It seemed narrow enough to use as a probe.

"Good," Leie said. "Now, I don't claim to be the only one who had the idea, inspecting for electricity. Others tried, and felt nothing. But I figured, maybe the current was too low to detect by hand. Remember how we used to check those pitiful, weak saline batteries Savant Mother Claire had us make, back in silly-ass chem class? Well, I did the same thing here. When no one was looking, I inserted a coinstick and touched the metal with my tongue."

"Yes?" Maia asked, growing more interested as she slipped the narrow prong into one of the tiny holes.

"Yes indeed! I swear you can taste a faint tickle of . . ."

Leie's voice trailed off as she stopped and stared. Maia, too, looked down in astonishment at the little sextant..

Across the center of its scratched, pitted face, a blank window had come alight, perhaps for the first time in centuries. Tiny, imperfect letters, missing corners and edges, flickered, then steadied into a constant glow.

…. T© fin3 wHat is Hiioen …

"Great Mother of life!"

The exclamation made both girls look up from the transfixing sight. Still blinking in surprise, Maia saw that Captain Poulandres and one of his officers stood in the doorway at the top of the aisle, staring with dumfounded expressions.

Maia's initial thought was pragmatic. How are they able to see the sextant from all that way up there?

"I . . ." Poulandres swallowed hard. ". . . came to tell you. The pirates say they want to talk. They say . . ." He shook his head, unable to concentrate on his urgent message. "By Lysos and the sea, how did you two manage to do that!"

It dawned on Maia that the captain couldn't see the tiny letters glowing on the sextant's face. He must be looking at something else. Something above and behind her back. Together, as if pulled by the same string, she and Leie turned around, and gasped in unison.

There, spread across the huge, formerly pale front wall of the hall, now lay an immense grid of faint, microscopic lines, upon which danced myriad, multihued particles, innumerable, smaller than specks. An orgiastic, colorful spectacle of surging, flowing patterns panoplied in whirling currents, eddies, teeming jungles of simulated structure and confusion . . . ersatz chaos and order . . . death and life.

Despite all trials and experience, some aspects of character might be too deep ever to change. Once more, it was Leie who recovered first to comment.

"Uh," she said in a dry, hoarse voice, glancing sideways at Maia. "Eureka … I think . . . ?"

The effect was even more spectacular when, a while later, the pirates tried to intimidate the escapees by cutting off the lights. Power no longer flowed to the string of electric bulbs. By then, however, those of the Manitou crew not on guard had already gathered in Renna's former cell, under the storm of pigmented, convoluted shapes that slowly twisted across the "Life Wall," as they called it. The men sat in huddled groups, or knelt below the dancing display, spreading open their treasured reference books, riffling pages by the soft, multispectral glow and arguing. Although they had confirmed that the eighteen simple patterns were components of this particular pseudo-world, not even the most expert player seemed able to make any more sense of the vista of swirling shapes.

"It's magic," the chief cook concluded, in awe.

"No, not magic," the ship's doctor replied. "It's much more. It's mathematics."

"What's the difference?" asked the young ensign Maia had met on the Manitou, speaking with an upper-clan accent, trying to be blase. "They're both just symbol systems. Hypnotizing you with abstractions."

The elderly physician shook his head. "No, boy, that's wrong. Like art an' politics, magic consists of persuadin' others to see what you want 'em to see, by makin' incantations and wavin' your arms around. It's always based on claims that the magician's force of will is stronger than nature."

The colors overhead laid lambent, churning reflections across the old man's pate as he laughed aloud. "But nature doesn't give a fart about anybody's force of will! Nature's too strong to coerce, an' too fair to play favorites. She's just as cruel an' consistent to a clan mother as to the lowliest var. Her rules hold for ever'body." He shook his head, sighing. "And She has a dear-heart love of math."