OX by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony [Anthony, Piers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0380413922
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

DREAMS

Aquilon wiped her eyes with her fists. “This R Pentomino is a menace!” she complained. “I’m getting a headache! It just goes on and on.”

Cal pulled his head out of the innards of the machine. “I told you it was an impressive dead end after eleven hundred and three moves.”

“I know. I wanted to see for myself.”

“Try the glider,” he suggested.

“The what?”

“You have been dealing with stationary forms. There are others. Here.” He extricated himself and came over. “This is the glider.” He made the pattern of dots on her canvas-sheet:

“That’s another pentomino!” she said indignantly.

He shrugged and returned to his work. “I hope to convert this machine to a specialized oscilloscope, or facsimile thereof, so that we can translate our signals into pattern-language. I have the feeling that the pattern-entities are as eager to talk with us as we are to talk with them. Think how confusing we must be to them!”

“But we are solid and visible!” she said, working on the new figure. It had gone from [1] to [2] to [3] In fact, it was now a mirror image of its original form, turned endwise. Funny.

“Precisely. An entity whose system is based on patterns of points would find our mode of operation virtually incomprehensible.”

She made the next figure, jumping straight from one to the next without such laborious additions and erasures. [4] “Do you think Veg is all right?”

“I doubt I ever get used to the caprices of female thought,” he remarked. “Veg is with Tamme.”

“That’s what I meant.”

“Jealousy—at your age?”

She looked at the next figure: [5] “Hey—this thing repeats itself on new squares! It’s like a blinker—only it moves!”

“Precisely. Patterns can travel. The glider moves diagonally at a quarter the speed of light.”

“Speed of light?”

“An advance of one square per move is the maximum possible velocity in this game, so we call it the speed of light. The glider takes four moves to repeat itself, one square across and one down, so that is one quarter light-speed.”

She looked at it, nodding. “Beautiful!”

Veg would have said, “So are you.” Not Cal. He said: “A variant of that formation is called the Spaceship. Spaceships of various sizes can move at half the speed of light. As they go, they fire off sparks that vanish, like propulsion.”

“The sparkle cloud did that!” she cried.

“Yes. We also know of a ‘glider gun’ that fires off gliders regularly. And another figure that consumes gliders. In fact, it is possible to fire several gliders to form new figures at the point of convergence—even another glider gun that shoots back at its parent guns, destroying them.”

“If I were a pattern, I’d be very careful where I fired my gliders!” Aquilon said. “That game plays a rough game!”

“It does. As does all nature. I should think assorted defensive mechanisms would appear by natural selection, or the game would be unstable—assuming it were self-willed. The possibilities are obvious.”

“Especially when you get into three dimensions!”

“Yes. It is a three-dimensional computerized grid I am working on now.

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