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_THE JEWELS OF APTOR_
by SAMUEL R. DELANY
ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y.
THE JEWELS OF APTOR
Copyright (C), 1962, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Printed in U.S.A.
The waves flung up against the purple glow of double sleeplessness. Along the piers the ships return; but sailing I would go through double rings of fire, double fears. So therefore let your bright vaults heave the night about with ropes of wind and points of light, and say, as all the rolling stars go, "I have stood my feet on rock and seen the sky."
--These are the opening lines from _The Galactica_, by the one-armed poet Geo, the epic of the conflicts of Leptar and Aptor.
PROLOGUE
Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea.
She didn't feel too well, so she sat on a rock down where the sand waswet and scrunched her bare toes in and out of the cool surface.
She turned away, looked toward the water, and hunched her shoulders alittle. "I think it was awful," she said. "I think it was prettyterrible. Why did you show it to me? He was just a little boy. Whatreason could they have possibly had for doing that to him?"
"It was just a film," he said. "We showed it to you so you would learn."
"But it was a film of something that really happened."
"It happened several years ago, several hundred miles away."
"But it did happen; you used a tight beam to spy on them, and when theimage came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and--But whydid you show it to me?"
"What have we been teaching you?"
But she couldn't think, and only had the picture in her mind, vividmovements, scarlets, and bright agony. "He was just a child," she said."He couldn't have been more than eleven or twelve."
"You are just a child," he said. "You are not sixteen yet."
"What was I supposed to learn?"
"Look around you," he said. "You should see something."
But the picture in her mind was still too vivid, too bright.
"You should be able to learn it right here on this beach, in the treesback there, in the rocks, in the bleached shells around your feet. Youdo see it; you just don't recognize it." Suddenly he changed his tone."Actually you're a very fine student. You learn quickly. Do you rememberanything about telepathy? You studied it months ago."
"'By a method similar to radio broadcast and reception,'" she recited,"'the synapse patterns of conscious thoughts are read from one cranialcortex and duplicated in another, resulting in similar sensualimpressions experienced--'" Suddenly she broke off. "But I can't do it,so it doesn't help me any!"
"What about history, then?" he said. "You did extremely well during theexamination. What good does knowing about all the happenings in theworld before and after the Great Fire do you?"
"Well, it's ..." she started. "It's just interesting."
"The film you saw," he said, "was, in a way, history. That is, ithappened in the past."
"But it was so--" Again she stopped. "--horrible!"
"Does history fascinate you because it's just interesting?" he asked."Or does it do something else? Don't you ever want to know what thereason is behind some of the things these people do in the pages of thebooks?"
"Yes, I want to know the reasons," she said. "Like I want to know thereason they nailed that man to the oaken cross. I want to know why theydid that to him."
"A good question," he mused. "Which reminds me, at about the same timeas they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that theforces of the universe were to be represented by a circle, half black,half white. But to remind themselves that there was no pure force, nopurely unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black halfand a spot of black paint in the white. Isn't that interesting?"
She looked at him and wondered how he had gotten from one to the other.But he was going on.
"And do you remember the goldsmith, the lover, how he recorded in hisautobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the FabulousSalamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father suddenly smackedthe boy ten feet across the room into a rack of kettles, sayingsomething to the effect that little Cellini was too young to rememberthe incident unless some pain accompanied it."
"I remember that story," she said. "And I remember that Cellini saidthat he wasn't sure if the smack was the reason he remembered theSalamander, or the Salamander the reason he remembered the smack."
"Yes, yes!" he cried. "That's it. The reason, the reasons ... Don't yousee the pattern?"
"Only I don't know what a Salamander is," she told him.
"Well, it's like the blue lizards that sing outside your windowsometimes," he explained. "Only it isn't blue, and it doesn't sing."
"Then why should anyone want to remember it?" she grinned. It was anattempt to annoy him, but he was not looking at her, and was talking ofsomething else.
"And the painter," he was saying, "he was a friend of Cellini, youremember, in Florence. He was painting a picture of "La Gioconda." As amatter of fact, he had to take time from the already crumbling pictureof "The Last Supper" of the man who was nailed to the cross of oak topaint her. And he put a smile on her face of which men asked forcenturies, 'What is the reason she smiles so strangely?' Yes, thereason, don't you see? Just look around."
"What about the Great Fire?" she asked. "When they dropped flames fromthe skies and the harbors boiled, that was reasonless. That was likewhat they did to that boy."
"Oh no," he said to her. "Not reasonless. True, when the Great Firecame, people all over the earth screamed, 'Why? Why? How can man do thisto man? What is the reason?' But just look around you, right here. Onthis beach."
"I guess I can't see it yet," she said. "I can just see what they did tohim, and it was awful."
"Well," said the man in the dark robe, "perhaps when you stop seeingwhat they did so vividly, you will start seeing why they did it. I thinkit's time for us to go back now."
As she slid off the rock and started walking beside him, barefooted inthe sand, she asked, "That boy--I wasn't sure, he was all tied up, buthe had four arms, didn't he?"
"He did."
"You know, I can't just go around saying it was awful. I think I'm goingto write a poem. Or make something. Or both. I've got to get it out ofmy head."
"That wouldn't be a bad idea," he mumbled as they approached the treesin front of the river. "Not at all."
And several days later, and several hundred miles away ...