Captives of the Flame by Samuel R. Delany (beach read TXT) 📕

intruder oscillated on it three times before it knew what had happened to it:)

4/3pi to 53e, 4/3pi to 53e, 4/3pi to 53e under high gravity—very high, that is, two to three million times that of earth, such as inside a star—in such warped space there is a subtle difference between 53 and 125, though they represent the same number. It's like the notes E-sharp and F, which are technically the same, but are distinguished between when played by a good violinist with a fine ear. When the root came loose, therefore, the variation threw the wave-length all off balance:) 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e....

(All right, everybody, concentrate—)

(There, there, there....)

For one moment, the intruding oscillation turned, ducked, tried to escape, and couldn't. It contracted into a small ball with a volume of 4/3pie3, and disappeared.

There....

Jon Koshar shook his head, staggered forward, and went down on his knees in white sand. He blinked. He looked up. There were two shadows in front of him. Then he saw the city.

It was Telphar, stuck on a desert, under a double sun. The transit ribbon started across the desert, got the length of twelve pylons, and then crumpled.

As he stood up, something caught in the corner of his eye.

His eyes moved, and he saw a woman about twenty feet away from him. Her red hair fell straight to her shoulders in the dry heat. He blinked as she approached. She wore a straight skirt and had a notebook under her arm. "Petra?" he said, frowning. It was Petra, but Petra different.

"Jon," she answered. "What happened to you?"

He looked down at himself. He was wearing a torn, dirty uniform. A prison uniform. His prison uniform!

"Arkor," said Petra, suddenly. (Her voice was higher, less sure.)

They turned. Arkor stood in the sand, his feet wide over the white hillocks. The triple scars down his face welled bright blood in the hot light.

They came together now. "What's going on?" Jon asked.

Arkor shrugged.

"What about the kids?" asked Petra.

"They're still right here," Arkor said, pointing to his head and grinning. Then his finger touched the opened scars. When he drew it away, he saw the blood and frowned. Then he looked at the City. The sun caught on the towers and slipped like bright liquid along the looping highways. "Hey," Jon said to Petra. (No, he realized; it was Petra with a handful of years lopped off.) "What's the notebook?"

She looked down at it, surprised to find it in her hands. Then she looked at her dress. Suddenly she laughed, and began to flip through the pages of the notebook. "Why, this is the book in which I finished my article on shelter architecture among the forest people. In fact this is what I was wearing the day I finished my article."

"And you?" Jon asked Arkor.

Arkor looked at the blood on his finger. "My mark is bleeding, like the night the priest put it there." He paused. "That was the night that I became Arkor, really. That was the time that I realized how the world was, the confusion, the stupidity, the fear. It was the night I decided to leave the forest." Now he looked up at Jon. "That was the uniform you were wearing when you escaped from prison."

"Yes," said Jon. "I guess it was what I was wearing when I became me, too. That was the time when freedom seemed most bright." He paused. "I was going to find it no matter what. Only somehow I felt I'd gotten sideswiped. I wonder whether I have or not."

"Have you?" asked Petra. She glanced at the City. "I guess when I finished that essay, that's when I really became myself, too. I remember I went through a whole sudden series of revelations about myself, and about society, and about how I felt about society, about being an aristocrat, even, what it meant and what it didn't mean. And I suppose that's why I'm here now." She looked at the City again. "There he is," she nodded.

"That's right," said Jon.

They started across the sand, now, making toward the shadow of the ruined transit ribbon. They reached it quicker than they thought, for the horizon was very close. The double shadows, one a bit lighter than the other, lay like two inked brush strokes over the page of the desert. "But how come we're in our own bodies," the Duchess asked, as they reached the shadow of the first pylon. "Shouldn't we be inhabiting the forms of...." Suddenly there was a sound, the shadow moved. Jon looked up at the ribbon above them and cried out.

As the metal tore away, they jumped back, and a moment later a length of the ribbon splashed down into the sand, where they had stood. They were still for a handful of breaths.

"You're darn right he's there," Jon said. "Come on."

They started again. Petra shook white grains from her notebook cover and they moved along the loose sand. A road seeped from under the desert, now, and began to rise toward Telphar. They mounted it and followed it toward the looming city. Before them the towers were dark streaks on the rich blue sky.

"You know, Petra's question is a good one," Arkor said few minutes later.

"Yeah," said Jon. "I've been thinking about it too. We seem to be in our own bodies, only they're different. Different as our bodies were at the most important moments of our lives. Maybe, somehow, we've come to a planet in some corner of the universe, where three beings almost identical to us, only different in that way, are doing, for some reason we'll never know, almost exactly what we're doing now."

"It's possible," Arkor said. "With all the myriad possibilities of worlds, it's conceivable that one might be like that, or like this."

"Even to the point of talking about talking about it?" asked Petra. She answered herself. "Yes, I guess it could. But saying all this for reasons we don't understand, and saying, 'Saying all this for reasons we don't understand....'" She shuddered. "It's not supposed to be that way. It gives me the creeps."

There was another sound, and they froze. It was the low sound of some structure tumbling, but they couldn't see anything.

Another fifty feet, when the road had risen ten feet off the ground and the first tower was beside them, they heard a cracking noise again. The road swayed beneath them. "Uh-oh," Arkor said.

Then the road fell. They cried out, they scrambled; suddenly there was cracked concrete around them, and they had fallen. Above them was a jagged width of blue sky between the remaining edges of the road.

"My foot's caught," Petra cried out.

Arkor was beside her, tugging on the concrete slab that held her.

"Hold on a second," Jon said. He grabbed a free metal strut that still vibrated in the rubble, and jammed it between the slab and the beam it lay on. Using the wreck of an I-beam for a fulcrum, he pried it up. "There, slip your foot out."

Petra rolled away. "Is the bone broken?" he asked. "I got a friend of mine out of a mine accident that way, once." He let the slab fall again. (And for a moment he stopped, thinking, I knew what to do. I wasn't clumsy, I knew....)

Petra rubbed her ankle. "No," she said. "I just got my ankle wedged in that crevice, and the concrete fell on top." She stood up, now, picking up the notebook. "Ow," she said. "That hurts."

Arkor held her arm. "Can you walk?"

"With difficulty," Petra said, taking another step and clamping her teeth.

"Alter says to stand on your other foot and shake your injured one around to get the circulation back," Arkor told her.

Petra gritted teeth, and stepped again. "A little better," she said. "I'm scared. This really hurts. This may be a body that looks like mine, but it hurts, and it hurts like mine." Suddenly she looked off into the city. "Oh hell," she said. "He's in there. Let's go."

They went forward again, this time under the road. The sidewalks, deserted and graying, slipped past. They passed a shopping section; teeth of broken glass gaped in the frames of store windows. Above, two roads veered and crossed, making a black, extended swastika on a patch of white clouds.

Then a sudden rumbling.

Silence.

They stopped.

Now a crash, thunderous and protracted. An odor of dust reached them. "He's there," Arkor said.

"Yes," said Jon.

"I can...."

Then the City exploded. There was one instant of very real agony for Jon as the pavement beneath his feet shot up at him, and he reached his mind out as a shard of concrete knocked in his face (all the time crying, No, no, I've just become Jon Koshar, I'm not supposed to ... as a lost Prince had cried out half a year and half a universe away) and at the same time, There....

Petra got a chance to see the face of the building beside them rip off a foot before the air blast tore the notebook from her hands, and at the same time she welled her thoughts from behind the bone confines of her skull. There....

And Arkor's thoughts (he never saw the explosion because he blinked just then) tore out through his eyelids as fragmented steel tore into them. There....

It was cold, it was black. For a moment they saw with a spectrum that reached from the star-wide waves of novas to the micro-micron skittering of neutrinos. And it was black, and completely cold. A rarefied breeze of ionized hydrogen (approximately two particles per cubic rod) floated over half a light year. Once, a herd of pale photons dashed through them from a deflected glare on some dying sun a trillion eons past. Other than that, there was silence, save for the hum of one lone galaxy, eternities away. They hovered, frozen, staring into nothing, above, below, behind, contemplating what they had seen.

Then, the green of beetles' wings, and they flailed into the blood of sensation from the blackness, whirled into red flame the color of polished carbuncle, smoothly through the nerves and into the brain; then, before the blue smoke, burning blue through the lightning seared axion of their corporate organisms, they were snared within the heat and electric imminency of a web of silver fire.

CHAPTER XII

In the laboratory tower of Toron, the transparent bubble above the receiving stage brightened. In shimmering haze on the platform, the transparent figures solidified. Then Alter and Tel slipped beneath the rail on the stage and dropped down to the floor (Alter still wore the hospital robe and the cast on her left arm) while Arkor, Jon, and Petra used the metal stairway to descend. A battery of relays snapped somewhere and the scarlet heads of forty-nine switches by the window snapped to off. The globe faded.

"A bit more explanation," Petra was saying. "Hey, kids, keep quiet."

"Well, as far as the Lord of the Flames goes, on Earth anyway, it's more or less trivial and irrelevant," said Arkor. "You're still right. This war is in Toromon, not outside it."

"My curiosity is still peaked," Jon said. "So give."

"From what I gathered while I saw scanning the minds of those two who came out of the generator building with the Lord of the Flames (I should say the host of the Lord of the Flames), there's a tribe behind the barrier which resembles more or less what man might have been forty or fifty thousand years ago. Physically they're squat, thick-boned, and have the elements of a social system. Mentally they're pretty thick and squat too. The Lord of the Flames got into one of them just about when he was at age four. Then he gave the kid about sixty thousand years worth of technical information. So he began building all sorts of goodies, forcing his people to help him, using some equipment from a ruined city that dates from pre-Great Fire times behind the barrier. That's how the generators and the anti-aircraft guns got constructed."

"Our war is still going on," Jon said.

"Well, the Lord of the Flames is no longer with us," said Petra. "We've chased it to the other end of the universe. Now that we've removed what external reason there was for the war, we've got to think about the internal ones."

"What are you going to do immediately about the kids?" Jon asked.

"I think the best thing for them to do is to go off to my estate for a little while," Petra said.

"It's on an island, isn't it?" Tel asked.

"That's right," Petra said.

"Gee, Alter. Now I can teach you how to fish, and we'll be right by the sea."

"What about Uske?" Arkor asked. "You can either walk into his room and interrupt an obscene dream he's having, and present your case and be arrested for