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

of darkness in a face the color of shipboards gone two winters without paint.

"Geryn," Alter said. "Geryn, he isn't a spy. He's from the mainland. And Geryn, he doesn't have any papers, either. He stowed away."

"You're not a spy?" Geryn demanded again.

"No, sir," Tel repeated.

Geryn backed away. "I like you," he said. "I trust you." Slowly he turned away. Then he whirled back. "I have no choice, you see. It's too late. The message has come. So I need you." He laughed. Then the laugh stopped short as if sliced by a razor. He put his hands over his eyes, and then brought his finger down slowly. "I'm tired," he said. "Rara, you owe me rent. Pay up or I'll kick you all out. I'm tired." He walked heavily toward the bar. "Give me something to drink. In my own tavern you can give me something to drink."

Someone laughed again. Tel looked at Alter.

"Well," she said. "He likes you."

"He does?"

"Um-hm," she nodded.

"Oh," said Tel.

At the bar, Geryn drained a large glass of pale green liquid, slammed the empty glass on the board and cried out, "The war. Yes, the war!"

"Oh, here we go," Alter whispered.

Geryn ran his finger slowly along the rim of the glass. "The war," he said again. He turned suddenly. "It's coming!" he declaimed. "And do you know why it's coming? Do you know how it's coming? We can't stop it, not now, not any more. I've received the signal, so there's no hope left. We must just go ahead and try to save something, something to start and build from again." Geryn looked directly at Tel. "Boy, do you know what a war is?"

"No, sir," said Tel, which wasn't exactly true. He'd heard the word.

"Hey," someone cried from the bar. "Are we gonna get stories, great fires and destruction again?"

Geryn ignored the cry. "Do you know what the Great Fire was?"

Tel shook his head.

"The world was once much bigger than it is today," Geryn said. "Once man flew not just between island and mainland, island and island, but skirted the entire globe of the earth. Once man flew to the moon, even to the moving lights in the sky. There were empires, like Toromon, only bigger. And there were many of them. Often they fought with one another, and that was called a war. And the end of the final war was the Great Fire. That was over fifteen hundred years ago. Most of the world, from what little we know of it today, is scarred with strips of impassable land, the sea is run through with deadly currents. Only fragments of the earth, widely separated can hold life. Toromon may be the only one, for all we are sure of. And now we will have another war."

Some one from the bar yelled, "So what if it comes? It might bring some excitement."

Geryn whirled. "You don't understand!" He whipped one hand through his shocked white hair. "What are we fighting? We don't know. It's something mysterious and unnamable on the other side of the radiation barrier. Why are we fighting?"

"Because ..." began a bored voice at the bar.

"Because," interrupted Geryn, suddenly pointing directly at Tel's face, "we have to fight. Toromon has gotten into a situation where its excesses must be channelled toward something external. Our science has outrun our economics. Our laws have become stricter, and we say it is to stop the rising lawlessness. But it is to supply workers for the mines that the laws tighten, workers who will dig more tetron, that more citizens shall be jobless, and must therefore become lawless to survive. Ten years ago, before the aquariums, fish was five times its present price. There was perhaps four per cent unemployment in Toron. Today the prices of fish are a fifth of what they were, yet unemployment has reached twenty-five per cent of the city's populace. A quarter of our people starve. More arrive every day. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. Our university turns out scientists whose science we can not use lest it put more people out of work. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. Eventually the mines will flood us with tetron, too much for even the aquariums and the hydroponic gardens. It will be used for the war."

"Then what?" asked Tel.

"We do not know who or what we are fighting," repeated Geryn. "We will be fighting ourselves, but we will not know it. According to the books, it is customary in a war to keep each side in complete ignorance of the other. Or give them lies like those we use to frighten children instead of truth. But here the truth may be ..." His voice trailed off.

"What's your plan?" Tel asked.

There was another laugh at the bar.

"Somehow," and his voice was lower. "Somehow we must get ready to save something, salvage some fragment from the destruction that will come. There are only a few of us who know all this, who understand it, who know what ... what has to be done."

"What is that?" Tel asked again.

Suddenly Geryn whirled. "Drinks!" he called. "Drinks all around!" The quiet amusement and general lethargy disappeared as the people moved to the bar. "Drink up, friends, my fellows!" cried Geryn.

"Your plan?" Tel asked again, puzzled.

"I'll tell you," answered the old man, almost in a whisper. "I'll tell you. But not just yet. Not just ..." He turned back again. "Drink up!" Three men who already had their glasses gave a cheer.

"Are you with me, friends?" Geryn demanded.

"We're with you," six more cried, laughing, clinking their glasses hard on the table top as Tel looked from Alter to Rara and back.

"My plan ..." began Geryn. "Have you all had a glass? All of you? Another round for everybody. Yes, a second round!"

There was a solid cheer, now. Glass bottoms turned toward the ceiling, then whammed on the counter top again.

"My plan is to—you understand it's not just my plan, but only a small part in a great plan, a plan to save us all—my plan is to kidnap Prince Let from the palace. That's the part that we must do. Are you with me, friends?" A yell rose, and somebody had started a friendly fight at the end of the bar. Then Geryn's voice suddenly broke through the sound, low, in a grating whisper that silenced them for seconds. "Because you must be with me! The time is tonight. I have ... I have it planned." The voices halted, and then heaved to a roar. "Tonight," repeated Geryn, though hardly anyone could hear him. "I have it planned. Only you've got to be ... be with me."

Tel frowned and Alter shook her head. The old man had closed his eyes for a moment. Rara was beside him, her hand on his shoulder. "You're going to get yourself sick with all this yelling. Let me get you up to your room."

As she turned him toward the stairs, the scarred giant who had been given a drink, now rose from the table, looked straight at Geryn, then drained his glass.

Geryn nodded, drew a breath through his teeth, and then allowed Rara to lead him up the stairs as Tel and Alter watched.

The noise among the drinking men and women at the bar increased.

CHAPTER IV

She made a note on her pad, put down her slide rule, and picked up a pearl snap with which she fastened together the shoulder panels of her white dress. The maid said, "Ma'am, shall I do your hair now?"

"One second," Clea said. She turned to page 328 of her integral tables, checked the increment of sub-cosine A plus B over the nth root of A to the nth plus B to the nth, and transferred it to her notebook.

"Ma'am?" asked the maid. She was a thin woman, about thirty. The little finger of her left hand was gone.

"You can start now." Clea leaned back in the beauty-hammock and lifted the dark mass of her hair from her neck. The maid caught the ebony wealth with one hand and reached for the end of the four yards of silver chain strung with alternate pearls and diamonds each inch and a half.

"Ma'am?" asked the maid again. "What are you figuring on?"

"I'm trying to determine the inverse sub-trigonometric functions. Dalen Golga, he was my mathematics professor at the university, discovered the regular ones, but nobody's come up with the inverses yet."

"Oh," said the maid. She ceased weaving the jeweled chain a moment, took a comb, and whipped it through a cascade of hair that fell back on Clea's shoulder. "Eh ... what are you going to do with them, once you find them?"

"Actually," said Clea. "Ouch ..."

"Oh, pardon me, I'm sorry, please ..."

"Actually," went on Clea, "they'll be perfectly useless. At least as far as anyone knows now. They exist, so to speak, in a world that has little to do with ours. Like the world of imaginary numbers, the square root of minus one. Eventually we may find use for them, perhaps in the same way we use imaginary numbers to find the roots of equations of a higher order than two, because cosine theta plus I sine theta equals e to the I sine theta, which lets us ..."

"Ma'am?"

"Well, that is to say they haven't been able to do anything like that with the sub-trigonometric functions yet. But they're fun."

"Bend your head a little to the left, ma'am," was the maid's comment.

Clea bent.

"You're going to look beautiful." Four and five fingers wove deftly in her hair. "Just beautiful."

"I hope that Tomar can get here. It's not going to be any fun without him."

"But isn't the King coming?" asked the maid. "I saw his acceptance note myself. You know it was on very simple paper. Very elegant."

"My father will enjoy that a good deal more than I will. My brother went to school with the King before ... before his Majesty's coronation."

"That's amazing," said the maid. "Were they friends? Just think of it? Do you know whether they were friends or not?"

Clea shrugged.

"And, oh," said the maid, continuing, "have you seen the ballroom? All the hors d'oeuvres are real, imported fish. You can tell, because they're smaller than the ones your father grows."

"I know," smiled Clea. "I don't think I've ever eaten any of Dad's fish in my life, which is sort of terrible, actually. They're supposed to be very good."

"Oh, they are, ma'am. They are. Your father is a fine man to grow such great, good fishes. But you must admit, there's something special about the ones that come from the coast. I tasted one on my way up through the pantry. So I know."

"What exactly is it?" Clea asked, turning around.

The maid frowned, and then smiled and nodded wisely. "Oh, I know. I know. You can tell the difference."

At that moment, Jon Koshar was saying, "Well, so far you've been right." He appeared to be more or less standing (the room was dim, so his head and hands were invisible), more or less alone ("Yeah, I trust you. I don't have much choice," he added.) in the pantry of his father's mansion.

Suddenly his voice took a different tone. "Look, I will trust you; with part of me, anyway. I've been caged up for nearly five years, for something stupid I did, and for something that no matter how hard I try, I can't convince myself was all my fault. I don't mean that Uske should be blamed. But chance, and all the rest ... well, all I mean is it makes me want out that much more. I want to be free. I nearly got myself killed trying to escape from the mines. And a couple of people did get killed helping me. All right, you got me out of that stainless steel graveyard I wandered into back at the radiation barrier, and for that, thanks. I mean it. But I'm not free yet. And I still want out, more than anything in the world.

"Sure, I know that you want me to do something, but I don't understand it yet. You say you'll tell me soon. Okay. But you're riding around in my head like this, so I'm not free yet. If that's what I have to do to get free, than I'll do it. But I'm warning you. If I see another crack in the wall, another spot of light getting in, I'll claw my hands off trying to break through and to hell with what you want. Because while you're there, I can't be free."

Suddenly the light in the pantry flipped on. His sudden face went from the tautness of his last speech