The Jewels of Aptor
By Samuel R. Delany.
Imprint
This ebook is the product of many hours of hard work by volunteers for Standard Ebooks, and builds on the hard work of other literature lovers made possible by the public domain.
This particular ebook is based on a transcription from Project Gutenberg.
The source text and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. They may still be copyrighted in other countries, so users located outside of the United States must check their local laws before using this ebook. The creators of, and contributors to, this ebook dedicate their contributions to the worldwide public domain via the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. For full license information, see the Uncopyright at the end of this ebook.
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces ebook editions of public domain literature using modern typography, technology, and editorial standards, and distributes them free of cost. You can download this and other ebooks carefully produced for true book lovers at standardebooks.org.
The waves flung up against the purple glow
These are the opening lines from The Galactica, by the one-armed poet Geo, the epic of the conflicts of Leptar and Aptor
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.”
The Jewels of 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 was wet and scrunched her bare toes in and out of the cool surface.
She turned away, looked toward the water, and hunched her shoulders a little. “I think it was awful,” she said. “I think it was pretty terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was just a little boy. What reason 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 the image came in on the vision screen, you made a film of it, and—But why did you show it to me?”
“What have we been teaching you?”
But she couldn’t think, and only had the picture in her mind, vivid movements, 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 trees back there, in the rocks, in the bleached shells around your feet. You do 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 remember anything 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 cranial cortex and duplicated in another, resulting in similar sensual impressions 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 the examination. What good does knowing about all the happenings in the world 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, it happened 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 the reason is behind some of the things these people do in the pages of the books?”
“Yes, I want to know the reasons,” she said. “Like I want to know the reason they nailed that man to the oaken cross. I want to know why they did that to him.”
“A good question,” he mused. “Which reminds me, at about the same time as they were nailing him to that cross, it was decided in China that the forces of the universe were to be represented by a circle, half black, half white. But to remind themselves that there was no pure force, no purely unique reason, they put a spot of white paint in the black half and 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 his autobiography that at age four, he and his father saw the Fabulous Salamander on their hearth by the fire; and his father suddenly smacked the boy ten feet across the room into a rack of kettles, saying something to the effect that little Cellini was too young to remember the incident unless some pain accompanied it.”
“I remember that story,” she said. “And I remember that Cellini said that he wasn’t sure if the smack was the reason he
