“That’s right,” said Geo, lying back in his bunk. “Which is sort of understandable. They didn’t come in contact with any of the technology of Aptor, and so it might well have seemed that way.”
Iimmi leaned back also. “Yeah,” he said. “I can see how the same thing almost—almost might have happened to me. If everything had been the same.”
Geo closed his eyes. Snake came down and took the top bunk; and when he slept, Snake told him of Urson, of his last thoughts, and surprisingly, things he mostly knew.
Emerging from the forecastle the next morning, he felt bright sunlight slice across his face. He had to squint, and when he did so, he saw her sitting cross-legged on the stretched canvas topping of a suspended lifeboat.
“Hi, up there,” he called.
“Hello,” she called down. “How are you feeling?”
Geo shrugged.
Argo slipped her feet over the gunwale and with paper bag in hand, dropped to the deck. She bobbed up next to his shoulder, grinned, and said, “Hey, come on back with me. I want to show you something.”
“Sure.” He followed her.
Suddenly she looked serious. “Your arm is worrying you. Why?”
Geo shrugged. “You don’t feel like a whole person. I guess you’re not really a whole person.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Argo. “Besides, maybe Snake will let you have one of his. How are the medical facilities in Leptar?”
“I don’t think they’re up to anything like that.”
“We did grafting of limbs back in Aptor,” Argo said. “A most interesting way we got around the antibody problem, too. You see—”
“But that was back in Aptor,” Geo said. “This is the real world we’re going into now.”
“Maybe I can get a doctor from the temple to come over,” she shrugged. “And then, maybe I won’t be able to.”
“It’s a pleasant thought,” Geo said.
When they reached the back of the ship, Argo took out a contraption from the paper bag. “I salvaged this in my tunic. Hope I dried it off well enough last night.”
“It’s your motor,” Geo said.
“Um-hm,” said Argo. She put it on a low set of lockers by the cabin’s back wall.
“How are you going to work it?” he asked. “It’s got to have that stuff, electricity.”
“There is more than one way to shoe a centipede,” Argo assured him. She reached behind the locker and pulled up a strange gizmo of glass and wire. “I got the lens from Sis,” she explained. “She’s awfully nice, really. She says I can have my own laboratory all to myself. And I said she could have all the politics, which I think was wise of me, considering. Don’t you?” She bent over the contraption. “Now, this lens here focuses the sunlight—isn’t it a beautiful day—on these thermocouples. I got the extra metal from the ship’s smith. He’s sweet. Hey, we’re going to have to compare poems from now on. I mean I’m sure you’re going to write a whole handful about all of this. I certainly am. Anyway, you connect it up here.”
She fastened two wires to two other wires, adjusted the lens, and the tips of the thermocouple glowed red. The armature tugged once around its pivot, and then tugged around once more. Geo glanced up and saw Snake and Iimmi standing above them, looking over the rail on the cabin’s roof. They grinned at each other, and then Geo looked back at the motor. It whipped around steadily, gaining speed until it whirred into an invisible copper haze. “Look at that thing go,” breathed Argo. “Will you just look at that thing go!”
Colophon
The Jewels of Aptor
was published in 1962 by
Samuel R. Delany.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Ben Steinberg,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2013 by
Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg.
The cover page is adapted from
After the Sunset, Landscape from Åland,
a painting completed in 1886 by
Victor Westerholm.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
April 19, 2023, 4:03 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-r-delany/the-jewels-of-aptor.
The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.
Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Copyright pages exist to tell you that you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you that the writing 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. The United States public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the United States to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission.
Copyright laws are different all over the world, and the source text or artwork in this ebook may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws before using this ebook. Standard Ebooks makes no representations regarding the copyright status of the source text or artwork in this ebook in any country other than the United States.
Non-authorship activities performed on items that are in the public domain—so-called “sweat of the brow” work—don’t create a new copyright. That means that nobody can claim a new copyright on an item that is in the public domain for, among other things, work like digitization, markup, or typography. Regardless, the contributors to this ebook release their contributions under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, thus dedicating to the worldwide public domain all
