LITMIR.BIZ

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half Byzantine icon?-but written in a script completely alien to me, resembling none I’d seen before, which seemed to change as its pages turned, momentarily revealing illustrations that vanished almost instantly. He was delighted with it, and paid me far more than I would have dared to ask. Then, for the first time, he became almost friendly.

      “Dennison,” he said, “where do these come from? Why were they made? Was it simply as a challenge to me, to my intellect? I have no doubt that some of them came from hidden cultures, arts not permitted to the masses, lost civilizations, perhaps even other worlds! But why? Again, I ask you, is it deliberate? A continuing contest? To see if I, Andreas Hoogstraten, have a breaking point?” He stood. From a skeletal cabinet as convoluted as the last agony of an El Greco saint, he lifted a vessel, which I had seen before, but which I had taken simply for some far-out potter’s drug-dream. He handed it to me. Perhaps a foot high, almost opaque, it was enormously heavy.

      “Look at it, Dennison,” he said. “Do you know what it is?”

      Up close, it looked like grayish glass, but with a higher lustre, and it was much, much heavier. Like any vase, it tapered to a neck, but there the resemblance ceased, for the neck doubled back on itself to penetrate the body halfway down and emerge again in a mouth melding with the other side.

      “It is a Klein bottle, Dennison. Are you familiar with the Moebius Strip?”

      “You mean a strip of paper you give a sort of twist to and then join its ends so that in effect it has one side only?”

      “Exactly. Well, a Klein bottle is like that, only in three dimensions. Its inside is its outside and vice versa. Do you understand?”

      I said I understood.

      He took it from me, looked at it with an expression of mixed pride and anger. “I have drilled into it, Dennison. I have used a little instrument with which surgeons look into our bodies’ inmost secrets. Inside it is a complex of beautifully ground crystals, and what seem to be controls and things I cannot put a name to. So far, it is the only unknown thing that has defeated me. I have had it several years, and I know no more about it than when it came to me, but my getting it could not have been an accident. It was part of the test, the challenge.”

      Shocked at his megalomania, I fumbled for something innocuous to say. “I—I suppose you have a pretty large collection by this time, Mr. Hoogstraten?”

      He replaced the Klein bottle in the cabinet. “A large collection?” He said it with a sneer. “Dennison, I have always two or perhaps three. They do not defeat me for very long. Indeed, this is the only one I have had to keep for several years.”

      “But what do you do with them?” I asked. “Do you give them away or sell them?”

      “Certainly not. When I have solved them, when they have served their purpose, I destroy them. That is the only way for me perhaps to get revenge, you understand?”

      Frankly, I was horrified. I started to protest that some of them were treasures, that they exhibited superb craftsmanship, that surely scientists would be interested in them.

      He cut me off before I had three words out. “Never!” he cried. “When I have solved them, they are nothing! Nothing! They no longer have a soul!”

      He paid me even more than he had previously, and exacted a promise that I’d keep hunting for him; and I left telling myself that no matter what I found, I’d never go back again.

      It was five months before I did, just after I returned from my annual trip to England, and then it was because I knew I had to see her one more time. In a sense, she had never left me. I would wake at night from my Pre-Raphaelite dreams of her, despairing, wondering how ever she could have married him-not for his money, certainly. But why, why, why?

      So I went back. The thing I’d found was simple—a crude tool, mysterious only in the fact that it had no discernible function. This time, when the man-servant admitted me, I saw that she wasn’t in the room, and all the while Hoogstraten examined what I’d brought him, I kept looking at the door through which she had come and gone, wishing, hoping.

      Finally he rose. “I will take the tool,” he told me, “even though it is not of so high a quality. I shall pay four hundred only.”

      I could control myself no longer. “I haven’t see Mrs. Hoogstraten,” I said, I hoped casually.

      He stopped counting money. For moments, those cold, glistening pupils stared at me. Then, “No,” he said, ever so gently. “You see—” he smiled, “—I found out what she was.”

      CAPTIVES OF THE FLAME, by Samuel R. Delany (Part 1)

      PROLOGUE

      The green of beetles’ wings…the red of polished carbuncle…a web of silver fire. Lightning tore his eyes apart, struck deep inside his body; and he felt his bones split. Before it became pain, it was gone. And he was falling through blue smoke. The smoke was inside him, cool as blown ice. It was getting darker.

      He had heard something before, a…voice: the Lord of the Flames.… Then:

      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.

      To his left a tooth of rock jutted from the sand, also casting a double shadow. He felt unreal, light. But the backs of his hands had real dirt on them, his clothes were damp with real sweat, and they clung to his back and sides. He felt immense. But that was because the horizon was so close. Above it, the sky was turquoise—which was odd because the sand was too white for it to be evening. Then he saw the City.

      It hit his eyes with a familiarity that made him start. The familiarity was a refuge, and violently his mind clawed at it, tried to find other familiar things. But the towers, the looped roadways, that was all there was—and one small line of metal ribbon that soared out across the desert, supported by strut-work pylons. The transit ribbon! He followed it with his eyes, praying it would lead to something more familiar. The thirteenth pylon—he had counted them as he ran his eye along the silver length—was crumpled, as though a fist had smashed it. The transit ribbon snarled in mid-air and ceased. The abrupt end again sent his mind clawing back toward familiarity: I am Jon Koshar (followed by the meaningless number that had been part of his name for five years). I want to be free (and for a moment he saw again the dank, creosoted walls of the cabins of the penal camp, and heard the clinking chains of the cutter teeth as he had heard them for so many days walking to the mine entrance while the yard-high ferns brushed his thighs and forearms…but that was in his mind).

      The only other things his scrambling brain could reach were facts of negation. He was some place he had never been before. He did not know how he had gotten there. He did not know how to get back. And the close horizon, the double shadows…now he realized that this wasnot Earth (Earth of the Thirty-fifth Century, although he gave it another name, Fifteenth Century G.F.).

      But the City.… It was on earth, and he was on earth, and he was—had been—in it. Again the negations: the City was not on a desert, nor could its dead, deserted towers cast double shadows, nor was the transit ribbon broken.

      The transit ribbon!

      No!

      It couldn’t be broken. He almost screamed. Don’t let it be broken, please.…

      The entire scene was suddenly jerked from his head. There was nothing left but blue smoke, cool as blown ice, inside him, around him. He was spinning in blue smoke. Sudden lightning seared his eyeballs, and the shivering after-image faded, shifted, became … a web of silver fire, the red of polished carbuncle, the green of beetles’ wings.

      CHAPTER I

      Silent as a sleeping serpent for sixty years, it spanned from the heart of Telphar to the royal palace of Toromon. From the ashes of the dead city to the island capital, it connected what once had been the two major cities, the only cities of Toromon. Today there was only one.

      In Telphar, it soared above ashes and fallen roadways into the night.

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