The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany (most read books .txt) 📖

turning on his side and sitting out from under the bunk.

Snake held out the leather purse to Geo.

"Huh?" Geo asked. "Didn't you give them to Argo yet?"

Snake nodded.

"Well, why didn't she take them. Look, I don't want to see them again."

Snake pushed the purse toward him again, and added, Look ...

Geo took the purse, opened the draw string, and turned the contents out in his hand: there were three chains, on each of which was a gold coin fastened by a hole near the edge. Geo frowned. "How come these are in here?" he asked. "I thought—where are the jewels?"

In ... ocean, Snake said. Urson ... switched ... them.

"What are you talking about?" demanded Geo. "What is it?"

Don't ... want ... tell ... you ...

"I don't care what you want, you little thief." Geo grabbed him by the shoulder. "Tell me!"

Know ... from ... back ... with ... blind ... priestesses, Snake explained rapidly. He ... ask ... me ... how ... to ... use ... jewels.. when ... you ... and ... Iimmi ... exploring ... and ... after ... that ... no ... listen ... to ... thoughts ... bad ... thoughts ... bad ...

"But he—" Geo started. "He saved your life!"

But ... what ... is ... reason, Snake said. At ... end ...

"You saw his thoughts at the end?" asked Geo. "What did he think?"

You ... sleep ... please, Snake said. Lot ... of ... hate ... lot ... of ... bad ... hate ... There was a pause in the voice in his head ... and ... love ...

Geo began to cry. A bubble of sound in the back of his throat burst, and he turned onto the pillow and tried to bite through the sound with his teeth, the tiredness, the fear, for Urson, for his arm, and the change which hurt. His whole body ached, his back hurt in two sharp lines, and he couldn't stop crying.

Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.

Geo laughed. "I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous."

"How?" asked Iimmi. "When? What was it?"

"Same time you did," Geo said. "I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later."

"When?" Iimmi repeated.

"I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me."

"Then what was it you saw, we saw?"

"Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?"

"Didn't Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean."

"Right," said Geo. "Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?"

"Did you have a theory?" Iimmi asked.

"About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was."

"Oh, that," Iimmi said. "I remember. Yes."

"I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama's lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn't a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn't have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an action is a reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we've been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more."

"All right," said Iimmi.

"And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos."

"All right again," Iimmi said. "And I'll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one—something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two—something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?"

"You picked just the right word," Geo smiled. "Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?"

"I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing," Iimmi said. "It would for me."

"It did," said Geo. "Jordde wasn't what you'd call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It's apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That's why he stopped reading Urson's thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson's balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn't get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy."

"Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?"

"Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God. Now, he knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to 'convert' Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy's tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn't want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess also."

"In other words," summarized Iimmi, "he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn't want it to happen to anybody else."

"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!"

QUEST AMID FUTURITY'S RUINS

What was the strange impetus that drove a group of four widely different humans to embark on a fear-filled journey across a forbidden sea to a legendary land?

This was Earth still, but the Earth of a future terribly changed after a planet-searing disaster, a planet of weird cults, mutated beasts, and people who were not always entirely human. As for the four who made up that questing party, they included a woman who was either a goddess, a witch, or both, a four-armed boy whose humanity was open to question, and two more men with equally "wild" talents.

The story of their voyage, of the power-wielding "jewels" they sought, of the atomic and post-atomic terrors they encountered, is a remarkable science-fiction Odyssey of the days to come.

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End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany