_THE JEWELS OF APTOR_ by SAMUEL R. DELANY ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y. THE JEWELS OF APTOR Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved Printed in U.S.A. The waves flung up against the purple glow 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." --These are the opening lines from _The Galactica_, by the one-armed poet Geo, the epic of the conflicts of Leptar and 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."