Captives of the Flame Part 28

Any ideas?_)

9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (came puttering along and pa.s.sed through both Jon and Petra;) 12 to 35, 10 to 37, (and then, again) 3 to 6, 7 to 10, 9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (_We are halfway between the surface and the center of a star not unlike our sun_, said Arkor. _Note all the strange elements around._) 9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27.

7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10 (_They keep on turning into one another_, Petra said.) 7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10.

3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6 (_At this temperature you would too if you were atomic_, Jon told her.) 3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6.

9 to 27, 9 to 27, 9 to 27 (_Where's our friend?_ Arkor wanted to know.)

pi to e, pi to 2e, 2pi to 4e, 4pi to 8e, 8pi to 16e, 16pi to 32e.

(_Speak of the_ ... Jon started. _Hey, we've got to do something about that. Not only is it transcendental, it's increasing so fast he'll eventually shake this star apart._) 3 to 6, 3 to 6, 3 to 6.

(_So that's what causes novas_, said Petra.) 7 to 10, 7 to 10, 7 to 10.

(At the next oscillation, Arkor, acting as a side-coefficient, pa.s.sed through the intruder.) 32^{2}pi to 64e (Arkor got out before the second extremity was reached. The wave cycle stuttered, having been reversed end on end.) 642pi to 32e (It tried to right itself and couldn't because Jon spun through the lower end divisibility) 642pi to 16/9e (then Arkor jumped in, tail first it recovered and it resolved into:) 642pi to 4/3e, 642pi to 4/3e, 642pi to 4/3e (it quivered, its range no longer geometric).

(_Watch this_, said Petra, _About face...._ She gave it a sort of nudge, not pa.s.sing through it, so that when it whirled to catch her, she was gone, and it was going the other way:)

4/3pi to 642e, 4/3pi to 642e, 4/3pi to 642e,

(_I hope no one ever does that to me_, said Petra. _Look, the poor thing is contracting._)

4/3 to 640e, 4/3pi to 622, 4/3pi to 560, 4/3pi to 499,

(Somehow the _e_ component chanced to slip through 125. Jon moved in like a shower of anti-theta-mazons and extracted a painless cube so fast that the intruder oscillated on it three times before it knew what had happened to it:)

4/3pi to 5^{3}e, 4/3pi to 5^{3}e, 4/3pi to 5^{3}e under high gravity--very high, that is, two to three million times that of earth, such as inside a star--in such warped s.p.a.ce there is a subtle difference between 5^{3} and 125, though they represent the same number. It's like the notes E-sharp and F, which are technically the same, but are distinguished between when played by a good violinist with a fine ear.

When the root came loose, therefore, the variation threw the wave-length all off balance:) 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e, 4/3pi to 5e....

(_All right, everybody, concentrate--_)

(_There, there, there...._)

For one moment, the intruding oscillation turned, ducked, tried to escape, and couldn't. It contracted into a small ball with a volume of 4/3pi_e_^{3}, and disappeared.

_There...._

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. Then he saw the city.

It was Telphar, stuck on a desert, under a double sun. The transit ribbon started across the desert, got the length of twelve pylons, and then crumpled.

As he stood up, something caught in the corner of his eye.

His eyes moved, and he saw a woman about twenty feet away from him. Her red hair fell straight to her shoulders in the dry heat. He blinked as she approached. She wore a straight skirt and had a notebook under her arm. "Petra?" he said, frowning. It was Petra, but Petra different.

"Jon," she answered. "What happened to you?"

He looked down at himself. He was wearing a torn, dirty uniform. A prison uniform. His prison uniform!

"Arkor," said Petra, suddenly. (Her voice was higher, less sure.)

They turned. Arkor stood in the sand, his feet wide over the white hillocks. The triple scars down his face welled bright blood in the hot light.

They came together now. "What's going on?" Jon asked.

Arkor shrugged.

"What about the kids?" asked Petra.

"They're still right here," Arkor said, pointing to his head and grinning. Then his finger touched the opened scars. When he drew it away, he saw the blood and frowned. Then he looked at the City. The sun caught on the towers and slipped like bright liquid along the looping highways. "Hey," Jon said to Petra. (No, he realized; it was Petra with a handful of years lopped off.) "What's the notebook?"

She looked down at it, surprised to find it in her hands. Then she looked at her dress. Suddenly she laughed, and began to flip through the pages of the notebook. "Why, this is the book in which I finished my article on shelter architecture among the forest people. In fact this is what I was wearing the day I finished my article."

"And you?" Jon asked Arkor.

Arkor looked at the blood on his finger. "My mark is bleeding, like the night the priest put it there." He paused. "That was the night that I became Arkor, really. That was the time that I realized how the world was, the confusion, the stupidity, the fear. It was the night I decided to leave the forest." Now he looked up at Jon. "That was the uniform you were wearing when you escaped from prison."

"Yes," said Jon. "I guess it was what I was wearing when I became me, too. That was the time when freedom seemed most bright." He paused. "I was going to find it no matter what. Only somehow I felt I'd gotten sideswiped. I wonder whether I have or not."

"Have you?" asked Petra. She glanced at the City. "I guess when I finished that essay, that's when I really became myself, too. I remember I went through a whole sudden series of revelations about myself, and about society, and about how I felt about society, about being an aristocrat, even, what it meant and what it _didn't_ mean. And I suppose that's why I'm here now." She looked at the City again. "There he is,"

she nodded.

"That's right," said Jon.

They started across the sand, now, making toward the shadow of the ruined transit ribbon. They reached it quicker than they thought, for the horizon was very close. The double shadows, one a bit lighter than the other, lay like two inked brush strokes over the page of the desert.

"But how come we're in our own bodies," the d.u.c.h.ess asked, as they reached the shadow of the first pylon. "Shouldn't we be inhabiting the forms of...." Suddenly there was a sound, the shadow moved. Jon looked up at the ribbon above them and cried out.

As the metal tore away, they jumped back, and a moment later a length of the ribbon splashed down into the sand, where they had stood. They were still for a handful of breaths.

"You're darn right he's there," Jon said. "Come on."

They started again. Petra shook white grains from her notebook cover and they moved along the loose sand. A road seeped from under the desert, now, and began to rise toward Telphar. They mounted it and followed it toward the looming city. Before them the towers were dark streaks on the rich blue sky.

"You know, Petra's question is a good one," Arkor said few minutes later.

"Yeah," said Jon. "I've been thinking about it too. We seem to be in our own bodies, only they're different. Different as our bodies were at the most important moments of our lives. Maybe, somehow, we've come to a planet in some corner of the universe, where three beings almost identical to us, only different in that way, are doing, for some reason we'll never know, almost exactly what we're doing now."

"It's possible," Arkor said. "With all the myriad possibilities of worlds, it's conceivable that one might be like that, or like this."

"Even to the point of talking about talking about it?" asked Petra. She answered herself. "Yes, I guess it could. But saying all this for reasons we don't understand, and saying, 'Saying all this for reasons we don't understand....'" She shuddered. "It's not supposed to be that way.

It gives me the creeps."

There was another sound, and they froze. It was the low sound of some structure tumbling, but they couldn't see anything.

Another fifty feet, when the road had risen ten feet off the ground and the first tower was beside them, they heard a cracking noise again. The road swayed beneath them. "Uh-oh," Arkor said.