Martin, George R.R. - The Glass Flower

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TheGlassFlower

THE GLASS FLOWER

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TheGlassFlower

George R.R. Martin

A DF Books NERDs Release

Once, when I was just a girl in the first flush of my true youth, a young boy gave me a glass flower as a

token of his love.

He was a rare and precious boy, though I confess that I have long forgotten his name. So too was the

flower he gave me. On the steel and plastic worlds where I have spent my lives, the ancient

glassblower's art is lost and forgotten, but the unknown artisan who had fashioned my flower

remembered it well. My flower has a long and delicate stem, curved and graceful, all of fine thin glass,

and from that frail support the bloom explodes, as large as my fist, impossibly exact. Every detail is

there, caught, frozen in crystal for eternity; petals large and small crowding each other, bursting from the

center of the blossom in a slow transparent riot, surrounded by a crown of six wide drooping leaves,

each with its tracery of veins intact, each unique. It was as if an alchemist had been wandering through a

garden one day, and in a moment of idle play had transmuted an especially large and beautiful flower

into glass.

All that it lacks is life.

I kept that flower with me for near two hundred years, long after I had left the boy who gave it to me and

the world where he had done the giving. Through all the varied chapters of my lives, the glass flower

was always close at hand. It amused me to keep it in a vase of polished wood, and set it near a window.

Sometimes the leaves and petals would catch the sun and flash brilliantly for an incandescent instant; at

other times they would filter and fracture the light, scattering blurred rainbows on my floor. Often

towards dusk, when the world was dimmer, the flower would seem to fade entirely from view, and I

might sit staring at an empty vase. Yet, when the morning came, the flower would be back again. It

never failed me.

The glass flower was terribly fragile, but no harm ever came to it. I cared for it well; better, perhaps,

than I have ever cared for anything, or anyone. It outlasted a dozen lovers, more than a dozen

professions, and more worlds and friends than I can name. It was with me in my youth on Ash and

Erikan and Shamdizar, and later on Rogue's Hope and Vagabond, and still later when I had grown old on

Dam Tullian and Lilith and Gulliver. And when I finally left human space entirely, put all my lives and

all the worlds of men behind me, and grew young again, the glass flower was still at my side.

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TheGlassFlower

And, at very long last, in my castle built on stilts, in my house of pain and rebirth where the game of

mind is played, amid the swamps and stinks of Croan'dhenni, far from all humanity save those few lost

souls who seek us out—it was there too, my glass flower. On the day Kleronomas arrived.

* * * *

"Joachim Kleronomas,” I said.

"Yes."

There are cyborgs and then there are cyborgs. So many worlds, so many different cultures, so many sets

of values and levels of technologies. Some cyberjacks are half organic, some more, some less; some

sport only a single metal hand, the rest of their cyberhalves cleverly concealed beneath the flesh. Some

cyborgs wear synthaflesh that is indistinguishable from human skin, though that is no great feat, given

the variety of skin to be seen among the thousand worlds. Some hide the metal and flaunt the flesh; with

others the reverse is true.

The man who called himself Kleronomas had no flesh to hide or flaunt. A cyborg he called himself, and

a cyborg he was in the legends that had grown up around his name, but as he stood before me, he

seemed more a robot, insufficiently organic to pass even as android.

He was naked, if a thing of metal and plastic can be naked. His chest was jet; some shining black alloy

or smooth plastic, I could not tell. His arms and legs were transparent plasteel. Beneath that false skin, I

could see the dark metal of his duralloy bones, the power-bars and flexors that were muscles and

tendons, the micromotors and sensing computers, the intricate pattern of lights racing up and down his

superconductive neurosystem. His fingers were steel. On his right hand, long silver claws sprang

rakishly from his knuckles when he made a fist.

He was looking at me. His eyes were crystalline lenses set in metal sockets, moving back and forth in

some green translucent gel. They had no visible pupils; behind each implacable crimson iris burned a

dim light that gave his stare an ominous red glow. “Am I that fascinating?” he asked me. His voice was

surprisingly natural; deep and resonant, with no metallic echoes to corrode the humanity of his

inflections.

"Kleronomas,” I said. “Your name is fascinating, certainly. A very long time ago, there was another man

of that name, a cyborg, a legend. You know that, of course. He of the Kleronomas Survey. The founder

of the Academy of Human Knowledge on Avalon. Your ancestor? Perhaps metal runs in your family."

"No,” said the cyborg. “Myself. I am Joachim Kleronomas."

I smiled for him. “And I'm Jesus Christ. Would you care to meet my Apostles?"

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TheGlassFlower

"You doubt me, Wisdom?"

"Kleronomas died on Avalon a thousand years ago."

"No,” he said. “He stands before you now."

"Cyborg,” I said, “this is Croan'dhenni. You would not have come here unless you sought rebirth, unless

you sought to win new life in the game of mind. So be warned. In the game of mind, your lies will be

stripped away from you. Your flesh and your metal and your illusions, we will take them all, and in the

end there will be only you, more naked and alone than you can ever imagine. So do not waste my time.

It is the most precious thing I have, time. It is the most precious thing any of us have. Who are you,

cyborg?"

"Kleronomas,” he said. Was there a mocking note in his voice? I could not tell. His face was not built

for smiling. “Do you have a name?” he asked me.

"Several,” I said.

"Which do you use?"

"My players call me Wisdom."

"That is a title, not a name,” he said.

I smiled. “You are traveled, then. Like the real Kleronomas. Good. My birth name was Cyrain. I

suppose, of all my names, I am most used to that one. I wore it for the first fifty years of my life, until I

came to Dam Tullian and studied to be a Wisdom and took a new name with the title."

"Cyrain,” he repeated. “That alone?"

"Yes."

"On what world were you born, then?"

"Ash."

Cyrain of Ash,” he said. “How old are you?"

"In standard years?"

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Martin, George R.R. - The Glass Flower

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