Doorways in the Sand by Roger Zelazny Read Free Book Online Page B

masterfully scripted passage. When one has nothing better to do one can always hope.
    As, through that port beside which I reclined, presumably resting, only half listening to the heated sounds exchanged between Charv and Ragma, I regarded the Earth and then the star-dotted field beyond it, immense in the distance of distances, I was taken by a glorious sensation doubtless compiled of recovery from my earlier discomforts, a near-metaphysical satisfaction of my acrophiliac tendencies and a general overlay of fatigue that spread slowly, lightly across me, like a delicious fall of big-flaked snow. I had never been at this altitude before, witnessing the distances, struggling to gain perspective, overwhelmed by the consideration of space, space and more space. The beauty of basic things, things as they are and things as they might be, reached out to me then, and I recalled some lines I had scribbled long ago, on regretfully giving up my math major rather than take a degree in it:
    Lobachevsky alone has looked on Beauty bare.
    She curves in here, she curves in here. She curves out there.
    Her parallel clefts come together to tease
    In un-callipygianous-wise;
    With fewer than one hundred eighty degrees
    Her glorious triangle lies.
    Her double-trumpet symmetry Riemann did not court-
    His tastes to simpler-curvedness, the buxom Teuton sort!
    An ellipse is fine for as far as it goes,
    But modesty, away!
    If I'm going to see Beauty without her clothes
    Give me hyperbolas any old day.
    The world is curves, I've heard it said,
    And straightway in it nothing lies.
    This then my wish, before I'm dead:
    To look through Lobachevsky's eyes.
    I felt very drowsy. I had been into and out of consciousness periodically and had no idea as to how much time had elapsed. My watch, of course, was of no assistance. I resisted going away again, however, both to prolong the aesthetic seizure and to keep abreast of developmenta about me.
    I was uncertain as to whether my rescuers were aware of my wakefulness, in that I was facing away from them, reclined and loosely restrained in a hammocklike affair of soft webbing. And even if they were aware, the fact that they were conversing in a non-terrestrial language doubtless provided them with a feeling of insulation. At some earlier time I had slowly realized that the thing that would most have surprised them probably surprised me even more. This was the discovery that, when I gave it a piece of my divided attention, I could understand what they were saying.
    A difficult phenomenon to describe better, but I'll try: If I listened intently to their words, they swam away from me, as elusive as individual fish in a school of thousands. If I simply regarded the waters, however, I could follow the changing outline, the drift, pick out the splashes and sparklings. Similarly, I could tell what they were saying. Why this should be I had no idea.
    And I had ceased to care after a time, for their dialogue was quite repetitious. It was considerably more rewarding to consider the curtate cycloid described by Mount Chimborazo if one were positioned somewhere above the South Pole, to see this portion of the surface as moving backward with respect to the orbital progression of the body.
    My thoughts suddenly troubled me. Where had that last one really come from? It felt beautiful, but was it mine? Had some valve given way in my unconscious, releasing a river of libido that cut big chunks of miscellanea from the banks it rushed between, to deposit them in shiny layers of silt up front here where I normally take my ease? Or could it be a telepathic phenomenon-me in a psychically defenseless position, two aliens the only other minds for thousands and thousands of miles about? Was one of them a logophile?
    But it did not seem that way. I was certain that my apprehension of the language, for example, was not a telepathic thing. Their speech kept coming into better and better focus-individual words and phrases now, not just