The Glass Flower by George R. R. Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

shards of slivered glass flying everywhere. One comes at me and I make it gone. But the others, the others ... they curve like smart missiles, become an aerial flotilla, attack. Rieseen Jay is pierced in a thousand places, and the blood drips from her eyes, her breasts, her open mouth. The monster is a little girl again, crying.
    “A moralist,” I say to Kleronomas.
    He ignores me, turns to look at Craimur Delhune and the shadow boy. Tattoos flame to new life upon the youth's skin, and in his hand a sword appears and takes fire. Delhune takes a step back, unnerved. The boy touches his flesh, mouths some silent oath, rises warily.
    “An altruist,” I say. “Giving succor to the weak."
    Kleronomas turns. “I hold no brief with slaughter."
    I laugh at him. “Maybe you're just saving them for yourself, cyborg. If not, you had better grow wings fast, before your prize flies away."
    His face is cold. “My prize is in front of me,” he says.
    “Somehow I knew that,” I reply, donning my plumed helmet. My armor is alive with golden highlights, my sword is a spear of light.
    My armor is as black as the pit, and the designs worked upon it, black on black, are of spiders and snakes and human skulls and faces a-writhe with pain. My long straight silver sword turns to obsidian, and twists into a grotesquerie of barbs and hooks and cruel spikes. He has a sense of drama, this damned cyborg. “No,” I say. “I will not be cast as evil.” I am gold and silver once more, shining, and my plumes are red and blue. “Wear the suit yourself if you like it so much."
    It stands before me, black and hideous, the helmet open on a grinning skull. Kleronomas sends it away. “I need no props,” he says. His grey-and-white ghost flitters at his side, plucking at him. Who is that? I wonder yet again.
    “Fine,” I say. “Then we'll dispense with the symbols.” My armor is gone.
    I hold out my bare, open hand. “Touch me,” I say. “Touch me, cyborg."
    As his hand reaches out to mine, metal creeps up his long dark fingers.
    * * * *
    In the game of mind, even more than in life, image and metaphor are everything.
    The place beyond time, the endless fog-shrouded plain, the cold sky and the uncertain earth beneath us, even that is illusion. It is mine, all of it, a setting—however unearthly, however surreal—against which the players may act out their tawdry dramas of dominance and submission, conquest and despair, death and rebirth, rape and mind-rape. Without my shaping, my vision and the visions of all the other painlords through the eons, they would have no ground below, no sky above, no place to set their feet, no feet to set. The reality offers not even the scant comfort of the barren landscape I give them. The reality is chaos, unendurable, outside of space and time, bereft of matter or energy, without measurement and therefore frighteningly infinite and suffocatingly claustrophobic, terribly eternal and achingly brief. In that reality the players are trapped; seven minds locked into a telepathic gestalt, into a congress so intimate it cannot be borne by most. And therefore they shrink away, and the very first things we create, in a place where we are gods (or devils, or both), are the bodies we have left behind. Within these walls of flesh we take our refuge and try to order chaos.
    The blood has the taste of salt; but there is no blood, only illusion. The cup holds a black and bitter drink; but there is no cup, only an image. The wounds are open and raw, dripping anguish; but there are no wounds, no body to be wounded, only metaphor, symbol, conjuring. Nothing is real, and everything can hurt, can kill, can evoke a lasting madness.
    To survive, the players must be resilient, disciplined, stable, and ruthless; they must possess a ready imagination, an extensive vocabulary of symbols, a certain amount of psychological insight. They must find the weakness in their opponent, and hide their own phobias thoroughly. The rules are