By George R. R. Martin

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.

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?”

“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?”

“Of course.”

I shrugged. “Close to two hundred. I’ve lost count.”

“You look like a child, like a girl close to puberty, no more.”

“I am older than my body,” I said.

“As am I,” he said. “The curse of the cyborg, Wisdom, is that parts can be replaced.”

“Then you’re immortal?” I challenged him.

“In one crude sense, yes.”

“Interesting,” I
said. “Contradictory. You come here to me, to Croan’dhenni and its
Artifact, to the game of mind. Why? This is a place where the dying
come, cyborg, in hopes of winning life. We don’t get many immortals.”

“I seek a different prize,” the cyborg said.

“Yes?” I prompted.

“Death,” he told me. “Life. Death. Life.”

“Two different things,” I said. “Opposites. Enemies.”

“No,” said the cyborg. “They are the same.”

* * *

Six hundred standard years ago, a creature known in legend
as The White landed among the Croan’dhenni in the first starship they
had ever seen. If the descriptions in Croan’dhic folklore can be
trusted, then The White was of no race I have ever encountered, nor
heard of, though I am widely traveled. This does not surprise me. The
manrealm and its thousand worlds (perhaps there are twice that number,
perhaps less, but who can keep count?), the scattered empires of Fyndii
and Damoosh and g’vhern and N’or Talush, and all the other sentients who
are known to us or rumored of, all this together, all those lands and
stars and lives colored by passion and blood and history, sprawling
proudly across the light-years, across the black gulfs that only the
volcryn ever truly know, all of this, all of our little universe . . .
it is only an island of light surrounded by a vastly greater area of
greyness and that fades ultimately into the black of ignorance. And this
only in one small galaxy, whose uttermost reaches we shall never know,
should we endure a billion years. Ultimately, the sheer size of things
will defeat us, however we may strive or scream; that truth I am sure
of.

But I do not defeat
easily. That is my pride, my last and only pride; it is not much to face
the darkness with, but it is something. When the end comes, I will meet
it raging.

The White was like
me in that. It was a frog from a pond beyond ours, a place lost in the
grey where our little lights have not yet shone on the dark waters.
Whatever sort of creature it might have been, whatever burdens of
history and evolution it carried in its genes, it was nonetheless my
kin. Both of us were angry mayflies, moving restlessly from star to star
because we, alone among our fellows, knew how short our day. Both of us
found a destiny of sorts in these swamps of Croan’dhenni.

The White came
utterly alone to this place, set down its little starship (I have seen
the remains: a toy, that ship, a trinket, but with lines that are
utterly alien to me, and deliciously chilling), and, exploring, found
something.

Something older than itself, and stranger.

The Artifact.

Whatever strange
instruments it had, whatever secret alien knowledge it possessed,
whatever instinct bid it enter; all lost now, and none of it matters.
The White knew, knew something the native sentients had never guessed,
knew the purpose of the Artifact, knew how it might be activated. For
the first time in—a thousand years? A million? For the first time in a
long while, the game of mind was played. And The White changed, emerged
from the Artifact as something else, as the first. The first mindlord.
The first master of life and death. The first painlord. The first
lifelord. The titles are born, worn, discarded, forgotten, and none of
them matter.

Whatever I am, The White was the first.

* * *

Had the cyborg asked to meet my Apostles, I would not have
disappointed him. I gathered them when he left me. “The new player,” I
told them, “calls himself Kleronomas. I want to know who he is, what he
is, and what he hopes to gain. Find out for me.”

I could feel their
greed and fear. The Apostles are a useful tool, but loyalty is not for
them. I have gathered to me twelve Judas Iscariots, each of them hungry
for that kiss.

“I’ll have a full scan worked up,” suggested Doctor Lyman, pale weak eyes considering me, flatterer’s smile trembling.

“Will he consent to
an interface?” asked Deish Green-9, my own cyberjack. His right hand,
sunburned red-black flesh, was balled into a fist; his left was a silver
ball that cracked open to exude a nest of writhing metallic tendrils.
Beneath his heavy beetling brow, where he should have had eyes, a
seamless strip of mirrorglass was set into his skull. He had chromed his
teeth. His smile was very bright.

“We’ll find out,” I said.

Sebastian Gayle
floated in his tank, a twisted embryo with a massive monstrous head,
flippers moving vaguely, huge blind eyes regarding me through turgid
greenish fluids as bubbles rose all around his pale naked flesh. He is a Liar came the whisper in my head. I will find the truth for you, Wisdom.

“Good,” I told him.

Tr’k’nn’r, my Fyndii
mindmute, sang to me in a high shrill voice at the edge of human
hearing. He loomed above them all like a stickman in a child’s crude
drawing, a stickman three meters tall, excessively jointed, bending in
all the wrong places at all the wrong angles, assembled of old bones
turned grey as ash by some ancient fire. But the crystalline eyes
beneath his brow ridge were fervid as he sang, and fragrant black fluids
ran from the bottom of his lipless vertical mouth. His song was of pain
and screaming and nerves set afire, of secrets revealed, of truth
dragged steaming and raw from all its hidden crevasses.

“No,” I said to him.
“He is a cyborg. If he feels pain it is only because he wills it. He
would shut down his receptors and turn you off, loneling, and your song
would turn to silence.”

The neurowhore Shayalla Loethen smiled with resignation. “Then there’s nothing for me to work on either, Wisdom?”

“I’m not sure,” I
admitted. “He has no obvious genitalia, but if there’s anything organic
left inside him, his pleasure centers might be intact. He claims to have
been male. The instincts might still be viable. Find out.”

She nodded. Her body
was soft and white as snow, and sometimes as cold, when she wanted
cold, and sometimes white hot, when that was her desire. Those lips that
curled upwards now with anticipation were crimson and alive. The
garments that swirled around her changed shape and color even as I
watched, and sparks began to play along her fingertips, arcing across
her long, painted nails.

“Drugs?” asked
Braje, biomed, gengineer, poisoner. She sat thinking, chewing some tranq
of her own devising, her swollen body as damp and soft as the swamps
outside. “Truetell? Agonine? Esperon?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“Disease,” she offered. “Manthrax or gangrene. The slow plague, and we’ve got the cure?” She giggled.

“No,” I said curtly.

And the rest, and on
and on. They all had their suggestions, their ways of finding out
things I wanted to know, of making themselves useful to me, of earning
my gratitude. Such are my Apostles. I listened to them, let myself be
carried along by the babble of voices, weighed, considered, handed out
orders, and finally I sent them all away, all but one.

Khar Dorian will be the one to kiss me when that day finally comes. I do not have to be a Wisdom to know that truth.

The rest of them
want something of me. When they get it, they will be gone. Khar got his
desire long ago, and still he comes back and back and back, to my world
and my bed. It is not love of me that brings him back, nor the beauty of
the young body I wear, nor anything as simple as the riches he earns.
He has grander things in mind.

“He rode with you,” I said. “All the way from Lilith. Who is he?”

“A player,” Dorian
said, grinning at me crookedly, taunting me. He is breathtakingly
beautiful. Lean and hard and well fit, with the arrogance and rough-hewn
masculine sexuality of a thirty-year-old, flush with health and power
and hormones. His hair is blond and long and unkempt. His jaw is clean
and strong, his nose straight and unbroken, his eyes a hale, vibrant
blue. But there is something old living behind those eyes, something old
and cynical and sinister.

“Dorian,” I warned him, “don’t try games with me. He is more than just a player. Who is he?”

Khar Dorian got up, stretched lazily, yawned, grinned. “Who he says he is,” my slaver told me. “Kleronomas.”

* * *

Morality is a closely knit garment that binds tightly when
it binds at all, but the vastnesses that lie between the stars are
prone to unraveling it, to plucking it apart into so many loose threads,
each brightly colored, but forming no discernible pattern. The
fashionable Vagabonder is a rustic spectacular on Cathaday, the Ymirian
swelters on Vess, the Vessman freezes on Ymir, and the shifting lights
the Fellanei wear instead of cloth provoke rape, riot, and murder on
half a dozen worlds. So it is with morals. Good is no more constant than
the cut of a lapel; the decision to take a sentient life weighs no more
heavily than the decision to bare one’s breasts, or hide them.

There are worlds on
which I am a monster. I stopped caring a long time ago. I came to
Croan’dhenni with my own fashion sense, and no concern for the aesthetic
judgments of others.

Khar Dorian calls
himself a slaver, and points out to me that we do, indeed, deal in human
flesh. He can call himself what he likes. I am no slaver; the charge
offends me. A slaver sells his clients into bondage and servitude,
deprives them of freedom, mobility, and time, all precious commodities. I
do no such thing. I am only a thief. Khar and his underlings bring them
to me from the swollen cities of Lilith, from the harsh mountains and
cold wastes of Dam Tullian, from the rotting tenements along the canals
of Vess, from spaceport bars on Fellanora and Cymeranth and Shrike, from
wherever he can find them, he takes them and brings them to me, and I
steal from them and set them free.

A lot of them refuse to go.

They cluster outside
my castle walls in the city they have built, toss gifts to me as I
pass, call out my name, beg favors of me. I have left them freedom,
mobility, and time, and they squander it all in futility, hoping to win
back the one thing I have stolen.

I steal their bodies, but they lose their souls themselves.

And perhaps I am
unduly harsh to call myself a thief. These victims Khar brings me are
unwilling players in the game of mind, but no less players for all that.
Others pay so very dearly and risk so very much for the same privilege.
Some we call players and some we call prizes, but when the pain comes
and the game of mind begins, we are all the same, all naked and alone
without riches or health or status, armed with only the strength that
lies within us. Win or lose, live or die, it is up to us and us alone.

I give them a chance. A few have even won. Very few, true, but how many thieves give their victims any chance at all?

The Steel Angels,
whose worlds lie far from Croan’dhenni on the other side of human space,
teach their children that strength is the only virtue and weakness the
only sin, and preach that the truth of their faith is written large on
the universe itself. It is a difficult point to argue. By their creed, I
have every moral right to the bodies I take, because I am stronger and
therefore better and more holy than those born to that flesh.

The little girl born in my present body was not a Steel Angel, unfortunately.

* * *

“And baby makes three,” I said, “even if baby is made of metal and plastic and names himself a legend.”

“Eh?” Rannar looked
at me blankly. He is not as widely traveled as me, and the reference,
something I have dredged up from my forgotten youth on some world he’s
never walked, escapes him entirely. His long, sour face wore a look of
patient bafflement.

“We have three players now,” I told him carefully. “We can play the game of mind.”

That much Rannar understood. “Ah yes, of course. I’ll see to it at once, Wisdom.”

Craimur Delhune was
the first. An ancient thing, almost as old as me, though he had done all
of his living in the same small body. No wonder it was worn out. He was
hairless and shriveled, a wheezing half-blind travesty, his flesh full
of alloplas and metal implants that labored day and night just to keep
him alive. It was not something they could do much longer, but Craimur
Delhune had not had enough living yet, and so he had come to
Croan’dhenni to pay for the flesh and begin all over again. He had been
waiting nearly half a standard year.

Rieseen Jay was a
stranger case. She was under fifty and in decent health, though her
flesh bore its own scars. Rieseen was jaded. She had sampled every
pleasure Lilith offered, and Lilith offers a good many pleasures. She
had tasted every food, flowed with every drug, sexed with males,
females, aliens, and animals, risked her life skiing the glaciers,
baiting pit-dragons, fighting in the soar-wars for the delectation of
holofans everywhere. She thought a new body would be just the thing to
add spice to life. Maybe a male body, she thought, or an alien’s
offcolor flesh. We get a few like her.

And Joachim Kleronomas made three.

In the game of mind, there are seats for seven. Three players, three prizes, and me.

Rannar offered me
a thick portfolio, full of photographs and reports on the prizes newly
arrived on Khar Dorian’s ships, on the Bright Phoenix and the Second
Chance and the New Deal and the Fleshpot (Khar has always had a certain
black sense of humor). The major-domo hovered at my elbow, solicitous
and helpful, as I turned the pages and made my selections. “She’s
delicious,” he said once, at a picture of a slim Vessgirl with
frightened yellow eyes that hinted at a hybrid gene-mix. “Very strong
and healthy, that one,” he said later, as I considered a hugely muscled
youth with green eyes and waist-long braided black hair. I ignored him. I
always ignore him.

“Him,” I said,
taking out the file of a boy as slender as a stiletto, his ruddy skin
covered with tattoos. Khar had purchased him from the authorities on
Shrike, where he’d been convicted of killing another sixteen-year-old.
On most worlds Khar Dorian, the infamous free trader, smuggler, raider,
and slaver, had a name synonymous with evil; parents threatened their
children with him. On Shrike he was a solid citizen who did the
community great service by buying up the garbage in the prisons.

“Her,” I said,
setting aside a second photograph, of a pudgy young woman of about
thirty standard whose wide green eyes betrayed a certain vacancy. From
Cymeranth, her file said. Khar had dropped one of his raiders into a
coldsleep facility for the mentally damaged and helped himself to some
young, healthy, attractive bodies. This one was soft and fat, but that
would change once an active mind wore the flesh again. The original
owner had sucked up too much dreamdust.

“And it,” I said.
The third file was that of a g’vhern hatchling, a grim-looking
individual with fierce magenta eye-crests and huge, leathery batwings
that glistened with iridescent oils. It was for Rieseen Jay, who thought
she might like to try a nonhuman body. If she could win it.

“Very good,
Wisdom,” said Rannar approvingly. He was always approving. When he had
come to Croan’dhenni, his body was grotesque; he’d been caught in bed
with the daughter of his employer, a V’lador knight of the blood, and
the punishment was extensive ritual mutilation. He did not have the
price of a game. Rut I’d had two players waiting for almost a year, one
of whom was dying of manthrax, so when Rannar offered me ten years of
faithful service to make up the difference, I accepted.

Sometimes I had
my regrets. I could feel his eyes on my body, could sense his mind
stripping away the soft armor of my clothes to fasten, leechlike, on my
small, budding breasts. The girl he’d been found with was not much
younger than the flesh I now wore.

* * *

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