（外文电子版资料）Martin, George R.R. - The Glass Flower.pdf

TheGlassFlower THE GLASS FLOWER file:///J|/sci-fi/Nieuwe%20map/George%20RR%20Martin%20-%20The%20Glass%20Flower.htm (1 of 36)17-2-2006 3:23:16 TheGlassFlower c 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 glassblowers 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