J.G. Ballard - The Crystal World

He woke into brilliant sunshine in a street of temples, where rainbows spangled the gilded air with a blaze of colors. Shielding his eyes, he lay back and looked up at the roof-tops, their gold tiles inlaid with row upon row of colored gems, like pavilions in the temple quarter of Bangkok.

A hand pulled at his shoulder. Trying to sit up, Sanders found that the semi-circle of clear pavement had vanished, and his body lay sprawled in a bed of sprouting needles. The growth had been most rapid in the entrance to the depository, and his right arm was encased in a mass of crystalline spurs, three or four inches long, that reached almost to his shoulder. Inside this frozen gauntlet, almost too heavy to lift, his fingers were outlined in a maze of rainbows.

Sanders dragged himself to his knees, tearing away some of the crystals. He found the bearded man in the white suit crouching behind him, his shotgun in his hands.

"Ventress!" With a cry, Sanders raised his jeweled arm. In the sunlight the faint nodes of the gem-stones he had stuffed into his cuff shone in the effloresced tissues of his arm like inlaid stars. "Ventress, for God's sake!"

His shout distracted Ventress from his scrutiny of the light-filled street. His small face with its bright eyes was transfigured by strange colors that mottled his skin and drew out the pale blues and violets of his beard. His suit radiated a thousand bands of color.

He knelt down beside Sanders, trying to replace the strip of crystals torn from his arm. Before he could speak there was a roar of gunfire and the glass trellis encrusted to the doorway shattered in a shower of fragments. Ventress flinched behind Sanders, then pulled himself through the window. As another shot was fired down the street they ran past the looted counters into a strong room where the door of a safe stood open on to a jumble of metal cash boxes. Ventress snapped back the lids on the empty trays, and then began to scoop together the few small jewels scattered across the floor.

Stuffing them into Sanders's empty pockets, he pulled him through a window into the rear alley, and from there into the adjacent street, transformed by the overhead lattices into a tunnel of vermilion light. They stopped at the first turning, and Ventress beckoned to the forest fifty yards away.

"Run, run! Anywhere, through the forest! It's all you can do!"

He pushed Sanders forward with the butt of his shotgun, whose breech was now encrusted by a mass of silver crystals, like a medieval flintlock. Sanders raised his arm. The jeweled spurs danced in the sunlight like a swarm of fireflies. "My arm, Ventress! It's reached my shoulder!"

"Run! Nothing else can help you!" Ventress's illuminated face flickered with anger, almost as if he were impatient of Sanders's refusal to accept the forest. "Don't waste the stones, they won't last you forever!"

Forcing himself to run, Sanders set off toward the forest, where he entered the first of the caves of light. He whirled his arm like a clumsy propeller, and felt the crystals recede slightly. With luck he soon reached a small tributary of the river that wound in from the harbor, and hurled himself like a wild man along its petrified surface.

For hours he raced through the forest, all sense of time lost to him. If he stopped for more than a minute the crystal bands would seize his neck and shoulder, and he forced himself on, only pausing to slump exhausted on the glass beaches. Then, he pressed the jewels to his face, warding off the glacé sheath. But their power faded, and as the facets blunted they turned into nodes of unpolished silica. Meanwhile, those embedded within the crystal tissues of his arm shone with undiminished brilliance.

At last, as he ran through the trees at the edge of the river, his arm whirling before him, he saw the gilt spire of the summer house. Stumbling across the fused sand, he made his way toward it. By now the vitrification of the forest had sealed the small pavilion into the surrounding trees, and only the steps and the doorway above remained clear, but for Sanders it still held a faint hope of sanctuary. The casements and jointing of the balcony were ornamented with the heraldic devices of some bizarre baroque architecture.

Sanders stopped a few yards from the steps and looked up at the sealed door. He turned and gazed back across the widening channel of the river. Its jeweled surface glowed in the sunlight, marbled like the pink crust of a salt lake. Two hundred yards away Thorensen's motor-cruiser still sat in its pool of clear water at the confluence of the subterranean streams.

As he watched, two men moved about on the foredeck of the cruiser. They were partly hidden by the starting cannon in front of the mast, but one of them, bands of surgical tape dividing his naked body into black and white halves, Sanders recognized as Kagwa, Thorensen's assistant.

Sanders walked a few steps toward the cruiser, debating whether to reach the edge of the petrified surface and swim across the pooi. Although the crystals might begin to dissolve in the water, he feared that the weight of his arm would first sink him to the bottom.

There was a flash of light from the muzzle of the cannon. A moment later, as the ground shifted slightly, Sanders caught a glimpse of a three-inch ball crossing the air toward him. With a sharp whistle it passed over his head and crashed into the petrified trees twenty yards from the summer house. Then the loud boom of the explosion reached him from the cruiser. Reflected off the hard surface of the river, the echoes rolled around the walls of the forest, drumming at Sanders's head.

Uncertain which way to move, he ran toward a patch of undergrowth near the steps of the summer house. Kneeling down, he tried to conceal his arm among the crystalline fronds. The two natives on board the cruiser were reloading the cannon, the big mulatto down on one knee as he worked the ramrod in and out of the barrel.

"Sanders-!" The low voice, little more than a harsh whisper, came from a few yards on Sanders's left. He looked around, peering up at the sealed door of the summer house. Then, below the steps, a hand reached out and waved at him.

"Here! Under the house!"

Sanders ran over to the steps. In the narrow hollow below the platform of the summer house, Ventress was crouching behind one of the stilts, shotgun in hand.

"Get down! Before they take another shot at you!" As Sanders slid backwards through the small interval Ventress seized one shoe and hauled him in, twisting his foot with an irritable flourish.

"Lie _down!_ By God, Sanders, you take your chances!"

His mottled face pressed toward Sanders as he lay against the side of the hollow. Then Ventress looked out again at the river and the distant cruiser. His flintlock lay in front of him, its ornamented barrel following every movement as the light outside varied its patterns.

Sanders gazed around the hollow, wondering if Thorensen had taken Serena with him and abandoned the summer house, hoping to trap Ventress there, or whether the latter had reached the pavilion first after the attack that morning in the streets of Mont Royal.

The wooden boards over their heads had vitrified into a rock-like glass, but the outlines of a trapdoor could still be seen in the center. On the ground below, a steel bayonet lay among a few shards laboriously chipped from the edges of the trapdoor.

Ventress pointed curtly to the trapdoor. "You can have a go in a moment. It's damned hard work."

Sanders sat forward. Lifting his arm, he turned over so that he could see across the river.

"Serena-your wife-is she still here?"

Ventress looked up at the beams over their heads. "I'll be with her soon. It's been a long search." Checking himself, he peered along his barrel, examining the sprays of frozen grass that skirted the banks before he spoke again. "So you saw her, Sanders?"