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A Mighty Fortress The light hits your eye, and the image is refracted by the lens onto your retina, and the data is carried by the optic nerve. But the actual seing takes place in your brain. So and no otherwise is it, with prisons. This story first appeared in Helix . A Mighty Fortress Brenda W. Clough His cell was exactly ten paces in each direction. If you could call it a cell: the force-field walls were clear, nearly invisible except when the distant primary Caruso heaved above the horizon to gild the curve above his head. At this latitude Friday, the lesser sun, never rose into view. He might be utterly at liberty, lord of illimitable space, standing on the high place and surveying Ugolino, his planet and kingdom. But then he returned to his pacing again. He lacked only some way of keeping count of his pacing. With subtlest cruelty his captors had denied him writing implements. A Catholic would use a rosary. He had seen a rosary once, clenched in an old woman’s hand. The woman must have been old – he remembered the dirt engraved in the wrinkles of the knuckles, and the black crescents under the broken nails – but her face had been invisible, hidden under the other corpses. Again he took control of his straying thoughts. He stepped out with resolution, raising his voice in song: “For all the saints, who from their labors rest! Who thee, by faith, before the world confessed ...” The old hymns of his boyhood, verse after ingrained verse in eight-or ten-or thirteen-beat lines, were as good as any abacus. The futile prowlings of a caged beast were transmuted to worship |
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