The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  Katin shrugged.

  “Then maybe you’ll write something about us if you don’t know yet what—”

  “—can we sue him if he says something that isn’t—”

  “Hey,” Katin interrupted. “I have to find a subject that can support a novel. I told you, I can’t tell you if you’re going to be in it or—”

  “—what sort of things you got in there anyway?” Idas was saying around Lynceos’ shoulder.

  “Huh? Like I said, notes. For the book.”

  “Let’s hear.”

  “Look, you guys don’t …” Then he shrugged. He dialed the ruby pivots on the recorder’s top, then flicked it to playback:

  “Note to myself number five thousand three hundred and seven. Bear in mind that the novel—no matter how intimate, psychological, or subjective—is always a historical projection of its own time.” The voice played too high, and too fast. But it facilitated review. “To make my book, I must have an awareness of my time’s conception of history.”

  Idas’ hand was a black epaulet on his brother’s shoulder. With eyes of bark and coral, they frowned, flexed their attention.

  “History? Thirty-six hundred years ago Herodotus and Thucydides invented it. They defined it as the study of whatever had happened during their own lives. And for the next thousand years it was nothing else. Sixteen hundred years after the Greeks, in Constantinople, Anna Comnena, in her legalistic brilliance (and in essentially the same language as Herodotus) wrote history as the study of those events of man’s actions that had been documented. I doubt if this charming Byzantine believed things only happened when they were written about. But incidents unchronicled were simply not considered the province of history in Byzantium. The whole concept had transformed. In another thousand years we had reached that century which began with the first global conflict and ended with the first conflict between globes brewing. Somehow the theory had arisen that history was a series of cyclic rises and falls as one civilization overtook another. Events that did not fit on the cycle were defined as historically unimportant. It’s difficult for us today to appreciate the differences between Spengler and Toynbee, though from all accounts their approaches were considered polar in their day. To us they seem merely to be quibbling over when or where a given cycle began. Now that another thousand years has passed, we must wrestle with De Eiling and Broblin, 34-Alvin and the Crespburg Survey. Simply because they are contemporary, I know they must inhabit the same historic view. But how many dawns did I see flickering beyond the docks of the Charles, while I stalked and pondered whether I held with Saunder’s theory of Integral Historical Convection or was I still with Broblin after all. Yet I have enough perspective to know that in another thousand years these differences will seem as minute as the controversy of two medieval theologians disputing whether twelve or twenty-four angels can dance on the head of a pin.

  “Note to myself number five thousand three hundred and eight. Never loose the pattern of stripped sycamores against vermilion—”

  Katin flicked off the recorder.

  “Oh,” Lynceos said. “That was sort of odd—”

  “—interesting,” Idas said. “Did you ever figure it out—”

  “—he means about the history—”

  “—about our time’s historical concept?”

  “Well, actually, I did. It’s quite an interesting theory, really. If you just—”

  “I imagine it must be very complicated,” Idas said. “I mean—”

  “—for people living now to grasp—”

  “Surprisingly enough, it isn’t.” (Katin) “All you have to do is realize how we regard—”

  “—Maybe for people who live later—”

  “—it won’t be so difficult—”

  “Really. Haven’t you noticed,” (again Katin) “how the whole social matrix is looked at as though it—”

  “We don’t know much about history.” Lynceos scratched his silver wool. “I don’t think—”

  “—we could understand it now—”

  “Of course you could!” (Katin encore) “I can explain it very—”

  “—Maybe later—”

  “—in the future—”

  “—it’ll be easier.”

  Dark and white smiles bobbed at him suddenly. The twins turned and walked away.

  “Hey,” Katin said. “Don’t you …? I mean, I can ex—” Then, “Oh.”

  He frowned and put his hands on his hips, watching the twins amble down the corridor. Idas’ black back was a screen for fragmented constellations. After a moment Katin lifted his recorder, flicked the ruby pips and spoke softly:

  “Note to myself number twelve thousand eight hundred and ten: Intelligence creates alienation and unhappiness in …” He stopped the recorder. Blinking, he looked after the twins.

  “Captain?”

  At the top of the steps Lorq dropped his hand from the door and looked down.

  The Mouse hooked his thumb through a tear in the side of his pants and scratched his thigh. “Eh … Captain?” Then he took the card out of the sack. “Here’s your sun.”

  Rusty brows twisted in shadow.

  Yellow eyes dropped their lights at the Mouse.

  “I, eh … borrowed it from Tyÿ. I’ll give it back—”

  “Come up here, Mouse.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Mouse started up the coiled steps. Ripples lapped the pool edge. His image, rising, glittered behind the philodendrons on the wall. Bare sole and boot heel gave his gait syncopation.

  Lorq opened the door. They stepped into the captain’s chamber.

  The Mouse’s first thought: His room isn’t any bigger than mine.

  His second: There’s a lot more in it.

  Besides the computers, there were projection screens on the walls, floor, and ceiling. Among the mechanical clutter, nothing personalized the cabin—not even graffiti.

  “Let’s see the card.” Lorq sat on the cables coiled over the couch and examined the diorama.

  Not having been invited to sit on the couch, the Mouse pushed aside a toolbox and dropped cross-legged to the floor.

  Suddenly Lorq’s knees fell wide; he stretched his fists; his shoulders shook; the muscles of his face creased. The spasm passed, and he sat up again. He drew a breath that pulled the laces tight on his stomach. “Come sit here.” He patted the edge of the couch. But the Mouse just swung around on the floor so that he sat by Lorq’s knee.

  Lorq leaned forward and placed the card on the floor.

  “This is the card you stole?” The expression that was his frown wrinkled down his face. (But the Mouse was looking at the card.) “If this were the first expedition I pulled together to plumb this star …” Lorq laughed. “Six trained and crackling men, who had studied the operation hypnotically, knew the timing of the whole business like they knew the beating of their own hearts, functioned closely as the layers in a bimetal strip. Stealing among the crew …?” He laughed again, shaking his head slowly. “I was so sure of them. And the one I was surest of was Dan.” He caught the Mouse’s hair, gently shook the boy’s head. “I like this crew better.” He pointed to the card. “What do you see there, Mouse?”

  “Well. I guess … two boys playing under a—”

  “Playing?” Lorq asked. “They look as if they’re playing?”

  The Mouse sat back and hugged his sack. “What do you see, Captain?”

  “Two boys with hands locked for a fight. You see how one is light and the other is dark? I see love against death, light against darkness, chaos against order. I see the clash of all opposites under … the sun. I see Prince and myself.”

  “Which is which?”

  “I don’t know, Mouse.”

  “What sort of person is Prince Red, Captain?”

  Lorq’s left fist flopped into the hammock of his right palm. “You saw him on the viewing screen in color and tri-D. You have to ask? Rich as Croesus, a spoiled psychopath; he has one arm and a sister so beautiful I …” Weight and
hammock came apart. “You’re from Earth, Mouse. The same world Prince comes from. I’ve visited it many times, but I’ve never lived there. Perhaps you know. Why should someone from Earth who’s had every advantage that could be distilled from the wealth of Draco, boy, youth, and man be …” The voice caught. Weight and hammock again. “Never mind. Take out your hell-harp and play me something. Go on. I want to see and hear.”

  The Mouse scrabbled in his sack. One hand on the wooden neck, one sliding beneath curve and polish; he closed his fingers and his mouth and his eyes. Concentration became a frown; then a release. “You say he’s one-armed?”

  “Underneath that black glove he so dramatically smashed up the viewer with, there’s nothing but clockworks.”

  “That means he’s missing a socket,” the Mouse went on in his rough whisper. “I don’t know how it is where you come from; on Earth that’s about the worst thing that can happen to you. Captain, my people didn’t have any, and Katin back there just got finished explaining how that made me so mean.” The syrynx came out of the sack. “What do you want me to play?” He hazarded a few notes, a few lights.

  But Lorq was staring at the card again. “Just play. We’ll have to plug up soon to come in to the Alkane. Go on. Quick now. Play, I told you.”

  The Mouse’s hand fell toward the—

  “Mouse?”

  —and moved away without striking.

  “Why did you steal this card?”

  The Mouse shrugged. “It was just there. It fell out on the rug near me.”

  “But if it had been some other card, the Two of Cups, the Nine of Wands—would you have picked it up?”

  “I … guess so.”

  “Are you sure there isn’t something in this card that’s special? If any other had been there, you would have let it lie or handed it back …?”

  Where it came from the Mouse didn’t know. But it was fear again. To battle it, he whirled and caught Lorq’s knee. “Look, Captain! Don’t mind what the cards say—I’m going to help you get to that star, see? I’m going right with you, and you’ll win your race. Don’t let some crazy-woman tell you different!”

  In their conversation, Lorq had been self-absorbed. Now he looked seriously at the dark frown. “You just remember to give that crazy-woman her card back when you leave here. We’ll be at Vorpis soon.”

  The intensity could maintain itself no longer. Rough laughter broke the dark lips. “I still think they’re playing, Captain.” The Mouse turned back in front of the couch. Planting his bare foot on top of Lorq’s sandaled one, for all the world like a puppy by its master, he struck.

  The lights flickered over the machines, copper and emerald, to arpeggios recalling harpsichords; Lorq looked at the boy by his knee. Something happened to him. He did not know the cause. But for the first time in a long time, he was watching someone else for reasons having nothing to do with his star. He did not know what he saw. Still, he sat back and looked at what the Mouse made.

  Nearly filling the cabin, the gypsy moved myriad flame-colored lights about a great sphere, in time to the crumbling figures of a grave and dissonant fugue.

  chapter five

  THE WORLD?

  Vorpis.

  A world has so much in it, on it—

  “Welcome, travelers …”

  —while a moon, Katin thought as they left the spacefield by dawn-blazed gates, a moon holds its gray glories miniatured in rock and dust.

  “… Vorpis has a day of thirty-three hours, a gravity just high enough to increase the pulse rate by point three of Earth normal over an acclimating period of six hours …”

  They passed the hundred-meter column. Scales, burnished under the dawn, bled the mists scarfing the plateau: the Serpent, animated and mechanical, symbol of this whole sequined sector of night, writhed on his post. As the crew stepped onto the moving roadway, an oblate sun rouged away night’s bruises.

  “… with four cities of over five million inhabitants. Vorpis produces fifteen percent of all the dynaplasts for Draco. In the equatorial lavid zones, more than three dozen minerals are quarried from the liquid rock. Here, in the tropic polar regions, both the arolat and the aqualat are hunted by net-riders along the inter-plateau canons. Vorpis is famous throughout the galaxy for the Alkane Institute, which is located in the capital city of its Northern Hemisphere, Phoenix …”

  They passed the limit of the info-service voice, into silence. As the road buoyed them from the steps, Lorq, among the crew, gazed on the plaza.

  “Captain, where we now go?” Sebastian had brought only one of his pets from the ship. It swayed and stepped on his ridged shoulder.

  “We take a fog crawler into the city and then go to the Alkane. Anyone can come with me who wants, wander around the museum, or take a few hours leave in the city. If anybody wants to stay back on the ship—”

  “—and miss a chance to see the Alkane?—”

  “—doesn’t it cost a lot to get in?—”

  “—but the captain’s got an aunt working there—”

  “—so we can get in free then,” Idas finished.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Lorq said as they jogged down the ramp to the slips where the fog crawlers moored.

  Polar Vorpis was set with rocky mesas, many of them several square miles in area. Between, heavy fogs rilled and slopped, immiscible with the nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere above. Powdered aluminum oxide, and arsenic sulfate in vaporized hydrocarbons expelled from the violent floor, filled the space between them. Just beyond the table that held the spacefield was another with cultivated plants, indigenous to a more southern latitude of Vorpis but kept here as a natural park (maroon, rust, scarlet). On the largest mesa was Phoenix.

  The fog crawlers, inertial-drive planes powered by the static charges built up between the positively ionized atmosphere and the negatively ionized oxide, plowed the surface of the mist like boats.

  On the concourse, the departure times drifted beneath the transparent bricks, followed by arrows directing the crowds to the loading slip:

  ANDROMEDA PARK—PHOENIX—MONTCLAIR

  and a great bird dripping fire followed through the multichrome beneath boots, bare feet, and sandals.

  On the crawler deck Katin leaned on the rail, looking through the plastic wall as white waves crackled and uncoiled over the sun to shatter by the hull.

  “Have you ever thought,” Katin said as the Mouse came up to him sucking on a piece of rock candy, “what a difficult time a man from the past would have understanding the present. Suppose someone who died in, let’s say, the twenty-sixth century woke up here. Do you realize how totally horrified and confused he’d be just walking around this crawler?”

  “Yeah?” The Mouse took the candy out of his mouth: “Want to finish this? I’m through with it.”

  “Thanks. Just take the matter of—” Katin’s jaw staggered as his teeth crushed crystalline sugar from the linen thread—“cleanliness. There was a thousand-year period from about fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred, when people spent an incredible amount of time and energy keeping things clean. It ended when the last communicable disease finally became not only curable, but impossible. There used to be an incredibility called ‘the common cold’ that even in the twenty-fifth century you could be fairly sure of having at least once a year. I suppose back then there was some excuse for the fetish: there seemed to have been some correlation between dirt and disease. But after contagion became an obsolescent concern, sanitation became equally obsolescent. If our man from five hundred years ago, however, saw you walking around this deck with one shoe off and one shoe on, then saw you sit down to eat with that same foot, without bothering to wash it—do you have any idea how upset he’d be?”

  “No kidding?”

  Katin nodded.

  Fog broke at a shaft of rock, sparking.

  “The idea of paying a visit to the Alkane has inspired me, Mouse. I’m developing an entire theory of history. It’s in conjunction with my novel. You don’t min
d indulging me with a few moments? I’ll explain. It has occurred to me that if one considers—” He stopped.

  Enough time passed for a handful of expressions to subsume the Mouse’s face. “What is it?” he asked when he decided nothing in the moiling gray had Katin’s attention. “What about your theory?”

  “—Cyana Von Ray Morgan!”

  “What?”

  “Who, Mouse. Cyana Von Ray Morgan. I’ve had a perfectly oblique thought: It just came to me who the captain’s aunt is, the curator at the Alkane. When Tyÿ gave her Tarot reading, the captain mentioned an uncle who was killed when he was a child.”

  The Mouse frowned. “Yeah …”

  Katin shook his head, mocking disbelief.

  “Who what?” the Mouse asked.

  “Morgan and Underwood.”

  The Mouse looked down, sideways, and in the other directions people search for mislaid associations.

  “I guess it happened before you were born,” Katin said at last. “But you must have heard about it, seen it someplace. The whole business was being sent out across the galaxy on psychoramics while it happened. I was only three, but—”

  “Morgan assassinated Underwood!” the Mouse exclaimed.

  “Underwood,” Katin said, “assassinated Morgan. But that’s the idea.”

  “In Ark,” the Mouse said. “In the Pleiades.”

  “With billions of people experiencing the whole business throughout the galaxy on psychoramics. No, I couldn’t have been more than three at the time. I was at home on Luna watching the inauguration with my parents when that incredible character in the blue vest broke out of the crowd and sprinted across Chronaiki Plaza with that wire in his hand.”

  “He was strangled!” the Mouse exclaimed. “Morgan was strangled! I did see a psychorama of that! One time in Mars City, last year when I was doing the triangle run, I experienced it as a short subject. It was part of a documentary about something else, though.”

  “Underwood nearly severed Morgan’s head,” Katin elucidated. “Whenever I’ve experienced a rerun, they’ve cut out the actual death. But five billion-odd were subjected to all the emotions of a man, about to be sworn in for his second term as Secretary of the Pleiades, suddenly attacked by a madman and killed. All of us, we felt Underwood land on our backs; we heard Cyana Morgan scream and felt her try to pull him off; we heard Representative Kolsyn yell out about the third bodyguard—that’s the part that caused all the confusion in the subsequent investigation—and we felt Underwood lock that wire around our necks, felt it cut into us; we struck out with our right hands, and our left hands were grabbed by Mrs. Tai. And we died.” Katin shook his head. “Then the stupid projector operator—his name was Naibn’n and thanks to his idiocy he nearly had his brain burned out by a bunch of lunatics who thought he was involved in the plot—swung his psychomat on Cyana—instead of the assassin so we could have learned who he was and where he was going—and for the next thirty seconds we were all a hysterical woman crouching on the plaza, clutching our husband’s streaming corpse amid a confusion of equally hysterical diplomats, representatives, and patrolmen, watching Underwood dodge and twist through the crowd and finally disappear.”