The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Oh,” I said. Have I said? One thing I hate is anyone telling me what I can or cannot know. “It’s like that?”

  “In your case. For now. From now on.” Her hand moved toward her pocket—for a moment I thought to pull out and wave her magic wand. But before she completed the gesture, she began to fade. I stood up with my most diplomatic smile—to find myself in a rectilinear garden of me’s—up, down, left, right, and diagonal. (It’s even more unsettling in weak gravity than it is in full.) I wandered along with, and through, and among a thousand ambling selves, till at last I was walking on yellow pebbles.

  3.

  WHAT DO YOU DO with information like that: Somewhere in the known universe is the survivor of a world, possibly destroyed by inscrutable aliens—whom you’ve been given specific orders not to scrute—the information itself blotted out of the Web, yet still trickling along from world to world, star to star. Oh, yes: the two of you just happen to be made for each other. And he wears the rings of Vondramach Tyrannus.

  If you’re as busy a person as an ID invariably is—well, you don’t dwell on it. For very long.

  Nonstop, I dwelt perhaps six hours.

  During the next seventy-two, in which I got my tiles to Batria and my new job1 wrapped neatly up, my thoughts returned to it, oh, perhaps a hundred, maybe a thousand times. Dwelling? Well, don’t we all live with some such idea anyway: Somewhere in the known universe is the perfect woman for me?

  Maybe now I tried to visualize him—for that’s what he was, now—a little harder than one usually does. You can come up with near perfect that way.

  But perfect?

  At thirty-six years standard you know it can’t be done.

  Which I guess is what desire is all about.

  SEVEN

  Home and a Stranger

  1.

  I WAS BACK ON Velm.

  Library sojourn and Japril’s message had, like all things, tumbled weeks and light-years into the past.

  My world?

  I had seen the friends I had wanted to see—Menek, Santine, F’namara. I had been at Dyethshome long enough to reach that state with parents and siblings where, if one is a traveler by nature, one withdraws a little in as friendly a way as possible, thinking on far pleasures while indulging near comforts.

  I’d taken a surface trip to a place, among Velm’s western geosectors: Beresh—I’d only heard it existed weeks before. (Worlds are big places.) I had gone to it, had looked at it, had loved it—had wrestled with its strange slang, its austere foods, its complex social rhythms. Velm’s world government is bureaucratic anarchy. That’s the plurality governing structure among the six thousand—the thirty percent of them that have world governments. Syndicated communism comes next; then benevolent feudalism—which any communist who’s spent time in one will tell us is never all that benevolent; then oligarchic collectivism; then industrial fascism; and by now, we are well over halfway through the seventy percent that don’t have world governments … just remember there’s no majority.

  Bureaucratic anarchy means a socialist world government in which small sections are always reverting to some form of feudal capitalism for anywhere from a week to two years standard—the longest we’ll allow it to last. Though I’d been hearing of these enclaves all my life, Beresh was the first on Velm I’d visited: verticals of blazing blue chalk, bright portable living-rooms lying all over, some clustered together into small court groups of five to fifteen, others stacked maybe two hundred high, next to ersatz elevator towers; from any one of which at any moment a woman or a child might emerge to engage me—lurking about in my tourist reds—in bargaining for some part of my travel credit, for which they would perform in return bizarre and fascinating services.

  Then the trip home: fourteen hours by ten-propeller flying platform; another six by monorail.

  Home.

  And we remember what a complicated …

  2.

  I CHECKED TO SEE if my baggage was properly tagged with the little green disks that would conduct it through the interlevels and on, then loped off the rickety old rollerwalk, crossed the broken blue bricks of Water-Alley, and sauntered between the heavy columns flanking the entrance to the local outlet of the Butcher’s Union. Inside, high on the shelves, behind copper webbing, racks of cloned flesh thrust pink and red through the hooking rings. Longpig over there, shortpig—our term for the native flesh—in front of me and on the far wall, a host of more exotic insect, lizard, and worm meats. Prime cultures, says Si’id, who supervises1 the kids working2 this shop as well as the next outlet down; she’d go on for hours about the various pedigrees and provenances if you let her.

  I never go into a butcher outlet anywhere on Velm, or anywhere else for that matter, no matter the geosector, without recalling the first time, during my fifth trip oflworld, that I was dining with my employe1 and her spouses for my third job1. (The feathers on everything; the very un-subtle music.) I was charmed when they served the meal on narrow plates, about three inches wide, curved around in a circle. You worked your way along from portion to portion—cunning I thought—eating with your fingers; though getting the tastes and smells so confused with one another would never go at home. There was the meat; and I began to tell them about the butcher outlets on Velm, and just what the cloned longpig I’d been raised on was, realizing as I spoke they were a little shocked. I picked up my own bit of roast, bit down—something hard was in it …

  Then I realized: Bone!

  This meat had once been walking around with a skeleton inside. Although I didn’t, many times when I’ve told the story, I’ve said I left the table.

  Inside, the stained-glass skylight lay reds and greens over the chipped stone flooring. Three other women waited with their director disks ready in claw (or hand), while the little human redhead who’d been working2 here as an apprentice for a standard year now, swung and slashed with her broad bright knife; and the two other apprentices behind the glass wall were preparing outgoing orders: one kid, another human, with long tanned arms, the other, evelm, with gold claws on tufted greenscaled ones, tossed the packages into a clinking chain net that carried them out through the sphincter flange.

  Minutes later, I’d sent a kilo and a half of flesh, tagged with a green disk, on ahead of me. (Shoshana had said: “Marq, if you’re going to come home unexpectedly, couldn’t you at least see about your own food?” So I was going to see about several of the folks’ today.) I was out the door again, through the gate, and onto the roller walkway—clink, clank, clunk, halt, bounce, go again. Blue noon-sky between the platforms of the two above-ground park-levels, like the scraps of dark blue cloth we cut up as kids to make patchwork maps of imaginary counties, clear and smokeless.

  Then overhead platforms pulled away.

  From the rollerwalk rail I watched pale cactuses drifting on my right, and the high boulders nearer and nearing on my left; we came around the cliff edge, to see the falls broiling on the rocks, and there beside it, its three freestanding multichrome walls rising two hundred meters each behind it, the black and silver pile: Dyethshome.

  3.

  I STEPPED OFF ONTO yellow sand, walked through a break in the lurid growth, and turned onto the variegated clay. Stone steps led up to the terrace flags—the same green stone fronting most of the older manufacturing communes all around the city. Three of my siblings were playing in the pool by the rocks that turn white down near the water. Spray splattered the olive flags. Tinjo flopped Bucephalus, splosh! Bucephalus wagged her scaled tail, sheeting out meters of droplets. Small Maxa jumped up and down at the pool edge, afroth to her chest.

  Tinjo saw me—or Bucephalus smelled me; Tinjo squealed and the same moment Bucephalus was out of the pool and up by the carved railing on all sixes, shaking her scaly head—Large Max swears Bu is the finest looking of all this generation’s children, human or evelm. Bu lolloped across the stones, the wet tufts on her legs dripping about her claws, the scales on her back a glister of purples and browns. She leaped aga
inst me, bronze claws hooked over my shoulders (yes, the gold-clawed apprentice in the butcher shop hails from a different continent than Bu), small tongues playing over my mouth. I opened wide, so she could be sure to taste me properly. Her eyelids signaled madly the sign we had both agreed on, when we were fifteen years younger—me sixteen and just emerging from human adolescence, she fifteen and just emerging from evelm infanthood—would be my name to her: Marq Dyeth, I read. Marq Dyeth, Marq Dyeth (I blinked back Bucephalus Dyeth for all I was worth), while with her nether tongue, the one below the three she was tasting inside my mouth with, she was saying in. that slow-motion basso: “Marq, you’re back! Where have you been? What did you see? Tell us how many stars you’ve swallowed since I last saw you? How many worlds have you chewed up and spit out—” which started me laughing, since I’d only been gone for three days two thousand kilometers to the oest-east. I almost bit my (and her) tongue.

  Then Tinjo, all of ten years old, was shoving Bu aside and, holding my shoulders, jumped naked and wet against me. And, of course, nothing would do her but to lick my face too. “All right, Tinjo,” I said. “From you it’s just sloppy.”

  “Well, I got your meat,” she said. “And took your bags inside.” Where she had them on her, I don’t know, since she was stark naked; but she held up her wet hand, in which were my green identidisks that had dragged my parcels home.

  “You’re a love.” I licked her wet hair. But she must have thought something was very funny. She began to laugh, and her face was burned darker than dragon’s urine by our white sun, all around her black eyes and watered lashes.

  I pocketed my disks.

  Then Small Maxa, who is an albino and will not tan—they had to do something to her skin to keep her from burning and insert darkening lenses behind her livid irises—stepped up in front of me. I bent down, and very seriously she mimed licking my face.

  Something is wrong with her.

  She hates to be touched. But at twelve, she wants to do what everybody else does. “Hello, Marq.” She grinned hugely, creasing her white face like an old human’s. “I’ve been building a toy mine that I want you to come see; I love you.” Then she held out her hand to me and I held out mine—about an inch away from hers. We made motions of shaking. Some of us think she might be crazy in some serious way. But we respect it.

  And Tinjo and Bucephalus were tearing off after each other around the terrace again, now down the steps, now into the water, now up the rocks.

  “I’ll come and see your mine after I’ve gone to my room a while. And do you want to see some vaurine recordings of where I’ve been?”

  “I love you. Yes, Marq.” She dropped her eyes; her hands made small ivory fists at her hips—which I always thought meant she wanted to hold you but didn’t dare because the contact would be too unpleasant.

  “I’ll see you in a while.” I put my hand about an inch from her cheek and mimed petting. Still grinning, she blinked, saying nothing by it, save some obscure physiological comment on our dark blue sky, our wide white sun.

  I turned away and walked through immense silver petals, blooming around me in the black wall, turning red.

  Inside, the crystal pillar by the door disappeared top and bottom into black pedestal and capital.

  Large Maxa (my mother the biogeneticisti, evelm) sat on her perch, where she usually does these days, blinking about the hall with quiet, gilded eyes, her gorgeous wings folded about herself, their polychrome membranes rustling in the draught from the high grate to the south court. Egri (my mother the industrial diplomati, retired, human) squatted beside Max, forearms about her knees, her toenails slightly yellow, her biceps sinewy, her long hair—slightly yellow—thinning over her freckled scalp. A childhood memory of the two of them, engaged in endless discussions in three languages about the complexities of the world and interworld information field, its signifying ramifications, its semiotic specifications. Now they just sit together, keeping each other company, looking up at the balcony platforms across the hall, down through the transparent stretches of flooring at the ball courts below, out at the rest of us.

  Lurking there in the entrance hall—which is the way evelmi from Maxa’s part of the world sit around in their own home caves—they’ve always struck me as probably a little daunting to most visitors.

  But they like it.

  “Marq?” Shoshana (my mother the architectural consultant1, human) came up from the spiral stair through the star pattern in silver set in the maroon clay. It represents an astronomical cluster, called Mu-3, visible in the skies from Velm’s northern hemisphere but not, unfortunately, from Morgre. “Glad you’re back.” Shoshana has hair like a salted helmet. “Lights were blinking on the console downstairs. Two students just arrived in the south wing.” Shoshana’s knuckles are silver berries, ripe and wrinkling in her sixty-eighth year; her hand, over the black globe that was both newel-nob and clock, half obscured the time. In the dark glass the time in Morgre, the Zevia-n-complex a third of the way west round Velm, and Katour, one of the three largest complexes in our world, way off in the north, glimmered in—respectively—brazen, emerald, and carbon light.

  “They’re two hours early,” I said. “I called myself rushing to get back here so I’d have some time to myself.” Regularly, groups of students come to study at Dyethshome, for which, over the last three generations, we have provided the south court. Orienting them is—yes—my job2 while I’m here. “I suppose I have to get to it, then.”

  “I know you want to go to your room and rest, Marq,” Large Maxa rumbled, showing a splinter of her wings’ scarlet lining. When I was five and six, she would reward our good behavior by unfurling them over us while we hissed our delight. “You see to them, make them comfortable.”

  “Sure, Maxa.”

  Egri blinked, sighed, and really looked more like an evelm than Maxa—which Egri claims is what fifty-four years as an ID1 will do to you.

  “I’ll get them set up, Shoshana. Then, after I’ve taken a break, I’ll go back in when the others get here.” Have you noticed? Whenever you come home, your folks always find something for you to do within the first three minutes.

  I trotted over the reliefs at the foot of the ramp circling above the spillway. We only flood it for parties. The carvings along the spill bottom, done by and of the native evelmi—well before any evelmi married into the Dyeths, or even before there were many evelmi in M-81; only dragons—have always been my favorite. Large Maxa, Kal’k, Sel’v, and N’yn, my evelm parents, were always a bit condescending toward the human kids’ delight in them. For one thing, as far as carvings go, they don’t taste like anything. And N’yn and Sel’v once took all of us, when I was thirteen, on a trip to the R’Rtour-wr, way up north, to see the cliff carvings there, where evelmi live in a squalor and violence which, though I’d heard about it, along with the horrifying tales of human exploitation, I had never seen before. Licking those slime-covered stones to taste the cinnamon and sandalwood—neither human scent really covers the evelmi palate—beneath that dribbling mucus …!

  As I reached the ramp’s crest, I peeled away my tourist reds and got most of them on the suspensor hooks at the first toss. They pulleyed off to be cleaned and folded away. Catwalks circled off toward the balconies.

  The ramp ended in a flowering of mirrors.

  I walked into them.

  4.

  MIRRORS SWUNG BACK AND up and out and down; I stepped under the irregular stone arch, traced with emerald guano. (I’ve mentioned the pearlbats …?) High Iiriani behind one of the towering multichromes flung parti-colored dapplings down through the transparencies and over the amphitheater’s tiered stones. Low Iiriani-prime was a diamond at the edge of one of the others—did it lend enough light to pale those hues? I could hear the falls, but all I could see from here were a few fountains, the thin jets deflected by suspended vanes.

  I walked down the cracked steps, squinting up among the theater seats’ ninety rows.

  Each month’s student
load is about twenty-five. It can be as low as twelve; it can be as high as thirty. They come to study the art (endless), the architecture (exemplary), the history (frequently embarrassing), or the technology (extensive) of Dyethshome—sometimes some combination or interface. They usually arrive in the late afternoon on the north monoline spur, which takes longer but doesn’t go through Morgre proper; lets them off within sight of the rear grounds—except during hotwind season, when we have someone meet them at the central station and take them here by an underground route. When I come in to meet them, they’re inevitably scattered up around the top ten tiers. I call them down, and after an hour’s orientation, during which I tell them about where they’ll stay in the six stories of galleries, tunnels, halls, corridors, ramps, lifts, and lounges below the amphitheater, comprising the subterranean part of the south court, discuss study aids, research guides, and various ways to get into town, tell them where they can cook, eat, wash, and shit, describe the more and less interesting runs for sex through Morgre, note the public parks offering the most joyous and the most somber dancing, the pools around which the conversation is the most and the least subtle, we’re usually all on a first-name basis and fairly happy.

  At the foot of the stairs I stepped over the grate; below it water glimmered. Barefoot and naked, I wandered onto the middle of the skene.

  Despite Shoshana’s lights, the amphitheater was empty.

  Trying to make sure I hadn’t overlooked someone sitting or standing in the very top row, I walked to a side aisle, stepped on the bottom stair, and ran the service number through my mind three times—before I realized I had it wrong.