The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Fiddle,” Shoshana said. Her job2 for the last year or so has been in an electronic instrument adjustment house. Fiddling, she tells us, is a very old term, whose origins no one is sure of, which means making small adjustments that are nevertheless absolutely necessary—though it seems to be connected somehow with some very ancient music. “Nea, I understand how upset you must be. And I’m even moved that you came all this way to talk about it. Simply because it’s as serious as it is, we just can’t make assumptions like that, Max. Zetzor, Ulus, Nepiy, all of them are very far away. We don’t really know anything about them—and no,” because Nea had raised one fist up to her shoulder, not in anger but in frustration. Still, Shoshana knew how easily Thants can take offense, even if it never lasts more than a month. “I’m not saying the tastes of any of your words suggest spoiled ingredients. I am simply saying that no meal yields up all its flavors at the first bite. Without contradicting a thing you’ve told us, I’m sure there must be more to it than that. We haven’t talked to Thadeus. We haven’t talked to Eulalia.”

  “Do you think I’ve been able to talk to them either? Not to mention Clearwater. I mean really talk to them? I know what they want, what they’ve said, and … some of the things they’ve done to get it. It makes me very frightened. Shoshana, Max, I don’t know what to do!” Her last sentence was softer and shriller than the ones before. It’s so easy to lose the nature of the distress when dealing with the crisis of people from another culture, much less another whole matrix of cultures—which is what a person from another world always is. “If Thadeus, Clearwater, and Eulalia do go off to Nepiy, what about the rest of us? Should we go with them, with some hope of sabotaging—”

  “Certainly not,” Egri said. “You’d be guilty of treason—and caught for it in the beat of a pearlbat’s wing.” Still squatting she put one foot down on the next inlaid platform, toes curling on the ornamental side.

  “Or should we stay where we are, working on the Family’s side to change their—”

  Egri simply laughed, flexing the toes of both feet. “Soon you will have things too complicated for anyone to follow. No, let’s try something more straightforward, more in touch with what you feel.”

  “But I don’t know what I feel!” Nea declared. “I’m frightened! I’m confused. How am I to know what—”

  “Are you hungry?” Egri asked. “Are you sad—”

  “I don’t …” and here Nea gave a little shudder, her fists and her lips held tightly. (I have been told that children, in the livable climes of Zetzor, are quickly taught not to cry: stoicism is a great virtue there and is expressed in all sorts of flamboyant ways.) “I don’t …” she repeated. “I can’t …”

  Then, beside Mother Dyeth’s silent personality column, light turned riotous in the entrance mirrors; mirrors swung in.

  Bucephalus came lolloping inside, turned, and took the stance of an evelm dragon hunter many years older than she. On the other side of the door, Tinjo (who is a love, but also a bit of a coward) peered around the edge.

  Small Maxa ran up to stand right by the jamb.

  Bronze head, bronze feet, bronze hands, bronze torso bright with Iiriani outside: heaving up a brazen forearm, George Thant shoved Small Maxa across the chest back against the multiple hinges and strode through, going from bright to umber. “There! You are there! Nea Thant! Thant! Nea! Thant! …” (Have I explained how the folk of northern Zetzor use the order of your names to render crushing insults both to intimates and strangers? Oh, never mind.) “Treacherous pupa! You are claimed as a sister to me! But you are as a drop of yellow poison in the clear currents of our Family’s love!”

  EIGHT

  Strangers and Visitors

  1.

  “YOU HAVE COME HERE to betray your kin to the viper and the ant. You have disgraced your ancestors and your progeny. Your treachery has shamed me, hurt me, confused me, and I would weep tears of hot vinegar if I could!” (Stamp, stamp, stamp—a reference, I believe, to a curse contained in an oral epic from equatorial Zetzor which, for the last few decades, had been popular at the poles.) “You have squandered ice and soil, jeopardizing the entire custom of unlimited space fare, won for you by the work of your illustrious father, Thant Thadeus—” (You can also proffer resounding compliments that way too.) “—and your melodiously sung mother, Thant Eulalia. As you know, and that knowledge must be your shame, unlimited space fare is limited only to those uses which will broaden minds and enrich cultures. If one is caught abusing it, it can be rescinded at any moment!” (Stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp—five stamps, I think, was an allusion to some parodic use a Zetzorian academic poet of the south had made of that equatorial epic.) “You have besmirched two parents’ joy at your birth and deepened the memory of pain your bodily mother, Thant Clearwater, still bears from her womb-work. Four siblings’ shouts of laughter and cries of pleasure have stilled in a night of fire and chagrin. Oh, Nea—” (Stamp; which I guess was just George—) “What did you call yourself doing, coming here like this? Now I am burdened with hauling you back. Thadeus commands it. Who knows what crazed notions you’ve left with our friends, the glaucomas and retinitises and cataracts with which you’ve infected their eyes so that whenever they gaze again in our direction, all their vision will be obscured by disease …!” George stalked back and forth, vituperating and stamping like some brass engine whose proper use no one can divine but which is nevertheless clearly malfunctioning.

  Nea opened her mouth, then closed it and her eyes. She opened her eyes, her expression for a moment nearing rage—once she actually got out a “No …!” She closed her eyes again, touched two foil fingers to her dark forehead, and shivered.

  “… spawn of a sewage pump, descendant of a slime mold, all genetic congruences we share are discredited by your infamy and actions. How could you, female son of Thant! See how I wring my hands and wring my hands once more, till the flesh goes raw on my palms. I have searched swamp, dry-plain, and canyon for appropriate execrations, and have yet found none for the nuance of my distress …”

  Shoshana and I glanced at each other. Years ago, along with V’vish, Kelso, and Alyxander, we had taken a vaurine-projection tour of Zetzor, basically to learn something of our friends’ world. “Probably saw more of it than any of us ever will,” was Thadeus’s curt comment, on their next visit when we began to ask what we thought were polite questions. But while we were touring the ever-light south, we had gone to a theater in the well-touristed city of K and seen an evening of energetic satire in the public theater about the northern Zetzori. (Not that the southerners aren’t strange.) One particular skit concerned a northern mother, from a Family enclave, going after a runaway child; it wasn’t unlimited space-fare that was in jeopardy that time but some local county tax-rebate the youngster’s presence in the mother’s labor cooperative assured. Still, the gestures, phrases, even the stamps were practically the same. And there was George, from north Zetzor’s 17, raving on and acting like a South Zetzorian parody of herself. It was funny and scary.

  By now some of my other parents—Jayne (who is human), Kal’k (who is evelm), Sel’v (evelm), Hirum (another human), and Hatti (human), and finally my sisters Alyxander and Black Lars (one human, one evelm; both IDs like me)—had come up on their various lifts to watch, quietly and wonderingly, the scene taking place in our west court vestibule.

  “I do not know my actions,” cried George, “yet what I have done and must do is lit by the reflections of starlight-gathering mirrors along the thousand-kilometer glacial fields.” She marched back toward the door, then stalked forward again, stepped to the side (stamp, stamp), then back. “I do not know my feelings, yet the feelings I have already anent this matter, as well as the feelings I know are to come, wrack me as lava from Kromhatch Kone shatters frozen scalings collected on the south face. Oh, Nea—” She seized her sister’s shoulder and pulled her toward the entrance—“let’s go!”

  The doorway, anticipating their exit, had not bothered to close. George dr
agged Nea stumbling out across the patio. Small Maxa, as the shimmering plates swung in, crouched in the doorway and began to cry.

  Large Maxa swayed, platform by platform, down from her perch, her wings showing now and again their inner scarlet. First Jayne, then Black Lars, next Hirum moved to Small Maxa. The earlier shove from George she had taken fairly well. But she knew the Zetzori’s aversion to contact. When George had grabbed Nea’s shoulder, her reserves had broken. She squatted in the doorway and sobbed.

  One, and another, we went to my crouching white sister, stooped to pat at (but not touch) the ivory fists bunched on her bony chest, to lick at (but not touch) her lightly veined ears, to rub at (but not touch) her knobby human back.

  “Marq Dyeth …?”

  I stood, surprised.

  At the top of the ramp, he had one hand on the rail. His call was oddly hoarse; also, oddly, hollowed by the height; and grossly accented.

  He said: “Your students are here now … many of us.”

  And I knew somehow he had not come in to tell me that. Knowing it, I also knew he’d been standing there a while—though how much he’d seen of George’s and Nea’s altercation I didn’t know.

  “Yes,” I said. “Thank you. Of course.” I knew too his choosing to speak then was absolutely not what it would have been from me: the discreet throat clearing, the diplomatic cough, the reminder to people caught up in a private moment that they are, in fact, observed.

  I cast apologetic looks about me. Only gold-clawed V’vish and bushy-haired Hirum caught them; they glanced at the stranger on the ramp, glanced back at me. I hurried across the vestibule and started up.

  He stood just in front of the reflecting south court doors, not waiting, his long body burned a red-brown Iiriani could never match. As I reached the ramp’s crest, he turned, and, with movements that (however awkwardly they nudged his wide shoulders, tilted his pelvic blades whose wings jutted above his raveling pants-waist) were completely familiar, he went through the swinging mirrors in the same motion with which, minutes ago, I had fled the polarized chamber.

  As I neared the doors, the panels’ silver gave me back, waving, only the thickset little male whose swagger is just a bit too much for any real elegance—but with the wreckage of a joy between short beard and heavy brows which, even seconds come to pieces, transformed what should have been the most familiar of faces: when the mirrors swung aside for me, I was not sure who walked out under the stone arch (he was gone …!), who walked down the steps, stepped wide of the grill, gamboled out onto the amphitheater skene, for I felt as though I were no longer who I had been.

  In those few seconds, he’d vanished …?

  They were there—scattered up around the top ten tiers.

  I looked around the empty seats far longer than I usually do. (He could have gotten back to the chamber …?) Finally I said: “Good afternoon. I see most of you have gotten here. My name is Marq Dyeth …” (Thinking: Why am I telling them? He knows.) “We’ll be talking together about an hour, maybe two, possibly more, to orient you and answer your questions. But first why don’t you all come down from your perches to the front rows here where we can make out each other’s faces. Yes, that’s it. Come on, now. I won’t urinate on you.” (Suffice that it’s an evelmism and would take a page and a half to explain fully. But they laughed, which was the important thing; and began to gather up their readers, recorders, miniscreens, and calculators.) “Just a second, I’ll start the moving stair …” on which, among them, he did not come down.

  2.

  I’M TEMPTED TO GIVE you an account of the whole three-hour orientation session2 (they do go on), if only because I know now that from his hiding place, he saw it all. I’m also tempted to omit it entirely—as I want to omit from thought all moments when he was not available to my sight, my tongue, my hand. But the truth is it was a student orientation session2 like any hundred others. There was the big-shouldered, short-tongued algae farmer1 from even further south—an embarrassingly healthy creature who smiled at everything and took down everything on a portable notator that wept an endless curl of paper into her scaly lap. Every minute or so she would wind it rapidly on another little red plastic spool, tear it off, and push it into another of the numberless pouches on her long vest. (“And do we have any other algae farmers, 1; or 2, with us this morning …?” There were three, wouldn’t you know: one from Ly’el Complex a few dozen kilometers away; two others from some geosector on the other side of this world.) There were the four evelmi with steel-colored claws from somewhere in the far north and shy of giving their professions2—where human/evelm relations are much less tranquil. They came and sat at the edge of the stage and were quiet, diffident, and probably hugely suspicious. The largest one now and again turned to whisper something to her smaller companions in a voice through which individual words were indistinguishable but which nevertheless sounded like a passing propeller platform; and I tried to pretend it wasn’t an interruption. There was the ebullient little fifty-year-old med tech2 (“… this workshift, that is. Last job2 I had was in a wildlife preserve in the comb-caves in the upper plateaus of the Veng’n’n Range, just about—well, quite far east of here. I loved it. Might even consider going back. But there’s also a possibility of going to work2 in the bauxite mines out east—in accounting, of course. Not actually in the mines. Even with GI, that’s a primary job1 of course …” One suspected she’d been retired from her own job1, whatever it had been, for at least ten years. “But it still sounds fascinating. Or then, I could always go into …”) One had come to study the sculpture of Bybe’t Kohimi (That’s the name—I remember now—of the artist who did the synapse-pillar’s pedestal and capital), of which Dyethshome happens to have the largest collection on the two worlds where she worked. Another had come to explore the documents in one of our libraries on simulacrum technology as it segues into bioengineering. (Our libraries are both vasty and selective on many subjects.) Another was here to learn more of the early stage production techniques used in the folk theater of Jae’l Bazerat, many of whose performances were first presented in this very amphitheater just over a hundred years ago. (Yes, extensive theater records are all on store in one of our numerous basements.) By now most of the affable, interested, and really rather bright group were perching or sitting or squatting around the stage edge. (Maybe five out of the two dozen had gotten stuck out in the first row of seats.) I sat in the skene’s center, suggesting to Ryla that she not try to see the Kyga-jewelry collection in the north court until after she had visited the G’har gallery in the west court; or reassuring R’eb she needn’t worry about her various religious food prohibitions while she was here; or dictating for the third time—just so Vagia could make sure she’d gotten it down right—the access number to activate the food choppers in the student kitchen downstairs, since it had been accidentally misprinted in the last brochure. Iiriani rolled like a flaring tread gear behind high-colored glass, lighting us now deep orange, now pale green, now a scalded yellow. But as I sat, naked and cross-legged on the old planks, every few minutes I would realize that, though he was not among their number, if he had retreated to some hiding place, he was still watching me. And I would halt on a word, then rush on among the coils of whatever explanation I was ensnared in, while my ears and knees flushed redder than the freestanding panes about the amphitheater of our rhetoric.

  3.

  WHEN THE SESSION WAS over, I fled the skene for my room. But by the time I reached the unactivated entrance column, I suddenly found myself afraid of my open platform’s sunset peace. Off I strode again, through underground halls, to search out Maxa and see her mines. Minutes later, when I heard her laughing in one of the lower galleries with Alyxander and Bu, I did not activate the drop-lift that would take me to them. Through bright corridors and across drear chambers I wandered into the dark, multi-columned hall we call the Old Library. Like the column by the vestibule entrance, these ornately topped and bottomed glimmerings (more Bybe’t) were the personalities o
f other dead Dyeths. From the wallboard I took out (yet again) one of the tiny crystal volumes of Mother Dyeth’s nine-volume memoirs that, in my rash adolescence, I’d promised myself I would someday read all through. A wonderful woman, my great-grandmother had a dreadful prose style; but since so much of her life, not to mention Vondramach’s, has been written about by people who didn’t (including Vondramach), those memoirs are like the heaviest ore—laced with valuable yield, I’m sure; but the refinement techniques are all but beyond me. I sat at one of the large scarred tables, pushed open the cover to the dusty reader-screen, funneled the little text crystal (so different from books) between my fingers into the receptor dish, and for an hour stared at one page of limp, bitter bombast by a woman by report both salty and pithy.

  I did not read, from one end to the other, another three sentences.

  Suddenly I was up and out between the glimmering ghosts. He was in the polarized chamber. And there were ways to get there without going back through the amphitheater itself. (Why would you build one if there weren’t?) What I wanted to avoid were the good-natured students still hanging around the stage. (“Oh, hey, Marq! We just wanted to ask you …”) Well, there were ways. But I had to go to another library and look them up to make sure I had the various spells and incantations down. Dyethshome is a hive of mentally activatable intricacies scattered about five courts, and nobody knows them all.

  Why hadn’t I thought of this an hour ago?

  I probably had.

  But that many decimal places, not to mention the confusion of Nea, George, and their Thantish theatrics, had fouled my tongue and fingers till I’d lost all notion of recipe.