The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  “It hurts.” He lifted his hand from under mine, put his arm around my shoulder; again I felt warm metal, cool flesh. “But one thing about what was done to me on my world: there are many worries—many kinds of worries—I do not have.”

  “The synapse-jamming?”

  “Do you wonder what I would be like without it? It’s not supposed to change who you are …”

  “I hadn’t,” I said. “Yet.” What I did wonder was what worries a tyrant, priest, and poet, dead two hundred years, had carried with her after such an operation.

  For a while, I felt one finger move on my shoulder, then another.

  He said: “Your family—they are very angry.”

  I looked up at him, wondering what he could mean. “I know very little of families,” I said.

  “I had none,” he said, “though I used to think of them a lot … when I was younger.”

  “I don’t follow you,” I said. “What family?”

  He looked down, with the slight brief smile of puzzlement that was so like his slight brief smile of pleasure. “When I came in from the theater, your sibling—the one with the metallic yellow flesh—was angry at your black sister; finally she took her outside while the rest of you watched.”

  “George—my …?” I looked up. “Nea …?” I stood and I went to the chair on which his wrinkled pants were piled, here and there in the folds showing metal belt-links. “They’re not even from our world. George and Nea are Thants. They’re friends of Dyeth.” But when it dawned on me, I laughed out loud. “You thought we were a family …?” Then I smiled. “Suddenly some of the things you’ve been saying begin to make sense. No, the Dyeths are very much our own nurture stream—at least that’s the translation of the northern evelmi’s term for it. This particular nurture stream has been bubbling along for seven ripples now. There’re only two older streams in the area—one at the tracer collective and one at the nematode farm. And I wouldn’t be all that upset if ours went on for seventeen or twenty-seven more.” There are so many small movements of response you expect from people when they listen to you—there the head nods slightly, here it raises a little, now the eyelids narrow. He, who, against me, forehead to foot, had responded so that, minutes ago, he had seemed an extension of myself, only sat, only watched. Though I was sure he listened as intently as anyone else could possibly listen (as intently as I knew I listened to him), still, before his still face, to believe it was all faith. “I was adopted by the Dyeths when I was a baby—from some infant exchange in the north; but most of my sisters come from even farther south. Small Maxa was semisomed from some neuroplasm that an evelm grandmother of mine, N’yom, donated to a bioengineering experiment many many years ago and that was just taken out of suspension about a decade and a half back—though of course most of Maxa’s chromosome sequence was taken from humans. But in the genetic sense she’s part evelm. Still, there is no egg-and-sperm relation between any of our parents and any of this generation of children, nor between any of my sisters—human or evelm—and each other.” But certainly the Web had told him this. Somewhere away from where words gather before speaking, I vaguely saw us taking a walk outside around the platform while we talked. And because such images are closer to movement than words, I moved, planning to speak. But he stood, with me, before words came. And walked with me as I started to walk. (Thus faith is rewarded.) “Rhyonon was a Family world, wasn’t it?” As we passed my workdesk, for a moment the lamp above it gave his eyes back their whites and greens. And the demon vanished into his pitted face. “At least someone told me that it was about to fall over in that direction.”

  “The Sygn,” he said. “They told me in the Web that that’s the side you and your stream … your world is on.”

  I said: “It’s also supposed to be the side that Japril and most of the Web are on … unless there’s been some new information that I’m not privy to.” At the rail, I lifted up the ornate triple hook from its hasp and swung out the lacquered gate.

  Korga nodded as we started down the wide plank steps. “My world was just about to join with the Family officially—when it was destroyed.” Korga’s toes and the balls of his feet were so big they hung over the edge of each step as he stepped down. His sole’s thick rims were rough and cracked, like a woman’s gone barefoot twenty years on sand. “And I did not even know there was a clash between them or, really, the name of either side.” As we walked down, he kept very close to me. And the way people much taller than you sometimes do, he rested one hand on my shoulder.

  That almost made me want to cry.

  “Tell me about the Dyeths,” he said, as we turned on the clearing to walk beside the raised platform.

  “Gylda Dyeth …” I said—recited really, as I would have in any orientation session2 had some student asked me the same question; frequently when I want to cry, I recite. “Gylda Dyeth migrated here to Velm, when she was nineteen, in a small shuttle of eight thousand colonists from a world called Klaven, which had recently become fearful of Cultural Fugue. It’s a problem certain metal-ceramic-plastic-intensive worlds, with an economic variation displacement of more than point-seven-six, are prone to fall into …” I halted, thinking of Rhyonon.

  There’s a ten-day period right after hotwind season when I wouldn’t let anyone—no matter how rough her feet—walk barefoot on fallen fire-cactus needles. Then the needles are bright red (and the cactus trunks smoke gray). But at this time of year they heap about in brown piles over the scrumbly soil (and the trunks are deep maroon). Those under our feet were almost as soft as the powder-soil discarded by the nematode strainers, or (more accurately) the sloughed scales over the floor of a seven-generation dragon cave.

  His hand still on my shoulder, we turned to take the circuit of blunt prickles. “I’ve always imagined Gylda, when she got here, looking somewhat like Nea Thant does now—a tall, intense, black woman with somewhat yellowish eyes. She spent six years on Velm, first in the north at the other end of the world, and then here in the south. It was on a religious visit to our little moon, Arvin, where she met the woman who once wore your rings.”

  “Vondramach Okk …” He said the name with the uncertainty of a native evelm passing some polysyllabled human word from tongue to tongue, inserting all sorts of apostrophes. “Japril, Ynn, and Marta told me of Vondramach Okk.”

  “They hit it off pretty well. Gylda spent the next five years standard in Vondramach’s services, doing jobs for her offworld that I like to imagine were somewhat similar to what I do today. Only my better judgment tells me that, given grandma’s youthful accomplishments and Okk’s mature needs, they were probably quite a bit nastier. Those five years took her all over the galaxy—sometimes with Vondramach, sometimes without. But as she had left Klaven, she finally left Vondramach’s service and came back here to Velm. They parted on good terms. When she returned to this world, here to Morgre, Vondramach gave her—or had built for her—well, here it looks like we’re outside it—”

  “Dyethshome?”

  I nodded.

  We walked between tall cactus trunks. Brown needles brushed our shoulders. Thick shadows from the platform’s central lamp barred the ground. Ahead, rocks broke away beneath netmoss. Arvin, the little moon that looks like a star, was up. Beneath it, the stream broiled through its crevice, searching for Whitefalls. “But there’s nothing much more I can really say about it, other than that it’s a stream where you are as welcome as I am, because each ripple, each wave and rill is held to the other by love. And I … well, guess I love you.” I sighed.

  We stepped wide of a small stone crevice onto netmoss. Last year’s deader, darker tangle cushioned the coppery web of this year’s. On the far rocks, banks of elephant lichen (trace of the Web’s planoforming, common to so many worlds) raised their crinkly barks in the night-light.

  Suddenly Korga’s hand dropped from my shoulder. “That …” he said. “That’s running water …?”

  “Yes. It joins with Whitefalls further along.”

 
“It’s the first I’ve ever seen.” He squatted, staring.

  I looked down at his back’s curve, measured over vertebrae and ribs and planed one side with star- and Arvinlight, ghostly through cactus branches. He held his hand over waters ribbed with their own quivering rush. Momentarily stones and metal seemed suspensors holding those heavy fingers up.

  He lowered them.

  Water bubbled at his palm’s edge, stilled between his knuckles. (His big toes broke the earth he squatted on.) He submerged his hand.

  I asked: “Does the cold water do anything to the rings’ functioning?”

  He looked up. “Perhaps it gives me a kind of … But it’s only the chill that would happen to anyone putting a hand in cold water.” He stayed there almost a whole minute. “No.”

  When he stood, I said: “This way.”

  His hand wet and warm on my shoulder, we came on around the platform’s fifth corner. As we started toward the stairs, I asked: “Rat, what do you feel about all this?” and wondered what his notion of “all this” was.

  He said: “Relief, mostly. They told me you existed—I had to wait most of a standard year, learning how to be a person who might walk, speak, and listen in your world.”

  “Relief …” I smiled. “Yes. I feel that too. They told me that you existed. And yet somehow my going on involved pretending you didn’t.”

  “All around the relief—” Korga’s wide heels hung from the back of each step as we climbed—“there is still anxiety. Yours, mostly. I sense it not as an emotional activity, but as a tenseness. Desire is still there; expectation is still there. A single orgasm in a single hour has not given me an answer.”

  Which made me gasp a little. “Yes, I feel that too …” I pushed through the gate; he followed me. “And yet we’re both—you and I—very different people.”

  “We are both in very different situations.”

  “We’re both—” I started to say from very different worlds. “We are each likely to have very different feelings at what comes upon us as well. I know for myself—” I turned at the rail as he closed the gate behind him and stepped up to stand next to me: “I know I want to do wonderful things for you, because watching you, being near you, not to mention touching you or holding you, gives me so much pleasure. I suppose somewhere the rational part of me is wondering if perhaps the differences between us might not end up with my hurting over them, but …”

  After a strangely long while he said (and he was halfway through his sentence before I realized it was an answer to mine): “You give me so much pleasure, why should I ever want to hurt you?”

  Somehow I assumed, in the search for difference, we had found identical emotions. Somewhere across the rocks came the growing pedal-bass of a sand scooter.

  I looked up to see if Korga was frowning at the sound. (He wasn’t.) “Rat, I think someone is …” I leaned down on the rail, folding my arms and hunching my shoulders. Beside me Korga grasped the rail, arms straight, and didn’t lean at all.

  We looked across the clearing, beyond the night rocks, to distant Morgre’s glimmer. Purple threads luminesced palely over the Hyte. At the horizon a few clouds streaked jet against starry blue.

  First two scooters, then three more, bounced up over the rock ridge. All but one had two riders.

  6.

  “HERE IT IS! LOOK! Here!” one called.

  Scooters swerved, slowed, hummed.

  One and another they halted before the platform.

  The woman who’d called out was our retired med-tech2. She got off the plastic and silver and treads and foils that made up her shared mount. As others dismounted, the scooters leaned over onto their stands. The med-tech2 rubbed the silver filigree on her openwork head-protector and turned to look across the dark stones, out at the handful of glitter that was Morgre. “Yes, this is certainly the view I visited in vaurine. The commentary said, now, that, in the fourth generation of Dyeths, several of them established their personal living rooms in this area.” She was reciting from a prospectus that she must have memorized with the help of General Info.

  “Do any of them still live here, Mima?” asked one of the evelm students still seated with all six legs drawn up on her swaying bike.

  I nudged Korga’s hand with my elbow and grinned as he glanced at me.

  “Let me see … It doesn’t say anything about that in my program,” the med-tech2, Mima, said. “But during the Bazerat productions, some of the younger Dyeths—Genya, Ari, or Maxa—would invite the performers and the technicians up here to rehearse. Special pentagonal platforms were built to facilitate the rehearsals.” (Yes, mine/Ari’s is the only one left.) “Imagine, playmakers like Vhed’dik and Cy’yja, or actors like Kand’ri, Sejer’hi, or Jae’l Bazerat herself may have stood right here and declaimed the lines of the Priest Passmar’t, or the Worm Digger Avess, or the Human Ambassador David.” (Kand’ri’s portrayal of the human David, without make-up or holographic assistance, is considered a high point in the illusionist art of the highly illusive theater by evelmi and humans alike. Myself, though I’m impressed, I’ve always been more moved by the evelm actors’ clouds, rocks, winds, and oilslicks. But these have a millennium of oestern equatorial tradi-Hon behind them.) “Any one of them,” repeated the diminutive Mima, “might have stood right where I’m standing now!” Actually it was about two meters back, where Korga and I were leaning.

  A tall woman I didn’t recognize dismounted her scooter. She wore a black body mask, face to feet. One of the other human students turned to her and said:

  “It was very nice of you to rent these scooters for us so we could come out and explore the landscape. It’s left the taste of friendship in our mouths.”

  The tall woman said: “I am only too pleased to help the local students.” Her voice had the faintly singsong quality of someone who had just learned the language through GI—a quality which, offworld, I hardly even noticed anymore, but which I had found myself listening constantly for in Rat’s speech, only to find the gross deformation in both consonants and vowels that told of an awkwardly muscular attachment to a vanished language system I could not comprehend. “I am only sad,” the woman went on, “that I have not yet met among your number the woman whose history particularly intrigues me. Well, as your study session goes on, perhaps one of you will introduce me. I intend to stay in Morgre for at least a week or so more. And I would like to spend as much time in your company as you would like to spend in mine.” I wondered briefly if she were from one of the mining or manufacturing hegemonies further north.

  Korga’s and my shadows lay across the clearing among the shadows the students and their scooters cast in my platform’s lamplight.

  About a meter and a half away, right in front of the steps, one woman turned slowly in a full circle: “It’s astonishing! We’re here, all alone, with only history and the landscape.”

  As her eyes swept unseeing past ours, Korga looked at me, his features faintly unsettled on his deeply pocked face; I would soon learn that was as close to surprise as he got. “They don’t see us …?”

  “Nor our platform. Nor do they hear us.” I chuckled through a smile. “That’s the chance you take, wandering the local countryside. You never know when you’re chatting about your innermost feelings right under somebody’s front porch.”

  “We’re invisible to them,” Korga said. “The way the chamber was. Back in the amphitheater.”

  I frowned. “Not exactly. In fact it’s entirely different. The reason they can’t see or hear us is because they’re there, up in the hills, ten kilometers out from Morgre, and we’re still in Dyethshome—which is just at the edge of Morgre complex itself.” I pointed over the students’ heads to the far city. “If it were a little lighter, you could make out the three stained-glass walls around the amphitheater … right about … there. Ten kilometers off. Which is where we are—right now.”

  Korga looked down at the students in front of us. He said in a perfectly normal voice: “The spiders who sent
me here said that I must study such things while I am here at Dyethshome and learn to grow comfortable in such a technology.” Most people when they speak in front of people who can’t see them whisper.

  “What a wonderful rise that looks like over there.” One of the evelm, her steel-colored claws indistinct in the evening light, reared beside her scooter and pointed (with her longest tongue). “Let’s go take a look at the view from there,” she said (with one of her others), “and maybe we can catch the big moonrise.”

  “You’re sure you’re not ready to go back to town?” The algae-farmer2 on the far scooter stuck out her own human tongue toward Morgre. (I’ve heard northerners say we southerners—human—who point like that just seem affected.) “I’ll just take one of the scooters back by myself. You can all double up …”

  “Oh, no!” declared the rather hefty evelm, stepping about on five of her six claws.

  “Please come with us,” said the tall masked human with the GI singsong.

  And the evelm: “Please come. But then, of course …” Evelmi are a lot stronger physically than humans; and, in most of their societies, a lot more easygoing. The first is hereditary, the second cultural; and the interplay of both with humans from two profoundly different agricultural-intensive worlds has produced the tragedy of the north.

  The big farmer2 laughed. “All right, I’ll go,” and she flung her high-booted leg back over the scooter seat.

  As the scooters swerved off toward another fine view of the star-lit Vyalou, I found myself thrown back through the many rides, night and day, I had taken over this landscape. “Rat,” I said, “why don’t you come with me—”

  “I should go back to the other students now,” he announced, almost as I spoke. His own thoughts had been turning among his own feelings, behind his still face.

  “No, I don’t mean now. Tomorrow. Come dragon hunting with me. Tomorrow morning. You want to become comfortable with our technology, and I can’t think of any better way. Go back to the other students. I’ll meet you in the student quarters just at—” I paused. “What month is it now?” (Those words, spoken or thought, are the signal for GI to play the time, day, week, month, and year across your consciousness by direct cerebral access: And it was ten o’clock of a balmy Yumber night, the seventeenth month of our seven-season year of twenty-five thirty-one-day cycles.) “Yes, just at sunrise. That’s what we’ll do. You go on now—” It was only because I was imagining seeing him again that I could dare tell him to go—and the telling was pain: something dull throbbed behind my knees. Above my testicles and between my shoulder blades, there seemed to be two pulleys, with a taut cable between, trying and failing to wind in opposite directions.