Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  "They're beautiful," he repeated, stepping closer.

  "I'll leave them in your room this evening." She picked one up with dark fingers and turned it over. "I find them fascinating myself. Almost hypnotic."

  "Here." Von Ray turned to one of the other columns. "I have something else to show you. Aaron had apparently heard of your interest in racing, and knew how well you were doing." Something was forming in the second column. "Two of his engineers had just developed a new ion-coupler. They told us it was too sensitive for commercial use and wouldn't be profitable for them to manufacture on any large scale. But Aaron said the response level would be excellent for small-scale racing craft. I offered to buy it for you. He wouldn't hear of it; he's sent it to you as a gift."

  "He did?" Lorq felt excitement lap above surprise. "Where is it?"

  In the column a crate stood on the corner of a loading platform. The fence of Nea Limani Yacht Basin diminished in the distance between the guide towers. "Over at the field?" Lorq sat down in the green hammock hanging from the ceiling. "Good! I'll look at it when I go down this evening. I still have to get a crew for the race."

  "You just pick your crew from people hanging around the spacefield?" Mother shook her head. "That always worries me."

  "Mom, people who like racing, kids who are interested in racing ships, people who know how to sail, they hang around the shipyards. I know half the people at Nea Limani anyway."

  "I still wish you'd get your crew from among your school friends, or people like that."

  "What wrong is with people who like this talk?" He smiled slightly.

  "I didn't say anything of that nature at all. I just meant you should use people you know."

  "After the race," his father cut in, "what do you intend to do with the rest of your vacation?"

  Lorq shrugged. "Do you want me to foreman out at the Sao Orini mine like last year?"

  His father's eyebrows separated then snarled over the vertical crevices above his nose. "After what happened with that miner's daughter ...?" The brows unsnarled again. "Do you want to go out there again?"

  Lorq shrugged once more.

  "Have you thought of anything that you'd like to do?" This from his mother.

  "Ashton Clark will send me something. Right now I've got to go pick up my crew." He stood up from the hammock. "Mom, thanks for the stones. We'll talk about vacation when school is really over."

  He started for the bridge that arched the water.

  "You won't be too ..."

  "Before midnight."

  "Lorq. One more thing."

  He stopped at the crest of the bridge, leaning on the aluminum banister.

  "Prince is having a party. He sent you an invitation. It's at Earth, Paris, on the Ile St.-Louis. But it's just three days after the Regatta. You wouldn't be able to get there— "

  "Caliban can make Earth in three days."

  "No, Lorq! You're not going to go all the way to Earth in that tiny— "

  "I've never been to Paris. The last time I was on Earth was the time you took me when I was fifteen and we went to Peking. It'll be easy sailing down into Draco." Leaving, he called back to them, "If I don't get my crew, I won't even get back to school next week." He disappeared down the other side of the bridge.

  Pleiades Federation/Draco (Caliban transit), 3162

  His crew was two fellows who volunteered to help him unpack the ion-coupler. Neither one was from the Pleiades Federation.

  Brian, a boy Lorq's age who had taken a year off from Draco University and flown out to the Outer Colonies, was now working his way back; he had done both captaining and studding on racing yachts, but only in the co-operative yachting club sponsored by his school. Based on common interest in racing-ships, their relation was one of mutual awe. Lorq was silently agape at the way Brian had taken off to the other end of the galaxy and was beating his way without funds or forethought; while Brian had at last met, in Lorq, one of the mythically wealthy who could own his own boat and whose name had, till then, been only an abstraction on the sports tapes— Lorq Von Ray, one of the youngest and most spectacular of the new crop of racing captains.

  Dan, who completed the crew of the little three-vaned racer, was a man in his forties, from Australia on Earth. They had met him in the bar where he had started a whole series of tales about his times as a commercial stud on the big transport freighters, as well as racing captains he had occasionally crewed for— though he had never captained himself. Barefoot, a rope around pants torn off at the knees, Dan was a lot more typical of the studs that hung around the heated walkways of Nea Limani. The high wind-domes broke the hurricane gusts that rolled from Tong across glittering Ark— it was the month of Iumbra when there were only three hours of daylight in the twenty-nine-hour day. The mechanics, officers, and studs drank late, talked currents and racing at the bars and the sauna baths, the registration offices and the service pits.

  Brian's reaction to continuing on after the race down to Earth: "Fine. Why not? I have to get back into Draco in time for vacation classes anyway."

  Dan's: "Paris? That's awful close to Australia, ain't it? I got a kid and two wives in Melbourne, and I ain't so anxious for them to catch hold of me. I suppose if we don't stay too long— "

  When the Regatta swept past the observation satellite circling Ark, looped the inner edge of the cluster to the Dim, Dead Sister, and returned to Ark again, it was announced that Caliban had placed second.

  "All right. Let's get out of here. To Prince's party!"

  "Be careful now ..." His mother's voice came over the speaker.

  "Give our regards to Aaron. And congratulations again, son," Father said. "If you wreck that brass butterfly on this silly trip, don't expect me to buy a new one."

  "So long, Dad."

  The Caliban rose from among the ships clustered at the viewing station where the spectators had come to observe the Regatta's conclusion. Fifty-foot windows flashed in starlight below them (behind one, his father and an android of his mother stood at the railing, watching the ship pull away), and in a moment they were wheeling through the Pleiades Federation, then toward Sol.

  A day out, they lost six hours in a whirlpool nebula ("Now if you had a real ship instead of this here toy," Dan complained over the intercom, "it'd be a sneeze to get out of this thing." Lorq turned the frequency of the scanner higher on the ion-coupler. "Point two-five down, Brian. Then catch it up fast— there!"), but made up the time and then some on the Outward Tidal Drift.

  A day later, and Sol was a glowing, growing light in the cosmos raging.

  Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162

  Shaped like the figure eight of a Mycenaean shield, De Blau Field tilted miles below the sweeping vans. Cargo shuttles left from here for the big star— port on Neptune's second moon. The five-hundred-meter passenger liners glittered across the platforms. Caliban fell toward the inset of the yacht basin, coming down like a triple kite. Lorq sat up from the couch as the guide beams caught them. "Okay, puppets. Cut the strings." He switched off Caliban's humming entrails a moment after touchdown. Banked lights died around him.

  Brian hopped into the control cabin, tying his left sandal. Dan, unshaven, his vest unlaced, ambled from his projection chamber. "Guess we got here, Captain." He stooped to finger dirt between his toes. "What kind of party is this you kids are going to?"

  As Lorq touched the unload button, the floor began to slant and the ribbed covering rolled back till the lower edge of the floor hit the ground. "I'm not sure," Lorq told him. "I suppose we'll all find out when we get there."

  "Ohhh no," Dan drawled as they reached the bottom. "I don't go for this society stuff." They started from beneath the shadow of the hull. "Find me a bar, and just pick me up when you come back."

  "If you two don't want to come," Lorq said, looking around the field, "we'll stop off for something to eat, and then you can stay here."

  "I ... well, sort of wanted to go." Brian looked disappointed. "This is as close as I'll ever get to going t
o a party given by Prince Red."

  Lorq looked at Brian. The stocky, brown-haired boy with coffee-colored eyes had changed his scuffed leather work-vest for a clean one with iridescent flowers. Lorq was only beginning to realize how dazzled this young man, who had hitched across the universe, was before the wealth, visible and implied, that went with a nineteen-year-old who could race his own yacht and just took off to parties in Paris.

  It had not occurred to Lorq to change his vest at all.

  "You come on then," Lorq said. "We'll get Dan on the way back."

  "Just you two don't get so drunk you can't carry me back on board."

  Lorq and Dan laughed.

  Brian was staring around at the other yachts in the basin. "Hey! Have you ever worked a tri-vaned Zephyr?" He touched Lorq's arm, then pointed across to a graceful, golden hull. "I bet one of those would really twirl."

  "Pickup is slow on the lower frequencies." Lorq turned back to Dan. "You make sure you get back on board by take-off time tomorrow. I'm not going to go running around looking for you."

  "With me this close to Australia? Don't worry, Captain. By the by, you wouldn't get upset if I should happen to bring a lady onto the ship?" He grinned at Lorq, then winked.

  "Say," Brian said. "How do those Boris-27s handle? Our club at school was trying to arrange a swap with another club that had a ten-year-old Boris. Only they wanted money too."

  "As long as she doesn't leave the ship with anything she didn't bring," Lorq told Dan. He turned to Brian again. "I've never been on a Boris more than three years old. A friend of mine had one a couple of years back. It worked pretty well, but it wasn't up to Caliban."

  They walked through the gate of the landing field, started down the steps to the street, and passed through the shadow from the column of the coiled snake.

  Paris had remained a more or less horizontal city. The only structures interrupting the horizon to any great extent were the Eiffel Tower to their left and the spiring structure of Les Halles: seventy tiers of markets were enclosed in transparent panes, tessellated with metal scrollwork— it was the focus of food and produce for the twenty-three million inhabitants of the city.

  They turned up Rue de Les Astronauts past the restaurants and hotel marquees. Dan dug under the rope around his middle to scratch his stomach, then pushed his long hair from his forehead. "Where do you get drunk around here if you're a working cyborg stud?" Suddenly he pointed down a smaller street. "There!"

  At the bend of the L-shaped street was a small cafe-bar with a crack across the window, Le Sideral. The door was closing behind two women.

  "Fine," Dan drawled, and loped ahead of Lorq and Brian. "I envy someone like that, sometimes," Brian said to Lorq, softly.

  Lorq looked surprised.

  "You really don't care," Brian went on, "I mean if he brings a woman on the ship?"

  Lorq shrugged. "I'd bring one on."

  "Oh. You must have it pretty easy with girls, especially with a racing ship."

  "I guess it helps."

  Brian bit at his thumbnail and nodded. "That would be nice. Sometimes I think girls have forgotten I'm alive. Probably be the same, yacht or no." He laughed. "You ever brought a girl onto your ship?"

  Lorq was silent a moment. Then he said, "I have three children."

  Now Brian looked surprised.

  "A boy and two girls. Their mothers are miners on a little Outer Colony world, New Brazillia."

  "Oh, you mean you ..."

  Lorq cupped his left hand on his right shoulder, right hand on his left.

  "We lead very different sorts of lives, I think," Brian said slowly, "you and I."

  "That's what I was thinking." Then Lorq grinned. Brian's smile returned uneasily.

  "Hold on, you there!" from behind them. "Wait!" They turned.

  "Lorq? Lorq Von Ray?"

  The black glove Lorq's father had described was now a silver one. The armband, high on his biceps, was set with diamonds.

  "Prince?"

  Vest, pants, boots were silver. "I almost missed you!" The bony face beneath black hair animated. "I had the field call me as soon as you got clearance at Neptune. Racing yacht, huh? Sure took your time. Oh, before I forget; Aaron told me if you did come, I should ask you to give his regards to your Aunt Cyana. She stayed with us for a weekend at the beach on Chobe's World last month."

  "Thanks. I will if I see her," Lorq said. "If she was with you last month, you've seen her more recently than I have. She doesn't spend much time on Ark any more."

  "Cyana ..." Brian began. " ...Morgan?" he finished in astonishment. But Prince was already going on: "Look." He dropped his hands on the shoulders of Lorq's leather vest (Lorq tried to detect a difference in pressure between gloved and ungloved fingers), "I've got to get to Mt. Kenyuna and back before the party. I have every available bit of transportation bringing people down from all over everywhere. Aaron's not co-operating. He's refused to have anything more to do with the party; he thinks it's gotten out of hand. I'm afraid I've been throwing his name around to get things I needed in a few places he didn't approve. But he's somewhere off on Vega. Do you want to run me over to the Himalayas?"

  "All right." Lorq started' to suggest that Prince stud with Brian. But perhaps with his arm Prince might not be able to plug in properly. "Hey, Dan!" he shouted down the street. "You're still working."

  The, Australian had just opened the door. Now he turned around, shook his head, and started back.

  "What are we going for?" Lorq asked as they started back toward the field.

  "Tell you on the way."

  As they passed the gate (and the Draco column ringed with the Serpent gleaming in the sunset), Brian hazarded conversation. "That's quite an outfit," he said to Prince.

  "There'll be a lot of people on the Ile. I want everybody to be able to see where I am."

  "Is that glove something new they're wearing here on Earth?"

  Lorq's stomach caught itself. He glanced quickly between the two boys.

  "Things like that," Brian went on, "they never get out to Centauri till a month after everybody's stopped wearing them on Earth. And I haven't even been in Draco for ten months anyway."

  Prince looked at his arm, turned his hand over.

  Twilight washed the sky.

  Then lights along the top of the fence flicked on: light lined the folds on Prince's glove.

  "My personal style." He looked up at Brian. "I have no right arm. This"— he made a fist of silver fingers— "is all metal and plastic and whirring doohickeys." He laughed sharply. "But it serves me ... about as well as a real one."

  "Oh." Embarrassment wavered through Brian's voice. "I didn't know."

  Prince laughed. "Sometimes I almost forget too. Sometimes. Which way is your ship?"

  "There." As Lorq pointed, he was acutely aware of the dozen years between his and Prince's first and present meetings.

  Draco, Earth, Nepal, 3162

  "All plugged?"

  "You're paying me, Captain," Dan's voice grated through. "Strung up and out."

  "Ready, Captain," from Brian.

  "Open your low vanes— "

  Prince sat behind Lorq, one hand on Lorq's shoulder (his real hand). "Everybody and his brother is coming to this thing. You just got here tonight, but people have been arriving all week. I invited a hundred people. There're at least three hundred coming. It grows, it grows!" As the inertia field caught them up, De Blau dropped, and the sun, which had set, rose in the west and crescented the world with fire. The blue rim burned. "Anyway, Che-ong brought a perfectly wild bunch with her from somewhere on the edge of Draco— "

  Brian's voice came over the speaker. "Che-ong, you mean the psychorama star?"

  "The studio gave her a week's vacation, so she decided to come to my party. Day before yesterday, she took it into her head to go mountain climbing, and flew off to Nepal."

  The sun passed overhead. To travel between two points on one planet, you just had to go up and come down in the rig
ht place. In a vane-projector craft, you had to ascend, circle the Earth three or four times, and glide in. It took the same seven/eight minutes to get from one side of the city to the other as it did to get to the other side of the world.

  "Che radioed me this afternoon they were stuck three-quarters of the way up Mt. Kenyuna. There's a storm below them, so they can't get through to the rescue station in Katmandu for a helicopter to come and pick them up. Of course, the storm doesn't stop her from getting a third of the way around the world to tell me her troubles. Anyway, I promised her I'd think of something."

  "How the hell are we supposed to get them off the mountain?"

  "You fly within twenty feet of the rock face and hover. Then I'll climb down and bring them up."

  "Twenty feet!" The blurred world slowed beneath them. "You want to get to your party alive?"

  "Did you get that ion-coupler Aaron sent?"

  "I'm using it now."

  "It's supposed to be sensitive enough for that sort of maneuvering. And you're a crack racing captain. Yes or no?"

  "I'll try it," Lorq said warily. "I'm a bigger fool than you are." Then he laughed. "We'll try it, Prince!"

  Reticulations of snow and rock glided under them. Lorq set the loran co-ordinates of the mountain as Prince bad given them. Prince reached over Lorq's arm and tuned the radio ...

  A girl's voice tumbled into the cabin:

  " ... Oh, there! Look, do you think that's them? Prince! Prince, darling, have you come to rescue us? We're hanging here by our little frozen nubs and just miserable. Prince ...?" There was music behind her voice; there was a babble of other voices.