Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Hold on, Che," Prince said into the mike. "Told you we'd do something." He turned to Lorq. "There! They should be right down there."

  Lorq cut the frequency filter till Caliban was sliding down the gravitational distortion of the mountain itself. The peaks rose, chiseled and flashing.

  "Oh, look, everybody! Didn't I tell you Prince wouldn't let us languish away up here and miss the party?"

  And in the background:

  "Oh, Cecil, I can't do that step— "

  "Turn the music up louder— "

  "But I don't like anchovies— "

  "Prince," cried Che, "do hurry! It's started to snow again. You know this would never have happened, Cecil, if you hadn't decided to do parlor tricks with the hobenstocks."

  "Come on, sweetheart, let's dance!"

  "I told you, no! We're too close to the edge!"

  Below Lorq's feet, on the floor screen, transmitting natural light, ice and gravel and boulders shone in the moonlight as the Caliban lowered.

  "How many of them are there?" Lorq asked. "The ship isn't that big."

  "They'll squeeze."

  On the icy ledge that slipped across the screen, some were seated on a green poncho with wine bottles, cheeses, and baskets of food. Some were dancing. A few sat around on canvas chairs. One had scrambled to a higher ledge and was shading his eyes, staring up at the ship.

  "Che," Prince said, "we're here. Get everything packed. We can't wait around all day."

  "Good heavens! That is you up there. Come on, everybody, we're on our way! Yes, that's Prince!"

  There was an explosion of activity on the ledge. The youngsters began to run about, picking things up, putting them in knapsacks; two people were folding the poncho.

  "Edgar! Don't throw that away! It's 'forty-eight, and you can't just pick up a bottle any old where. Yes, Hillary, you may change the music. No! Don't turn the heater off yet! Oh, Cecil, you are a fool. Brrrr!— well, I suppose we'll be off in a moment or two. Of course I'll dance with you, honey. Just not so close to the edge. Wait a second. Prince? Prince ...!"

  "Che!" Prince called as Lorq settled still closer. "Do you have any rope down there?" He put his hand over the mike. "Did you see her in Mayham's Daughters where she acted the wacky, sixteen-year-old daughter of that botanist?"

  Lorq nodded.

  "That wasn't acting." He took his hand from the mike again. "Che! Rope! Do you have any rope?"

  "Oodles! Edgar, where's all that rope? But we climbed up here on something! There it is! Now, what do I do?"

  "Tie big knots in it every couple of feet. How far are we above you?"

  "Forty feet? Thirty feet? Edgar! Cecil! Jose! You heard him. Tie knots!"

  On the floor screen Lorq watched the shadow of the yacht slip over the bergs; he let the boat fall even lower.

  "Lorq, open the hatch in the drive-room when we're—

  "We're seventeen feet above them," Lorq called over his shoulder. "That's it, Prince!" He reached forward. "And it is open."

  "Fine!"

  Prince ducked through the doorway into the drive-room. Cold air slapped Lorq's back. Dan and Brian held the ship steady in the wind.

  On the floor screen Lorq saw one of the boys fling the rope up at the ship— Prince would be standing in the open hatchway to catch it in his silver glove. It took three tries. Then Prince's voice came back over the wind: "Right! I've got it tied. Come on up!" And one after another they mounted the knotted rope.

  "There you go. Watch it— "

  "Man, it's cold out there! Soon as you get past the heating field-"

  "I've got you. Right in— "

  "Didn't think we'd make it. Hey, you want some Chateauneuf du Pape 'forty-eight? Che says you can't get— "

  The voices filled the drive-room. Then:

  "Prince! Luscious of you to rescue me! Are you going to have any nineteenth-century Turkish music at your party? We couldn't get any local stations, but there was this educational program beaming up from New Zealand. Airy! Edgar invented a new step. You get down on your hands and knees and just swing your up and down. Jose, don't fall back onto that silly mountain! Come in here this instant and meet Prince Red. He's the one who's giving the party, and his father has ever so many more millions than yours. Close the door now and let's get out of the engine room. All these machines and things. It isn't me."

  "Come inside, Che, and annoy the captain awhile. Do you know Lorq Von Ray?"

  "My goodness, the boy who's winning all those races? Why, he's got even more money than you— "

  "Shhhhh!" Prince said in a stage whisper as they came into the cabin. "I don't want him to know."

  Lorq pulled the ship away from the mountain, then turned.

  "You must be the one who won those prizes: You're so handsome!"

  Che-ong wore a completely transparent cold suit.

  "Did you win them with this ship?"

  She looked around the cabin, still panting from the climb up the rope. Rouged nipples flattened on vinyl with each breath.

  "This is lovely. I haven't been on a yacht in days." And the crowd surged in behind her:

  "Doesn't anybody want any of this 'forty-eight— "

  "I can't get any music in here. Why isn't there any music— Cecil, do you have any more of that gold powder?"

  "We're above the ionosphere, stupid, and electromagnetic waves aren't reflected any more. Besides, we're moving too— "

  Che-ong turned to them all. "Oh, Cecil, where has that marvelous golden dust got to? Prince, Lorq, you must try this. Cecil is the son of a mayor— "

  "Governor— "

  "— on one of those tiny worlds we're always hearing about, very far away. He had this gold powder that they collect from crevices in the rocks. Oh, look, he's still got lots and lots!"

  The world began to spin beneath them.

  "See, Prince, you breathe it in, like this. Ahhhh! It makes you see the most marvelous colors in everything you look at and hear the most incredible sounds in everything you hear, and your mind starts running about and filling in absolutely paragraphs between each word. Here, Lorq— "

  "Watch it!" Prince laughed. "He's got to get us back to Paris!"

  "Oh!" exclaimed Che, "it won't bother him. We'll just get there a little faster, that's all."

  Behind them the others were saying:

  "Where did she say this goddamn party was?"

  "Ile St-Louis. That's in Paris."

  "Where— ?"

  "Paris, baby, Paris. We're going to a party in— "

  Draco, Earth, Paris, 3162

  In the middle of the fourth century the Byzantine Emperor Julian, tiring of the social whirl of the Cite de Paris (whose population, then under a thousand, dwelt mostly in skin huts clustered about a stone and wooden temple sacred to the Great Mother), moved across the water to the smaller island.

  In the first half of the twentieth century, the queen of a worldwide cosmetic industry, to escape the pretensions of the Right Bank and the bohemian excesses of the Left, established here her Paris pied a terre, the walls of which were lined with a fortune in art treasures (while across the water, a twin-towered cathedral had replaced the wooden temple).

  At the close of the thirty-first century, its central avenue hung with lights, the side alleys filled with music, menageries, drink, and gaming booths, while fireworks boomed in the night, the Ile St.-Louis held Prince Red's party.

  "This way! Across here!"

  They trooped over the trestled bridge. The black Seine glittered. Across the water, foliage dripped the stone balustrades. The sculptured buttresses of Notre Dame, floodlit now, rose behind the trees in the park on the Cite.

  "No one can come onto my island without a mask!" Prince shouted.

  As they reached the bridge's center, he vaulted to the rail, grabbed one of the beams, and waved over the crowd with his silver hand. "You're at a party! You're at Prince's party! And everybody wears a mask!" Spheres of fireworks, blue and red, bloomed on the dark behind his b
ony face.

  "Airy!' squealed Che-ong, running to the rail. "But if I wear a mask, nobody will recognize me, Prince! The studio only said I could come if there was publicity!"

  He jumped, grabbed her vinyl glove, and led her down the steps. There, on racks, hundreds of full-headed masks glared.

  "But I have a special one for you, Che!" He pulled down a two-foot, transparent rat's head, ears rimmed with white fur, eyebrows sequined, jewels shaking at the end of each wire whisker.

  "Airy!" squealed Che as Prince clapped the shape over her shoulders.

  Through the transparent leer, her own delicate, green-eyed face twisted into laughter.

  "Here, one for you!" Down came a saber-toothed panther's head for Cecil; an eagle for Edgar, with iridescent feathers; Jose's dark hair disappeared under a lizard's head.

  A lion for Dan (who had come protesting at everyone's insistence, though they had forgotten him the moment he had given his belligerent consent) and a griffon for Brian (whom everyone had ignored till now, though he'd followed eagerly).

  "And you!" Prince turned to Lorq. "I have a special one for you too!" Laughing, he lifted down a pirate's head, with eyepatch, bandana, scarred cheek, and a dagger in bared teeth, It went lightly over Lorq's head: he was looking through mesh eyeholes in the neck. Prince slapped him on the back. "A pirate, that's for Von Ray!" he called as Lorq started across the cobble street.

  More laughter as others arrived at the bridge.

  Above the crowd, girls in powdered, towering, twenty-third-century, pre-Ashton Clark coiffures, tossed confetti from a balcony. A man was pushing up the street with a bear. Lorq thought it was someone in costume till the fur brushed his shoulder and he smelled the musk. The claws clicked away. The crowd caught him up,

  Lorq was ears.

  Lorq was eyes.

  Bliss filed the receptive surface of each sense glass-smooth. Perception turned suddenly in (as the vanes of a ship might turn) as he walked the brick street, mortared with confetti. He felt the presence of his centered self. His world focused on the now of his hands and tongue. Voices around him caressed his awareness.

  "Champagne! Isn't that just airy!" The transparent plastic rat had cornered the griffon in the flowered vest at the wine table. "Aren't you having fun? I just love it!"

  "Sure," Brian answered. "But I've never been to a party like this. People like Lorq, Prince, you— you're the sort of people I only used to hear about. It's hard to believe you're real."

  "Just between us. I've occasionally had the same problem. It's good to have you here to remind us, Now you just keep telling us— "

  Lorq passed on to another group.

  " ...on the cruise boat up from Port Said to Istanbul, there was this fisherman from the Pleiades who played the most marvelous things on the sensory-syrynx. .

  " ...and then we had to hitchhike all the way across Iran because the mono wasn't working. I really think Earth is coming apart at the seams ..."

  " ...beautiful party. Perfectly air ..."

  The very young, Lorq thought; the very rich; and wondered what limits of difference those conditions defined.

  Barefoot, with a rope belt, the lion leaned against the side of a doorway, watching. "How you doing, Captain?"

  Lorq raised his hand to Dan, walked on.

  Now, specious and crystal, was within him. Music invaded his hollow mask where his head was cushioned on the sound of his own breath. On a platform at a harpsichord a man was playing a Byrd pavane. Voices in another key grew over the sound as he moved further on; on a platform on the other side of the street, two boys and two girls in twentieth-century mod re-created a flowing antiphonal work of the Mommas and the Poppas. Turning down a side street, Lorq moved into a crowd that pushed him forward, till at last he confronted the towering bank of electronic instruments that were reproducing the jarring, textured silences of the Tohu-bohus. Responding with the nostalgia produced by ten-year-old popular music, the guests, in their bloated mache and plastic heads, broke off in twos, threes, fives, and sevens to dance. A swan's head swayed to the right. Left, a frog's face wobbled on sequined shoulders. As he moved even further, into his ear threaded the thirdless modulations that he had heard over the speaker of the Caliban, hovering above the Himalayas.

  They came running through the dancers. "He did it! Isn't Prince a darling!" They shouted and cavorted. "He's got that old Turkish music!"

  Hips and breasts and shoulders gleaming beneath the vinyl (the material had pores that opened in warm weather to make the transparent costume cool as silk), Che-ong swung around, holding her furry ears,

  "Down, everybody! Down on all fours! We're going to show you our new step! Like this: just swing your— "

  Lorq turned under the exploding night, a little tired, a little excited. He crossed the street edging the island and leaned on the stone near one of the floodlights that shone back on the buildings of the Ile. Across the water on the opposite quay people strolled, in couples or singly, gazing at the fireworks or simply watching the gaiety here.

  Behind him a girl laughed sharply. He turned to her—

  — head of a bird of paradise, blue feathers about red foil eyes, red beak, red rippling comb—

  — as she pulled away from the group to sway against the low wall. The breeze shook the panels of her dress so that they tugged at the scrolled brass fastenings at shoulder, wrist, and thigh. She rested her hip on the stone, sandaled toe touching the ground, one inch above it. With long arms (her nails were crimson) she removed her mask. As she set it on the wall, the breeze shook out her black hair, dropped it to her shoulders, raised it. The water reticulated below them as under flung sand.

  He looked away. He looked back. He frowned.

  There are two beauties (her face struck the thought in him, articulate and complete): with the first, the features and the body's lines conform to an averaged standard that will offend no one: this was the beauty of models and popular actresses; this was the beauty of Che-ong. Second, there was this: her eyes were smashed disks of blue jade, her cheekbones angled high over the white hollows of her wide face. Her chin was wide; her mouth, thin, red, and wider. Her nose fell straight from her forehead to flare at the nostrils (she breathed in the wind— and watching her, he became aware of the river's odor, the Paris night, the city wind); these features were too austere and violent on the face of such a young woman. But the authority with which they set together would make him look again, he knew, once he looked away; make him remember, once he had gone away. Her face compelled in the way that makes the merely beautiful gnaw the insides of their cheeks,

  She looked at him: "Lorq Von Ray?"

  His frown deepened inside his mask.

  She leaned forward, above the paving that lipped the river. "They're all so far away." She nodded toward the people on the quay. "They're so much further away than we think or they think. What would they do at our party?"

  Lorq took off his mask and placed the pirate beside her crested bird.

  She glanced back at him. "So that's what you look like. You're handsome."

  "How did you know who I was?" Thinking he might somehow have missed her in the crowd that had first come across the bridge, he expected her to say something about the pictures of him that occasionally appeared across the galaxy when he won a race.

  "Your mask. That's how I knew."

  "Really?" He smiled. "I don't understand."

  Her eyebrows' arch sharpened. There were a few seconds of laughter, too soft and gone too fast.

  "You. Who are you?" Lorq asked.

  "I'm Ruby Red."

  She was still thin. Somewhere a little girl had stood above him in the mouth of a beast— Lorq laughed now. "What was there about my mask that gave me away?"

  "Prince has been gloating over the prospect of making you wear it ever since he extended the invitation through your father and there was the faintest possibility that you would actually come. Tell me, is it politeness that makes you indulge him in his nasty prank
by wearing it?"

  "Everyone else has one. I thought it was a clever idea."

  "I see." Her voice hung above the tone of general statement. "My brother tells me we have all met a long time ago." It returned. "I ... wouldn't have recognized you. But I remember you."

  "I remember you."

  "Prince does too. He was seven. That means I was five."

  "What have you been doing for the last dozen years?"

  "Growing older gracefully, while you've been the enfant terrible in the raceways of the Pleiades, flaunting your parents' ill-gotten gains."

  "Look!" He gestured toward the people watching from the opposite bank. Some apparently thought he waved; they waved back.

  Ruby laughed and waved too. "Do they realize how special we are? I feel very special tonight." She raised her face with eyes closed. Blue fireworks tinted her lids.

  "Those people, they're too far away to see how beautiful you are."

  She looked at him again.

  "It's true. You are— "

  "We are ..."

  "— very beautiful."

  "Don't you think that's a dangerous thing to say to your hostess, Captain Von Ray?"

  "Don't you think that was a dangerous thing to say to your guest?"

  "But we're unique, young Captain. If we want, we're allowed to flirt with Dan— "

  The streetlights about them extinguished.

  There was a cry from the side street; the strings of colored bulbs as well were dead. As Lorq turned from the embankment, Ruby took his shoulder.

  Along the island, lights and windows flickered twice. Someone screamed. Then the illumination returned, and with it laughter.

  "My brother!" Ruby shook her head. "Everyone told him he was going to have power trouble, but he insisted on having the whole island wired for electricity. He thought electric light would be more romantic than the perfectly good induced-fluorescence tubes that were here yesterday— and have to go back up tomorrow by city ordinance. You should have seen him trying to hunt up a generator. It's a lovely six-hundred-year-old museum piece that fills up a whole room. I'm afraid Prince is an incurable romantic— "

  Lorq placed his hand over hers.