Nova

by Samuel R. Delany

  "Ruby— "

  She flung her other arm; another layer fell.

  She leaned back, and the nets pulled, striking his ankles so that he slipped.

  "No! Let me ..."

  Through shifting links he saw she was masked again: glittering glass, her eyes; her mouth and nostrils, grilled. All expression was in her slim shoulders, the small muscles suddenly defined. She bent; her stomach creased. The adapter circuits magnified the strength in her arms some five hundred to one. Lorq was wrenched forward down the steps. He fell, caught at the wall. Rock and metal hurt his arms and knees.

  What the links gave in strength, they sacrificed in precision of movement. A swell swept the web, but he was able to duck beneath and gain two steps. But Ruby kicked back; he was yanked down four more. He took two on his back, then one on his hip. She was reeling him down. Fog lapped her calves; she backed further into the suffocating mists, stooped till her black mask was at the fog's surface.

  He threw himself away from her, and fell five more steps. Lying on his side, he caught at the links and heaved. Ruby staggered, but he felt another stone edge scrape his shoulder.

  Lorq let go of the nets, of his held breath. Again he tried to duck what fell at him.

  But he heard a gasp from Ruby.

  He beat links from his face and opened his eyes. Something outside ...

  It darted, dark and flapping, between the walls.

  Ruby flung up an arm to ward it off. And a sheet of netting exploded up from Lorq. It rose, avoiding the links.

  Fifty pounds of metal fell back into the fog. Ruby staggered, disappeared.

  Lorq went down more steps. The mist lapped his thighs. The astringent arsenic fog clogged his head. He coughed and clutched rock.

  The dark thing flapped about him now. The weight lifted a moment; he scrambled up the stones on his belly. Sucking fresher air, gasping and dizzy, he looked back.

  The net hovered above him, grappling with the beast. He pulled himself up another step as the shape flapped free. Links fell heavy on his leg; pulled from his leg; dragged down the steps; vanished.

  Lorq sat up and forced himself to follow the thing's flight between the stones. It cleared the walls, gyred twice, then returned to Sebastian's shoulder:

  The squat cybord stud looked down from the wall.

  Lorq swayed to his feet, squeezed his eyes closed, shook his head, then lurched up the Esclaros des Nuages.

  Sebastian was fastening the steel band about the creature's flexing claw when Lorq reached him at the head of the steps.

  "Again, I"— Lorq took another breath and dropped his hand on Sebastian's gold-matted shoulder - "you thank."

  They looked from the rocks out where no rider broke the mist.

  "You in much danger are?"

  "I am."

  Tyy came quickly across the wharf to Sebastian's side.

  "What it was?" Her eyes, alive like metal, flashed between the men. "I the black gilly saw released!"

  It all right is," Lorq told her. "Now, anyway. I a run-in with the Queen of Swords just had. But your pet me saved."

  Sebastian took Tyy's hand. As her fingers felt the familiar shapes of his, she calmed.

  Sebastian frowned.

  "To the Dim, Dead Sister we now go," Lorq told them.

  Shadow and shadow; shadow and light: the twins were coming acoss the wharf. You could see the puzzled expression on Lynceos' face. Not on Idas'.

  "But ...?" Sebastian began. Then Tyy's hand moved in his and he stopped.

  Lorq volunteered no answer to the unfinished question. "The others we get now. I what I waited for have. Yes; time to go it is."

  Katin fell forward to clutch the links. The rattle echoed in the net house.

  Leo laughed. "Hey, Mouse. In that last bar your big friend too much to drink had, I think."

  Katin regained his balance. "I'm not drunk." He raised his head and looked up the curtained metal. "It'd take twice as much as that to get me drunk."

  "Funny. I am." The Mouse opened his sack. "Leo, you said you wanted me to play some more. What do you want to see?"

  "Anything, Mouse. Anything you like, play."

  Katin shook the nets again. "From star to star, Mouse; imagine, a great web that spreads across the galaxy, as far as man. That's the matrix in which history happens today. Don't you see? That's it. That's my theory. Each individual is a junction in that net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the psychological threads that hold individual to individual. Any historic event is like a ripple in the net."

  He rattled the links again. "It passes over and through the web, stretching or shrinking those cultural bonds that involve each man with each man. If the event is catastrophic enough, the bonds break. The net is torn a while. De Eiling and 34-Alvin are only arguing where the ripples start and how far they travel. But their overall view is the same, you see. I want to catch the throw and scope of this web in my ... my novel, Mouse. I want it to spread about the whole web. But I have to find that central subject, that great event which shakes history and makes the links strike and glitter for me. A moon, Mouse; to retire to some beautiful rock, my art perfected, to contemplate the flow and shift of the net; that's what I want, Mouse. But the subject won't come!"

  The Mouse was sitting on the floor, looking in the bottom of the sack for a control knob that had come off the syrynx.

  "Why don't you write about yourself?"

  "Oh, that's a fine idea! Who would read it? You?"

  The Mouse found the knob and pushed it back on its stem.

  "I don't think I could read anything as long as a novel."

  "But if the subject were, say, the clash between two great families like Prince's and the captain's, wouldn't you at least want to?"

  "How many notes have you made on this book?" The Mouse chanced a tentative light through the hangar.

  "Not a tenth as many as I need. Even though it's doomed as an obsolete museum reliquary, it will be jeweled"— he swung back on the nets— "crafted"— the links roared; his voice rose— "a meticulous work; perfect!"

  "I was born," the Mouse said. "I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you."

  Katin looked at his big, weak fingers against the mail. After a while he said, "Mouse, sometimes you make me want to cry."

  The smell of cumin.

  The smell of almonds.

  The smell of cardamon.

  Falling melodies meshed.

  Bitten nails, enlarged knuckles; the backs of Katin's hands flickered with autumn colors; across the cement floor his shadow danced in the web.

  "Hey, there you go," Leo laughed. "You play, yeah, Mouse! You play!"

  And the shadows danced on till voices:

  "Hey, are you guys still— "

  "— in here? Captain told us to— "

  "— said to hunt you up. It's— "

  "— it's time to get going. Come on— "

  "— we're going!"

  Chapter Six

  Draco/Pleiades Federation (Roc transit)

  "The Page of Wands."

  "Justice."

  "Judgement. My trick. The Queen of Cups."

  "Ace of Cups."

  "The Star. My trick. The Hermit."

  "With trumps she leads!" Leo laughed. "Death."

  "The Fool. My trick is. Now: the Knight of Coins."

  "Trey of Coins."

  "King of Coins. My trick it is. Five of Swords."

  "The Deuce."

  "The Magus; my trick."

  Katin watched the darkened chess table where Sebastian, Tyy, and Leo, after the hour of reminiscence, played three-handed Tarot-whist.

  He did not know the game well; but they did not know this, and he ruminated that they had not asked him to play. He had observed the game for fifteen minutes over Sebastian's shoulder (the dark thing huddled by his foot), while hairy hands dealt and fanned the cards. From his small knowledge Katin tried to construct a cutting brilliance to toss into the pl
ay.

  They played so fast.

  He gave up.

  But as he walked to where the Mouse and Idas sat on the ramp with their feet hanging over the pool, he smiled; in his pocket he thumbed the pips on the end of his recorder, wording another note.

  Idas was saying: "Hey, Mouse, what if I were to turn this knob ...?"

  "Watch it!" The Mouse pushed Idas' hand from the syrynx. "You'll blind everybody in the room!"

  Idas frowned. "The one I had, back when I fooled around with it, didn't have— " His voice trailed, waiting for an absent completion.

  The Mouse's hand slipped from wood to steel to plastic. His fingers brushed the strings and snagged unamplified notes— "You can really hurt somebody if you don't use this thing properly. It's highly directional, and the amount of light and sound you can get out of it could detach somebody's retina or rupture an eardrum. To get opacity in the hologram images, you know, this thing uses a laser."

  Idas shook his head. "I never played around with one long enough to find how it worked inside all the— "

  He reached out to touch the safer strings.

  "It sure is a nice-looking— "

  "Hello," Katin said.

  The Mouse grunted and went on tuning drones.

  Katin sat down on the other side of the Mouse and watched for a few moments. "I just had a thought," he said, "Nine times out of ten, when I just say 'hello' to someone in passing, or when the person I speak to is going off to do something else, I spend the next fifteen minutes or so rehearsing the incident, wondering whether my smile was taken for undue familiarity, or my sober expression improperly construed as coldness. I repeat the exchange to myself a dozen times, varying my tone of voice and trying to extrapolate the change this might cause in the other person's reaction— "

  "Hey." The Mouse looked up from his syrynx. "It's all right. I like you. I was just busy is all."

  "Oh." Katin smiled; the smile was worn away by a frown. "You know, Mouse, I envy the captain. He's got a mission. And his obsession precludes all that wondering about what other people think of him."

  "I don't go through all that like you described," the Mouse said. "Much."

  "I do." Idas looked around. "Whenever I'm by myself, I do it all the— " and dropped his dark head to examine his knuckles.

  "It's pretty fair of him to let us all have this time off and fly the ship with Lynceos," Katin said.

  "Yeah," said Idas. "I guess it— " and turned his hands over to follow the dark scribblings on his palms.

  "Captain's got too many things to worry about," the Mouse said. "And he doesn't want them. It doesn't take anything to get across this part of the trip, so he'd just as soon have something to occupy his mind. That's what I think."

  "You think the captain has bad dreams?"

  "Maybe." The Mouse struck cinnamon from his harp, but so strongly their noses and the backs of their mouths burned.

  Katin's eyes teared.

  The Mouse shook his head and turned down the knob Idas had touched. "Sorry."

  "Knight of ... " Across the room Sebastian looked up from the game and wrinkled his nose. " ...Swords."

  Katin, the only one with legs long enough, tipped the water below the ramp with the toe of his sandal. Colored gravel shook; Katin took out his recorder and flipped the recording pip:

  "Novels were primarily about relationships." He gazed at the distortions in the mosaic wall behind the leaves as he spoke. "Their popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness. The Captain and Prince, for example, through their obsessions are totally related— "

  The Mouse leaned over and spoke into the jeweled box:

  "The captain and Prince probably haven't even seen each other face to face for ten years!"

  Katin, annoyed, clicked the recorder off. He considered a retort; found none. So he flipped it on again: "Remember that the society which allows this to happen is the society that has allowed the novel to become extinct. Bear in mind as you write that the subject of the novel is what happens between people's faces when they talk to one another." Off again.

  "Why are you writing this book?" the Mouse asked. "I mean what do you want to do with it?"

  "Why do you play your syrynx? I'm sure it's for essentially the same reason."

  "Only if I spent all that time just getting ready, I'd never play a thing; and that's a hint."

  "I begin to understand, Mouse. It's not my aim, but my methods of achieving it which bug you, as it were."

  "Katin, I do understand what you're doing. You want to make something beautiful. But it don't work that way. Sure, I had to practice a long time to be able to play this thing. But if you're going to make something like that, it's got to make people feel and thrill to the life around them, even if it's only that one guy who goes looking for it in the Alkane's cellar. It won't make it if you don't understand some of that feeling yourself."

  "Mouse, you're a fine, good, and beautiful person. You just happen to be wrong is all. Those beautiful forms you wield from your harp, I've looked at your face closely enough to know how much they're impelled by terror."

  The Mouse looked up and wrinkles scored his forehead.

  "I could sit and watch you play for hours. But they're only momentary joys, Mouse. It's only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent. Yes, there is an area of myself I haven't been able to tap for this work, one that flows and fountains in you, gushes from your fingers. But there's a large part of you that's playing to drown the sound of someone screaming in there." He nodded to the Mouse's scowl.

  The Mouse made his sound again.

  Katin shrugged.

  "I'd read your book," Idas said.

  The Mouse and Katin looked up.

  "I've read a ... well, some books— " He looked back at his hands.

  "You would?"

  Idas nodded. "In the Outer Colonies, people read books, even novels sometimes. Only there aren't very ... well, only old— " He looked up at the frame against the wall: Lynceos lay like an unborn ghost; the captain was in the other. He looked back with loss in his face. "It's very different in the Outer Colonies than it is— " He gestured around the ship, indicating all of Draco. "Say, do you know the place we're going well?"

  "Never been there," Katin said.

  The Mouse shook his head.

  "I was wondering if you knew whether we could get hold of some ..." He looked back down. "Never mind ..."

  "You'd have to ask them," Katin said, pointing to the cardplayers across the room. "It's their home."

  "Oh," Idas said. "Yeah. I guess— " Then he pushed himself off the ramp, splashed into the water, waded onto the gravel, and walked, dripping, across the rug.

  Katin looked at the Mouse and shook his head.

  But the trail of water was completely absorbed in the blue piling.

  "Six of Swords."

  "Five of Swords."

  "Excuse me, do any of you know— "

  "Ten of Swords. My trick. Page of Cups."

  "— on this world we're going. Do you know if— "

  "The Tower."

  ("I wish that card hadn't come up reversed in the captain's reading," Katin whispered to the Mouse. "Believe me, it portends no good.")

  "The Four of Cups."

  "My trick. Nine of Wands."

  "— we can get hold of— "

  "Seven of Wands."

  "— any bliss?"

  "The Wheel of Fortune. My trick is." Sebastian looked up. "Bliss?"

  The explorer who decided to name the outermost of the Dim, Dead Sister's planets Elysium had indulged a poor joke. With all the planoforming devices available, it was still a frozen cinder ellipsing at trans-Plutonian distances from Her ghost-light, barren and uninhabited.

  Someone had once proposed the doubtful theory that all three of the re
maining worlds were really moons that had been in the shadow of a gigantic planet when the catastrophe occurred, and thus escaped the fury that had annihilated their protector. Poor moon if moon you are, Katin thought as they swept by. You've done no better as a world. A lesson there in pretension.

  Once the— explorer explored further, he regained his sense of proportion. His grin faltered at the middle world; he called it Dis.

  His fate suggests the agenbite of inwit come too late; flaunting the gods even once reaped a classical reward. His ship crashed on the innermost planet. It remained unnamed, and to this day was referred to as the other world, without pomp, circumstance, or capitals. It was not till a second explorer came that the other world suddenly disclosed a secret. Those great plains, which from a distance had been judged solidified slag, turned out to be oceans-of water, frozen. True, the top ten to a hundred feet was mixed with every sort of rubble and refuse. It was finally decided that the other world had once been entirely under two to twenty-five miles of water. Perhaps nineteen twentieths had steamed into space when the Dim, Dead Sister went nova. This left a percentage of dry land just a little higher than Earth's. The unbreathable atmosphere, the total lack of organic life, the sub-sub temperatures? Minor problems, compared to the gift of seas; easily corrected. So humanity, in the early days of the Pleiades, encroached on the charred and frozen land. The other world's oldest city— though not its biggest, for the commercial and economic shift over the past three hundred years had shifted the population— had been very carefully named: the City of Dreadful Night.

  And the Roc put down by the black blister of the City tipping the Devil's Claw.

  Pleiades Federation, other world, CDN, 3172

  " ...of eighteen hours." And that was the end of the info-voice.

  "Is this home enough for you?" the Mouse asked.

  Leo gazed across the field. "I never this world walked," the fisherman sighed. Beyond, the sea of broken ice stretched toward the horizon. "But great segmented and six-flippered nhars in schools across that sea move. The fishermen for them with harpoons long as five tall men together hunt. The Pleiades it is; home enough it is." He smiled, and his frosted breath rose to dim his blue eyes.