Triton
Samuel Delany
Triton, the outermost moon of Neptune, was a world of absolute freedom, where every wish could be fulfilled. But for Bron Helstrom, one of Triton’s elite, life had lost its meaning. There, in a world of endless possibilities, Bron began a searing odyssey to find the elusive object of his desires ...
The door opened; she slipped out,
She wore white gloves.
She wore white boots.
Her long skirt and high-necked bodice were white. Full white sleeves draped her wrists. She reached up and pulled the white cloak around her shoulders. Its paler-than-ivory folds swept around.
Over her head was a full-head mask: white veils hung below the eyes; the icy globe was a-glitter with white sequins. White plumes rose above it, as from some albino peacock ....
The white mask turned to him .... Her gloved fingers fell from her white-scarved throat, came toward his.
He took them.
They walked along the corridor that, once more, became high, roofless street.
“Now. What do you want to know about me?”
After moments, she said: “Go on. Any way you can.”
Moments later, he said: “I’m ... not happy in the world I live in ....”
In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany’s 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with our own Earth. High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of “the happily reasonable man,” Bron Helstrom—an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he— or she—seems.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR SAMUEL R. DELANY:
“A writer of consistently high ambition and achievement ... Delany’s fiction demands—and rewards—the kind of close reading that one ungrudgingly brings to serious novelists ... Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, [he] invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store for him/her.”
—Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review
Triton
Some Informal Remarks Toward The Modular Calculus, Part One
Triton, An Ambiguous Heterotopia
The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of society. There is a continual exchange of meaning between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression ... To be useful, the structural analysis of symbols has somehow to be related to a hypothesis about role structure. From here, the argument will go in two stages. First, the drive to achieve consonance in all levels of experience produces concordance among the means of expression, so that the use of the body is co-ordinated with other media. Second, controls exerted from the social system place limits on the use of the body as medium.
—Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols
1. Trouble On Triton, Or Der Satz
No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.
—Willard Van Orman Quine, Word and Object
He had been living at the men’s co-op (Serpent’s House) six months now. This one had been working out well. So, at four o’clock, as he strolled from the hegemony lobby onto the crowded Plaza of Light (thirty-seventh day of the fifteenth paramonth of the second yearN, announced the lights around the Plaza—on Earth and Mars both they’d be calling it some day or other in Spring, 2112, as would a good number of official documents even out here, whatever the political nonsense said or read), he decided to walk home.
He thought: I am a reasonably happy man.
The sensory shield (he looked up:—Big as the city) swirled pink, orange, gold. Cut round, as if by a giant cookie-cutter, a preposterously turquoise Neptune was rising. Pleasant? Very. He ambled in the bolstered gravity, among ten thousand fellows. Tethys? (No, not Saturn’s tiny moon—a research station now these hundred twenty-five years—but after which, yes, the city had been named.) Not a big one, when you thought about places that were; and he had lived in a couple.
He wondered suddenly: Is it just that I am, happily, reasonable?
And smiled, pushing through the crowd.
And wondered how different that made him from those around.
I can’t (he stepped from the curb) look at every one to check.
Five then? There: that woman, a handsome sixty—or older if she’d had regeneration treatments—walking with one blue, high-heeled boot in the street; she’s got blue lips, blue bangles on her breasts.
A young (fourteen? sixteen?) man pushed up beside her, seized her blue-nailed hand in his blue-nailed hand, grinned (bluely) at her.
Blinking blue lids in recognition, she smiled.
Really, breast-bangles on a man? (Even a very young man.) Just aesthetically: weren’t breast-bangles more or less predicated on breasts that, a) protruded and, b) bobbed ...? But then hers didn’t.
And she had both blue heels on the sidewalk. The young man walked with both his in the street. They pushed into parti-colored crowd.
And he had looked at two when he’d only meant to look at one.
There: by the transport-station kiosk, a tall man, in maroon coveralls, with a sort of cage over his head, shouldered out between several women. Apparent too as he neared were cages around his hands: through the wire you could see paint speckles; paint lined his nails; his knuckles were rough. Some powerful administrative executive, probably, with spare time and credit enough to indulge some menial hobby, like plumbing or carpentry.
Carpentry?
He humphed and stepped aside. A waste of wood and time.
Who else was there to look at in this crowd—
With tiny steps, on filthy feet, ten, fifteen—some two dozen—mumblers shuffled toward him. People moved back. It isn’t, he thought, the dirt and the rags I mind; but the sores ... Seven years ago, he’d actually attended meetings of the Poor Children of the Avestal Light and Changing Secret Name; over three instruction sessions he’d learned the first of the Ninety-Seven Saya-ble mantras/mumbles: Mimimomomizolalilamialomu-elamironoriminos ... After all this time he wasn’t that sure of the thirteenth and the seventeenth syllables. But he almost remembered. And whenever the Poor Children passed, he found himself rehearsing it, listening for it in the dim thunder of labials and vowels. Among a dozen-plus mumblers, all mumbling different syllable chains (some took over an hour to recite through), you couldn’t hope to pick out one. And what mumbler worth his salt would be using the most elementary say-able mumble in a public place anyway? (You had to know something like seventeen before they let you attend Supervised Unison Chanting at the Academy.) Still, he listened.
Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.) In the group’s middle, some had soiled rags tied over their faces. Frayed ends flapped at an ill-shaved jaw. A woman to the side, with a c
racked yellow bowl (she was almost pretty, but her hair was stringy enough to see through to her flaking scalp), stumbled, opened her eyes, and looked straight at him.
He smiled.
Eyes clamped again, she ducked her head and nudged someone beside her, who took up her bowl and her begging position, shuffling on with tight-clenched lids: she (yes, she was his fourth person) sidled and pushed among them, was absorbed by them—
Ahead, people laughed.
He looked.
That executive, standing free of the crowd, was waving his caged hands and calling good-naturedly: “Can’t you see?” His voice was loud and boisterous. “Can’t you see? Just look! I couldn’t give you anything if I wanted to! I couldn’t get my hands into my purse to get anything out. Just take a look!”
The executive was hoping to be mistaken for a member of some still severer, if rarer, sect that maimed both body and mind—till some mumbler opened eyes and learned the dupe was fashion, not faith. A mumbler who blinked (only newer members wore blindfolds, which barred them from the coveted, outside position of Divine Guide) had to give up the bowl and, as the woman had done, retire within. The man harangued; the Poor Children shuffled, mumbled.
Mumblers aimed to ignore such slights; they courted them, gloried in them: so he’d been instructed at the meetings seven years ago.
Still, he found the joke sour.
The mumblers, however laughable, were serious. (He had been serious, seven years ago. But he had also been lazy—which was why, he supposed, he was not a mumbler today but a designer of custom-styled, computer metalogics.) The man was probably not an executive, anyway; more likely some eccentric craftsman—someone who worked for those executives who did not have quite the spare time, or credit, to indulge a menial hobby. Executives didn’t—no matter how good-naturedly—go around harangueing religious orders in the street.
But the crowd had closed around the Poor Children. Had the harasser given up? Or been successful? Footsteps, voices, the roar of people passing blended with, and blotted out, the gentle roar of prayer.
And he’d looked at, now ... what?
Four out of five? Those four were not very good choices for a reasonable and happy man. And who for the fifth?
Six kaleidoscopically painted ego-booster booths (“Know Your Place in Society,” repeated six lintels) sided the transport kiosk.
Me? he thought. That’s it. Me.
Something amusing was called for.
He started toward the booths, got bumped in the shoulder; then forty people came out of the kiosk and all decided to walk between him and the booth nearest I will not be deterred, he thought. I’m not changing my mind: and shouldered someone hard as someone had shouldered him.
Finally, inelegantly, he grabbed a booth’s edge. The canvas curtain (silver, purple, and yellow) swung. He pushed inside.
Twelve years ago some public channeler had made a great stir because the government had an average ten hours videotaped and otherwise recorded information on every citizen with a set of government credit tokens and/or government identity card.
Eleven years ago another public channeler had pointed out that ninety-nine point nine nine and several nines percent more of this information was, a) never reviewed by human eyes (it was taken, developed, and catalogued by machine), b) was of a perfectly innocuous nature, and, c) could quite easily be released to the public without the least threat to government security.
Ten years ago a statute was passed that any citizen had the right to demand a review of all government information on him or her. Some other public channeler had made a stir about getting the government simply to stop collecting such information; but such systems, once begun, insinuate themselves into the greater system in overdetermined ways: jobs depended on them, space had been set aside for them, research was going on over how to do them more efficiently—such overdetermined systems, hard enough to revise, are even harder to abolish.
Eight years ago, someone whose name never got mentioned came up with the idea of ego-booster booths, to offer minor credit (and, hopefully, slightly more major psychological) support to the Government Information Retention Program:
Put a two-franq token into the slot (it used to be half a franq, but the tokens had been devalued again a year back), feed your government identity card into the slip and see, on the thirty-by-forty centimeter screen, three minutes’ videotape of you, accompanied by three minutes of your recorded speech, selected at random from the government’s own information files. Beside the screen (in this booth, someone had, bizarre-ly, spilled red syrup down it, some of which had been thumb-smudged away, some scraped off with a fingernail), the explanatory plaque explained: “The chances are ninety nine point nine nine and several nines percent more that no one but you has ever seen before what you are about to see. Or,” as the plaque continued cheerily, “to put it another way, there is a greater chance that you will have a surprise heart attack as you step from this booth today than that this confidential material has ever been viewed by other human eyes than yours. Do not forget to retrieve your card and your token. Thank you.”
He had, for several weeks, worked at the public channels (as a copy researcher, while, in the evenings, he had been taking his metalogical training course) and, eight years ago, had been appalled at the booths* institution. It was as if (he used to think, and had said a number times, and had gotten a number of laughs when he said it) the Germans, during Earth’s Second World War, had decided to make Dachau or Auschwitz a paying tourist proposition before the War was over. (He had never been to Earth. Though he’d known a few who had.) But he had not made a stir; it had simply become another of the several annoyances that, to live in the same world with, had to be reduced to amusements. For two years, while finding the booths derisively amusing in theory, he had never gone into one—as silent protest. He had kept it up till he realized practically no one he knew ever went into them either: they considered the millions of people who did, over all the inhabited Outer Satellites, common, unthinking, politically irresponsible, and dull—which made it depressingly easy to define the people who did not use them, if only by their prejudices, as a type. He hated being a type. (“My dear young man,” Lawrence had said, “everyone is a type. The true mark of social intelligence is how unusual we can make our particular behavior for the particular type we are when we are put under particular pressure.”) So, finally (five years ago? No, six), he had entered one, put in his quarter-franq token (yes, it had been a quarter-franq back then) and his card, and watched three minutes of himself standing on a transport platform, occasionally taking a blue program folder from under his arm, obviously debating whether there was time to glance through it before the transport arrived, while his own voice, from what must have been a phone argument over his third credit-slot rerating, went back and forth from sullenness to insistence.
He had been amused.
And, oddly, reassured.
(“Actually,” he’d said to Lawrence, “as a matter of fact I have been in them, a number of times. I rather pride myself on occasionally doing things contrary to what everyone else does.” To which Lawrence—who was seventy-four, homosexual, and unregenerate—had muttered at the vlet board, “That’s a type too.”)
He took his card from the pouch on his loose, rope belt, found his two-franq token, and, with his thumb, pushed it into the slot, then fed the card into the slip.
Across the top of the screen appeared his name:
Bron Helstrom and below that his twenty-two digit government identity number.
The screen flickered—which it was not supposed to. A blur, filling the right half, rushed upward, froze a moment on the image of a doorway that someone (him?) was starting to open—then the blur rushed again, sliding (the heavy black border; the single bright line up the middle) across the screen; which meant the multitrack videotape had somehow lost sync. (When it happened on one of the public channel viewers at the co-op, it was quickly followed by a “We Regret That, Due to Technical Di
fficulties ...” in quaint, 1980’s computer type.)
Snap! from the speaker (which he assumed—though he had no reason to be sure—was a length of five-hundred micro-track videotape, somewhere in an Information Retention storage bank, breaking) turned the screen into colored confetti. The speaker grill hummed and chuckled, simultaneously and inanely.
Broken?
He looked at the card slip: How do I get my card out? he thought, a little panicky. Pry it out with my five-franq token? He couldn’t get it with a fingernail. Was the fault possibly here in the booth and not in the storage bank ... ?
Indecision storming, he leaned against the booth’s back wall and watched storming dots. Once he bent and put his eye to the slip. A centimeter beyond the aluminum lips, the card edge, to some whirring timer, quivered like a nervous tongue.
He leaned back again.
After three minutes, the screen went gray; the speaker’s burr ceased.
From the metal slip the card thrust (like a printed-over tongue, yes; with a picture of him in one corner). As he took it, thick wrists heavy with bracelets, that on a thinner wrist would have jangled (Lawrence had said: “Thick wrists are just not considered attractive right through here,” and sighed. Bron, finally, had smiled), he saw his reflection in the dead glass.
His face (syrup spilled his shoulder), under pale, curly hair, was distraught. One eyebrow (since age twenty-five it had grown constantly, so that he actually had to cut it) was rumpled: his other he’d had replaced, when he was seventeen, by a gold arc set in the skin. He could have had it removed, but he still enjoyed the tribute to a wilder adolescence (than he would care to admit) in the Goebels of Mars’s Bellona. That gold arc? It had been a small if violent fad even then. Nobody today on Triton knew nor cared what it meant. Frankly, today, neither would most civilized Martians.
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