Triton

by Samuel Delany

  He turned to her.

  Somehow, she had expected it to be Mad Mike the Christian. But the face, under pale, curly hair, was someone else’s. One eyebrow was rough and rumpled. The other had been replaced with a gold arc in the skin.

  When she recognized him, she thought: Oh, no ... ! It was just too ... well, banall For dream or theater! With this, no mise en scene was possible! Meeting her old self like that ... well, it was just too pat. It was as cliche as—well, “waiting for the dawn,” or “the horrors of war.” Wasn’t theater involved with belief? How could anyone believe such an absurd coincidence! Just running into herself like that, why the chances were fifty-to-one, fifty billion to one!—There had been some mistake! That’s not the way the production could have possibly been planned! The action, properly speaking, would be invisible from the pit ... She glanced at the Spike again.

  Almost all the women were writing now, crowding each other, reaching over one another’s shoulders. With bright-colored pens, they filled in bright-colored numbers on the large paper grids scattered on the table—from just a glance, she knew they were filling in the plurality female deployment configuration. How hopelessly banal! Was she really going to have to take part in this absurb drama? She turned again to Bron—

  he stood at the counter, smiling at her, pleasantly enough, if a little nervous, but completely unaware. She raised her hand tentatively toward his face, then shrieked:

  “I shall destroy you!” She clawed at his gold brow, hissing: “I shall destroy you, destroy you, do you hear!” Her nails, she noticed, were not the carefully-filed, surgically-narrowed ones from her last bit of cosmetic surgery, or even the broad and cleaned ones she’d had before the operation, but the bitten ones of her adolescence. “I shall destroy you—as you destroyed me” The words tore at her throat. She turned, gasping, away.

  It was over!

  Some of the women were clapping politely.

  She gasped in another breath, overcome with emotion. A terrible script! Devoid of whatever meaning—or was it meaninglessness?—it might have for an audience! But I did give a brilliant performance. I must have gotten carried away with the part. Completely carried away. Her eyes were tearing. She reached for a chair to collapse into, but it was over there, behind the third bar. So she staggered on another few steps. Lord, how many bars were there? But somewhere behind them all there must be a chair. She staggered on, still wracked by the emotions the performance had evoked, one fragment of her mind still aloof and objective: As moved as I was by it, it’s still a terrible part! I mean—she gasped another breath, as the emotions welled on; it was as if the whole production had been some tawdry, twilight melodrama the intellect could not bear but the heart could not resist—I may have been that kind of man. But I am not that type of woman! Hot, buffeting, embarrassing, her emotions roiled and seethed. Oh, I must sit down, she thought, reached out for the chair again—

  —and woke, suddenly, completely, and (annoying-ly) with the same question she had drifted off with: Why did I lie to Audri?

  The silly dream—its emotional detritus still falling away from the images—certainly didn’t suggest any answer. She turned over once more, with two ques—

  tions, now, equally puzzling. First: Where had the lie come from? Second: Why was she so obsessed with it?

  Why did I lie?

  What could possibly have prompted it?

  She lay, coldly and clearly awake: I never lied when I was a man. But thinking, for the hundredth time, over what she had said to Audri, it seemed to have resonances that filtered back through her entire life, the whole of it, on Triton, on Mars, as a man, as a woman. And she could not articulate any of them. You should always tell the truth, she thought, not because one lie leads to another, but rather because one lie could so easily lead you to that terrifying position from which, with just the help of a random dream, you can see, both back and ahead, the morass where truth and falsity are simply, for you, indistinguishable.

  Oh, this is crazy, Bron thought suddenly. Why am I lying here, flagellating myself with guilt? I never used to lie: with Audri, or Philip, or anyone. If a situation came up, I faced it! Well, if I could before, I can now. It’s only one slip-up. There’s no reason to start being a moral perfectionist now. That’s not your job. Were women just less truthful than men? All right: Was she less truthful as a woman than she had been as a man? Very well, then that’s just one more thing I need a man to do—to tell the truth for me! Now turn over and go back to sleep!

  She turned on her side, then to her back again, one hand against her chin. She bit at a piece of dead skin on her lip; and felt terribly empty. Here I am, she thought, as she had done from time to time ever since she’d come from Mars: Here I am, on Triton, and again I am lost in some hopeless tangle of confusion, trouble, and distress—

  But this is so silly!

  She breathed deeply and turned to the other side. It was just life and there was nothing logical you could do about it; and if sleep were denied her for the night, then there was nothing to do about that either but wait for dawn, that—suddenly and shockingly!—she was sure, sure for thirty-seven entire seconds (each counted with a louder and louder heart-thud that finally blocked her throat with terror), sure in a way that implied volumes on the rotation of the planets, on the entropy of the chemistry in the sun itself (moving and churning somewhere in the real universe beyond the sensory shield), sure with a surety which, if it were this subjectively complete must be objectivity (and wasn’t that the reason why, her scrambling mind careened on, unable to stop even for the terror, that, in these ice—and rock-bound moons, the subjective was held politically inviolable; and hadn’t they just killed three out of four, or five out of six, to keep it so—? Then, as suddenly, sureness ceased; and she was left, on her side, shaken, with stuttering heart and breath, biting her bleeding lip, with a memory of something that now only seemed—But ... no, not if she had felt like that about it; she had been sure!), sure would never come.

  Appendix A.

  From The Triton Journal: Work Notes and Omitted Pages

  I

  “You know,” Sam said pensively, “that explanation of mine this evening—about the gravity business?” They stood in the warm semidark of the co-op’s dining room. “If that were translated into some twentieth-century language, it would come out complete gobbledy-gook. Oh, perhaps an s-f reader might have understood it. But any scientist of the period would have giggled all the way to the bar.”

  “S-f?” Bron leaned against the bar.

  “‘Scientifiction?’

  ‘Sci-fi?’

  ‘Speculative fiction?’

  ‘Science fiction?’

  ‘S-f?’—that’s the historical progression of terms, though various of them resurfaced from time to time.”

  “Wasn’t there some public-channel coverage about ?”

  “That’s right,” Sam said. “It always fascinated me, that century when humanity first stepped onto the first moon.”

  “It’s not that long ago,” Bron said. “It’s no longer from us to them than from them to when man first stepped onto the American shore.”

  Which left Sam’s heavy-lipped frown so intense Bron felt his temples heat. But Sam suddenly laughed. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that Columbus discovered America; the bells off San Salvador; the son buried in the Dominican Republic ...”

  Bron laughed too, at ease and confused.

  “What I mean—” Sam’s hand, large, hot, and moist, landed on Bron’s shoulder—“is that my explanation would have been nonsence two hundred years ago. It isn’t today. The episteme has changed so entirely, so completely, the words bear entirely different charges, even though the meanings are more or less what they would have been in—”

  “What’s an episteme?” Bron asked.

  “To be sure. You haven’t been watching the proper public-channel coverages.”

  “You know me.” Bron smiled. “Annie-shows and ice-operas—always in the intell
ectual forefront. Never in arears.”

  “An episteme is an easy way to talk about the way to slice through the whole—”

  “Sounds like the secondary hero in some ice-opera. Melony Episteme, co-starring with Alona Liang.” Bron grabbed his crotch, rubbed, laughed, and realized he was drunker than he’d thought.

  “Ah,” Sam said (Was Sam drunk too ... ?), “but the episteme was always the secondary hero of the s-f novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.

  II

  Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).

  III

  Text and textus? Text, of course, comes from the Latin textus, which means “web.” In modern printing, the “web” is that great ribbon of paper which, in many presses, takes upwards of an hour to thread from roller to roller throughout the huge machine that embeds ranked rows of inked graphemes upon the “web,” rendering it a text. All the uses of the words “web,”

  “weave,”

  “net,”

  “matrix” and more, by this circular ‘etymology’ become entrance points into a textus, which is ordered from all language and language-functions, and upon which the text itself is embedded.

  The technological innovations in printing at the beginning of the Sixties, which produced the present “paperback revolution,” are probably the single most important factor contouring the modern science-fiction text. But the name “science fiction” in its various avatars—s-f, speculative fiction, sci-fi, scientifiction—goes back to those earlier technological advances in printing that resulted in the proliferation of “pulp magazines” during the Twenties.

  Naming is always a metonymic process. Sometimes it is the pure metonymy[1] of associating an abtract group of letters (or numbers) with a person (or thing), so that it can be recalled (or listed in a metonymic order with other entity names). Frequently, however, it is a more complicated metonymy: old words are drawn from the cultural lexicon to name the new entity (or to rename an old one), as well as to render it (whether old or new) part of the present culture. The relations between entities so named are woven together in patterns far more complicated than any alphabetic or numeric listing can suggest: and the encounter between objects-that-are-words (e.g., the name “science fiction,” a critical text on science fiction, a science-fiction text) and processes-made-manifest-by-words (another science-fiction text, another critical text, another name) is as complex as the constantly dissolving interface between culture and language itself. But we can take a model of the naming process from another image:

  Consider a child, on a streetcorner at night, in one of Earth’s great cities, who hears for the first time the ululating sirens, who sees the red, enameled flanks heave around the far, building edge, who watches the chrome-ended, rubber-coated, four-inch “suctions” ranked along those flanks, who sees the street-light glistening on glass-faced pressure-meters and stainless-steel discharge-valves on the red pump-housing, and the canvas hose heaped in the rear hopper, who watches the black-helmeted and rubber-coated men clinging to their ladders, boots lodged against the serrated running-board. The child might easily name this entity, as it careers into the night, a Red Squealer.

  Later, the child brings this name to a group of children—who take it up easily and happily for their secret speech. These children grow; younger children join the group; older children leave. The name persists—indeed, for our purposes, the locus of which children use and which children do not use the name is how we read the boundary of the group itself.

  The group persists—persists weeks, months, years after the child who first gave it its secret term has outgrown both the group and its language. But one day a younger child asks an older (well after the name, within the group, has been hallowed by use): “But why is it a Red Squealer?” Let us assume the older child (who is of an analytical turn of mind) answers: “Well, Red Squealers must get to where they are going quickly; for this reason sirens are put on them which squeal loudly, so that people can hear them coming a long way off and pull their cars to the side. They are painted with that bright enamel color for much the same reason—so that people can see them coming and move out of their way. Also, by now, the red paint is traditional; it serves to identify that it is, indeed, a Red Squealer one sees through the interstices of traffic and not just any old truck.”

  Satisfying as this explanation is, it is still something of a fiction. We were there, that evening, on the corner. We know the first child called it a Red Squealer out of pure, metonymic apprehension: there were, that evening, among many perceived aspects, “redness” and “squealing,” which, via a sort of morphological path—

  of-least-resistence, hooked up in an easily sayable/ thinkable phrase. We know, from our privileged position before this text, that there is nothing explicit in our story to stop the child from having named it a Squealing Red, a Wah-Wah, a Blink-a-blink, or a Susan-Anne McDuffy—had certain nonspecified circumstances been other than the simplest reading of our fiction suggests. The adolescent explanation, as to why a Red Squealer is a Red Squealer, is as satisfying as it is because it takes the two metonyms that form the name and embeds them in a web of functional discourse—satisfying because of the functional nature of the adult episteme[2], which both generates the discourse and of which, once the discourse is uttered, the explanation (as it is absorbed into the memory, of both querant and explicator, which is where the textus lies embedded) becomes a part.

  Science Fiction was named in like manner to the Red Squealer; in like manner the metonyms which are its name can be functionally related:

  Science fiction is science fiction because various bits of technological discourse (real, speculative, or pseudo)—that is to say the “science”—are used to redeem various other sentences from the merely metaphorical, or even the meaningless, for denotative description/presentation of incident. Sometimes, as with the sentence “The door dilated,” from Heinlein’s Beyond This Horizon, the technological discourse that redeems it—in this case, discourse on the engineering of large-size, iris apertures; and the sociological discourse on what such a technology would suggest about the entire culture—is not explicit in the text. Is it, then, implicit in the textus! All we can say for certain is that, embedded in the textus of anyone who can read the sentence properly, are those emblems by which they could recognize such discourse were it manifested to them in some explicit text.

  In other cases, such as the sentences from Bester’s The Stars My Destination, “The cold was the taste of lemons, and the vacuum was the rake of talons on his skin... Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his skin. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like water trickling through his fingers,” the technological discourse that redeems them for the denotative description/presentation of incident is explicit in the text: “Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the PyrE explosion. He was suffering from Synesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another.”

  In science fiction, “science”—i.e., sentences displaying verbal emblems of scientific discourses—is used to literalize the meanings of other sentences for use in the construction of the fictional foreground. Such sentences as “His world exploded,” or “She turned on her left side,” as they subsume the proper technological discourse (of economics and cosmology in one; of switching circuitry and prosthetic surgery in the other), leave the banality of the emotionally muzzy metaphor, abandon the triviality of insomniac tossings, and, through the labyrinth of technical possibility, become possible images of the impossible. They join the repertoire of sentences which may propel textus into text.

  This is
the functional relation of the metonyms “science” and “fiction” that were chosen by Hugo Gernsbach to name his new pulp genre. He (and we) perceived that, in these genre texts, there existed an aspect of “science” and an aspect of “fiction,” and because of the science, something about the fiction was different. I have located this difference specifically in a set of sentences which, with the particular way they are rendered denotatively meaningful by the existence of other sentences not necessarily unique to science fiction, are themselves by and large unique to texts of the s-f genre.

  The obvious point must be made here: this explanation of the relation of these two onomal metonyms

  Science/Fiction no more defines (or exhausts) the science-fictional-enterprise than our adolescent explanation of the relation of the two onomal metonyms Red/Squealer defines (or exhausts) the enterprise of the fire engine. Our functional explanation of the Red Squealer, for example, because of the metonyms from which the explanation started, never quite gets around to mentioning the Red Squealer’s primary function: to put out fires.

  And the ‘function’ of science fiction is of such a far more complex mode than that of the Red Squealer, one might hesitate to use such metonyms—“function” and “primary”—to name it in the first place. Whatever one chooses to name it, it can not be expressed, as the Red Squealer’s can, by a colon followed by a single infini-tive-with-noun—no more than one could thus express the “primary function” of the poetic-enterprise, the mundane-fictional-, the cinematic-, the musical-, or the critical-. Nor would anyone seriously demand such an expression for any of these other genres. For some concept of what, primarily, science fiction does, as with other genres, we must rely on further, complex, functional explanation: