A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Who are the One-Eyes?”

  “They’re dead now,” the boy said after a minute. “They could have helped you. But they’re all dead.”

  “But what did they do?”

  “They kept us from the others. They tried to teach us. They tried to make it so we would know what to do. But they got killed finally by the others, the ones you saw.”

  Joneny frowned. Something was beginning to clear, but he wasn’t sure what it was. “Maybe there’s somebody back at your City who can tell me just exactly what this is about. Why don’t we go back there?”

  The boy shook his head. “Nobody there can help you.”

  “How can you be sure? Do you know everybody on the ship?”

  Joneny didn’t expect an answer, but the boy nodded.

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Many.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” Joneny insisted.

  The boy shrugged.

  “They won’t be hostile to me, will they?”

  “No, they won’t be hostile.”

  “Fine,” Joneny said. He was excited by the idea of something to be uncovered on one of the other ships. His magnetic soles, however, were weaker than he thought, for when he turned, he came loose and drifted away from the floor, helpless.

  The boy, still holding the desk, swung his leg out and offered, “Here, grab my arm.”

  Joneny flailed at the boy’s ankle, caught, and was pulled back down to where his sandals clicked onto the bulkhead.

  “You’re not very used to free fall, are you?” the boy said.

  “I’m a little out of practice,” Joneny said, releasing the kid’s foot and righting himself. “That’s your idea of an arm?”

  “What do you call it?” asked the boy a little indignantly.

  “I call it a leg,” laughed Joneny.

  “Sure,” said the boy. “But a leg is an arm, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose, technically speaking, you could call anything that sticks out—Oh, never mind.” It really wasn’t worth going into. As they started for the door, Joneny reflected: now here’s a piece of information that could have nothing to do with the ballad. Legs and arms were both arms: that was quite logical when, under free fall, hands and feet had developed almost equal dexterity. Under her legs was a green-eyed child? That was safely in the realm of nonsense.

  Only something from way back in a semantics course he had taken was jabbing at his mind. What did they call it? Denotative instability? The spiral of decreasing semantic functionality…something like that. Then it hit him. In an environment where there is no gravity, or little enough gravity to develop this much dexterity in hands and feet, words of vertical placement—up, down, under, over, above, below—would rapidly lose their precise meanings. According to the spiral, before the words disappeared from the language altogether, they would stay on awhile as subtle variants of words with more immediate meanings—inside, through, between. (Two fine examples of the spiral of decreasing semantic functionality that Joneny was completely unaware of were recreation hall and navigation offices.) Between, thought Joneny. Between her legs was a green-eyed child. He stopped as they were about to enter the tube to the cruiser. The boy stopped too, looked puzzled, and blinked at him with his wide green eyes.

  It was impossible; they were all born from the Birth Market. But there had been a Market crash, and everything changed. “Which City did you come from?” Joneny asked suddenly.

  “Sigma-9.”

  Joneny stopped. Before them, the triple door to the flexible portion of the tube sank back into the wall.

  “Which lock is your shuttle boat in?” Joneny asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  “Which lock?” Joneny demanded.

  “No shuttle boat—” the boy began.

  “Then how the hell did you get over here?”

  “Like this,” the boy said.

  Then there wasn’t any boy there anymore. Joneny was floating alone in the tube. He blinked. He decided he was crazy. Then he decided he was sane and that something strange was happening. But if this was a fantasy of his own imagining, why was he aware of the contradictions in it? The boy had said there were “many” on Sigma-9, and he had also said there were no people on it. Suddenly Joneny turned and pulled himself back to the navigation offices. Launching himself into the room he shouted at the robot mechanism: “Connect me with somebody who can give me some cogent information about what’s going on here!”

  “I am sorry,” came the clipped, archaic voice. “I have called all over the City, sir, and no human agent has responded to my announcement of your presence.” It was repeated: “No human agent has responded to your presence.”

  Joneny felt chills unraveling up his spine.

  chapter five

  Once more in his chrono-drive, sitting back in his hammock, Joneny watched the twisted shell of Sigma-9 grow in his viewscope. The crushed surface plates had been chewed up and spit out by a mad rush through how many millions of miles of meson showers—those tiny particles bigger than electrons, but most smaller than nucleons, that came in a staggering quantity of which masses, spins, and charges—yet what had caused the catastrophe had been something else.

  Automatically he slowed as the webbing of bare girders flashed brightly in the direct light from the sun. He passed over the wreck, and a gaping darkness veered beneath. From the distance, the shimmer that played over this ruins was invisible. He switched on the iridium cell computer and let it record the twists and wrenches in the metal. It might be able to reconstruct the catastrophe. He drifted out over the edge of the gaping hull, a blister of blackness beneath. Slowly the mechano took him down into the pit. The view screen went black as they cut into the shadow. He swept the selector up and down the spectrum. At the violet end of the band there was enough hazy light to determine the details of the wreck. Girders, melted to blobs on the ends, spider-webbed in a blue underwater fog. Hunks of refuse moved about lazily, caught by the faint gravity of the ship’s mass.

  A section of corridor was split below him like a length of rubber tubing. As he swung his viewscope around the depths of the Sigma-9, he stopped. Deep in the marine blue was a faint red. He looked over the dials. No particular radiation to worry about. Double-checking, he found it higher to the left. He wondered again what that shimmering had been. He sank farther into the ship. Once he switched to natural light, but immediately the screen went black.

  The computer was chuckling away but so far had arrived at no conclusion. He got out a pressure gell as the ship finally anchored itself to a strut. The gell was a mobile force bubble composed of a complex arrangement of geodesically crystallized plasmas. It held about six hours’ worth of air, could be moved from his power belt, as well as be adjusted to become opaque to almost any frequency of radiation. Delicate work could be done at the edges of the gell by forming the skin into gloves.

  The bubble wavered on the floor, growing. He stepped forward, and it surrounded him with just a tingle on his skin before the plasmas sealed.

  He walked toward the door, the bubble rolling with him. It was like walking inside a balloon. The sphincter of metal wings that was the airlock pulled away in a circular opening on total black. He touched his belt and the light-frequency differential plunged into far violet: the ship behind him darkened at the same time the scene outside the lock began to glow like blue, milky mist.

  The ship had anchored on a wall of girders that jutted out three hundred yards into the body of the wreck in a huge octagonal web. A bank of corridors twisted out into the cavity like arteries severed in meat. Raising his eyes, Joneny saw a sectioning of the ripped outer hull. Lowering them, he could see where the red glow leaked from behind twisted girders and burst chambers.

  Launching from the lock and hovering in the blue, he looked at his own cruiser, a thin, seamless, silver-blue oblong. But when he glanced over the octagonal web floating beside him, he grabbed his belt and brought himself to a quick stop, banging into the bub
ble’s transparent wall. Something was climbing over the girders.

  It stood up and waved at him.

  The boy, still naked, seemed to have no protection from the hard vacuum of the gutted starship. The shifting of his fine hair increased the submarine illusion. The boy was about thirty feet away, and from this distance (and under this particular frequency of light that the pressure gell was translating), his eyes were black. He waved again.

  Joneny’s mind jutted toward half a dozen different conclusions, several of which involved doubts of his own sanity. He rejected them all and at last merely waved back—because there was nothing else to do. Just then the boy left the girder and sailed through the space between them. With hands and feet he caught the surface of the gell and perched there like a frog. Then he was—half inside; and then all the way in. “Hello.”

  Joneny’s back was pressed against the curved inside of the gell and his hands spread-eagled over the transparent plasma. And he was sweating. “What—” he began. Impossibilities fluttered in his mind like moths. He tried to shake them clear. People leaping across hard vacuum, climbing through pressure gells, disappearing, appearing: impossible—

  “Hello,” the boy repeated, green eyes blinking.

  Now Joneny repeated: “Wha—”

  “You okay?”

  “What are you!” Joneny finally got out, and peeled himself from the wall.

  The boy blinked again and shrugged.

  Joneny wanted to scream, “Get out of here”; cover his eyes until the apparition went away; go home. He didn’t. The same passion that made him collect impossibly cumbersome books in a world of recording crystals made him look closely at the impossibilities around him now.

  He saw fifteen of them right off. They were standing on the web of girders, some upside down, some sideways, all naked, all watching him and, from what he could make out, all duplicates of the boy who shared the gell with him.

  “I figured you were going to come out here,” the boy said. Then he asked, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “My adrenaline count I’m sure is way above normal,” Joneny said as calmly as he could. “But that is because I am in a situation in which lots of things are happening I don’t understand.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you!” Some of Joneny’s calmness went.

  “I told you, I don’t know what I am. I don’t know.” It took Joneny a moment to see through his own upset and realize there was genuine perturbation in the boy’s face. “What are you?” the boy asked.

  “I’m a student of galactic anthropology. I’m a human being. I’m flesh and blood and bone and hormones and antibodies that can’t jump a hundred miles of cold space without protection, that can’t disappear and reappear, that can’t walk through a crystallized pressure gell. I answer to the name of Joneny Horatio T’waboga, and I may be stark, raving mad.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want to give it a try now?”

  The boy looked blank.

  “Well what’s your name?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “What do people call you?”

  “The people call me the Destroyer’s Children.”

  Joneny, as has been pointed out, was not semantically alert enough to catch all he had been told by that statement; it floated on the surface of his mind, and out of the corner of his eye he saw the red glow in the labyrinthine ruin. “What’s that?” he asked, again because he could think of nothing else to do.

  “A Death’s Head,” the boy told him.

  Now his eye caught again the boy’s duplicates on the webbing. One leaped off and sailed by ten feet away, peering back over his shoulder until he grew too small to make out. “What about them?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are they Destroyer’s Children too?”

  The boy nodded. “Yeah. They’re the rest of me.”

  Again Joneny turned his mind away from the syntactical discrepancies that would have given him many of the answers he sought. Now he looked back at the Death’s Head.

  He touched his belt and the gell began to drift toward the glow, gaining speed. He wouldn’t have been shocked if the boy had simply slipped out of the gell once it started moving, but he came along predictably inside the bubble.

  “Incidentally,” Joneny said, “how much air do you breathe? This has only got six hours for one person, and I didn’t bring a renewer.”

  “It depends,” the boy said. “I don’t have to breathe any.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “All right. But then I won’t be able to talk.”

  “Well, breathe when you want to say something, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  They neared a wall of refuse. The junk floated closely, but there were paths through. “Which way?” Joneny asked.

  “You can go through a corridor,” the boy said. Then he added in a strangled voice, “I…just…used…up…two…seconds…of…air.”

  “Huh?” asked Joneny. “Which corridor?”

  “You can go through that one,” the boy said. “One…and…a…quarter…seconds…more…”

  Joneny moved the gell into the end of a tubular corridor that had been crushed and broken open. The walls were bare and set with free-fall handholds. They passed a place where another corridor had joined this one. The intersection was ripped raggedly at the seam.

  “Where are we heading for now?” he asked again over his shoulder.

  “We’ll be coming to the Mountains soon.” The strangled voice once more: “One…and…a…”

  “Oh, cut it out,” Joneny said. “I don’t care what you use up. I don’t intend to stay that long anyway.”

  “I was just trying to be helpful.”

  They turned another corner, passed the next section where the wall had been ripped, and sailed down the straightaway. At the end of the corridor, Joneny brought them to a halt and gasped.

  Before them in blue mist a vast auditorium rolled away. In the center, above a raised dais, was a huge sphere. Even at this distance and in this light, Joneny could see etched on the surface a representation of the lands and oceans of Earth. The scooped immensity of the hall, the rings of seats, the isolated globe, gave the place a comprehensible air of hugeness, completely different from his glimpse of empty space in which the wreck hung. This feeling of contained size was calming, nearly religious. “What’s this? Is it the Death’s Head?”

  “It’s the Courthouse,” said the boy.

  “The Courthouse?” Joneny looked from the smooth, vaulted ceiling down to the tiered seats, at last back to the globe. “What happened here?”

  “Trials.” He added, “Of criminals.”

  “Were there many criminals onboard the starships?”

  “Not many, at least at the beginning. Toward the end there were a lot more.”

  “What did the criminals do?”

  “Mostly went against the Norm.”

  “The Norm?”

  “That’s right. You can hear the records if you want. They were all recorded.”

  “Does the mechanism still work?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Where is it?”

  “Down there.” The boy pointed toward the dais.

  Joneny touched his belt, and the gell floated down over the seats toward the globe. He paused just above the stage, adjusted the gell for hyper-malleability and magno-permeability. His sandal soles clicked as he hit the floor, a drop of an inch, and stuck there through the pliable surface of the gell.

  When he glanced toward the boy, he saw that he was hovering on the other side of the dais now, outside the bubble. The boy motioned to him, and Joneny carefully walked the bubble around the edge of the dais. When he reached the other side, there was a small pop as the boy stuck his head inside (Joneny jumped a little) and said, “The index is right there.” He popped out again.

  Joneny reached for the slanted desk through the bubble’s skin, which molded to his hands. He ran his fingers around the edge of the d
esk till he found a catch. He pushed it, pulled at the desktop; it came up. Revealed was a complicated mosaic. Bending closer, Joneny saw that it was actually a matrix of pentagonal labels, each holding two names. The top of the desk slid back down into an envelope. Joneny squinted in the blue:

  45-A7 Milar vs. Khocran; 759-V8 Travis vs. The Norm; 654-M87 DeRogue vs. Blodel; 89-T68L One-Eyed Davis vs. The Norm.

  The tray of labels was on a very long conveyor that moved upward. It was arranged in some sort of five-coordinate index system that was roughly chronological. As he perused the labels, one thing became quite clear. There was a marked increase of trials between One-Eyed Someone-or-Other and The Norm. Joneny came to the place where the crystal labels stopped. The last trial was 2338-T87 One-Eyed Jack vs. The Norm.

  Joneny looked up as the boy popped inside the gell again. “What do you do with these?” Joneny asked.

  “How do you mean? Just press one and it’ll play back.”

  “Press?”

  “With your finger or your toe or your elbow,” the boy said a bit impatiently. “Just press it.”

  Joneny reached out and pressed the last labeled pentagon—and stepped back as a roar swelled around him. The sound was being transmitted through the soles of his feet. The whole floor of the dais was acting as the vibration plate for some sort of loudspeaker. The roaring was the sound of many people talking at once.

  A staccato tattoo rang out above it, and an elderly baritone, oddly accented, cried out, “Order in the court! Silence! Please! Order in the court.” The roaring stilled, became the rustling of someone here twisting in a chair, someone there coughing behind a fist.

  Joneny looked across the empty chairs in the blue auditorium.

  “Order in the court,” the voice repeated unnecessarily. The baritone voice paused, then went on: “There has been a slight deviation from normal proceedings. Captain Alva, before we make the official opening, you may make your statement.”

  “Thank you, judge.” It was the voice of a younger man. Also a very tired man, Joneny thought. His phrases were measured, with long pauses between. “Thank you. Only it isn’t exactly a statement I want to make. It’s a request—of the Court, and an appeal to the leniency of the citizens of the City of Sigma-9. I would like to request that this trial not take place…” In his pause a murmur began among the people. “…and that One-Eyed Jack, in fact all the One-Eyes remaining in Sigma-A-9, be placed in the custody of the City’s navigation staff, with myself fully and finally responsible for their conduct.” The murmur broke out into expletives of indignation. Above them the judge’s gavel crashed and the judge’s voice cut sharply over the noise: