A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Thou’rt the one going to the burial field,” Rimgia said, pretending not to be desperately pleased at the prospect of being the subject of a song. “And thou’rt the one who has heard all the strange ideas of the world—not I. Yes, I would change places with thee if I could, Naä—though if those foreign elders’ strange idea is right, it means that someday I may have to live your life, and you mine—that we might change places yet!”

  “Or that we already have,” Naä said. “In fact that’s one reason, I guess, I have trouble with it. But when I see you tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Ienbar says. That’s next best to going to see him, isn’t it?”

  “And some time soon thou must come and eat with us. And sing this new song for Abrid and my father—Father likes thy singing almost as much as I do.”

  And, laughing, the two women parted to go their different ways through the town.

  —

  When he reached the first field, Rahm paused to fill his chest with the scent of grain under hot sun and to listen to the roar of crickets, to grass spears brushing one another, and to sparrows and crows and jays, which all, with another breath, would again become what at any other time he would think of as silence.

  Halfway across the field, Tenuk the plowman looked up, halted his animal, and waved. Ahead of the plow, the mule was the hue of cut slate. A distant ear twitched—and waving back, Rahm imagined the rasping bluebottle worrying at the eyelashes of that diligent, tractable beast.

  With more humor than reproach, Rahm thought: Tenuk’s only three days farther along than when I left. They’ve missed me here.

  Beets grew to Rahm’s right. Kale stretched to his left. He walked along one field’s edge. The earth was soft. Yellowing grasses brushed and scratched his sweating calves. Moist soil gave and sprang back to his bare soles. Even as he tried to take in all that was familiar about his fields, his country, his home, one new bit of the familiar was wiped away with the next.

  He turned onto the path toward town. Moments later, trotting out under lowering oak branches, he saw the woman at the stone well halt, clay jug at her hip; she recognized him—and smiled. Rahm grinned back as four children careened from behind the door hanging off the hut across the way, a dog yapping among them. (Three years ago and a head and a half shorter, in her dirty hands the eldest of those children had held that dog up to him as a puppy, and Rahm had said, “Why not call him ‘Mouse’? A big mouse—that’s what he looks like,” and the girl and the others had laughed, because it was such a silly idea—calling a dog a mouse!) They ran toward him, not seeing him. As they broke around him, he caught up the youngest and swung her to his shoulder as she squealed. And suddenly he was among them, the others jumping around him and clapping. The little one grappled his long hair, and her squeal became laughter that, somewhere in it, had his name. And he said all theirs, and their mothers’, then theirs again (“Hello, Jallet. Hey there, Wraga…How is thy mother, Kenisa? Jallet, dost thy fat old man Mantice still waste his time with the water cart? I did not see thy uncle Gargula in the fields today. Perhaps he’s still doing some work for thy mother? But you must not let Veema work him too hard! Tell her I told you so too! Let Gargula get back to the beet fields, where he’s needed! Wraga, so long…”), and called them all out again in farewell, because it pleased him—almost surprised him—that after a week in the field, those names that he had not thought of over all the adventurous days, names that he might as well have forgotten, came back so quickly to his tongue. A step more, and he set the little girl down. She grabbed hold of his forefinger now, tugging and calling for another ride. But Rahm laughed and freed himself. And they were running on.

  Where she’d carried her loom out into her yard, to sit cross-legged on the ground, Hara looked up from her strings and shuttles and separator plank and tamping paddle. A breeze lifted the ends of the leaf-green rag tied around hair through which white flowed like currents in a stream; it moved the hem of her brown skirt back from browner ankles. Her breasts were flat and long, the aureoles wide around dark dugs. Her eyes were black and glittering within their clutch of wrinkles, which deepened when she saw him. “Hello to thee, young Rahm!”

  Rahm came over to stand behind her and look down. Crouching now, he frowned at her pattern: blue, orange, green, cut away sharply by the unwoven strings. “What makest thou there?”

  “Who knows,” Hara said, her smile more full of spaces than teeth. “Perhaps it’s something thou mayest wear thyself one day, when they decide in the council house that a bit of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and more of the world’s wisdom has settled between thy ears.”

  That made Rahm laugh. He patted the weaver’s shoulder—and stood, still able to feel where the girl, gone now, had sat on his.

  Hara slammed down the treadle. The shuttle ran through quivering threads, drawing gray yarn.

  Rahm loped off between stone and thatch buildings. Toward him from an alley end, an ox tugged a creaking cart. The side slats were woven with wide leather strips, the bed piled with rocks.

  Its two drivers, man and boy, were gray from cracked, callused toes to bushy beard (on the elder) and hair. The man raised an arm to Rahm even as he frowned—as though the rock dust powdering his face and beard made a fog hard to see through. But the boy, who held a sack on his lap, suddenly pushed it to the bench, stood in his seat, and called out: “Rahm!”

  Stopping, Rahm grinned. “Hey, Abrid!”

  Washed free of quarry powder, Kern’s hair and beard would be the same powder gray. But after a splash from the bucket, Abrid’s braids would be as red as his sister’s. And because I know that, thought Rahm, that’s how I know I’m home!

  Kern halted the cart with a grunt. His frown deepened. He nodded to Rahm. But Kern’s frown was as welcoming, Rahm knew, as any smile.

  Abrid jumped down from the bench and seized Rahm’s wrist the way a much younger child might, though the grit on his palms made the boy’s hand feel like an old man’s. “You will work again with us at the stone pits, Rahm?”

  “No, Abrid.” Rahm shook his head. “I will stay in the fields.”

  —

  Inside the house Rimgia had put the dough cakes on the hot stones down at the fire and was tossing handfuls of cut turnips and sliced squash and chopped radishes into the bowl of lettuces she had torn up, when something in the voices outside caught her. She turned from the counter and stepped across the floor mat; she needed more water. As she went, she hooked two fingers in the handle of the jar sitting there, but it was already half full. Holding the jar, she pulled in the door with the other hand and stepped out onto the porch over the high sill (which kept the heavy winter rains from coming up to the door—Abrid had better fix that loose plank soon). She looked out, to call: “Father, Abrid, come in and get your—!”

  Her father, Kern, still sitting on the cart seat, and her brother, Abrid, already standing, looked around.

  She saw Rahm.

  Reaching up to run her hand, still moist from the water in which she’d washed the vegetables, across her forehead and into her hair, Rimgia set the water pitcher on the porch planks and, with a surge of delight, rushed barefoot down the steps. “Rahm! Thou wilt stay to eat with us?” Again a hand to her hair to brush back some from her forehead (yes, Rahm thought, the same red as her brother’s beneath his work dust); but her face was full of a smile that wanted to get even bigger, wanted to swallow all the sunlight and breeze around them. She wiped her other hand on her shift’s hip. “Come, stay—there’s more than enough! And thou canst tell us of all thy adventures in thy wander. Did you get back this morning? Or last night?”

  “I only tramped in by the southern fields ten minutes past, and glimpsed Tenuk stalking his mule. I’ll come and see thee soon, Rimgia. But I haven’t even told Ienbar I’m here.”

  Abrid jumped down and came around the cart—he almost bumped the corner, but swung his hip away—to stand near the steps. He lifted the pitcher, frowned into it, then poured some into his hand. He sp
lashed his face, threw another handful against his chest. Water fell to darken the dust on one knee, the toes of one foot. Sitting on the step now, with two fingers together, he wiped his light lashes free of dirt. “Hey, why wilt thou not stay, Rahm?”

  “I will, but some other time, boy!”

  “Well, then.” Rimgia went to the cart bench to take down the sack Abrid had left on the seat. (In it, Rahm knew, would be pears and some melons Abrid had gathered from the orchards and fields up near the quarry. Yes, he was home.) As she did so, the scent of the baked dough cakes came from the door. Rahm smiled—and Rimgia wondered if the scent was what he smiled at. (How many dozens of them had she seen Rahm, now sitting on the well wall, now walking across the commons, wolf down in the last year?) “Then thou must come back soon.”

  Climbing from the wagon beside her, her father turned and clapped Rahm’s shoulder. And still frowned, silently—but silence was Kern’s way.

  Rahm said: “When I’ve seen Ienbar, I’ll return.”

  “Thou mayest see Naä there,” Rimgia said. “Earlier, when I came with her from the fields, she too was off to talk with him.” These people here, my brother, my father, and Rahm (Rimgia thought), perhaps we are all a single consciousness and only believe ourselves separate, so that we are closest to the truth at a moment like this when we almost forget it. The notion, odd as it was, made her smile even more than the pleasure of her friend’s return.

  And with all the smiling and nodding and grinning and waving—that seemed the only comfortable thing to do (or frowning, if you were Kern) when you’d been away and come back—Rahm left his friends and their father.

  —

  There was another young man in that village, who, though he had lost his parents during the same autumnal fever that had killed Rahm’s almost a decade ago, was as different from Rahm as a young man could be—for, though likely he loved it as much, he had a very different view of Çiron.

  Qualt hauled a great basket of yellow rinds and chicken feathers and milk slops and eggshells and corn shucks from his wagon, to go, stiff-legged and leaning back against it, over the mossy stones to overturn it, rushing and bouncing down, at the ravine precipice into the soggy and steaming gully. A lithe and wiry youngster of twenty-two, given to bursts of intense conversation, long periods of introspection, and occasional smiles that startled his face but would linger there half a morning, he was the town garbage collector.

  And Qualt was in love with red-haired Rimgia.

  Qualt stood at the rocky rim, the empty basket in his big hands. (Unlike Rahm, Qualt’s hands and feet were the only things you might call big about him; oh, yes, and perhaps his ears, if his hair was tied back—though it wasn’t now. Really, he was a rather slight young fellow.) Qualt breathed slowly, not smelling, really, what lay among the rocks below.

  A few weeks before, you see, when a number of Çiron’s young people, Qualt, Rimgia, Abrid, and Rahm among them, had gone for a full-moon swim at the quarry lake, they’d all sung songs (Rahm the loudest, Qualt the best), most of them learned from Naä, and cooked sweet dough on sticks over the open fire (the way Ienbar had suggested they try) till very late, and finally gone chastely to sleep. Qualt and Rimgia had slept, yes, on the same blanket: Qualt’s blanket. Yes, Rimgia and Qualt—head to heel, heel to head—the water a silver sheet beside them. Qualt had woken just at dawn and a bit before the others, to find Rimgia’s arm over his calf and her cheek pressed against the calloused ball of his foot and his wide toes. Her eyes had been closed and her breath had made the tiniest whistle he’d almost not heard for the sound of the current, the splash of small fish, and the morning’s first birds. But he’d lain staring down over his hip, afraid to move lest she wake, his heart hammering harder and harder, so that it was all he could do to pay attention to the feel of—yes, he could move them without disturbing her—the toes on his right foot in the copper torrent, the cataract, the cool swirl of her hair.

  Later he’d decided she was a strange girl. But when, in all the nights between then and today, he’d drifted off to sleep, he kept finding a dark tenderness among his thoughts of her.

  Suddenly Qualt smacked the basket bottom, turned it up to peer within its smelly slats, then dragged it behind him, rasping on rock, toward the dozen others that stood around the end of his wagon.

  —

  Rahm walked through the village, wondering at how well he knew his home’s morning-to-morning and evening-to-evening cycle.

  In hours, Rahm thought, the sun will drop behind the trees, and the western houses will unroll shadows over the streets. Then at dawn the sun will push between the eastern dwellings to stripe the dust with copper. He strolled on, hugely content.

  Reaching the burial meadow, Rahm glanced over the un-marked graves. (But Ienbar knew the name and location of each man, each woman, and each child laid here time out of memory, and kept all the scrolls about them.) The visiting singer was coming toward the meadow up the road from the fields.

  A chamois mantle hung forward over one shoulder but was pushed back from the other. A chain of shells held her short skirt low on her hips. A strap ran down between her breasts, holding something to her back. Its carved wooden head slanted behind her neck. Rahm knew it was her harp. “And hello to thee, Naä.”

  “Rahm, you’re back! Are you going to see Ienbar? I was on my way to visit him, but I stopped at my lean-to to replace three of my harp strings—”

  “Yes, Rimgia told me, only moments past,” Rahm said. “Kern and Abrid were just home from the stone pits.”

  “And in your wander, what’d you see?” She fell in beside him. “That’s what I want to hear about!”

  “Naä”—Rahm looked at the ground, where olive tufts poked from the path dust—“thou makest fun of me.”

  “What do you mean, make fun?”

  “Thou, who hast traveled over all the world, asketh me what I have seen that thou hast not, after a simple week’s wander?”

  “Oh, Rahm, I wasn’t making fun of you. I’m interested!”

  “But thou hast come all the way from Calvicon with thy songs and tales. What can I have seen in a week that thou in a dozen years hast not?”

  “But that’s what I want you to tell me!”

  He saw her glance over to catch his expression (he was still pretending interest in the tufted ridge of the path) and saw her surprise that his expression was a smile. “But now thou seest,” he said, looking at her again, “I am making fun of thee!”

  “We’ll go to Ienbar together, and while we go, you’ll tell me!”

  “Naä, I saw antelopes come down across hazed-over grasses to drink at yellow watering holes at dawn. I found a village of folk who wove and plowed and quarried as we do, and live in huts and houses that might well have been built on the same plans as ours—though the only words in the whole of their language I could make out, after a day with them, were the words for ‘star,’ ‘ear,’ and ‘tomato plant.’ On the fifth day, as the rituals instruct us, I ate nothing from the time I woke, but drank only water, and stopped three times to purify myself with wise words. And when the sun went down, still fasting, I composed myself for sleep—hoping for a mystic dream.”

  She grinned. “Did you have one?”

  “I dreamt,” Rahm said gravely, “that I walked by a great, rushing stream. And as the sun rose and I ambled along beside the current, the water began to sparkle. Then, in the dream, a little branch feeding into the water lay before me, so I decided to wade across to the other side. I stepped in. The water was cold at first, but a few steps on, as the water reached my thighs and finally my waist, it grew warm. Then even warmer. And warmer. I woke”—he chuckled—“to find I had pissed myself, the way I used to when I was a boy in bed, a couple of times a week, even unto my fifteenth year—and my mother would become angry and say I made the shack stink.” The chuckle became a laugh. “Then she’d make me go sleep out in the tool cabin. But that, I’m afraid, was all there was of mystic dreaming!”

  “Oh
, Rahm—well, you’d better not tell Ienbar that.” Naä laughed outright. “Then again, maybe you should. He just might find something in it—if he just doesn’t find it funny too.”

  “Then I found a very real, very un-mystic”—Rahm laughed again—“stream and washed myself; and went on my way. And this morning,” he finished, “I was attacked by a wild prairie lion and wrestled with her, to break her neck with my arm. Then I came home here.”

  Naä shook her head. “Rahm, you folk amaze me.”

  He looked at her as they walked, his amber eyes full of questioning.

  “Three months ago, when I first came here, I’d never have believed such people as you existed.” Naä paused a moment, as if searching within for her answer. “Sometimes I still don’t believe that you do.”

  “Why, Naä?”

  “Rahm, I’ve traveled to lots of places, through lots of lands. I know songs and stories from even more lands and places than I’ve visited—more lands and places than you could imagine. But most of the songs and stories I know are about fights and wars, about love that dies, about death and betrayal and revenge. Yet here there is…” She raised her shoulders and looked up at the branches, whose early summer green had begun to go smoky after the first bright hue of spring. “But I can’t even name it.” She let her shoulders fall. “Here I go out and sing to Rimgia and to the other women in the fields. I come and exchange songs and tales with Ienbar, or go sit and talk with Hara over her shuttles. Sometimes I eat with you in the evening or take long walks alone in the foothills of the mountains. If any woman of the village comes around a corner of the path, my heart leaps as happily as if it were my own sister coming to meet me. If any man of the village crosses my path, we smile and call to each other with the same warmth I’d call to my own brother.” She glanced at him, then glanced away. “Whenever a group of you get together after work in the evening or before a council meeting, and everyone turns to me and asks me to sing…well, I’ve never sung better!” Naä looked down at the dust. “The only thing any of you say there is to fear in the whole of this land are the flying creatures from Hi-Vator. And no one can even remember why that is, so even that’s awfully easy to forget; and since I’ve been here, I’ve only once seen what might have been a silhouette of one against some moonshot clouds, anyway.