A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  “We must go to Hi-Vator—now, we must go! Don’t you think so, groundling? And you can hide there as I have hidden here—and maybe we can even play some tricks as we have played here? But I will tell them of their danger! Though perhaps, after we get there, it would be best if I hid and you went up to implore the Queen and her Handsman to save themselves; for there are few in Hi-Vator who ever paid much attention to me—and then, most of them, only to curse me. Of course we could go together…and no one who knew the true import of the message I bring could really think evil of me anymore—do you think?”

  “Dost thou think,” Qualt demanded, his hand on the hard, furry shoulder beside him, which flexed and flexed in darkness, “that the Winged Ones there might help us here?”

  “Help you?” The beating paused a puzzled moment. “I daresay they could if they wanted. But help you? After all the help I’ve given you today, carrying you here, getting you there, lifting you out of this danger and away from that one, don’t you think it’s time, given the gravity of this turn, for you to think about helping me?”

  “Then we must go to thy nest at Hi-Vator! Here, let me mount thee…” and, rising in the darkness from his squat, steadying himself on the shoulder below him, Qualt stepped over and around to the soft dirt behind. The warm back rose against his belly, his chest.

  “Hold tight—we have not gone this far before! But you know now how it’s done!”

  In the black, Qualt clutched the Winged One’s neck. Great vibrations started either side of him. Twigs and soft soil dropped away beneath his bare feet. Swinging free, his legs brushed their calves by the Winged One’s tough heels.

  “But what of the singer?” Qualt thought to call.

  “Oh”—and the head strained back beside his—“she has already escaped them—and is off running in the woods! There, look, their tent’s on fire. And all is confusion with them.” And they rose above the trees, Qualt looking down over the furred shoulder to see flames lapping at the striped wall flare now, then retreat under the slap of water, then surge still again. Beside him, wings gathered up, beat hugely down—

  How, Qualt wondered, could such flight be carried on in the dark—even as the first moonlight cleared. Then he forgot the paring of light above and simply clung, sometimes with his eyes closed, sometimes merely squinting against the wind.

  They rose before the mountains.

  And rose.

  And rose—till, beside the rush of water over the rocks, at last Qualt stepped away from his flying companion, arms tingling, oddly light-headed.

  “See there, the fire up on that ledge?” the Winged One said while Qualt tried to catch his breath. “Climb for it, groundling!”

  “Climb?”

  “Up the webbing there. See the guylines running from under those rocks?”

  There was no talk now—and Qualt was glad of it—of either of them continuing alone or either of them hiding.

  They climbed the sagging net.

  As Qualt passed one ledge, a Winged One, very fat, waddled quickly to the edge and, with lips pulled back from little teeth and little lids squeezed closed, followed them with her face from below to above.

  They walked along a stone cliff, Qualt picking his way carefully, lagging farther and farther behind his companion, who, wings wide, bounded ahead, till three youngsters half ran, half soared from the cave mouth beside him to freeze, ears cocked and gawking. At a sudden mew within, they retreated. But now his companion waited for Qualt to catch up, making some disgusted comment about the children Qualt didn’t wholly follow.

  Steps had been carved into the mountain that they had to climb. Some of the edges were stone. Some were roots, with earth packed behind them. Qualt moved his hands along the stone walls on either side and wondered why his companion, behind him now on the stairs, didn’t fly this last length of the ascent—which was apparently not the last length after all, because now they had to climb up another fifty feet of webbing, with the rush and rumble of falling water invisible below among dark rocks.

  Finally they gained a ledge where a dozen Winged Ones waited. Qualt was very confused for a while, since no one seemed to want to speak to them.

  Fires burned in several stone tubs. The cave entrances flickered and resounded with wings going in and out, with mewing retreating and emerging. Finally Qualt heard someone say beside him, in that high, childish voice they all spoke with: “But you can see, that is not the groundling who was here earlier; that is not the one who saved my life. I took him home. He has not returned. They look alike, yes, but not that much alike. Don’t you see how much smaller he is?

  “And you—” This was addressed to Qualt’s companion, who, on reaching the ledge, had suddenly seemed to become indifferent to the whole enterprise and was now sitting on the rocky rim, hanging his heels in space, with his sails drawn in about him and feigning great interest in the night breezes and the night clouds and anything that was not the confused converse behind him. “Well,” continued the standing Winged One, who wore some sort of flattened chain around his neck (the only dress or ornament Qualt had seen among them so far), “we certainly didn’t expect to see you here, just now—”

  “Please,” Qualt said, suddenly stepping forward, “please, thou must understand. But we heard something!”

  At which, with a sudden straightening of his hips, his companion pushed himself off the cliff, dropped into the black, like a feetfirst dive into ink, then a moment later rose out of it, into the firelight, soaring now beside them, sailing now above them—with a triumphant hoot that Qualt had never heard before!

  After that, Qualt and his companion both were given lots of attention.

  —

  Naä ran—well beyond the camp now…still waiting for the sound of footsteps behind her, wondering at the fact that somehow she was still alive, to flee, to run, to escape—from her own absurd and dangerous plan. She took long breaths with her mouth wide, to make as little sound as possible. Ienbar’s knife was still in her belt. She still held Rimgia’s shawl at her neck. Only an hour later, in the woods at the other side of the village, did she realize that she had gone beyond the town as well. She was going up a slope: this way, she realized, would take her toward the quarry where the stone workers went to hew in the day.

  Leave this village, she thought. I am a singer! (In the dark, she clutched the knife hilt till it hurt her hand, till it bruised the undersides of her knuckles, till it stung with the salt on her palm.) I am no woman for this sort of thing, whatever this sort of thing was—killing on the sly, making brainlessly heroic rescues. A bit wildly she thought: I could make a ballad out of what I’ve already done today and tonight and have the satisfaction of knowing no one will ever believe it! You may have lost Rahm. But you saved Rimgia. Reasonably, you can’t do more. So go! Go on!

  Which is when her foot went into the ditch—and with the shooting pain, she turned, she fell. I’ve probably twisted my ankle, she thought. She got herself free, stepped gingerly on it—it didn’t hurt that much. But in ten minutes, or when next she got off it, certainly then the throbbing that precluded walking would begin.

  From somewhere, the moon (that, earlier, Uk had expected to light his way into town) rose with its crescent of illumination to light Naä’s way through the woods. The underbrush tried to slow her, but she hurried on. Then, at the height of another slope, brush gave way to grasses and trees—one of the pear orchards above the village. She started out across it, still cursing her foolhardiness and shivering when she thought of the mad luck that had let her get this far.

  She shivered again, though the night had grown warmer—and was of the sort that, any other evening, would have been pleasant.

  Between moonlit trees, in a small space a few yards to her left, Naä saw dark forms stretched on the grass. More corpses, was her first thought. Even up here…?

  Nothing particularly happened to change her mind; but she decided to go closer. Would it be villagers she knew? When she was a yard away, it occurred
to her that they might be sleeping soldiers the Myetrans had stationed—which was when one propped himself up on an arm and whispered, “Who art thou?” in a voice that, even as it started chills on her back, she recognized.

  “Abrid?” she asked the shadowed figure.

  “Who art thou?” he repeated.

  She told him, “It’s Naä!”

  The moon had leached all red from his braids, leaving them near the gray they were after his workday in the quarry, so that one could see his father in his face…

  “Rimgia!” she heard the boy whisper, leaning toward the other sleeping figure. “It’s Naä!”

  A moment on, Naä crouched between the two youngsters, demanding: “But what are you doing here?”

  “Thou saidst I should get Abrid,” Rimgia whispered sleepily. “I did. We came here to hide.”

  “But they’ll find you if they look for you!”

  Rimgia sat cross-legged now, rocking backward and forward a little, clearly exhausted. “Why didst thou come up here?”

  “To bring you your shawl,” Naä said shortly. She tugged the printed cloth from her shoulder. It had gotten torn several more times. Naä’s legs and arms were scratched, and she was still waiting for the ghost of the pain to reassert itself from when she had gone into the muddy ditch. But that was long enough back so that, if it hadn’t started to pain her yet, then maybe she hadn’t really twisted her ankle at all. She laughed at the thought that luck could go with you as easily as against (the escape seemed beyond luck, like the luck of being born at all) and tossed the cloth toward the girl; who simply looked at it, where it landed in the grass, tented in three places on stiff stalks.

  Naä said, “It got a bit messed up, I think.” Then she laughed. “I’m so glad to see you, girl; I’m so glad to see you both!”

  Abrid was squatting now. He said, “Naä, nobody will find us up here!”

  “I found you,” Naä said. “And I wasn’t even looking! You’ve got to go much farther. And really hide this time. But the two of you together!”

  Rimgia lifted both hands to her neck, rubbing. “Naä, how did you get away? What happened? Why did you come here? Where are you going?”

  “Get away? It was dumb luck. What happened? I’ll tell you the next time we see each other. Where am I going? I—” and she stopped because she couldn’t bring herself to say: I’m terrified and I’m running away….

  Then Abrid asked: “Where is thy harp?”

  Naä looked down at the knife in her hand, its blade black as water. For the first time in many minutes she relaxed her fingers; the pain bloomed like a hot glow around her fist as her fingers loosened on the handle. “I…I put my harp away for a while. It’s not a time for singing. Look, you two must keep going—you must get miles from the village. As if you’re on a wander together. And then you must hide, not anywhere you’ve ever hidden before. But somewhere new.” Slowly the glow went out. “And so must I.”

  “You’ll go with us?” Rimgia demanded, leaning forward now, her eyes, for a moment, bright in the moon.

  “I don’t know whether I—”

  But then Rimgia’s eyes turned away, up toward the sky. Abrid was looking too.

  Like a vast and strangely shaped leaf, a figure crossed the moon. Then another. And then another—going in the other direction. A cloud’s tendril touched the crescent. Another flying form swooped below it.

  “They scare me,” Abrid said, dropping back on his buttocks, his crossed feet coming down loudly in the grass. He hugged his knees in tightly, looking up. Half a dozen of the creatures moved in the sky. He spoke in a whisper. “Everyone’s always been afraid of them….”

  “Dost thou think they can see us?” Rimgia asked. “There’re so many frightening things around. I’ve heard of creatures that can weave a man into a web and suffocate him; and lions that roam the level lands; and the Winged Ones—”

  “I wish thou wouldst sing a song for us now,” Abrid said.

  “I don’t have my harp,” Naä said shortly. “And the Myetrans, I’m afraid, have stolen my voice for a while.”

  Again she looked at the knife. Again she looked at the sky. “You two,” she said, “at least get out of the orchard here and back somewhere in the woods. And hide! I have to go—”

  “Where art thou going?” Rimgia asked, now on her knees, now rocking back to get her feet under her. She stood.

  “I think,” Naä said, “I’m going back to town—to Çiron. Again.”

  “Naä?”

  For the singer had abruptly turned.

  She turned back again. “Yes?”

  Rimgia bent to pick up the shawl. “Thank you!”

  “For going back?”

  “For trading places with me!”

  Naä laughed. Then she started again through the trees. If they’ve stolen my voice from me, she thought as she entered the woods to descend the slope, I must steal something from them in return. But what can it be that they’ll sorely, sorely miss?

  —

  Qualt was in love with Rimgia.

  We’ve written it; it was true.

  Thus it would be silly to believe that in the course of all Qualt’s enterprises, she was never once in his mind. But it would be equally simplistic to think she formed some sort of focus for him—that somehow all his acts were envisioned, performed, and evaluated with her image bright before him; that they were done for her. Rather, the sort of social catastrophe that Çiron had undergone takes selves already shattered by the simple exigencies of the everyday and drives the fragments even farther apart, so that the separate selves of love and bravery, misery and despair, run on apace, influencing one another certainly, but not in any way one.

  As such catastrophes occasionally evoke extraordinary acts of selflessness or bravery, they sometimes evoke extraordinary efforts to make one part of what is too easily called the self confront another part.

  Naä had found Rimgia doubtless because she was not, in that final dash through the woods, looking for her. But once he had conveyed the gravity of what his winged companion had overheard to the Handsman and—a few minutes later—to the Queen at Hi-Vator, Qualt decided with the same force of will that had impelled him for the whole of the day, even to this height, that he must now find Rimgia and speak to her.

  Perhaps Qualt’s failure—his only failure, really, among all he’d attempted since the Myetrans came—was because he was so certain he knew where to find her.

  —

  The scrabblings on the roof were the footsteps of one Winged One, or three, or perhaps more. On the ground beside the hut, light from the crescent moon was lapped and loosed by a score of beating, crossing, conflicting wings.

  Someone, unthinking, mewed.

  Someone else went “Shhush!”

  Then Qualt lowered himself down from the roof’s edge, feeling for the window, the toes of his right foot catching on the shutter’s planks, while the night air, which minutes before had been a torrent around him, was just a breeze at his back. When he swung his other foot against the shutter, the catch gave and it swung in. Stepping about and finding purchase on the sill, he caught the fingertips of his right hand over the upper lintel and let himself down till he was sitting in the window, holding on to the beam above with one hand and the window’s side with the other, his head—along with both legs—thrust into the darkened hut.

  Recalling the motion with which his companion had pushed himself off the upper ledge into the night, Qualt jumped forward and landed in a squat that dropped him low enough to scrape the knuckles on his right hand painfully on the floor. His left hand flailed out because the floor was closer than he’d thought.

  Regaining his balance, he whispered, “Rimgia? Abrid?” He stood. “Rimgia…it’s me, Qualt!”

  The darkness across the room to his left he recognized as the fireplace, its embers dead. There, next to it, that must have been Kern’s pick. And that was probably Kern’s—or Rimgia’s—fishing pole against the wall.

  “Rim
gia?” He took another step across the kitchen, feeling suddenly the emptiness of the house as the noises on the roof caused him to lift his eyes but brought forth no sound within.

  Didn’t Rimgia sleep in the back, over there?

  He pushed the hanging away and stepped inside. From a half-open shutter, light from the moon lay over a pallet, with a wrinkled throw across the matting—not unlike the one he so rarely slept on these summer nights in his cottage down by the dump. “Rimgia?” And Abrid’s sleeping space just beyond the wall…“Abrid?” He said that out full voice three times. Then he said again more softly: “Rimgia?” He stood there; and while the hanging swung behind him, he pulled his lower lip into his mouth to press it with his front teeth—till, at sudden pain, he let it free and put his tongue up over his upper lip now. He rubbed both forearms against his ribs and swallowed and coughed and swallowed again. The chill aloft on the night had been refreshing, but the memory of it made him want to hug himself in his desire for warmth. A vision he’d had, during the whole of the flight down, was of coming in (through the window, more or less as he’d done) to kneel on one knee by her bed, to reach out and touch her shoulder as she slept; then, when his touch startled her awake, so that she lifted her head, pulling copper hair over the pillow (the moonlight was supposed to be full silver, not just this gauze of half shadow), he would say…Qualt took another breath, stepped forward, dropped to a squat, knees winging up beside him, and reached for the bed. He only rested his wide fingers on the wrinkled throw, however, while he tried to take in the fact that she was really not here.

  Still, if she was absent, it was her absence. And everything hers was, it seemed, extraordinarily important at this moment.

  “Rimgia,” he said, “I like thee—like thee a lot! Dost thou like me? I mean…really like me?”

  Then, because of the scrabbling above, Qualt was up, into the other room (to flee the vacant house that had just held his bravest act that day), to vault onto the sill and twist about, reach up for the lintel, his broad feet—a moment later—disappearing above it.