A, B, C: Three Short Novels

by Samuel R. Delany

  Over the next weeks, as his various accomplishments during the Myetran siege (from his gathering of information, to his help to Naä, to the water for the prisoners, to the multiple garbage peltings, and finally to his own night journey to Hi-Vator) would come to general awareness, they would make this modest young man into a true town hero—and the already high respect and regard in which he was held would become something quite stellar. What Rahm and Naä had done was the stuff of song. But what Qualt had done was finally the stuff of myth.

  At this moment, however, neither Qualt nor Rimgia knew the reputation for heroism that was to accrue. Right now Qualt was moody, because an hour back he’d had to take his garbage wagon, along with ten other carts (along with Mantice and Brumer and some others), full of corpses, piled so high one or two regularly fell off—soldiers and villagers both—down some two hundred yards, to dump them into a part of the ravine his predecessor at the dump years ago had told him about: the safest place to put corpses when, through man-made or natural catastrophe, the death toll exceeded what the burial meadow might reasonably hold.

  The fact and the location were always with him, but this was the first he’d ever had to use it.

  Rimgia wandered toward Qualt. Three days ago, she had wanted to make her questions interesting for Naä, but she’d wanted to take the most interesting of their answers to Qualt. Now, however, as she’d explained to Naä only a bit before, those answers in the aftermath of the violence seemed somehow irrelevant, so she’d come here feeling oddly empty—yet had come just the same.

  Between her fingers, she turned the stem of a black-eyed flower with yellow petals she’d thought to show him; but then, because even that seemed so childish, she threw it to the gravel. And Qualt, because he had seen her father burned down on the common the night before last and had wondered at her mourning, looked at her seriously and said: “Wouldst thou come in? I have some broth heating. I’ve knocked the marrow from half a dozen pork bones into it.”

  She stepped within the curve of the lean arm he held out, and they walked between the piles of junk about his yard. From the Winged Ones flying above, shadows passed and pulled away from them, till at the door hanging she turned and looked up, shifting her shoulders under his grip—which he loosened, but did not release. “Qualt, isn’t it odd?” she said. “The Winged Ones saved us—saved our whole village. They turned out to be brave and wonderful and generous. Yet we’ve always been taught to fear them; and now it seems there was no reason to fear. All this time, perhaps we could have been friends with them, learning from them, enjoying their ways and wonders while they benefited from ours. Doesn’t that make us seem like a very small-minded little village?”

  “Perhaps,” said thoughtful Qualt. He squeezed her shoulder with his hard, large hand, near permanent in its glove of dirt.

  “Dost thou not think so?” she asked, looking up—at him and at three (then three more) Winged Ones passing through the luminous space between his long curly hair and the roof’s edge.

  “Perhaps,” he said. “But there still might be reason to fear.”

  “To fear? The Winged Ones who saved us? But why?”

  Qualt took in a breath, squeezed her shoulder again, and looked slowly at the flying figures around them. “Maybe it’s only a little thing—but when it happened, it made me afraid. There was a Winged One who was with me, and whom I thought my friend. And when the Winged Ones came down at our request and were triumphant, and the soldiers had all surrendered, he was with us when we penned some of the Myetrans up in the corral of crossed wires they’d imprisoned some of our people in before. I’d put in both soldiers and officers. And my winged friend now called through the wires to one of the officers standing just inside, all in black, still in his hood, with that straight, straight cloak they wear lapping smack to the earth. The only thing that let you know he was a prisoner, really, was that his powergun sling was empty; I’d taken it away from him and smashed it. Well, the Winged One wanted to know, how do you like being a prisoner? Wouldn’t it be better to be free? And wouldn’t you like to fly, loosed from this cage, free of the fetters of the earth itself? He kept on teasing him, in his little scrap of a voice. Then, with three flaps to take off, he was up and inside. Wouldn’t the officer like to climb on my back, just put an arm around my neck and hold to my shoulder? I stood outside, grinning as broadly as a child, watching and wishing I’d been offered the ride—that I could change places with him. Myself, I think the officer was afraid at first; and the other soldiers inside the enclosure only looked at the ground. But finally, perhaps because he was also afraid not to, the officer stepped up and put his arms around the Winged One’s neck; and with a few beats of those great wings, making the leaves both inside and outside the fence spin up into the air, they were up among those leaves, then above them, then above the corral itself, moving into the sky, higher and higher toward the sun. In less than a minute, they were small as a bird, flying now this way, now that way, against the sky’s burning white. Because of the scale, it was hard to tell what was happening; but I remember, as I watched them, it seemed that the backward and forward turnings of that Winged One were awfully quick—dazzlingly fast, faster than I’d seen any of the others fly: a moth about a fire, darting back and about before the sun. Then I realized the speed was real—for the officer’s cape spread and billowed and fluttered and flapped, for all the world like a third wing! Had the officer tried to choke the Winged One in his flight? For the Winged One, I realized, was trying to dislodge the man and throw him loose! He flew sideways, he dove headfirst, then whirled about and rose, now flew upside down, now back again! One thought the officer’s cape had gone mad! In no more than thirty seconds, I saw the man tear loose—and fall!

  “For the first moments of his plummet, I wondered if my friend might swoop down below him and catch him. But he only flew away. Then I wondered if the falling man might spread that cloak and use it somehow to fly with, but no. It closed in the air above him, straight over his head. He arrowed down, landing among the trees, some hundred yards off.

  “When my companion returned, I was still sure there’d be some explanation—that something had happened on the flight; but no, back on the ground the big fellow was laughing and strutting and boasting to us and all his fellows what a joke it had been; it seemed a joke—to some of them, and to some of them not.

  “But why? I asked him at last. Why did you do it?

  “He cocked his head at me and said: He was wearing a cape, like the one who seared my wing with his accursed powergun!

  “But it probably wasn’t him, I told him. All the officers wear capes. You can’t just replace one person for another like that!

  “But he shrugged his huge shoulders. Well, I wasn’t ready to be a ground-bound female, limping along with only one wing and holiness to help me. Why not replace one with the other? Didn’t they flog four at random for the mischief of you and me? Oh, I see, he went on. I can hear it in your voice. Like all the others among my people: You’re no longer my friend. You don’t like me anymore. You disapprove. You are afraid. Well, there was no reason to think you’d be otherwise. I’ll find someone else to play with. Then he spread his great wings, with all their scars, and shook them in the sun and beat them and flew away.

  “But that’s when I was afraid.”

  Rimgia shuddered. “That’s terrible!” And after she shuddered, she watched his face and thought what a sensitive and intelligent young man he was, to have such wonderful feet and hands. “If you wanted to do something like that, it would be better to take one of their dreadful guns and just shoot them through the fence!”

  “Mmmm,” Qualt said. But it was uncertain if he meant he agreed with her or merely that he’d heard her. “Later”—shadows around them became smaller and darker, larger and paler—“I and some of the others went to look at the Myetran who’d fallen among the trees. He’d taken down a lot of branches, and we put his body in a wagon.” Always the shadows moved. “As soon as I came back
, I ordered the corral to be opened; and I told the soldiers inside to go—it was the corral I was in charge of; I mean, what were we going to do with them? And sullenly they went.”

  “Mmmm,” Rimgia said now, though it was as hard to tell what she meant as it had been when Qualt had said it. Then she said, because it was really why she’d come looking for him in his yard anyway: “Qualt, I like thee—I like thee very much. Dost thou like me?”

  “Yes, I…Yes…yes!” he blurted, stepping away from her to look at her wonderingly, then moving back to hold her tightly in his one arm—even while his other suddenly felt astonishingly empty.

  Rimgia looked up at the flying creatures, who crossed and parted and reversed and lowered and rose. “Maybe they’re not like us,” she said. “Maybe they’re different.”

  Qualt said very carefully: “They are brave and wonderful and generous. They saved our village….He did so many things for me—for us. He was my friend—he’s still my friend. But because they do things that make me so afraid of their difference from us, that perhaps is why we might still be afraid of them a little. But come inside now, Rimgia.” He turned with her and pushed back his door hanging. “There’s something I must say to thee, must ask thee.”

  “Whatever is it?” and she stepped within.

  —

  Gargula stayed on in the field. Several times, sensing the hour, Tenuk’s mule had turned to start back; but Gargula pulled him steady, sometimes with a jerk, staying late for much the reason he had started late.

  The first night on the common where Rimgia had lost her father, Gargula had seen an older sister whom he loathed burned till, screaming, she’d fallen dead among so many others screaming—and watched an aunt whom he’d loved far more than his mother trampled by her own friends. Like Rahm, Gargula had spent the night in the fetid and fouled cellar of the council house that, as a boy, he had helped build. On his release he’d brought dead Tenuk’s mule to the field, a man—the only man to go to the fields that day—looking for something. But because the monotonous furrows would not yield it up, he might well have gone on plowing into darkness unto dawn.

  What halted him, however, was—well, it was music. But it was also thunder. A house-sized hammer struck among metal mountains might have produced those notes. Then a voice joined them, but a voice like the sky itself opening up and starting to sing—or was it singing?

  The mule, then Gargula, stopped.

  Before the phrase ended, incomprehensible within its own roar, it collapsed into a laugh—but a laugh as if the whole earth had become woman and was laughing. Finally, there was a voice, with words actually recognizable:

  OH, DEAR! NO, I SOUND AWFUL, RAHM!

  I’M AFRAID THAT WASN’T A GOOD IDEA AT ALL!

  JUST WAIT A MINUTE, WILL YOU?

  LET ME SWITCH THIS THING—

  Gargula stood, the field ahum about him.

  Then, for whatever reason (not like a man who’d been given what he needed, but like one whom a certain shock had informed that what he needed was not to be found where he was looking), he unhooked the plow and, as the mule twitched a slate-colored ear, turned with the animal toward town.

  To the west the sky was a wall of indigo, behind mountains whose peaks were crumpled foils, silver and copper. To the east above the tree’s back fringe, salmons were layered with purples, separated by streaks the cold color of flame—before which burned and billowed golden clouds. Above in the vault, coming together in yellowish haze, insect tiny, Winged Ones turned, one after the other, to fly toward the rocks.

  Gargula walked Tenuk’s mule to the path.

  As they came out under oak leaves, he heard the visiting singer’s voice, harmonizing with her harp notes. A group had gathered at the well—a number of the village young people who were friends. Rimgia and Abrid and Qualt were there. Though he could not see her, certainly Naä sat at their center, on the well wall, singing, playing.

  As he looked among the listeners, Gargula saw that Rahm’s black hair was now braided down his back—the way you were supposed to wear it after you’d come in from a wander. Things, Gargula reflected, were finally settling into the ordinary.

  And a bit of the weight at the back of his tongue, that had made it too heavy for speech all day, he finally and surprisingly swallowed. (Across the common a line of elders, in their woven robes, walked toward the council building’s plank door for that evening’s special meeting.) Gargula blinked in the road at the branches leaning from the underbrush—so that only when the Myetran officer was three steps away, sling buttoned down over his gun hilt at his leggings’ black waist and puma pelt fastened around black shoulders, did Gargula see him.

  Without a nod, the lieutenant walked by man and mule, to the southeast, the sun’s last fire falling slantways on the puma’s lids and side teeth, on the bronze hair and brown cheek, making him squint—so that Gargula, who turned to watch Kire as he passed, did not even catch the color of his eyes.

  —New York/Amherst

  June 1962/June 1992

  ruins

  Lightning cracked a whip on the dark, scarring it with light.

  Clikit ran for the opening, ducked, fell, and landed in dust. Outside, rain began with heavy drops, fast and full. He shook his head, kneeled back, and brushed pale hair from his forehead. Taut, poised, he tried to sense odors and breezes the way he fancied an animal might.

  There was the smell of wet dirt.

  The air was hot and still.

  Blinking, he rubbed rough hands over his cheeks, pulling them away when the pain in his upper jaw above that cracked back tooth shot through his head. A faint light came around corners. Clikit kneaded one ragged shoulder. Dimly he could see a broken column and smashed plaster.

  Behind him, the summer torrent roared.

  He stood, trying to shake off fear, and walked forward. Over the roar came a clap like breaking stone. He crouched, tendons pulling at the backs of his knees. Stone kept crumbling. Beneath the ball of his foot he could feel sand and tiny pebbles—he had lost one sandal hours ago. He stepped again and felt the flooring beneath his bare foot become tile. The strap on his other sandal was almost worn through. He knew he would not have it long—unless he stopped to break the leather at the weak spot and retie it. Clikit reached the wall and peered around cautiously for light.

  In a broken frame above, a blue window let in Tyrian radiance. The luminous panes were held with strips of lead that outlined a screaming crow.

  Clikit tensed. But over the fear he smiled. So, he had taken refuge in one of the ruined temples of Kirke, eastern god of Myetra. Well, at least he was traveling in the right direction. It was Myetra he had set out for, uncountable days, if not weeks, ago.

  In a corner the ceiling had fallen. Water filmed the wall, with lime streaks at the edge. A puddle spread the tile, building up, spilling a handsbreadth, building again, inching through blue light. As he looked down at the expanding reflection of the ruined ceiling, he pondered the light’s origin, for—save the lightning—it was black outside.

  He walked to the wall’s broken end and looked behind for the source—and sucked in his breath.

  Centered on white sand a bronze brazier burned with unflickering flame. Heaped about its ornate feet were rubies, gold chains, damascened blades set with emeralds, silver proof, crowns clotted with sapphires and amethysts. Every muscle in Clikit’s body began to shake. Each atom of his feral soul quivered against its neighbor. He would have run forward, scooped up handfuls of the gems, and fled into the wild wet night, but he saw the figure in the far door.

  It was a woman.

  Through white veils he could see the ruby points of her breasts, then the lift of her hip as she walked out onto the sand, leaving fine footprints.

  Her hair was black. Her eyes were blue. “Who are you, stranger?” And her face…

  “I’m Clikit…and I’m a thief, Lady! Yes, I steal for a living. I admit it! But I’m not a very good thief. I mean a very bad one.” Something in the expres
sion that hugged her high cheekbones that balanced over her lightly cleft chin made him want to tell her everything about himself. “But you don’t have to be afraid of me, Lady. No, really! Who are—”

  “I am a priestess of Kirke. What do you wish here, Clikit?”

  “I was…” Dusty and ragged, Clikit drew himself up to his full four feet eleven inches. “I was admiring your jewels there.”

  She laughed. And the laugh made Clikit marvel at how a mouth could shape itself to such a delicate sound. A smile broke on his own stubbled face, which was all wonder and confusion and unknowing imitation. She said, “Those jewels are nothing to the real treasure of this temple.” She gestured toward them with a slim hand, the nails so carefully filed and polished they made Clikit want to hide his own broad, blunt fingers back under his filthy cloak.

  Clikit’s eyes darted about between the fortune piled before him (and beside him! and behind him!) and the woman who spoke so slightingly of it. Her ebon hair, though the light from the brazier was steady, danced with inner blues.

  “Where are you from?” she asked. “Where are you going? And would you like to see the real treasure of the temple?”

  “I am only a poor thief, Lady. But I haven’t stolen anything for days, I haven’t! I live out of the pockets of the rich who stroll the markets of Voydrir, or from what I can find not tied down on the docks of Lehryard, or from what is left out in the gardens of the affluent suburbs in Jawahlo. But recently, though, I’ve heard of the wealth of Myetra. I only thought I would journey to see for myself.”

  “You are very near Myetra, little thief.” Absently she raised one hand, thumb and forefinger just touching, as if she held something as fine as the translucent stuffs that clothed her.