Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

by Samuel R. Delany

  They finished, opened their eyes, stared about with expressions that could have been embarrassment, could have been contempt.

  Hawk was leaning forward with a look of rapt approval. Edna was smiling politely. I had the sort of grin on my face that breaks out when you’ve been vastly moved and vastly pleased. Lewis and Ann had sung superbly.

  Alex began to breathe again, glanced around to see what state everybody else was in, saw, and pressed the autobar, which began to hum and crush ice. No clapping, but the appreciative sounds began; people were nodding, commenting, whispering. Regina Abolafia went over to Lewis to say something. I tried to listen until Alex shoved a glass into my elbow.

  “Oh, I’m sorry…”

  I transferred my briefcase to the other hand and took the drink smiling. When Senator Abolafia left the two Singers, they were holding hands and looking at one another a little sheepishly. They sat down again.

  The party drifted in conversational groups through the gardens, through the groves. Overhead clouds the color of old chamois folded and unfolded across the moon.

  For a while I stood alone in a circle of trees listening to the music: a de Lassus two-part canon, programmed for audio-generators. Recalled: an article in one of last week’s large-circulation literaries stating that it was the only way to remove the feel of the bar lines imposed by five centuries of meter on modern musicians. For another two weeks this would be acceptable entertainment. The trees circled a rock pool; but no water. Below the plastic surface, abstract lights wove and threaded in a shifting lumia.

  “Excuse me… ?”

  I turned to see Alexis, who had no drink now or idea what to do with his hands. He was nervous.

  “… but our young friend has told me you have something I might be interested in.”

  I started to lift my briefcase, but Alex’s hand came down from his ear (it had gone by belt to hair to collar already) to halt me. Nouveau riche.

  “That’s all right. I don’t need to see them yet. In fact, I’d rather not. I have something to propose to you. I would certainly be interested in what you have if they are, indeed, as Hawk has described them. But I have a guest here who would be even more curious.”

  That sounded odd.

  “I know that sounds odd,” Alexis assessed, “but I thought you might be interested simply because of the finances involved. I am an eccentric collector who would offer you a price concomitant with what I would use them for: eccentric conversation pieces—and because of the nature of the purchase I would have to limit severely the people with whom I could converse.”

  I nodded.

  “My guest, however, would have a great deal more use for them.”

  “Could you tell me who this guest is?”

  “I asked Hawk, finally, who you were and he led me to believe I was on the verge of a grave social indiscretion. It would be equally indiscreet to reveal my guest’s name to you.” He smiled. “But indiscretion is the better part of the fuel that keeps the social machine turning, Mr. Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson…” He smiled knowingly.

  I have never been Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson, but then, Hawk was always an inventive child. Then a second thought went by, vid., the tungsten magnates, the Cadwaliter-Ericksons of Tythis on Triton. Hawk was not only inventive, he was as brilliant as all the magazines and newspapers are always saying he is.

  “I assume your second indiscretion will be to tell me who this mysterious guest is?”

  “Well,” Alex said with the smile of the canary-fattened cat, “Hawk agreed with me that the Hawk might well be curious as to what you have in there,” (he pointed) “as indeed he is.”

  I frowned. Then I thought lots of small, rapid thoughts I’ll articulate in due time. “The Hawk?”

  Alex nodded.

  I don’t think I was actually scowling. “Would you send our young friend up here for a moment?”

  “If you’d like.” Alex bowed, turned. Perhaps a minute later, Hawk came up over the rocks and through the trees, grinning. When I didn’t grin back, he stopped.

  “Mmmm…” I began.

  His head cocked.

  I scratched my chin with a knuckle. “… Hawk,” I said, “are you aware of a department of the police called Special Services?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “They’ve suddenly gotten very interested in me.”

  “Gee,” he said with honest amazement. “They’re supposed to be effective.”

  “Mmmm,” I reiterated.

  “Say,” Hawk announced, “how do you like that? My namesake is here tonight. Wouldn’t you know.”

  “Alex doesn’t miss a trick. Have you any idea why he’s here?”

  “Probably trying to make some deal with Abolafia. Her investigation starts tomorrow.”

  “Oh.” I thought over some of those things I had thought before. “Do you know a Maud Hinkle?”

  His puzzled look said “no” pretty convincingly.

  “She bills herself as one of the upper echelon in the arcane organization of which I spoke.”

  “Yeah?”

  “She ended our interview earlier this evening with a little homily about hawks and helicopters. I took our subsequent encounter as a fillip of coincidence. But now I discover that the evening has confirmed her intimations of plurality.” I shook my head. “Hawk, I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where the walls not only have ears, but probably eyes, and long, claw-tipped fingers. Anyone about me—yea, even very you—could turn out to be a spy. I suspect every sewer grating and second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommygun, or worse. What I just can’t figure out is how these insidious forces, ubiquitous and omnipresent though they be, induced you to lure me into this intricate and diabolical—”

  “Oh, cut it out!” He shook back his hair. “I didn’t lure—”

  “Perhaps not consciously, but Special Services has Hologramic Information Storage, and their methods are insidious and cruel—”

  “I said cut it put.” And all sorts of hard little things happened again. “Do you think I’d—” Then he realized how scared I was, I guess. “Look, the Hawk isn’t some small time snatchpurse. He lives in just as paranoid a world as you’re in now, only all the time. If he’s here, you can be sure there are just as many of his men—eyes and ears and fingers— as there are of Maud Hickenlooper.”

  “Hinkle.”

  “Anyway, it works both ways. No Singer’s going to— Look, do you really think I would—”

  And even though I knew all those hard little things were scabs over pain, I said, “Yes.”

  “You did something for me once, and I—”

  “I gave you some more welts. That’s all.”

  All the scabs pulled off.

  “Hawk,” I said. “Let me see.”

  He took a breath. Then he began to open the brass buttons. The flaps of his jacket fell back. The lumia colored his chest with pastel shiftings.

  I felt my face wrinkle. I didn’t want to look away. I drew a hissing breath instead, which was just as bad.

  He looked up. “There’re a lot more than when you were here last aren’t there?”

  “You’re going to kill yourself, Hawk.”

  He shrugged.

  “I can’t even tell which are the ones I put there anymore.”

  He started to point them out.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, too sharply. And for the length of three breaths, he grew more and more uncomfortable, till I saw him start to reach for the bottom button. “Boy,” I said, trying to keep despair out of my voice, “why do you do it?” and ended up keeping out everything. There is nothing more despairing than a voice empty.

  He shrugged, saw I didn’t want that, and for a moment anger flickered in his green eyes. I didn’t want that either. So he said: “Look… you touch a person, softly, gently, and maybe you even do it with love. And, well, I guess a piece of information goes on up to the brain where something interprets it as pleasure. Maybe something up there in my hea
d interprets the information all wrong…”

  I shook my head. “You’re a Singer. Singers are supposed to be eccentric, sure; but—”

  Now he was shaking his head. Then the anger opened up. And I saw an expression move from all those spots that had communicated pain through the rest of his features, and vanish without ever becoming a word. Once more he looked down at the wounds that webbed his thin body.

  “Button it up, boy. I’m sorry I said anything.”

  Halfway up the lapels his hands stopped. “You really think I’d turn you in?”

  “Button it up.”

  He did. Then he said, “Oh.” And then, “You know, it’s midnight.”

  “Edna just gave me the Word.”

  “Which is?”

  “Agate.”

  I nodded.

  He finished closing his collar. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Cows.”

  “Cows?” Hawk asked. “What about them?”

  “You ever been on a dairy farm?”

  He shook his head.

  “To get the most milk, you keep the cows practically in suspended animation. They’re fed intravenously from a big tank that pipes nutrients out and down, branching into smaller and smaller pipes until it gets to all those high yield semi-corpses.”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “People.”

  “… and cows?”

  “You’ve given me the Word. And now it begins to funnel down, branching out, with me telling others, and them telling still others, till by midnight tomorrow…”

  “I’ll go get the-”

  “Hawk?”

  He turned back. “What?”

  “You say you don’t think I’m going to be the victim of any hanky-panky with the mysterious forces that know more than we— Okay, that’s your opinion. But as soon as I get rid of this stuff, I’m going to make the most distracting exit you’ve ever seen.”

  Two little lines bit down Hawk’s forehead. “Are you sure I haven’t seen this one before?”

  “As a matter of fact I think you have.” Now I grinned.

  “Oh,” Hawk said, then made a sound that had the structure of laughter but was all breath. “I’ll get the Hawk.”

  He ducked out between the trees.

  I glanced up at the lozenges of moonlight in the leaves.

  I looked down at my briefcase.

  Up between the rocks, stepping around the long grass, came the Hawk. He wore a gray evening suit; a gray silk turtleneck. Above his craggy face his head was completely shaved.

  “Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson?” He held out his hand.

  I shook: small sharp bones in loose skin. “Does one call you Mr… ?”

  “Arty.”

  “Arty the Hawk.” I tried to look like I wasn’t giving his gray attire the once-over.

  He smiled. “Arty the Hawk. Yeah. I picked that name up when I was younger than our friend down there. Alex says you got… well, some things that are not exactly yours. That don’t belong to you.”

  I nodded.

  “Show them to me.”

  “You were told what—”

  He brushed away the end of my sentence. “Come on, let me see.”

  He extended his hand, smiling affably as a bank clerk. I ran my thumb around the pressure-zip. The cover went tsk. “Tell me,” I said, looking up at his head still lowered to see what I had, “what does one do about Special Services? They seem to be after me.”

  The head came up. Surprise changed slowly to a craggy leer. “Why, Mr. Cadwaliter-Erickson!” He gave me the up and down openly. “Keep your income steady. Keep it steady, that’s one thing you can do.”

  “If you buy these for anything like what they’re worth, that’s going to be a little difficult.”

  “I would imagine. I could always give you less money—”

  The cover went tsk again.

  “—or, barring that, you could try to use your head and outwit them.”

  “You must have outwitted them at one time or another. You may be on an even keel now, but you had to get there from somewhere else.”

  Arty the Hawk’s nod was downright sly. “I guess you’ve had a run-in with Maud. Well, I suppose congratulations are in order. And condolences. I always like to do what’s in order.”

  “You seem to know how to take care of yourself. I mean I notice you’re not out there mingling with the guests.”

  “There are two parties going on here tonight,” Arty said. “Where do you think Alex disappears off to every five minutes?”

  I frowned.

  “That lumia down in the rocks”—he pointed towards my feet—“is a mandala of shifting hues on our ceiling. Alex,” he chuckled, “goes scuttling off under the rocks where there is a pavilion of Oriental splendor—”

  “—and a separate guest list at the door?”

  “ Regina is on both. I’m on both. So’s the kid, Edna, Lewis, Ann—”

  “Am I supposed to know all this?”

  “Well, you came with a person on both lists. I just thought…” He paused.

  I was coming on wrong. Well. A quick change artist learns fairly quick that the verisimilitude factor in imitating someone up the scale is your confidence in your unalienable right to come on wrong. “I’ll tell you,” I said. “How about exchanging these”—I held out the briefcase—“for some information.”

  “You want to know how to stay out of Maud’s clutches?” In a moment he shook his head. “It would be pretty stupid of me to tell you, even if I could. Besides, you’ve got your family fortunes to fall back on.” He beat the front of his shirt with his thumb. “Believe me, boy. Arty the Hawk didn’t have that. I didn’t have anything like that.” His hands dropped into his pockets. “Let’s see what you got.”

  I opened the case again.

  The Hawk looked for a while. After a few moments he picked a couple up, turned them around, put them back down, put his hands back in his pocket. “I’ll give you sixty thousand for them, approved credit tablets.”

  “What about the information I wanted?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you a thing.” He smiled. “I wouldn’t tell you the time of day.”

  There are very few successful thieves in this world. Still less on the other five. The will to steal is an impulse towards the absurd and the tasteless. (The talents are poetic, theatrical, a certain reverse charisma…) But it is a will, as the will to order, power, love.

  “All right,” I said.

  Somewhere overhead I heard a faint humming.

  Arty looked at me fondly. He reached under the lapel of his jacket, and took out a handful of credit tablets—the scarlet-banded tablets whose slips were ten thousand apiece. He pulled off one. Two. Three. Four.

  “You can deposit this much safely—?”

  “Why do you think Maud is after me?”

  Five. Six.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “How about throwing in the briefcase?” Arty asked.

  “Ask Alex for a paper bag. If you want, I can send them—”

  “Give them here.”

  The humming was coming closer.

  I held up the open case. Arty went in with both hands. He shoved them into his coat pockets, his pants pockets; the gray cloth was distended by angular bulges. He looked left, right. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Thanks.” Then he turned, and hurried down the slope with all sorts of things in his pockets that weren’t his now.

  I looked up through the leaves for the noise, but I couldn’t see anything.

  I stooped down now and laid my case open. I pulled open the back compartment where I kept the things that did belong to me, and rummaged hurriedly through.

  Alex was just offering Puffy-eyes another scotch, while the gentleman was saying, “Has anyone seen Mrs. Silem? What’s that humming overhead—?” when a large woman wrapped in a veil of fading fabric tottered across the rocks, screaming.

  Her hands were clawing at her covered face.

&nbs
p; Alex sloshed soda over his sleeve and the man said, “Oh my God! Who’s that?”

  “No!” the woman shrieked. “Oh no! Help me!” waving her wrinkled fingers, brilliant with rings.

  “Don’t you recognize her?” That was Hawk whispering confidentially to someone else. “It’s Henrietta, Countess of Effingham.”

  And Alex, overhearing, went hurrying to her assistance. The Countess, however, ducked between two cacti, and disappeared into the high grass. But the entire party followed. They were beating about the underbrush when a balding gentleman in a black tux, bow tie, and cummerbund coughed and said, in a very worried voice. “Excuse me, Mr. Spinnel?”

  Alex whirled.

  “Mr. Spinnel, my mother…”

  “Who are you?” The interruption upset Alex terribly.

  The gentleman drew himself up to announce. “The Honorable Clement Effingham,” and his pants legs shook for all the world as if he had started to click his heels. But articulation failed. The expression melted on his face. “Oh, I… my mother, Mr. Spinnel. We were downstairs, at the other half of your party, when she got very upset. She ran up here—oh, I told her not to! I knew you’d be upset. But you must help me!” and then looked up.

  The others looked too.

  The helicopter blacked the moon, doffing and settling below its hazy twin parasols.

  “Oh, please…” the gentleman said. “You look over there! Perhaps she’s gone back down. I’ve got to”—looking quickly both ways—“find her.” He hurried in one direction while everyone else hurried in others.

  The humming was suddenly syncopated with a crash. Roaring now, as plastic fragments from the transparent roof chattered down through the branches, clattered on the rocks…