The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  Along the dock sounded the chang-chang-chang of one of the new metal hammers recently brought from Nevèrÿon that her mother thought so ill of and her father found ‘interesting.’ What was the relation of the wooden mallet and dowels with which Big Inek fixed down deckboards in her parents’ boat yards and this new, metal-headed engine and the iron spikes it could hold wood together with—as long as you did not use them near water.

  And more important, how to tell? And what relation would whatever method she devised to tell bear to the method through which Venn had arrived at her inexpressible principle?

  In the boat yards that afternoon, Norema wandered about aimlessly for an hour; then, when Inek made a comment, prepared a cauldron of glue inefficiently for another hour, so that at least it looked as if she were doing something. Thinking: the value of real work and the value of work-just-for-show: couldn’t those be the first two terms in an example of Venn’s principle? And what would the third term be …? But she also began to think of things to do, ways to examine.

  That evening she took out a sheaf of reed paper on which were the carefully drawn plans for a boat that already stood half finished in the yard, its ribs rising naked and supported by cut treetrunks, which, over the years of their use, had lost much of their bark but still dangled some, like sea weed. She stood with her weight mostly on one foot and studied the plans. She climbed up through the thick struts, bearing cuts of the smoothing blades like inverted fish scales up their curves; and she studied the boat—not so much to see how one followed the other, but to see what each, as two things that did so follow, was in itself, how each was different.

  Soon she got another piece of reed paper and one of the styluses (which you hung around your neck on a leather thong, and a horn with an inch of berry juice in the bottom that you dipped your stylus into) and began making notes, sketches, more plans.

  Next morning she was at the yard early, getting out paint jars, artist’s mirrors, stencils, trimming patterns, and examining them under the porch roof which, as the sun warmed the storage hut, buzzed with the insects that lived in the thatching. Then she left the yard and walked toward the forest. She looked at flowers and seeds. She looked at dead leaves and live ones, holding them close to examine how the pale veins branched through the flat, tough green or the frail, brittle brown, and squinted up at the dark, brown branches, an expanding net in the flakes of green that massed about them. In the midst of all this, various ideas like image, model, example, expression, representation, symbol, and reflection began to separate themselves for her. Her thoughts went back to what Venn had said, as Norema walked back to the boat yard. Inside the gate, she told a quickly made-up story to little Jori, who stared at her through the tale with wide, incredulous eyes, pawing at the sawdust with her bare toes and twisting at a piece of vine, her pale hair matted for all the world like a clutch of pine splinters. Then Norema asked Jori to tell the story to Big Inek. Then she got Big Inek to tell it back to her. He grunted between sentences each time his mallet fell on the thumb-thick dowel, which sank more each stroke, its head splintering a little more each hit: at which point she remembered the old and the young sailor she had seen on the docks with Venn, and realized, not as two connected ideas, but as a single idea for which there were no words to express it as a unity: while any situation could be used as an image of any other, no thing could be an image of another—especially two things as complicated as two people. And to use them as such was to abuse them and to delude oneself—that it was the coherence and ability of things (especially people) to be their unique and individual selves that allowed the malleability and richness of images to occur at all.

  Such was her concentration on Venn’s idea that the only thing she took away from Venn’s morning class next day was a patch of sunlight through a hole in the trap above in the thatch, falling to shape itself to the brown shoulder of the girl who sat in front of her, and the rustle of Venn’s stick in the straw with which the class floor was covered.

  Meals at home, where she pondered all Venn had said of the matrix of money and material in which her parents’ business was fixed and which bounded her parents’ so diverse personalities, sometimes approached disaster: her father frowned across the wooden table with its clay and brass settings. The woman who helped her mother with the house and the cooking, clicked her teeth and said Norema must not have put her head on when she’d gotten up that morning. Jori laughed. And Quema asked—so many times that her father told her to stop—if there were anything the matter. Through it all, their words were images of illogic and incomprehension; her soup was the sea and her bread was the island a-float in it. The smell of apples in batter recalled the orchards where she had picked them last week, or run with others to steal them last year. Every sensation led to the memory of myriad others. Any pattern perceived could be set beside any other, the relation between the patterns becoming a pattern of its own, itself to be set beside another and related …

  She went to the waterfront and looked at nets and trees. She looked at women and men with rough hands and rags tied around their heads, working on their boat rigs. She looked at fish scales and bird feathers and at a broken length of boat ribbing, just washed ashore, whose smoothing-blade cuts were invisible on the grainy gray. She looked at three women and a man carrying baskets of fish, roped around their shoulders, up the sand, which clung to their feet high as their ankles, an image of glittering shoes. The baskets were woven from tree branches. She drew on her paper the curve of sand around the water, and beside it, the curve of water up to the sand. Behind a beached snaggle of wood, she heard a sound like a baby, and looked behind it to find Marga, asleep and crying to herself. Later she heard a gull shriek like a mad woman, wailing. And a day later, when she was coming down a narrow alley toward the docks, from the window beside her she heard a baby—for the world like a mewing gull.

  In a blade of sunlight a-slant the dust between the shadows of two stone huts, she stopped. While she listened, she remembered, for the first time in a while, the actual walk with Venn down the stream when the idea she had been examining these last days had been first presented to her. She recalled her absurd attempt to construct an example—an image that, because it was constructed of things it simply did not fit, reversed the idea into an idea silly by itself, ridiculous in application—ridiculousness that could easily, she saw, have strayed into the pernicious, the odious, or the destructive, depending how widely one had insisted on applying it. There was Venn’s idea (the baby had stopped crying); there was her image of it, formed of all possible misunderstanding; and there …

  Something happened: it happened inside her head; it happened to her mind, and its effect spread through her body like a chill, or a warmth, and was realer than either. She gasped and blinked, looked at the sun, dust, shadow, tried to apprehend what had just changed, and felt a stray thread on her sleeve tickle her arm in the breeze, a leather crease across her instep from her soft leather shoe, the air passing in through the rims of her nostrils breathing, the moisture at the corners of her eyes.

  It’s a new thought, she thought. But immediately knew that was only because she had been thinking in words so insistently for the past few days that words came easily to cling about everything in her head; she quickly shook them away to look at the idea more clearly. It was at least as inexpressible as Venn’s so highly inexpressible idea, which, image before image ago, had been its content. She opened her mouth, feeling her tongue’s weight on the floor of her mouth, the spots of dryness spreading it, and tasting the air’s differences, which marked not the air’s but the tongue’s itself. Words fell away, leaving only the relations they had set up between the sensual and the sensory, which was not words but which had been organized—without any of it ever leaving its place on the reed paper of her perception—by words: that organization was the way in which the stretch of sand between the house walls beside her and the stretch of sky between the house roofs above her could reflect one another; the thrum of a wasp worrying a
t its gray, flaking home under the thatched eaves up there could recall the thrum of water worrying the root-tangled spit at the beach’s far end, leaving the sand, leaves, wings, waves, wasps …

  What a glorious and useless thing to know, she thought, yet recognizing that every joy she had ever felt before had merely been some fragment of the pattern sensed dim and distant, which now, in plurality, was too great for laughter—it hardly allowed for breath, much less awe! What she had sensed, she realized as the words she could not hold away any longer finally moved in, was that the world in which images occurred was opaque, complete, and closed (though what gave it its weight and meaning was that this was not true of the space of examples, samples, symbols, models, expressions, reasons, representations and the rest—yet that everything and anything could be an image of everything and anything—the true of the false, the imaginary of the real, the useful of the useless, the helpful of the hurtful) was what gave such strength to the particular types of images that went by all those other names; that it was the organized coherence of them all which made distinguishing them possible.

  But of course that was not what she had known … only an expression of it, one sort of image. And yes, she thought, remembering Venn again, to express it was to reverse much of its value. To express it was to call it containable: and it was its uncontainableness she had known.

  Some flash caught her eye; she turned and saw Fevin coming down the side street. Rolls of net hung over his shoulder; net dragged behind him in the dust. Her sister Jori and two little boys were trying to step on it. The flash had come from a mirror tied to one boy’s—no, not to a little boy, she realized; it was Lari, her sister’s friend. Norema thought of rults and Rulvyn, mirrors and models; and smiled.

  Fevin hailed her: ‘Have your heard what happened to old Venn?’

  Norema looked perplexed. ‘What?’

  ‘While she was off last night, on one of her exploring trips, she fell down from a tree and—’

  ‘—and sprained her hip. She just got home this morning; some youngsters found her hobbling through the swamp.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ Norema demanded.

  ‘As right as one can be at seventy with a sprained hip—when you were already crippled at thirty-five.’

  Norema turned and dashed up the street while Fevin suddenly bellowed: ‘Hey, you little ones. Cut that out! You tear my nets and I’ll tear off your toes!’

  Norema ran through sun, over shells, under shadow. On wooden, leaf-littered stairs, she tugged at the rail, taking three steps at a time, while the breeze dipped branches almost to her head and, from the bare earth banked on the other side, roots wriggled free and stuck there, under thin dust. She leaped rocks she had helped position in the stream for stepping, jumped to the bank (which broke open under her feet between grass blades) and, with grass flailing her calves, reached the rut that wound the high rock on her left (the great oak on her right) to the thatched school shelter.

  In front of the shack, she demanded of Dell, who had one hand on the corner post, squinting after some bird who beat away between the leaves, ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Uh-hm,’ Dell said, not looking down. ‘But she’d like to see you.’

  Norema dashed to the door, pushed inside. Thatch that has been rained on and sun-dried and rained on and sun-dried enough ceases to have much smell of its own, but it begins to do something to the other smells around it, underlining some, muting others, adding to others an accent missing in stone or wooden dwellings. On the shelves along one wall: rocks, small skeletons, butterflies, rolls of reed paper tied with rubbed vine. On the other wall: a cooking fire’s mudded stones, with a series of wooden baffles for the smoke that Venn had been experimenting with a year ago but had never gotten to the efficiency of your average kitchen hearth. A half charred potato lay on the ashes against the stone.

  The bed had been pulled over to the table (instead of pulling the table to the bed, which was typically Venn). Three scrolled, metal lamps hung from the ceiling. Chains for a fourth dangled near them. On the table among sheets of reed paper, were brass rules, compasses, calipers, astrolabes, and a paint-box finer than the ones her father kept his blueprints in. Venn sat on the bed, her naked back full of sharp bones and small muscles—still the hard back of a sea woman, a turnip hoer, a bridge builder. The skin at the crease of her armpits was wrinkled, that across her shoulders thin.

  Norema said: ‘I heard about …’

  Venn turned slowly (painfully?) on the raddled furs. And grinned. I was wondering if you’d come to see me.’

  Then the young woman and the old woman laughed, at their different pitches in the close room, but with a shared, insistent relief.

  ‘The boys have been hanging around being helpful all morning. The trouble is I don’t like boys—I suppose that’s why I spend so much energy being pleasant and patient with them. Then patience wears through, and I get snappish and send them off. Where were you, girl? Have you ever noticed about the men on this coast? It’s the strangest thing: they will cook for one another at the drop of a leaf—on fishing trips, out overnight in the hills, or visiting one another in some bachelor hut full of litter and squalor. But the only time it would even enter their heads to cook for a woman—even if she’s crippled and in bed with a sprained hip—is if they want to bed her. And I, fortunately, am past that. Come around here, woman. Under the shelf there is a basket: most of the things in it would make a nice salad—and I assume you’re clever enough to recognize the things that wouldn’t. (If you’re dubious, just ask.) You’ll find a knife under there; and a bowl. That’s right. I’d do it myself, but my better judgement tells me not to even try to walk for at least three days. Did I ever tell you about my Nevèrÿon friend—who once went with me up to visit the Rulvyn? Yes, of course, I was telling you only a week or so ago. Well, you know we haven’t seen each other for years. My friend is from an old and complicated Nevèrÿon family, half of which, so I have been told, are always in dungeons somewhere and the other half of which are always fighting to avoid dungeons—with perhaps still another half fighting to keep them there. Well, only a night ago, my friend came to see me. All the way from Nevèrÿon. And in a beautiful boat, the richest I’ve ever seen, with its rowing slaves dressed finer than the members of our best families, I tell you. And we talked—oh, how we talked! Till the sun rose and I had heard of the most amazing and dire marvels, all of which my friend asked my opinion on—as if I were some Rulvyn holy woman, fresh from a spate of meditation in the mountains! Ha! And when the first waterfront sounds drifted up from the blue between the trees, my friend left.’ Venn sighed. ‘What a marvelous boat! And I shall probably never see my friend or the boat again. But that’s the way of the world. Ah, of course I’m sure you would rather hear about what happened to me last night. Has it ever occurred to you—and it did to me, last night, when I got to overhear two hill women who passed under me in the swamp where I was relaxing in a rough-barked tree: paddling along on their raft, they each spoke slightly different dialects, and were having trouble understanding each other, I realized—but at any rate, it occurred to me that language always has the choice of development two ways. Consider: you’re inventing language and you come on an object for the first time, so you name it “tree.” Then you go on and you find another object. You have the choice of calling it a tree-only-with-special-properties, such as squat, hard, gray, leafless, and branchless, for instance—or you can name it a completely different object, say: “rock.” And then the next object you encounter you may decide is a “big rock,” or a “boulder,” or a “bush,” or “a small, squat tree,” and so on. Now two languages will not only have different words for the same things, but they will end up having divided those same things up into categories and properties along completely different lines. And that division, as much or more than the different words themselves, will naturally mold all the thinking of the people who use that language. We say “vagina” and “penis” for a man’s and woman’s genitals, whil
e the Rulvyn say “gorgi” for both, for which “male” and “female” are just two different properties that a gorgi can exhibit—and believe me it makes all the difference! Still, the initial division, as one goes about on the first, new, bright trip through a world without names is, for all practical purposes, arbitrary. (That was when I fell out of the tree and sprained my cursed hip! That salad looks good, woman. There are two bowls.) Now consider, for instance, even the word for word …’

  Two years later, Venn died.

  She had apparently gone up through the trap of the teaching station to lie under the winter stars, with a few instruments, a few sheets of reed paper; and there, probably just after dawn—for her body was not yet stiff—with what thoughts a-dash through her mind like the shooting stars of which she had logged seven, she died: and Norema and Jori and the others, with oddly dry throats, blinking a lot, and opening and closing their hands, stood in the grass, looking up, while Fevin, at the roof’s edge, lowered (with a rope around the chest and under the arms) the thin woman with the flapping hem and stained, bony ankles.

  Three months after that, the red ship came.

  3

  ‘HAVE YOU SEEN IT?’ Jori demanded, bursting into the kitchen from the back garden. ‘It’s so big!’ and ran through, banging her hip against the plank table hard enough to make the bowls and the pans clatter. Quema scowled at a pot of something bubbling on the firehook. Norema put the shell, whose pale, inner lip she had been polishing with a piece of worn, wild kid’s skin, on the table, and wondered if she should go to the docks or not.

  She didn’t—that afternoon.

  And the stories began to come back:

  The boat had stayed at the waterfront dock not more than an hour; only three women had come down the plank to squint around—their hair was dusty, braided, brown. Then they had gone back up. The boat had weighed anchor again and was now up in the middle of the sounds, the reflection of its high, scarlet, scroll-worked rim wrinkling over and running on the water.