They Fly at Ciron

by Samuel R. Delany

  Already, in the margins of his take-off with Vortcir and his aunt, at the rim of their ride together, and at the edge of their landing with the others, Rahm had learned that these were a people among whom the women’s furry breasts were scarcely larger than the men’s, and that the men’s genitals were almost as internal as the women’s. The distinction between the sexes was only minimally evident, till one paused to urinate, as that male over there was doing, or when one of them was (as he realized at a glance to his left, where several were joking about a young female who evidently was) in a state of sexual excitement.

  Carefully, while trying not to be caught staring, Rahm watched them. And, in their close, nervous groups, with their small eyes they watched him back. They watched him from ledges above. They watched him from the rope nets strung from staid oak branch to staunch hemlock trunk—apparently the youngsters’ favorite place to play. They watched him from other, broader nets, strung from the rocks down by the water to the higher ledges, thirty and forty yards overhead—where, it seemed, the elderly gathered to gossip, stretching their wings till they quivered. The watching was particularly strange because, by now Rahm knew, they were doing more listening than looking. What, he wondered, could they hear of him, through their constant, mewing intercourse.

  Within his first thirty minutes at Hi-Vator, Rahm saw a group of six winged children tease a smaller and younger child unmercifully. The older ones were—as far as he could tell—all boys. The little one was—most probably—a girl. The teasing reached such intensity that, twice, it became violent: had he been in his own home, Rahm would have stepped in to stop it. But now he could only look about uncomfortably for Vortcir or his aunt, both of whom happened, for the moment, to be somewhere else. Why, he wondered wildly, weren’t any other adults paying attention… ?

  Within his first three hours there, Rahm observed a game where you sailed cunningly constructed toys made of twigs and thin leather from ledge to ledge, then took them into the sky to sail them from flyer to flyer. Also he saw two other children playing with a lemur-like pet. Then he became involved in what he only realized was another game after fifteen minutes of it, as first one then another Winged One politely volunteered to fly him now to this ledge, now to another, now to still one more: and he would grasp the warm, heavy shoulders and be carried here and there around the many ledges of the gorge in which their cave dwellings were sunk, each side of a silvery feather of falling water. Rahm had already noted, upon landing, that it was a lot easier to tell the sex of the Winged One—strong young female or male—who’d just carried him. From the giggling together of those waiting to ferry him about, or others who had just finished, Rahm realized—with sudden humor—that, somehow, with them, this flying and carrying was a sexual game: and some others, he saw now, didn’t approve!

  For ten minutes later three older ones marched up and put a rather gruff end to it. The ones who’d been playing with him fluttered off. The older ones apologized to him in a way that, though he smiled and nodded and shrugged a lot, he didn’t quite see the point of—since there was no harm in it.

  Three hours more, and he’d discovered that while the Winged Ones’ word for “star” was the same as his, they had no single word for “ear,” but more than ten for its various parts and functions—also, from repeated inquiry, he finally decided they had no concept at all of the “tomato plant.”

  “What are you thinking, my friend?” Vortcir asked, suddenly at his side, when Rahm, in those first three hours, had once more gone still a moment, to stare off at those furry youngsters wrestling together by the falling water’s edge, or at the creatures who seemed to be grinding some sort of grain in the great circular stone troughs behind them, or just at the clouds behind them all, in the luminous mid-morning sky.

  “I am thinking,” Rahm said, slowly and with consideration, “that, with perhaps here and there an exception that perplexes me—” he was recalling the children’s particularly violent teasing—“thou art a people, a people very like my own.”

  And sitting in the sunlight, cross-legged on the blanket beside the wheel of his garbage cart, Qualt broke open a papaya. As its black seeds in their rich juice spilled out over the orange flesh in the morning sun, Qualt said: “Then, from what thou tellest me—with perhaps here and there something I do not quite understand—thy folk at Hi-Vator are…a people too; a people much like mine.” And the similarity of what Qualt said to what—miles up the mountain—Rahm was saying (and the vastly differing situations in which each said it) should begin to speak to you of the true differences between Qualt and Rahm.

  Qualt tossed half the fruit.

  Perched on the wooden frame of some overturned bench that was not used any more in the village, but which sat here among the detritus lying about in the young garbage collector’s yard, it reached out a great wing. The tines at its end caught the fruit and brought it back to the small, dark face. It bit, and juice and seeds ran down the fur at both sides of the mouth. It mewed, resettling itself. “Good! Hey, groundling—my sister was a rude, rough girl who went with the other poor girls to collect the filaments the cave-beasts spin, up in the rocks, to make our ropes and hunting nets and webs. But I was only a mischief maker, too lazy even to help them there. No, my people often thought that I was not a good one. So I took to wandering—flying here, flying there, listening now to these ones, now to those! Even when I was coming back, I saw one of your men, fighting with a lion, and dropped to give him my help, but one of those others seared my wing with the kind of flaming evil we saw last night—”

  “It’s a killing evil!” Qualt bit his fruit. “And that’s why thou must do as I say. If we keep on, my friend, like we’ve begun this morning—”

  At which point there was ringing from behind the house.

  Qualt was on his feet. “Quick now, as I told thee—” He sprinted off between the junk strewn about the yard toward the house corner, to step around it, over moist rocks and three piles of old pots, some broken, some nested in one another, hollyhocks grown up between them.

  The path up to the garbage collector’s shack was narrow, and you couldn’t walk without brushing the low branches. Long ago Qualt had strung a rope between those branches which, if any of them were hit, rang a goat’s bell he’d fixed to a post near the front door.

  “Hey, there, Qualt,” came a familiar voice. Old Hara pushed from the path end. “I wondered if you were home, there…”

  Qualt went forward.

  “Ah, boy, this is a deadly day!” Yes, it was Hara, with the white in her hair like the froth of the quarry falls, with her skirt the colors of leaves and earth and hides. “Phew!” Her face wrinkled even more, as she came barefoot toward the house. “How do you stand the stink?”

  “Why dost thou come here, Hara? Why dost thou come here after what happened in the town last night?”

  The weaver shook her head. “I go to a council meeting. You know that Ienbar, among so many, was killed—burned to death at his shack by the burial meadow.”

  “Not Ienbar, too? But where are they meeting, Hara? Not in the council building?”

  The old woman shook her head. “No, boy—the Myetrans are there now. But it’s not a meeting you can linger about the edges and overhear. Not this time.” She reached out and pushed the side of Qualt’s head playfully with her knuckles. “Oh, maybe when a bit more of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and some more of wisdom has settled between thy ears—but there’s no need for anyone to know where we meet now. The Myetrans are still about all over the town. And they do not want us meeting. No, not after last night—”

  “Yes,” Qualt said. “I see—” Hara crossed toward the corner of the house. Qualt hurried after her, just as she stepped around the pots and hollyhocks. But the back yard, with the varied junk strewn about in it, and the garbage cart to the side, was empty.

  “It won’t be an easy meeting, though—I tell you, boy! There’s seven hundred and forty people here at Çiron—oldsters and babes among
us. While the Myetrans—well, there are thousands of them, it seems! And we have to figure out a way to—”

  “Hara,” Qualt said. “Hara, there’re not thousands of them!”

  She stopped and looked at him.

  Qualt crumpled the papaya rind and flung it into the bushes. “There’re not thousands of them. There’re not hundreds of them! There’re a hundred eighty-seven. Perhaps I’m off by five or six—up or down. But not by more!”

  Hara frowned. “And how dost thou know, little dirty-fingers?”

  “Because I counted!”

  “When didst thou count?”

  “Earlier this morning. They get their camp up at sunrise—and I. . . I counted. A hundred eighty-seven. A few more than half of them are in the village. Somewhat less than half are at their camp. There’s a group of five, whom all the others obey. They stay in three tents that are larger than the others, at the back of the encampment—the mounted one with the beard who killed Rimgia’s father last night is one of them. Then, among the rest, there are ten who wear the black clothes, with the black cloaks and hoods—who ride horses and tell their men, the ones who have only the swords and their metal and leather plates bound to them, where to go and what to do. The black ones and the five leaders alone have the powerguns—the things they killed Kern and Tenuk and… killed so many with. Powerguns are what they call them—someone overheard them speak the word, and told me. And there’re no more than twenty powerguns among them—and a dozen are resting, at any one time. That’s another thing they have to do—after they fire them twenty or thirty times they have to let them rest a while, so they’ll regain their fire. Someone—I heard them joking about them when they rounded up some forty-three of our people, wounded all, but who could still walk, and herded them into a wire corral where they have them imprisoned—”

  “Forty-three of us imprisoned?” Hara exclaimed. “Ah, thank the generous earth! For in town, they’ve started to count the bodies of those who were killed—and there - seemed to be more than thirty missing. Do you know who the corralled ones are, Qualt? Do you know which ones are their prisoners? You tell us that, and it would ease a lot of sick hearts, boy—”

  “I can tell you that: and I can tell you more—though I’ll have to learn it later. But there are ten in black, who, with the five leaders, have the powerguns.”

  Hara had started walking again.

  “But tell the council, Hara! There are five in charge. And only a hundred eighty-seven all together—give or take four or five… !”

  “You can believe I’ll tell them, boy! You can believe it—” Hara went on toward the quarry road, making for wherever the village council had decided to hold its meeting.

  Qualt stood in the yard, breathing hard—as though the imparting of the information had been a sudden and painful effort.

  You see, he was a very different person from Rahm.

  Over the edge of Qualt’s roof thrust a sharp face with scooped ears. A moment later, a shadow flapped—

  Qualt turned as the Winged One moved out onto the air—as if air were water and the Winged One pushed off into it as Qualt might push off from the quarry shore… and Qualt himself were looking up at it as a fish might look from the lake bottom.

  The Winged One sailed over the yard—full of the things that, now and again, curious Qualt had rescued from the irredeemable arc into the ravine, a kind of sculpture garden of furniture, farm equipment, and even more unrecognizable stuffs, pieces leaning in odd positions, an occasional rope from one to the other from which some pot or bit of houseware hung.

  Flapping wings settled, till the Winged One perched on the corner of Qualt’s garbage wagon. One sail out for balance, the Winged One moved the other’s edge across his mouth, knocking away the little seeds that had stuck to his face fur. “Say, groundling—there! You’ve told what we learned aloft this morning to one of your elders, like you wanted. Do you think that now you’ll let me take you up to Hi-Vator? There it would be fun—and you wouldn’t have to hide like you say I have to here …! Though there I might still have to hide from a few, because some folk there—some even of my own family—do not like me as much as all that!” The Winged One laughed out shrilly, the mighty sails out full—on which, with the sunlight behind them, Qualt could see scars that spoke of violence and adventure. “Sometimes I think I can not—or perhaps I should not—go back to Hi-Vator. Oh, there’re not many up there who listen for my return. Other times I think maybe I should go visit them, with one of you groundlings on my back to surprise them, as though I were a Handsman or a noble, who could make and break such laws at will. But if I could make and break such laws, then I would not be the outlaw I am. Oh, I assure you—I’m only a little outlaw. Don’t fear me, friend. I never broke any big laws. I just forget and do what I want sometimes, and discover it wasn’t what someone else wanted me to do. Then I have to fly…

  “Yes,” Qualt said, absently. “This law, that thou spokest of earlier. Now what is this ‘law’ that you are outside of, as thou sayest—”

  But the Winged One just laughed. “I know, groundling! Perhaps we can roll around together on the earth the way we did last night—that was fun too, ‘ey? Or would you like to try it in the air? That was a good game, no?—even if it only came by the accident of that awful sound, so that I could not tell where I was when I flew into you! You groundlings do it in the dirt. We Winged Ones do it in the—”

  But suddenly Qualt turned, vaulted up on the bench of the garbage cart, and stood erect on the seat while the wheels creaked below them both. “No, my friend—there’ll be a later time for Hi-Vator.” Qualt stepped behind the creature’s great sail, like an object rejoining a shadow that had been momentarily lost to it by a mystery beyond naming. “Yes, like last night, we’ll fly a bit more at Çiron!”

  By his final three hours at Hi-Vator, Rahm had decided that, no, the Winged Ones were a very, very different people from his—but that it was precisely those differences that made them a people. With each new thought or realization or insight about them, however, there came a moment when Rahm would stand, now for seconds, now for minutes, still as the cliffs rising above him, his mind fallen miles below, turning among memories of the light- and bloodlashed night, trying to hold coherent the idea of a people of his own. When he stood so long like that, some of the Winged Ones watched or listened quietly. Others, better mannered, merely listened and pretended not to watch at all—though more and more mewed about it to one another, out of sight and hearing.

  Among the stranger things that had happened to him that afternoon was a conversation he’d had with an old Winged One, whom Vortcir had been eager to have him meet for more than an hour now. The Winged One’s fur was more gray than brown. Her eyes were wrinkled closed.

  Rahm and the ancient creature hung together on one of the rope webs, above the waterfall, while the old Winged One explained to Rahm that one of the most important ideas around which all the Winged Ones’ lives revolved was something called god—apparently a very hard thing to understand, since it was at once the universal love binding all living things and, at the same time, a force that punished evil-doers, even as it forgave them: also it was a tree that grew on the bare peak of the world’s highest mountain, a tree older than the world itself, a tree whose roots required neither earth nor water—those roots having secreted the whole of the world under it, including the mountain it perched on. The tree’s leaves were of gold and iron. Its fruit conferred invisibility, immortality, and perfect peace. To make things even more complicated, for just a short while—twenty-nine years to be exact, the old Winged One explained—god had not been a tree at all, but rather a quiet, good, and simple woman with one deformed wing, who therefore could not fly and thus limped about the mountains’ rocks like a groundling. Various and sundry evil Winged Ones would come across her and try to cheat her, or to rob her, or—several times—even attempt to kill her, only to be shamed by a power she had, called “holiness,” whereupon they repented and—often—beca
me extremely good, fine, and holy people themselves for the rest of their lives, during which they did nothing but help other Winged Ones.

  “There are other peoples,” the old Winged One told Rahm, as she stretched over the knotted vines, “who represent god as a silver crow, while for others god is a young man strung up to die on a blasted tree…” which only confused Rahm further.

  Still, something about the old Winged One made her comforting to listen to. Something in her manner recalled …Ienbar? The stories of the flightless god were gentle and good and took Rahm’s mind off the cataclysmic images that lazed just under memory’s surface.

  Rahm climbed down from the rope net, curious as to why he felt better, but not convinced that this idea/tree/ cripple was much more than a story with too many impossibilities to believe, so that while it might have had something he couldn’t quite catch to do with the world around him now, he couldn’t believe it had much to say of the world he’d left below.

  The afternoon sun had lowered enough to gild the western edge of every crag and rock. At the fire Winged Ones adjusted three mountain goats on wooden roasting spits. Walking up to another ledge, Rahm saw some others pounding nuts on a large rock with small stones held in their prehensile toes. Still others, on the ledge above that, had gathered hip-high heaps of fruit—yellow, purple, and orange—so that when, a few minutes later, Vortcir’s aunt came up to him and said: “There’s to be a feast tonight!” Rahm was not really surprised.

  “In honor of the Handsman’s safe return?” Rahm asked.

  “In honor of the groundling who saved him!” she declared, shrill and breathy. Then, with wings wide, she turned to drop over the rocky rim at his feet and crawl down a web.

  Winged Ones carried a trestle over, piled with fruit and nutbread. “Have some,” Vortcir urged him. “Some of us have flown leagues and leagues to bring these to the nest.” They brought a chain for Vortcir—who insisted they bring another for Rahm. Vortcir’s aunt herself held it on the spurs of her wings and lowered it around Rahm’s neck with cooling, windy motions. Several Winged Ones made music on a rack of gongs, while youngsters flapped and scrambled over the rocks, flinging the scarlet, cerise, and leaf-green rinds at each other, now at a furry arm, now at a leg jerked back, from which the peel peeled limply away, falling to the stone as the thrower mewed and the target squealed. Caves pitting the cliff-side site echoed with chucklings and chitterings. Across the twelve-foot fire troughs, the spitted carcasses rolled above flame, fat dribbling and bubbling along the bottom of each beast.