A, B, C

by Samuel R. Delany

  If he starts walking toward me, she thought, I’m going to be scared out of my ears. So I better start walking toward him. Besides, I want to see what he looks like. She left the columns. Glancing quickly both ways, she saw that the Temple was deserted save for them.

  He’s a kid, she thought, three quarters of the way across. My age, she added, and again a foreign thought tried to intrude itself on her but never made it: he was coming toward her now. At last he stopped before her. His muscles lay like wire under his brown skin; black hair massed low on his forehead, and his eyes gleamed deep beneath the black shrub of brows.

  She gulped. “What are you doing here? Do you know somebody could catch you in here and get mad as hell? If somebody comes along, they might even think you were trying to steal Hama’s eye.” I shouldn’t have said that, because he moved funny. “You better get out of here because everybody will be up here in a half hour for morning services.”

  At that news, he suddenly darted past her and sprinted toward the altar.

  “Hey!” she called and ran after him.

  Snake vaulted the brass altar rail.

  “Wait a minute!” she called, catching up. “Wait, will you!”

  Snake turned as she slung her leg across the brass bar. “Look, so I gave away my hand. But that was only guilt feelings. You gave yours away too, though.”

  Snake frowned, tilted his head, then grinned.

  “We’ll help each other, see. You want it too, don’t you?” She pointed up to the head of the statue towering above them. “So let’s cooperate. I’ll take it for a little while. Then you can have it.” He was listening, she saw; she guessed her strategy was working. “We’ll help each other. Shake on it?” She stuck out her right hand.

  All four hands reached forward.

  Whoops, she thought, I hope he’s not offended….

  But the four hands grasped hers, and she added her left to the juncture. “All right. Come on. Now, I had all this figured out last night. We don’t have much time. Let’s go around…” But he reached out and took the coil of string from where she had stuck it in her belt. He walked to where the stalks of wheat spired from the altar base up through Hama’s fist. With the twine in one hand, he grabbed a stalk with the other three and, hand over hand over hand, hoisted himself up to where the first broad metal leaves branched from the stalk. His dirty feet swung out frogwise; then he caught the stem with his toes and at last hoisted himself to the frond. He looked down at her.

  “I can’t climb up there,” she said. “I don’t have your elevation power.”

  Snake shrugged.

  “Oh, damn,” she said. “I’ll do it my way.” She ran across the altar to the great foot of the statue. Because he sat cross-legged, Hama’s foot was on his side. Using toes for steps, she clambered to the dark bulge of the deity’s divine bunion. She made her way across the ankle, up the shin, and back down the black thigh, till she stood at the crevice where the leg and torso met.

  Out beyond the great knee, Snake regarded her from his perch in the groin of the yellow leaf. They were at equal height.

  “Yoo-hoo!” She waved. “Meet you at the clavicle.” Then she stuck her tongue out. The stylized ripples in Hama’s loincloth afforded her another ten feet. The bulge in the contrastingly realistic belly of the god made a treacherous ledge along which she inched until she arrived at the cavernous navel. Her hands left wet prints on the black stone.

  Glancing out, she saw that Snake had gotten to the next cluster of leaves.

  The god’s belly button, from this intimate distance, revealed itself as a circular door, about four feet in diameter. She dried her hands on her blouse, crouched before the door, and began to work the combination. She missed the first number twice, dried her hands off, and began again. According to the plans in the main safe of the Temple (on which she had first practiced combination breaking), there was a ladder behind this door that led up into the statue. She remembered it clearly and saved her life by doing so.

  Because when she reached the second number, reversed the dial, and felt the telltale click at the third, she pulled on the handle—and was nearly pushed from the ledge as the door swung. She grabbed at a handle as the stone slipped from under her feet.

  She was hanging five feet out in the air over the sacred groin fifty feet below.

  The first thing she tried, after closing her eyes and mumbling a few laws of motion, was to swing the door to. When she swung out, however, the door swung closed; and when she swung in, the door swung open. After a while she just hung. She gave small thanks that she had dried her hands. When her arms began to ache, she wished that she hadn’t, because then it would be over by now. She went over what she knew about taking judo falls. After closing her eyes, she perfunctorily attempted to reconstruct what she could of an ancient poem, about a young lady who had ended in a similar position, with the refrain “Curfew must not ring tonight….”

  Then the door swung closed, and someone grabbed her around the waist. She didn’t open her eyes but felt her body pressed against the tilting stone. Her arms dropped, tingling, to her sides. The ligaments flamed with pain. Then pain dulled to throbbing, and she opened her eyes. “How the hell did you get down here?” she asked Snake. Snake helped her stagger through the open door. She stopped to rub her arms. “How did he know about the ladder?”

  They stood at the bottom of the shaft. The ladder beside them rose into the darkness.

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Oh, I’ll be able to climb up there, never you worry. Hey, can you speak?”

  Snake shook his head.

  “Oh,” she said. Something started at the edge of her mind again, something unpleasant. Snake had started up the ladder, which he had come down so quickly a minute ago. She glanced out the door, saw that the Temple was empty, pulled the door to, and followed.

  They ascended into darkness. Time somehow got lost, and she was not sure if she had been climbing for ten minutes or two or twenty. Once she reached for a rung and her hand fell on nothing. The shock in the rhythm started her heart beating. Her arms were beginning to ache again, just slightly. She reached up for the next rung and found it in its proper place. Then the next. And then again the next.

  She started counting steps again, and when seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six dropped below her, there was another missing rung. She reached above it, but there was none. She ran her hand up the edge of the ladder and found that it suddenly curved, depressingly enough, into the wall. “Hey, you!” she whispered in the darkness.

  Something touched her waist. “Gnnnnnggggg,” she said. “Don’t do that.” It touched her on the leg, took hold of her ankle, and pulled. “Watch out,” she said.

  It pulled again. She raised her foot, and it was tugged sideways a good half meter and set on solid flooring. Then a hand (her foot was not released) took her arm, and another held her waist, and tugged. She stiffened for one instant before she remembered the number of limbs her companion had. She stepped off the ladder, sideways into the dark, afraid to put her other foot down lest she go headlong into the seventy-five-foot-plus shaft.

  Holding her arm now, he led her along the tunnel. We should be going through the shoulder, she figured, remembering the plan.

  They reached a steep incline. Now down the upper arm, she recalled. The slope, without visual orientation, made her a little dizzy. She put her hand out and ran her fingers along the wall. That helped some.

  “I feel like Euridice,” she said aloud.

  You…funny…an echoing sounded in her skull.

  “Hey,” she said. “What was that?” But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out. They were in a section of the passage now that corresponded roughly to the statue’s radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trapdoor, and found themselves high in the Temple. Below them the great hall spread, vast, deep, and empty. Beside them, the stems
of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist on which they were standing and spired another fifty feet before breaking into clusters of grain. Beyond the dark, gargantuan chest, in the statue’s other hand, the giant scythe leaned into shadow.

  “Look,” she said. “You follow me now.” She started back along the top of the forearm and climbed over the rippling biceps. They reached the shoulder and crossed the hollow above the collarbone until they stood just below the scooping shell of the ear.

  “You still have the string?” she asked him.

  Snake handed it to her.

  “I guess my bag is heavy enough.” She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck. Then, holding the other, she heaved the cord up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug.

  “I hope this works,” she said. “I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me.” She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the trumpet, she looked down at Snake. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”

  Snake joined her a moment later.

  The ear was hollow too. It led back into a cylindrical chamber that went up through the head of the god. The architect who had designed the statue had conveniently left the god’s lid flipped. They climbed the ladder at the side of the passage and emerged amid the tangle of pipes representing hair. Where the forehead began to slope dangerously forward, they could see the foreshortened nose and the brow of the statue’s middle eye above that. There wasn’t much of anything after that for the next hundred feet until the base of the altar. “Now you really can be some help,” she told him. “Hold on to my wrist and let me down. Slowly now. I’ll get the jewel.”

  They grabbed wrists, and Snake’s other three hands, as well as the joints of his knees, locked around the base of five pipes that sprouted around them.

  Slowly she slid forward until her free hand slipped on the stone and she dropped the length of their two arms and swung just above the statue’s nose. The eye opened in front of her. The lid arched above her, and the white of the eye on either side of the ebony iris shone faintly in the half darkness. At this distance, all the features of the statue lost their recognizable human character, and she was staring into concaved darkness. At the center of the iris, in a small hollow, sitting on the top of a metal support, was the jewel.

  She reached her free hand toward it as she swung.

  Somewhere a gong sounded. Light flooded over her. Looking up, she saw white sockets of light shining down into her own eyes. Panicking, she almost released Snake’s wrist. But a voice in her head (hers or someone else’s, she couldn’t tell) rang out:

  Hold…on…damn…it…

  She grabbed the jewel. The metal shaft in which the jewel had sat was not steady, and tilted as her hand came away. The tilting must have set off some clockwork mechanism, because the great lid above was slowly lowering over the ivory and ebony eye. She swung again at the end of the rope of bone and flesh; half blinded by the lights above her, she looked over her shoulder, down into the Temple. She heard singing, the beginning of a processional hymn.

  The morning rites had started!

  Light glinted on the stone limbs of the god. Figures poured into the Temple, miniature and far away. They must see her! But the hymns, sonorous and gigantic, rose like floodwater, and she suddenly thought that if she fell, she would drown in the sound of it.

  Snake was pulling her up. Stone against her arm, against her cheek. She clenched her other fist tightly at her side. Another hand came down to help. Then another. Then she was lying among the metal pipes, and he was prying her fingers from his wrist. He tugged her to her feet, and for a moment she looked out over the crowded hall.

  Nervous energy contracted coldly along her body, and the sudden sight of the great drop filled her eyes and her head. She staggered. Snake caught her and at last helped her back to the ladder. “We’ve got it!” she said to him before they started down. She breathed deeply. Then she checked in her palm to see if it was still there. It was. Again she looked out over the people. Light on the upturned faces made them look like pearls on the dark floor. Exaltation suddenly burst in her shoulders, flooded her legs and arms, and for a moment washed the pain away. Snake, with one hand on her shoulder, was grinning. “We’ve got it!” she said again.

  They went down the ladder inside the statue’s skull. Snake preceded her out the ear. He reached around, caught the cord, and let himself down to the shoulder.

  She hesitated, then put the jewel in her mouth, and followed him. Standing beside him once more, she removed it and rubbed her shoulders. “Boy, am I going to have some charley horse by tomorrow,” she said. “Do me a favor and untie my bag for me?”

  Snake untied the parcel from the end of the cord, and together they climbed down the biceps and back over the forearm to the trapdoor in the wrist.

  She glanced down at the worshipers. “I wonder which one is old Dunderhead?” But Snake was taking the jewel from her hand. She let him have it and watched him raise it up above his head.

  He raised the jewel and the pearls disappeared as heads bent all through the Temple.

  “That’s the ticket!” Argo grinned. “Come on.” But Snake did not go into the tunnel. Instead he walked around the fist, took hold of one of the bronze wheat stems, and slid down through an opening between thumb and forefinger. “That way?” asked Argo. “Oh, well, I guess so. You know I’m going to write an epic about this. In alliterative verse. You know what it is, alliterative verse?”

  But Snake had already gone. She followed him, clutching the great stems with her knees. He was waiting for her at the leaves. Nestled there, they gazed once more at the fascinated congregation.

  Again Snake held aloft the jewel, and again heads bowed. The hymn began to repeat itself, individual words lost in the sonority of the hall. The tones drew out, beat against themselves in echo, filled their ears, made her wrists and the back of her neck chill. They started down the bottom length of the stem, coming quickly. When they stood at last on the base, she put her hand on his shoulder and looked across the altar rail. The congregation pressed close, although she did not recognize an individual face. The mass of people stood there, enormous and familiar. As Snake started forward, holding up the jewel, the people fell back. Snake climbed over the altar rail, then helped her over.

  Her shoulders were beginning to hurt now, and the enormity of the theft started chills up and down, up and down her back. The altar steps, as she put her foot down, were awfully cold.

  They walked forward again, and the last note of the hymn echoed to silence, filling the hall with the roaring hush of hundreds breathing.

  Simultaneously, she and Snake got the urge to look back at the height of Hama behind them. All three eyes were shut. A hundred dark robes rustled about them as they started forward again.

  There was a spotlight on them, she realized. That was why the people, beyond the circular effulgence around them, seemed so dim. Blood beat at the bottom of her tongue. They walked forward among shadowed faces, among parting cloaks and robes.

  The last of the figures stepped aside from the Temple door, and she could see the sunlight out in the garden. They stood a moment. Snake held high the jewel. Then they ran from the door and over the bright steps.

  The hymn began again behind them, as if their departure were a signal. Music poured after them. When they reached the bottom step, they whirled like beasts, expecting the congregation to come welling darkly out after them.

  There was only the music. It flowed into the light that washed around them, a transparent river, a sea.

  “Freeze the drop in the hand,

  and break the earth with singing.

  Hail the height of a man,

  also the he
ight of a woman.”

  Over the music they heard a brittle chirping from the trees. Fixed with fear, they watched the Temple door. No one came out. Snake suddenly stood back and grinned.

  She scratched her red hair, shifted her weight, and looked at Snake. “I guess they’re not coming.” She sounded almost disappointed. Then she giggled. “I guess we got it.”

  —

  “Don’t move,” repeated Hama Incarnate.

  “Now look…” began Urson.

  “You are perfectly safe,” the god continued, “unless you do something foolish. You have shown great wisdom. Continue to show it. I have a lot to explain to you.”

  “Like what?” asked Geo.

  “I’ll start with the lizard.” The god smiled.

  “The what?” asked Iimmi.

  “The singing lizards,” said Hama. “You walked through a grove of trees just a few minutes ago. You had just been through the most frightening time in your lives. Suddenly you heard a singing in the trees. What was it?”

  “I thought it was a bird,” Iimmi said.

  “But why a bird?” asked the god.

  “Because that’s what a bird sounds like,” stated Urson impatiently. “Who needs an old lizard singing to them on a morning like this?”

  “Your second point is much better than your first,” said the god. “You do not need a lizard, but you did need a bird. A bird means spring, life, good luck, cheerfulness. To you. You think of a bird singing and you think thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language: Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel 2X4 in New English. You expected a bird because after what you had been through, you needed to hear a bird. Lizards run from under wet rocks, scurry over gravestones. A lizard is not what you needed.”

  “So what do lizards have to do with why we’re here?” demanded Urson.

  “Why are you here?” repeated the god, subtly changing Urson’s question. “There are many reasons, I am sure. You tell me some of them.”