Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  The earl nodded.

  Suddenly Pryn bent her head to loose the links from under her hair. ‘Here…’ She lifted the chain from her neck. ‘I’m not a spy. And I’m certainly not a hero. You take it!’ Surprised she’d actually said it, she’d wondered, rehearsing it in her mind, how much her hesitation had been idealism and how much, indeed, simple fear. ‘I think when I want to find a fortune, I’ll go back to Kolhari and see what I can win in the markets there. I have the key to Belham’s lock, I’ve been shown the memory of water, and I’ve flown a dragon—there ought to be something I can do. Go on. You take it.’

  The earl raised an eyebrow. ‘You would just…give it to me?’

  Pryn extended her two fists. ‘It was just…given to me.’ On its chain, the bronze disk turned and turned back in the late sunlight. ‘I have no use for it, need of it, nor, really, knowledge about it—at least that I knew, when I got it, would turn out to be knowledge.’

  ‘Oh…’ The earl pondered. ‘Well, the truth is…I have no need of it either!’ He smiled again; the stocky little man’s cloak drifted open. ‘I don’t, believe me! Take it with you back to Kolhari—if you go. Pass it on to someone else. You see…how shall I put it?’ He coughed. ‘It’s as if my voice deserts me when I most need—’ He turned first left, then right, looking among the unknown writings on the various parchments for some prompt to articulation. ‘The astrolabe is a tool to bring people here. But once it, itself, is here, it has finished its job—until it is recirculated abroad. Once it reaches the origin, the center, the heart of the system, however, it is, so to speak, excluded from the system, and the system itself threatens to come to a halt without that vital part.’

  ‘But perhaps you want the money…?’ Pryn said, tactfully, she hoped—though it just sounded suspicious. ‘Take it. Certainly it would be an easier job if you had it to help you than if it were off, sliding and slipping all over Nevèrÿon.

  ‘Jobs, work, tools, engines, hearts—the engines that drive the workers to use their tools and function on their jobs! Production! Ah!’ the earl cried. ‘I have been associating with Old Rorkar and his like so long now I only know how to speak of the world as if it were all a huge brewery! Your astrolabe is a sign in a system of signs. It has a meaning, yes, but that meaning is supplied by the rest of the system, which includes not only the tales of history, madness, and invention, but the similar instruments sailors use to orient themselves at sea, the play of power in the land, and the language by which they can all of them be—systematically—described.’

  Again Pryn frowned—though whether it was her inherited suspicion or real confusion, there was no one to say. ‘What is this astrolabe’s power?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Why are the stars different?’

  ‘Good! Good!’ the earl exclaimed. Momentarily, his expression passed near something Pryn could recognize—before it retreated into beatific certainty. ‘For a moment, I thought I had misjudged you, both in your ignorance and your knowledge. Some of your actions, words, statements seemed to mark you as a creature from another world, another system entirely!’ He breathed relief. ‘You want to know how—as Old Rorkar and the other peasants around here who know no other language than the language of labor would put it, the language our fathers who owned them first taught them—it works?’

  ‘I’ll show her!’

  Pryn looked at the door.

  Panting from his run up in his military underwear, Ardra blinked about the stone chamber. ‘I can show her!’ He held the jambs.

  Behind him on the rocky landing stood a tall man, his head shaved, a white collar-cover around his neck. He waited with his arms folded as Ardra came in.

  ‘I can show her—like I saw you show the last one who came!’

  Lavik laughed. ‘That was years ago. You couldn’t remember—’

  ‘Let him try!’ Jenta stepped back to the rail and sat. ‘Let’s see if he remembers…’

  The slave in the doorway was barefoot. One toe looked as though it had started out to be two, then gotten stepped on for its ambition. He scrunched them—the normal nine and the deformed one—relaxed them, scrunched them again.

  ‘Give it to me!’ Ardra took the chain from Pryn and turned to the counter. With his forearm he started to clear the wood of models, statuettes, rocks, shells—

  ‘I’ll move those!’ The earl lifted some of the tiny objects and put them to the side, lifted some others.

  Ardra blinked at his stepfather. Then he took the astrolabe and turned it on its back. The bolt that joined its several disks was held by a twist of wire. ‘Here, you bend this to take it apart—’ Ardra grimaced, twisted. The wire slid from its hole to tinkle the counter. ‘This back disk, when you take it off, is a map, just like on the astrolabes sailors use. Do you know how the sailors’ work?’

  ‘I’ve heard it has to do with finding where you are by the stars…But I don’t really know how it—’

  ‘Neither do I.’ Ardra handed Pryn the bottom disk. Etched on bronze was the twisted suggestion of an involuted coast. Measurement lines gridded it. Contour lines wound on it. Pryn glanced between the columns again. Certainly the scribed lines might indicate such an inlet. ‘It’s a map of the area here…?’

  ‘Can you tell which side of the coastline is water and which side is land?’ Working the other disks apart, Ardra glanced over. ‘I can’t.’

  Pryn looked again at the greenish metal and watched what she’d assumed inlets become peninsulas—and peninsulas become inlets!

  In the doorway, the slave unfolded one arm, reached up, and rubbed his earlobe vigorously between thumb and forefinger, then folded his arm again.

  ‘The rhet here—that’s what this disk is called,’ which wasn’t really a true disk but a spidery filigree cleanly cut from one, with a center hole for the bolt, and many little points, juttings, and curvings, in each of which was itself a small hole, ‘—is the “stars” part.’ Ardra held it up. ‘The holes—they’re the stars that hang in the sky over the map.’ The sun put the rhet’s involuted shadow half on the rock wall and half on some parchment hanging there. ‘You hold it.’

  Pryn took it, while Ardra went scrambling through things his stepfather had moved away.

  The curlicued shadow, a bright dot in the tip of each curl, moved on the stone as Pryn looked at what the boy pawed through.

  Ardra picked up a gray block, spat on it, took the marking stick from the shell, and rubbed its point on the wet spot. ‘Ink…’ He spat again, rubbed the point some more. Gray turned black. ‘Now hold the rhet up—no, over here.’ He moved Pryn’s wrist so that the shadow was entirely on the parchment, then turned to the earl. ‘Is it all right if I use the corner of this piece…?’

  ‘I would rather you wouldn’t…’ The earl looked up at the inscription in still another unknown script that filled most of the parchment’s top half. ‘But then, I suppose it’s all right, really. Go on.’

  Ardra turned back to Pryn. ‘Hold it very still.’ With the inking stick clumsily in his fist, he leaned across the counter and placed a black dot on the parchment at one of the luminous pinpoints, then at another—he moved his own curly head aside from where its frizzy shadow obscured the rhet’s—and at another. ‘These are the stars. Do you know the patterns stars make at night and the names the sailors give to them?’

  There had been times, during her journey south, when Pryn had gone a little ways apart from her campfire to look up at the night, when she had thought, as do all such travelers, that between her changing days the stars’ array was her one permanence. She’d even thought to spend more time looking at them, to familiarize herself with them, to try and write down what she saw in them and the patterns they made; but, as so frequently happens with such travelers, what was illuminated in the immediate sphere of her own fire had finally reclaimed her interest. ‘No…’ Pryn blinked.

  ‘Don’t jiggle!’

  ‘…No, I don’t know them. Not really.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Ardra finished placing his
last black ‘star’ within its tiny halo. ‘There…You can put it down.’

  Curlicues of light and shadow slid down the parchment. Black ‘stars’ remained.

  Pryn lay the rhet among the loose disks.

  ‘Can you see the pictures such stars as these might make on the sky?’ Ardra leaned over the counter again and drew a line between two dots; and two more. ‘Is that right…?’ He glanced back over his shoulder.

  The earl nodded.

  ‘That’s the part I thought he wouldn’t remember,’ Jenta said.

  Without unfolding his arms, the slave turned to rub his chin back and forth on his shoulder—for the tickling of the gnats swarming just outside the door in the damp crevice.

  Pryn looked at the parchment again.

  Ardra had connected one set of stars all to a single star above them; he was making a similar pattern beside it. More black stars on the tan ‘sky’ speckled down between the two spined wing shapes. The trajectories of the rhet’s curlicues and filigrees had obscured the pattern Ardra now traced. The boy marked an angular line down from a kind of beak, to a neck, to a body that joined both flared wings.

  ‘It’s a dragon…!’ Pryn said.

  ‘Yep!’ Ardra connected the ‘stars’ that formed the beast’s curving tail. ‘It’s the constellation Gauine, the Great Sea Dragon, that rears aloft in the night, guarding Mad Olin’s treasure at Neveryóna. Have you ever looked up at the unchanging stars and seen her among them?’

  ‘I’m not…sure. My aunt, when I was a little girl, sometimes took me outside at night and pointed out some constellations. But she said people saw different ones in different parts of the country. And I never could remember their names, anyway, so I don’t know if—’

  ‘I haven’t seen her,’ Ardra said. ‘You haven’t seen her either. Because there aren’t any such stars, at least none in this pattern. The holes are set to suggest any number of southern constellations, so that a northerner who’s seen the sky maps southern sailors make might think this one is from our region. But there’s no constellation—north or south—it actually and accurately represents.’

  Lavik said: ‘I didn’t think he would remember that!’

  ‘You could look for it all night long, at any time of the year, in any part of…’ Once more Ardra glanced at his stepfather—who nodded him on (and Pryn realized she was listening to a recitation). ‘…part of the world, as the unchanging heavens circle and tilt through the night and the year, and still you’d never find it. It doesn’t exist. That’s why these stars are “different.” And I…’ Ardra faltered again. He put down the stick. His shoulders drooped; his gaze, then his smudged fingers, fell among the disassembled astrolabe. ‘…I don’t remember about this next part.’

  It had formed the top layer, a disk from which two opposing semicircles had been cut, so that what remained was just a flat ring with a band left across its center, in the middle of which was the hole for the bolt. About the rim were inscribed the signs that had identified it with this odd local writing which, Pryn reflected, must have no need of capitals.

  The earl took it from his stepson’s hand, held it up, turned it. A ring of shadow collapsed and opened over the angular dragon. ‘But I’m sure our guest can see for herself…’ He handed it to Pryn.

  Taking it, Pryn looked at the markings on the metal that had formed the astrolabe’s rim. ‘They’re Belham’s signs for numbers, but what numbers I don’t—?’

  ‘That’s precisely what they are,’ the earl said. ‘More to the point, they are no more.’ With his forefinger he reached over to indicate a sign on the bronze. ‘“One—”’ His finger moved on—‘“Two—”’ and on—‘“Four—”’ and on—‘“Eight—”’ and on—‘“Sixteen—”’ and on—‘“Thirty-two—”’ and on ‘“Sixty-four,” and so on, about the circle. A circle of numbers counting nothing. That’s all.’

  ‘I’ll put it back together now!’ Ardra pushed between them, taking the circle from Pryn, reaching to pull the other disks together across the counter.

  ‘Ardra—!’ the earl said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m going to put it back together now.’ He blinked at Pryn, ‘Is that all right?’

  Pryn nodded.

  ‘So you see—’ the earl stepped from the counter—‘your astrolabe, as a sign in a system of signs—’

  Behind Pryn, Ardra said: ‘It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in—’ he grunted, twisting something—‘the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.’

  ‘Now I hope you see,’ the earl said, ‘what your astrolabe is not: It is not a tool to perform a job; it is not a key to open a lock; it is not a map to guide you to the treasure; it is not a coded message to be deciphered; it is not a container of secret meanings that can be opened and revealed by some other, different tool, different key, different code, different map. It’s an artfully constructed part of an artfully constructed engine that, by the maneuvering of meanings, holds open a space from which certain meanings are forever excluded, are always absent. That alone is what allows it to function—to work, if you insist on the language of the brewery—in the greater system.’

  ‘Like a great castle with no lord in it,’ Lavik said.

  ‘Or a monastery from which the powerful priests have all gone,’ said Jenta.

  ‘Or the Liberator’s headquarters—’ Pryn looked about the chamber—‘in Neveryóna.’

  The earl frowned.

  Just then Ardra stepped around Pryn. ‘Here you are.’ Reassembled, the astrolabe hung from its chain.

  ‘That’s really very good, Ardra,’ Jenta said. ‘That’s very good.’

  ‘Your astrolabe functions in the system in its particular way,’ the earl went on, ‘because that is the way, finally, all signs function.’

  Ardra put the chain over Pryn’s head—which surprised her, because she’d intended to take it back herself. ‘I never understood that part, either.’ The boy stepped back.

  With some frustration, the earl turned to the parchment on which Belham’s numbers were written in that strange script. ‘Take Belham’s sign “one.” Excluded from what it can mean are “two,” “three,” “four,” “five,” “six,” or “twenty-two-divided-by-seven”…’

  Whereas it can mean an apple, a pear, a kumquat, a great castle, a lord, or even one other number,’ Lavik said. ‘They’re not excluded.’

  ‘What is excluded from it—’ the earl lowered his hand—‘what it is empty of, alone, is what makes it meaningful. Ardra, why are you up here anyway?’

  ‘Oh.’ The boy blinked. ‘Well, I…I brought a message. From mother.’ He looked at the doorway.

  The slave waited.

  The earl, Jenta, and Lavik looked too—and Pryn had a suspicion they hadn’t even seen the man till now.

  ‘Oh, you brought a message. Well,’ the earl said. ‘What does the Lady Nyergrinkuga say?’

  ‘My lord,’ the slave answered (Pryn was surprised at the voice, which was somehow shriller than she’d expected), ‘the lady says that dinner is ready.’

  ‘Dinner is ready,’ the earl repeated. ‘Oh. Thank you, Ardra. You may go—’ this to the slave, who unfolded his arms, touched the back of his fist to his forehead, turned from the doorway, and hurried down. ‘Why don’t we all go down, then? Shall we?’

  Jenta walked up to Pryn and put his arm around her shoulder in a way that for a moment felt comfortable and made her smile with the memory of the way the earl or Madame Keyne had been with the workers, but, a moment later, as they followed Ardra out through the door into the crevice steps, became, through its uncertainty of lightness and pressure, a man touching a woman—which, Pryn thought, had it been Inige rather than this hairy, affable, eldest son, would have been acceptable. Then, because of the narrowness of the crevice, his hand fell away; Jenta fell behind. Pryn glanced back to see the earl’s cloak open as the little man descended after Lavik. Pryn hurr
ied down, away from the tickling of the almost invisible gnats, to the sunlight below.

  ‘Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat. Do you agree?’ Inige asked from his couch beneath the brace of lamps. ‘Common sense says all the workers would need to do is demand ownership, and Rorkar certainly couldn’t oppose them. Nevertheless, Yrnik comes in every morning and opens the brewery—whether Rorkar sleeps on the hill or no. Of course, the truth is that father’s soldiers used to be called in, when, occasionally, the workers did try to take over. That ill-remembered association is the real bond between father and the peas and businessmen around here. Somehow, though, as father’s soldiers drifted away, the rebellions ceased. The workers who do remember them have somehow got it confused, so that, when they talk about them today, it’s the lack of soldiers—today—that makes rebellion unnecessary. And I’m sure no one talks to Yrnik about the men and women who held his job previously that father and Rorkar together ruined or removed or obliterated as thanks for their desire to better the lot of those around them. But that’s the sort of thing Belham’s language can’t write of; and no one has yet cared to write them in the new script.’

  ‘Nor does anyone here care to talk about it,’ said the earl.

  ‘Is that what they teach you in the north is proper dinner conversation?’ Tritty asked. ‘Really. You know’ she turned back to Pryn, ‘Queen Olin, whom you were discussing with my husband, was often a guest here—at least in his Lordship’s father’s day.’ On her couch, she turned to the earl. ‘Or was it your father’s father’s?’

  ‘You know, I was never really sure.’ The earl reached from his couch to a tray, passing in the hands of a slave, piled with sliced and peeled kiwis, a fruit of which Pryn had never even heard before that evening. ‘It is hard to keep the past organized. And when the past is disorganized, the present is…well, as you see it: all barbaric splendor—and misery. But as long as I can keep clear the principles by which the present orders itself, I suppose that’s why I stay one of the most powerful of the remaining, real barbarian princes—“Earl” is the title the northern aristocracy has granted us. But the fine points of such terminology have never troubled me.’