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PRAISE ON BOTH SIDES
OF THE ATLANTIC FOR SAMUEL
R. DELANY:
"Beautifully intricate and gloriously mystifying.... Long may he write!"
—Analog
"He tosses basic concepts of time and space and mathematics (but
valid ones; not pseudo-surface jargon) around as dizzyingly as he juggles
dazzling psychological insights and aesthetic theorizings. . . . This is
one of the people who have begun to carve the new myth out of the void. I hope
he can keep it up. I want to read more."
—Judith Merril, Fantasy & Science Fiction
"Streaked through with poetry and crammed
with vivid images. . ..
Read Delany, but read him sparingly, judiciously. The rewards will be
considerable."
—New
Worlds (England)
In
THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, Samuel R.
Delany has written
his finest book to date, a hypnotically fascinating tale of love and adventure
in a far-future world constantly changing, becoming stranger with each change.
Don't miss it.
SAMUEL
R. DELANY was
bom April Fool's Day, 1942. He grew up in New York
City's Harlem and variously considered becoming a physicist, a mathematician,
or a composer. He attended The Dalton Elementary
School, the Bronx High School of Science, and City College, where he was poetry
editor of The Promethean for a term.
His first sf novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was
written when he was nineteen. His subsequent trilogy, The Fall of the Towefs, was completed while he was still twenty-one. Last year his novel Babel-17 was nominated for the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula award for best sf
novel of 1966. The Einstein Intersection was written primarily during a year of travel in France, Italy, Greece,
Turkey, and England. Samuel R. Delany is married, and lives on the Lower East
Side of Manhattan.
THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
the einstein intersection
Copyright
©, 1967, by Samuel R. Delany An
Ace Book. All Rights Reserved
Cover
art by Jack Gaughan.
for
Don
Wollheim a responsible man in all meanings to and for what is within and
Jack
Gaughan for what is without
Printed in U.S.A.
It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funanimal world.
James Joyce/Finnegans Wake
I do not say, however, that every delusion or
wandering of the mind should he called madness.
Erasmus of Rotterdam/In Praise of Folly
There is a hollow, holey cylinder running
from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the
handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound
is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are
open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I have been
playing music I've been called all different kinds of fool—more times than Lobey, which is my name.
What I look like?
Ugly and grinning most of the time. That's a whole lot of big nose and gray eyes
and wide mouth crammed on a small brown face proper for a fox. That, all scratched around with spun brass for hair. I hack
most of it off every two months or so with my machete. Grows
back fast. Which is odd, because I'm twenty-three and
no beard yet. I have a figure like a bowling pin, thighs, calves, and
feet of a man (gorilla?) twice my size (which is about five-nine) and hips to
match. There was a rash of hermaphrodites the year I was born, which doctors
thought I might be. Somehow I doubt it.
Like
I say, ugly. My feet have toes almost as long as my
fingers and the big toes are semi-opposable. But don't knock it; once I saved Little Jon's life.
We were climbing the Beryl Face, slipping
around on all
that glassy rock, when Little Jon lost his footing and was dangling by one
hand. I was hanging by my hands, but I stuck my foot down, grabbed him by the
wrist and pulled him back up where he could step on something.
At this point Lo Hawk folds his arms over his
leather shirt, nods sagely so that his beard bobs on his ropy neck, says: "And just what were you two young Lo men doing on
Beryl Face in the first place? It's dangerous, and we avoid danger, you know.
The birthrate is going down, down all the time. We can't afford to lose our
productive youth in foolishness." Of course it isn't going down. That's
just Lo Hawk. What he means is that the number of total norms is going down. But there's
plenty of births. Lo Hawk is from the generation where the number of non-functionals, idiots, mongoloids, and cretins was well over
fifty percent. (We hadn't adjusted to your images yet. Ah, well.) But now there are noticeably more functionals
than non-functionals; so no great concern.
Anyway,
not only do I bite my fingernails disgracefully, I also bite my toenails.
And
at this point I recall sitting at the entrance of the source-cave where the
stream comes from the darkness and makes a sickle of light into the trees, and
a blood spider big as my fist suns himself on the rock beside me, belly pulsing
out from the sides of him, leaves flicking each other above. Then La Carol
walks by with a sling of fruit over her shoulder and the ldd
under her arm (we had an argument once whether it was mine or not. One day it
had my eyes, my nose, my ears. The next, "Can't
you see it's Lo Easy's boy? Look how strong he isl" Then we both fell in love with other people and
now we're friends again) and she makes a face and says, "Lo Lobey, what are you
doing?"
"Biting my toenails. What does it look like?"
"Oh,
really I" and
she shakes her head and goes into the woods toward the village.
But right now I prefer to sit on the flat
rock, sleep, think, gnaw, or sharpen my machete. It's my privilege, so La Dire
tells me.
Until a little while ago, Lo Little Jon, Lo
Easy, and Lo me herded goats together (which is what we were doing on the Beryl
Face: looking for pasture). We made quite a trio. Little Jon, though a year
older than me, will till death look like a small
black fourteen-year-old with skin smooth as volcanic glass. He sweats through
his palms, the soles of his feet and his tongue (no real sweat glands: piddles
like a diabetic qn the
first day of winter, or a very nervous dog). He's got silver mesh for hair—not
white, silver. The pigment's based on the metal pure,
the black skin comes from a protein formed around the oxide. None of that rusty
iron brown of melanin that suntans you and me. He sings, being a little simple,
running and jumping around the rocks and goats, flashing from head and groin
and armpits, then stops to cock his leg (like a nervous dog, yeah) against a
tree-trunk, glancing around with embarrassed black eyes. Smiling, those eyes
fling as much light, on a different frequency, as his glittering head. He's got
claws, too. Hard, sharp homy ones
where I have nubs. He's not a good
Lo to have mad at you.
Easy,
on the other hand, is large (about eight feet tall), furry (umber hair curls
all down the small of his back, makes ringlets on his belly), strong (that
three hundred and twenty-six pounds of Easy is really a lot of rock jammed
jagged into his pelt: his muscles have comers), and gentle. Once I got angry at
him when one of the fertile nannies fell down a rock chimney.
I
saw it cxwning. The ewe was the big blind one who had
been giving us perfect norm triplets for eight years. I stood on one foot and
threw rocks and sticks with the other three limbs. It takes a rock on the head
to get Easy's attention; he was much closer than I
was.
"Watch it, you non-functional, lost-Lo mongoloidl She's gonna fall in
the—" At which point she did.
Easy
stopped looking at me with his what-are-you-throw-ing-stones-at-me-for?
face, saw her scrabbling at the edge, dove for her,
missed, and both of them started bleating. I put all behind the rock that
caught him on the hip and almost cried. Easy did.
He
crouched at the chimney edge, tears wetting the fur on his cheeks. The ewe had
broken her neck at the bottom of the chimney. Easy looked up and said,
"Don't hurt me no more, Lobey. That"—he
knuckled his blue eyes, then pointed down —"hurts
too much already." What can you do with a Lo
like that? Easy has claws too. All he ever uses them
for is to climb the titan palms and tear down mangoes for the children.
Generally
we did a good job with the goats, though. Once Little Jon leaped from the
branch of an oak to the back of a lion and tore out its throat before it got to the herd (and rose from
the carcass, shook himself, and went behind a rock, glancing over his shoulder). And as
gentle as he is, Easy crushed a blackbear's head with
a log. And I got my machete, all ambidextrous, left footed, right handed, or
vice versa. Yeah, we did a good job. Not no more.
What happened was Friza.
"Friza" or "La Friza"
was always a point of debate with the older folk-doctors and the elders who
have to pass on titles. She looked normal: slim, brown, full mouth, wide nose,
brass colored eyes. I think she may have been bom
with six fingers on one hand, but the odd one was nonfunctional, so a
traveling doctor amputated it. Her hair was tight, springy, and black. She kept
it short, though once she found some red cord and wove it through. That day she
wore bracelets and copper beads, strings and strings. She was beautiful.
And
silent.
When she was a baby, she was put in the kage with the
other non-functionals because she didn't move. No La.
Then a keeper discovered she didn't move because she already knew how; she was
agile as a squirrel's shadow. She was taken out of the kage.
Got back her La. But she never spoke. So at age eight,
when it was obvious that the beautiful orphan was mute, away went her La. They
couldn't very well put her back in the kage.
Functional she was, making baskets, plowing, an
expert huntress with the bolas. That's
when there was all the debate.
Lo Hawk upheld, "In my day, La and Lo
were reserved for total norms. We've been very lax, giving this title of purity
to any functional who happens to have the misfortune
to be bom in these confusing times."
To which La Dire replied, "Times change,
and it has been an unspoken precedent for thirty years that La and Lo be
bestowed on any functional creature born in this our new home. The question is
merely how far to extend the definition of functionality. Is the ability to
communicate verbally its sine qua non?
She is intelligent and she
learns quickly and thoroughly. I move for La Friza."
The girl sat and played with white pebbles by
the fire while they discussed her social standing.
"The
beginning of the end, the beginning of the end," muttered Lo Hawk.
"We must preserve something."
"The
end of the beginning," sighed La Diré. "Everything must change." Which had been their standing exchange as long as I remember.
Once, before I was bom,
so goes the story, Lo Hawk grew disgruntled with village life and left. Rumors
came back: he'd gone to a moon of Jupiter to dig out some metal that wormed in
blue veins through the rock. Later: he'd left the Jovian satellite to sail a
steaming sea on some world where three suns cast his shadows on the doffing
deck of a ship bigger than our whole village. Still later: he was reported
chopping away through a substance that melted to poisonous fumes someplace so
far away there were no stars at all during the year long nights. When he had
been away seven years, La Dire apparently decided it was time he came back. She
left the village and returned a week later—with Lo Hawk. They say he hadn't
changed much, so nobody asked him about where he'd been. But from his return
dated the quiet argument that joined La Dire and Lo Hawk faster than love. . .
must preserve," Lo Hawk. "... must
change," La Dire.
Usually
Lo Hawk gave in, for La Dire was a woman of wide reading, great culture, and
wit; Lo Hawk had been a fine hunter in his youth and a fine warrior when there
was need. And he was wise enough to admit in action, if not words, that such
need had gone. But this time Lo Hawk was adamant:
"Communication is vital, if we are ever
to become human
beings. I would sooner allow some short-faced dog who
comes from the hills and can approximate forty or fifty of
our words to make known his wishes, than a mute child. Oh,
the battles my youth has seen! When we fought off the
giant spiders, or when the wave of fungus swept from the
jungle, or when we destroyed with lime and salt the twenty-
foot slugs that pushed up from the ground, we won these
battles because we could speak to one another, shout in-
structions, bellow a warning, whisper plans in the
twilight
darkness of the source-caves. Yes, I would sooner give La or
Lo to a talking dog!" v
Somebody
made a nasty comment: "Well, you couldn't very well give her a Lei" People snickered. But the older folk are very
good at ignoring that sort of irreverence. Everybody ignores a Le anyway.
Anyway, the business never did get settled. Toward moondown
people wandered off, when somebody suggested adjournment. Everyone creaked and
groaned to his feet. Friza, dark and beautiful, was
still playing with the pebbles.
Friza didn't move when a baby because she knew how
already. Watching her in the flicker ( I was only
eight myself) I got the first hint why she didn't talk: she picked up one of
the pebbles and hurled it, viciously, at the head of the guy who'd made the
remark about "Le." Even at eight she was sensitive. She missed, and I
alone saw. But I saw too the snarl that twisted her face, the effort in her
shoulders, the way her toes curled—she was sitting cross-legged—as she threw
it. Both fists were knotted in her lap. You see, she didn't use her hands or
feet. The pebbles just rose from the dirt, shot through the air, missed its
target, and chattered away through low leaves. But I saw: she threw it.
Each
night for a week I have lingered on the wUd flags of
the waterfront, palaces crowding to the left, brittle light crackling over the
harbor in the warm autumn. TEI goes strangely. Tonight when I turned back into
the great trapezoid of the Piazza, fog hid the tops of the red flagpoles. I sat
on the base of one nearest the tower and made notes on Lobey's
hungers. Later I left the decaying gold and indigo of the Basilica and
wandered through the back alleys of the city till well after midnight. Once I
stopped on a bridge to watch the small canal drift through the close walls
beneath the night-lamps and clotheslines. At a sudden shrieking I whirled: half
a dozen wailing cats hurled themselves about my feet and fled after a brown
rat. Chills snarled the nerves along my vertebrae. I looked back at the water:
six flowers-proses—floated from beneath the bridge, crawling
over the oil. I watched them till a motorboat puttering on some larger
waterway nearby sent water slapping the foundations. 1 made my way over the
small bridges to the Grand Canal and caught the Vaporetto
back to Ferovia. It turned windy as we floated
beneath the black wood arch of the Ponti Academia; I
was trying to assimilate the flowers, the vicious animals, with Lobey's adventure—each applies, but as yet I don't quite
know how. Orion straddled the water. Lights from the shore shook in the canal
as we passed beneath the dripping stones of the Rialto.
Author's
Journal/Venice,
October 1965
In a
few lines I shall establish how Maldoror was virtuous
during his first years, virtuous and happy. Later he became aware he was born
evil. Strange fatality!
Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont) The Songs of Maldoror
All prologue to why
Easy, Little Jon, and me don't herd goats no more.
Friza
started tagging along, dark and ambiguous, running and jumping with Little Jon
in a double dance to his single song and my music, play-wrestling with Easy,
and walking with me up the brambly meadow holding my hand—whoever heard of La-ing or Lo-ing somebody you're
herding goats with, or laughing with, or making love with. All of which I did
with Friza. She would turn on a rock to stare at me
with leaves shaking beside her face. Or come tearing toward me through the
stones; between her graceful gait and her shadow in the rocks all suspended and
real motion was. And was released when she was in my arms laughing—the one
sound she did make, loving it'in her mouth.
She
brought me beautiful things. And kept the dangerous away.
I think she did it the same way she threw the pebble. One day I noticed that
ugly and harmful things just weren't happening: no lions, no condor bats. The
goats stayed together; the kids didn't get lost and kept from cliffs.
"Little Jon, you don't
have to come up this morning.'*
"Well, Lobey, if you don't think—''
"Go on, stay
home."
So Easy, Friza, and
me went out with the goats.
The
beautiful things were like the flock of albino hawks that moved to the meadow.
Or the mother woodchuck who brought her babies for us to see.
"Easy,
there isn't enough work for all of us here. Why don't you find something else
to do?"
"But I ^ike coming up here, Lobey."
"Friza
and me can take care of the herd."
"But I don't mi-"
"Get lost, Easy."
He said something else and
I picked up a stone in my foot and hefted it. He looked confused, then lumbered away. Imagine, coming on like that with Easy.
Friza and I had the field and the herd to ourselves alone. It stayed good and beautiful with
unremembered flowers beyond rises when we ran. If there were poisonous snakes,
they turned off in lengths of scarlet, never coiling. And, ahl
did I make music.
Something killed her.
She
was hiding under a grove of lazy willows, the trees that droop lower than
weeping, and I was searching and calling and grinning—she shrieked. That's the
only sound I ever heard her make other than laughter. The goats began to bleat.
I found her under the tree,
face in the dirt.
As
the goats bleated, the meadow went to pieces on their rasping noise. I was
silent, confused, amazed by my despair.
I
carried her back to the village. I remember La Dire's
face as I walked into the. square with the limber body
in my arms.
"Lobey, what in the world . . . How did she . . . Oh, no! Lobey, no!"
So Easy and Little Jon took the herd again. I went and sat at the entrance to the
source-cave, sharpened my blade, gnawed my nails, slept and thought alone on
the flat rock. Which is where we began.
Once Easy came to talk to
me.
"Hey,
Lobey, help us with the goats. The lions are back.
Not a lot of them, but we could still use you." He squatted, still
towering me by a foot, shook his head. "Poor Lobey." He ran his hairy fingers over my head.
"We need you. You need us. Help us hunt for the two missing kids?" Go
away.
"Poor
Lobey." But he went.
Later Little Jon came. He stood
around for a minute thinking of something to say. But by the time he did, he
had to go behind a bush, got embarrassed, and didn't come back.
Lo Hawk came too. "Come hunting, Lo Lobey. There's a bull been seen a mile south. Horns as long
as your arm, they say."
"I
feel rather non-functional today," I said. Which is not
the sort of thing to joke about with Lo Hawk. He retired,
humphing. But I just wasn't up to his archaic manner.
When
La Dire came, though, it was different. As I said, she has great wit and
learning. She came and sat with a book on the other side of the flat rock, and
ignored me for an hour. Till I got mad. "What are
you doing here?" I asked at last.
"Probably the same thing you are."
"What's that?"
She
looked serious. "Why don't you tell me?" ■ I went back to my
knife. "Sharpening my machete." "I'm
sharpening my mind," she said. "There is something to be done that
will require an edge on both." "Huhr
"Is
that an inarticulate way of asking what it is?" "Huhr I said again. "Yeah. What is it?"
"To ldll whatever killed Friza."
She closed her book. "Will you help?"
I
leaned forward, feet and hands knotting, opened my
mouth—then La Dire wavered behind tears. I cried. After nil
that time it surprised me. I put my forehead on the rock and bawled.
"Lo
Lobey," she said, the way Lo Hawk had, only it
was different. Then she stroked my hair, like Easy. Only
different. As I gained control again I sensed both her compassion and
embarrassment. Like Little Jon's; different.
I
lay on my side, feet and hands clutching each other, sobbing toward the cavity
of me. La Dire rubbed my shoulder, my bunched, distended hip, opening me with
gentleness and words:
'Xet's talk about
mythology, Lobey. Or let's you listen. We've had quite a time
assuming the rationale of this world. The irrationale
presents just as much of a problem. You remember the legend of the Beaties? You remember the Beade Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender. He
was the one Beade who did not sing, so the earliest
forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles
were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned,
finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll." I put my head in
La Dire's lap. She went on. "Well, that myth is
a version of a much older story that is not so well known. There are no 45's or
33's from the time of this older story. There are only a few written versions,
and reading is rapidly losing its interest for the young. In the older story Ringo was called Orpheus. He too was torn apart by
screaming girls. But the details are different. He lost his love—in this
version Eurydice—and she went straight to the great rock and the great roll,
where Orpheus had to go to get her back. He went singing, for in this version
Orpheus was the greatest singer, instead of the silent one. In myths things
always turn into their opposites as one version supercedes
the next."
I said, "How could he go into the great
rock and the great roll? That's all death and all life." "He did."
"Did he bring her back?"
"No."
I
looked from La Dire's old face and turned my head in
her lap to the trees. "He lied, then. He didn't really go. He probably
went off into the woods for a while and just made up some story when he came
back."
"Perhaps," La Dire said.
I
looked up again. "He wanted her back," I said. "I know he wanted
her back. But if he had gone any place where there was even a chance of getting
her, he wouldn't have come back unless she was with him. That's how I know he
must have been lying. About going to the great rock and the great roll, I
mean."
"All
life is a rhythm," she said as I sat up. "All death Is rhythm suspended, a syncopation before life
resumes." She picked up my machete. "Play something." She held
the handle out. "Make music."
I
put the blade to my mouth, rolled over on my back, curled around the bright,
dangerous length, and licked the sounds. I didn't want to but it formed in the
hollow of my tongue, and breathing carried it into the knife.
Low;
first slow; I closed my eyes, feeling each note in the quadrangle of shoulder
blades and buttocks pressed on the rock. Notes came with only the meter of my
own breathing, and from beneath that, there was the quickening of the muscles
of my fingers and toes that began to cramp for the faster, closer dance of the
heart's time. The mourning hymn began to quake.
"Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with
your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum. Drum, Lobey!"
I let the melody speed, then
flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers. "Drum, Lobey!"
I rocked to my feet and began to slap my
soles against the stone. "Drum!"
I
opened my eyes long enough to see the blood spiders scurry. The music laughed.
Pound and pound, trill and warble, and La Dire laughed for me too, to play,
hunched down while sweat quivered on my nape, threw up my head and it dribbled
into the small of my back, while I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips,
beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up to prick the sun, new sweat
trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck.
"Drum,
my Lo Ringo; play, my Lo Orpheus," La Dire cried.
"Oh, Lobey!" She
clapped and clapped.
Then,
when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves and the stream, she nodded,
smiling. "Now you've mourned properly."
I
looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled.
Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.
"Now
you're almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play
more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you."
All
sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a
syncopation before the rhythm resumed. "Le Dorik?"
"Go. Enjoy yourself
before you begin your journey."
Frightened,
I shook my head, turned, fled from the cave mouth.
Le-
Suddenly
the wandering little beast fled, leaving in my lap—O horror—a monster and
misshapen maggot with a human head.
"Where is your soul that I may ride it!"
Aloysius Bertrand/The
Dwarf
Come ALIVEI You're in the PEPSI generation!
Current catchphrase/(Commercial)
-Dorik!
An hour later I was crouching, hidden, by the
kage. But the kage-keeper,
Le Dorik, wasn't around. A white thing (I remember
when the woman who was Easy's mother flung it from
her womb before dying) had crawled to the electrified fence to slobber. It
would probably die soon. Out of sight I heard Griga's
laughter; he had been Lo Griga till he was sixteen.
But something—nobody knew if it was genetic or not—rotted his mind inside his
head, and laughter began to gush from his gums and hps.
He lost his Lo and was placed in the kage. Le Dorik was probably inside now, putting out food, doctoring
where doctoring would do some good, killing when there was some person beyond
doctoring. So much sadness and horror penned up there; it was hard to remember
they were people'. They bore no title of purity, but they were people. Even Lo
Hawk would get as offended over a joke about the kaged
ones as he would about some titled citizen. "You don't know what they did to them when I was
a boy, young Lo man. You never saw them dragged back from the jungle when a few
did manage to survive. You didn't see the barbaric way complete norms acted,
their reason shattered bloody by fear. Many people we call Lo
and La today would not have been allowed to live had they been bom fifty
years ago. Be glad you are a child of more civilized times."
Yes, they were people. But this is not the first time I had wondered what it
feels like to keep such people—Le Dorik?
I went back to the village.
Lo
Hawk looked up from re-thonging his sports-bow. He'd
piled the power cartridges on the ground in front of the door to check the
caps. "How you be, Lo Lobey?"
I
picked a cartridge out with my foot, turned it over. "Catch that bull
yet?"
"No."
I pried the clip back with the tip of my
machete. It was good. "Let's go," I said. "Check the rest
first."
While I did, he finished stringing the bow,
went in and got a second one for me; then we went down to the river.
Silt
stained the water yellow. The current was high and fast, bending ferns and long
grass down, combing them from the shore like hair. We kept to the soggy bank
for about two miles.
"What killed Friza?"
I asked at last.
Lo
Hawk squatted to examine a scarred log: tusk marks. "You were there. You
saw. La Dire only guesses."
We
turned from the river. Brambles scratched against Lo Hawk's leggings. I don't
need leggings. My skin is tough and tight. Neither does Easy or Little Jon.
"I didn't see
anything," I said. "What does she guess?"
An
albino hawk burst from a tree and gyred away. Friza
hadn't needed leggings either.
"Something
killed Friza that was non-functional, something
about her that was non-functional."
"Friza
was functional," I said. "She wasl"
"Keep your voice down,
boy."
"She kept the herd
together," I said more softly. "She could make the animals do what she wanted.
She could move the dangerous things away and bring the beautiful ones
nearer."
"Bosh," said Lo
Hawk, stepping over ooze.
"Without
a gesture or a word, she could move the animals anywhere she wanted, or I
wanted."
"That's La Dire's nonsense you've been listening to."
"No.
I saw it She could move the animals just
like the pebble."
Lo Hawk started to say something else. Then I
saw his thoughts backtrack. "What pebble?" "The pebble she
picked up and threw." "What pebble,
Lobey?"
So I
told him the story. "And it was functional," I concluded. "She
kept the herd safe, didn't she? She could have kept it even without me."
"Only
she couldn't keep herself alive," Lo Hawk said. He started walking again.
We
kept silent through the whispering growth, while I mulled. Then:
"Yaaaaaa—" on three different tones.
The
leaves whipped back and the Bloi triplets scooted
out. One of them leaped at me and I had an armful of hysterical, redheaded
ten-year-old.
"Hey there now," I said sagely.
"Lo
Hawk, Lobey! Back there—"
"Watch it, will
you?" I added, avoiding an elbow.
"—back
there! It was stamping, and pawing the rocks—" This from
one of them at my hip.
"Back where?" Lo
Hawk asked. "What happened?"
"Back there by the—"
"—by
the old house near the place where the cave roof falls in—"
"—the bull came up
and—"
"—and
he was awful big and he stepped—** "—he stepped on the old house
that—" "—we was playing inside—"
"Hold
up," I said and put Bloi-3 down.
"Now where was all this?"
They
turned together and pointed through the woods.
Hawk
swung down his crossbow. "That's fine," he said. "You boys get
back up to the village."
"Say—"
I caught Bloi-2's shoulder. "Just how big was her
Inarticulate blinking now. "Never mind," I said. "Just get going." They looked
at me, at Lo Hawk, at the woods. Then they got.
In
silent consensus we turned from the river through the break in the leaves from
which the children had tumbled.
A
board, shattered at one end, lay on the path just before us as we reached the
clearing. We stepped over it, stepped out between the sumac branches.
And
there were a lot of other smashed boards scattered across the ground.
A
five foot section of the foundation had been kicked in, and only one of the
four supporting beams was upright.
Thatch
bits were shucked over the yard. A long time ago Carol had planted a few more
flowers in this garden, when, wanting to get away from the it-all
of the village, we had moved down here to the old thatched house that used to
be so cozy, that used to be . . . she had planted the hedge with the fuzzy
orange blooms. You know that kind?
I
stopped by one cloven print where petals and leaves had been ground in a dark mandala on the mud. My foot fit inside the print easily. A
couple of trees had been uprooted. A couple more had been broken off above my
head.
It was easy to see which way he had come into
the clearing. Bushes, vines and leaves had erupted inward. Where he had left,
everything sort of sagged out.
Lo
Hawk ambled into the clearing swinging his crossbow nonchalantly.
"You're
not really that nonchalant, are you?" I asked. I looked around again at
the signs of destruction. "It must be huge."
Lo
Hawk threw me a glance full of quartz and gristle. "You've been hunting
with me before."
"True.
It can't have been gone very long if it just scared the kids away," I
added.
Hawk stalked toward the place where things
were sagging.
I hurried after.
Ten
steps into the woods, we heard seven trees crash somewhere: three—pause—then
four more.
"Of
course if he's that big he can probably move pretty far pretty fast," I
said.
Another three trees.
Then a roar:
An
unmusical sound with much that was metallic in it, neither rage nor pathos, but
noise, heaved from lungs bigger than smelting bellows, a long sound, then
echoing while the leaves turned up beneath a breeze.
Under
green and silver we started again through the cool, dangerous glades.
And step and breathe and step.
Then in the trees to our left-He came leaping, and that leap rained us
with shadow and twigs and bits of leaf.
Turning
his haunch with one foreleg over here and hind-leg way the hell over there, he looked down at us with an eye bloodshot, brown
and thickly oystered in the comers. His eyeball must
have been big as my head.
The wet, black nostrils steamed.
He was very noble.
Then
he tossed his head, breaking branches, and hunkered with his fists punched into
the ground—there were hands with homy hairy fingers
thick as my arm where he should have had forehooves—bellowed,
reared, and sprang away.
Hawk
fired his crossbow. The shaft flapped like a darning needle between the timbers
of his flank. He was crashing off.
The
bark of the tree I had slammed against chewed on my back as I came away.
"Come
on," Hawk hollered, as he ran in the general direction the man-handed bull
had.
And
I followed that crazy old man, running to kill the beast. We clambered through
the cleft of broken rock (it hadn't been broken the last time I'd come
wandering down here through the trees—an afternoon full of sun spots and
breezes and Friza's hand in mine, on my shoulder, on
my cheek). I jumped down-onto a stretch of moss-tongued brick that paved the
forest here and there. We ran forward and—
Some
things are so small you don't notice them. Others are so big you run right into
them before you know what they are. It was a hole in the earth and the side of
the mountain that we almost stumbled into. It was a ragged cave entrance some
twenty meters across. I didn't even know it was there till all that sound came
out of it.
The
bull suddenly roared from the opening in the rock and trees and brick, defining
the shape of it with his roaring.
When
the echo died, we crept to the crumbled hp and looked over. Below I saw glints
of sunlight on hide, turning and turning in the pit. Then he reared, shaking
his eyes, his hairy fists.
Hawk jerked back, even though the claws on
the brick wall were still fifteen feet below us.
"Doesn't this tunnel go into the
source-cave?" I whispered. Before something that grand, one whispers.
Lo
Hawk nodded. "Some of the tunnels, they say, are a hundred feet high. Some
are ten. This is one of the bigger urterioles."
"Can it get out again?" Stupid question.
On
the other side of the hole the horned head, the
shoulders emerged. The cave-in had been sloped there. He had climbed out. Now
he looked at us, crouched there. He bellowed once with a length of tongue like
foamy, red canvas.
Then he leaped at us across the hole.
He
didn't make it, but we scurried backward. He caught the lip with the fingers of
one hand—I saw black gorges break about those nails—and one arm. The arm
slapped uround over the earth, searching for a
handhold.
From
behind me I heard Hawk shout (I run faster than he does). I turned to see that
hand rise from over him!
He was all crumpled up on the ground. The
hand slapped a few more times (Boom—Booml Boom!) and then arm and fingers slipped, pulling a
lot of stone and bushes and three small trees, down, down, down.
Lo
Hawk wasn't dead. (The next day they discovered he had cracked a rib, but that
wasn't till later.) He began to ciirl up. I thought
of an injured bug. I thought of a sick, .sick child.
I
caught him up by the shoulders just as he started to breathe again. "Hawk! Are you—"
He
couldn't hear me because of the roaring from the pit. Hut he pulled himself up,
blinking. Blood began trickling from his
nose. The beast had been slapping with cupped palm. Lo Hawk had thrown himself
down and luckily most of the important parts of him, like his head,
had suffered more from air-blast than concussion. "Let's get out of
here!" mid I began to drag him toward the trees.
When we got there, he was shaking his head.
"—no,
wait, Lobey—" came over in his hoarse voice during
a lull in the roaring.
As I got him propped against a tree, he
grabbed my wrist.
"Hurry,
Hawk! Can you walk? We've got to get away. Look, 111 carry you—"
"No!"
The breath that had been knocked out of him lurched back into his lungs.
"Oh,
come on, Hawk! Fun is fun. But you're hurt and that
thing is a lot bigger than either of us figured on. It must have mutated from
the radiation in the lower levels of the cave."
He tugged my wrist again. "We have to
stay. We have to kill ft."
"Do
you think it will come up and harm the village? It hasn't gone too far from the
cave yet."
"That—"
He coughed.. "That has nothing to do with it. I'm
a hunter, Lobey."
"Now, look—"
"And
I have to teach you to hunt." He tried to sit away from the trunk.
"Only it looks like you'll have to learn this lesson by yourself."
"Huh?"
"La Dire says you have to get ready for
your journey."
"Oh,
for goodness—" Then I squinted at him, all the crags and age and assurance
and pain in that face. "What I gotta dor
The
bull's roar thundered up from the caved-in roof of the source-cave.
"Go
down there; hunt the beast, and loll it." "Nol"
"It's
for Friza." "Howr I demanded.
He shrugged. "La Dire knows. You must
learn to hunt, and hunt well." Then he repeated that.
"I'm
all for testing my manhood and that sort of thing. But-"
"It's
a different reason from that, Lobey."
"But-"
"Lobey."
His voice nestled down low and firm in his tliroat.
"I'm older than you, and I know more about this whole business than you
do. Take your sword and crossbow and go down into the cave, Lobey. Go on."
I sat there and thought a whole lot of
things. Such as: bravery is a very stupid thing. And how
surprised I was that so much fear and respect for Lo Hawk had held from my
childhood. Also, how many petty things can accompany pith, moment, and
enterprise—like fear, confusion, and plain annoyance.
The
beast roared again. I pushed the crossbow farther up my arm and settled my
machete handle at my hip.
If
you were going to do something stupid—and we all do—it might as well be a brave
and foolish thing.
I clapped Lo Hawk's
shoulder and started for the pit.
On
this side the break was sharp and the drop deep. I went around to the sagging
side, where there were natural ledges of root, earth, and masonry. I circled
the chasm and scrambled down.
Sun
struck the wall across from me, glistening with moss. I dropped my hand from
the moist rock and stepped across mi oily rivulet whose rainbow went out under
my shadow. Somewhere up the tunnel, hooves clattered on stone.
I
started forward. There were many cracks in the high ceiling, here and there
lighting on the floor, a branch clawing crisped leaves, or the rim of a hole
that might go down a few inches, a few feet, or drop to the lowest levels of
the source-cave that were thousands of feet below.
I came to a fork, started beneath the vault
to the left, and ten feet into the darkness tripped and rolled down a flight of
shallow steps, once through a puddle (my hand splatting
out in the darkness), once over dry leaves (they roared their own roar beneath
my side), and landed at the bottom in a shaft of light, knees and palms on
gravel.
Clatter!
Clatter!
Much closer: Clatter!
I sprang to my feet and away from the
telltale light. Motes cycloned in
the slanting illumination where I had been. And the motes stilled.
My stomach felt like a loose bag of water
sloshing around on top of my gut. Walking toward that sound—he was quiet now
and waiting—was no longer a matter of walking in a direction. Rather: pick that
foot up, lean forward, put it down. Good. Now, pick up the other one, lean
forward—
A
hundred yards ahead I suddenly saw another light because something very large
suddenly filled it up. Then it emptied.
Clack! Clack! Clack!
Snort!
And
three steps could carry him such a long way. Then a lot of clacks!
I
threw myself against the wall, pushing my face into dirt and roots.
But the sound was going away.
I
swallowed all the bitter things that had risen into my throat and stepped back
from the wall.
With
a quick walk that became a slow run I followed him under the crumbling vaults.
His sound came from the
right.
So I
turned right and into a sloping tunnel so low that ahead of me I heard his
horns rasp on the ceiling. Stone and scale and old lichen chittered
down on his hulking shoulders, then to the ground.
The
gutter on the side of the tunnel had coated the stone with fluorescent slime.
The trickle became a stream as the slope increased till the frothing light
raced me on the left.
Once his hooves must have crossed a metal
floor-plate, because for a half dozen steps orange sparks glittered where lie
stepped, lighting him to the waist.
He was only thirty meters
ahead of me.
Sparks
again as he turned a comer.
I
felt stone under the soles of my feet and then cold, smooth metal. I passed
some leaves, blown here by what wind, that his hooves had ignited. They writhed
with worms of fire, glowing about my toes. And for a moment the darkness was
filled with autumn.
I reached the comer,
started around.
Facing me, he bellowed.
His
foot struck a meter from my foot and from this close the sparks fit his raw
eyes, his polished nostrils.
His
hand came between his eyes and me, falling! I rolled backward, grabbing for my
machete.
His
palm—flat this time, Hawk—clanged on the metal plate where I had been. Then it
fell again toward the place where I was.
I was lying on my back with the hilt of the
blade on the door, point up. Very few people, or bulls, can hit a ten ]x;nny
nail and drive it to the hilt. Fortunately.
He
jerked me from the floor, pinioned to his palm, and I ^ot flung around (holding on to the blade with hands
and feet and screaming) an awful lot.
He
was screaming too, butting the ceiling and lots of tilings
falling. From twenty feet he flung me loose. The blade pulled free, my flute
filled with his blood, and I hurled into the wall and rolled down.
His
right shoulder struck the right wall. He lurched. His left shoulder struck the
left wall. And his shadow flickering on the dripping ceiling was huge.
He
came down toward me, as I dragged my knees over a lot of wrought stone, beneath
me, rocked back to my feet (something was sprained too) and tried to look at
him, while he kept going out between steps.
Beside me in the wall was a grating about
three feet high, with the bars set askew. It was probably a drain. I fell
through. And dropped about four feet to a sloping floor.
It was pitch-black above me and there was a hand
grasping and grasping in the dark. I could hear it scrabbling
against the wall. I took a swipe overhead, and my blade
struck something moving. J
B-oaaaaaa. . .
The sound was blunted from behind the stones.
But from my side came the sharp retort of his palm as he started slapping.
I
dived forward. The slope increased, and suddenly I slid down a long way, very
fast, getting even more scraped up. I came up sharply against pipes.
Eyes
closed, I lay there, the tip of the crossbow uncomfortable under my shoulder,
the blade handle biting between the bars and my hip. Then the places that were
uncomfortable got numb.
If
you really relax with your eyes closed, the lids slowly pull open. When I
finally relaxed, light filled my eyes from the bottoms up like milk poured in
bowls.
Light? I blinked.
Gray light beyond the grating, the gray that sunlight gets when it comes
from around many comers. Only I was at least another two levels down. I lay behind the entrance
to another drain like the one I had leaped through.
Then somewhere, the roar of a bull, still echoing through these deep
stones.
I pulled myself up on the bars, elbows
smarting, shoulders bruised, and something pulled sore in the bulk of my
thigh. I gazed into the room below.
At
one time there was a floor level with the bottom of this grating, but most of
it had fallen in a long and longer time ago. Now the room was double height and
the grate was at least fifteen feet above the present floor.
Seventy, eighty meters across, the room was
round. The walls were dressed stone, or bare rock, and rose in gray toward the
far light. There were many vaulted entrances into dark tunnels.
In the center was a machine.
While
I watched it began to hum wistfully to itself and several banks of lights
glittered into a pattern, froze, glittered into another. It was a computer from
the old time (when you owned this Earth, you wraiths and memories), a few of
which chuckled and chartered throughout the source-cave. I'd had them described
to me, but this was the first I'd seen.
What had wakened me—
(and had I been asleep? And had I dreamed, remembering now
with the throbbing image clinging to the back of my eyes, Friza?)
—was the wail of the beast.
Head
down, bide bristling over the hunks of his shoulders, gemmed with water from
the ceiling, he hunched into the room, dragging the knuckles of one hand, the
other—the one I had wounded twice—hugged to his belly.
And
on three legs, a four legged animal (even one with hands) limps.
He blinked about the room,
and wailed again, his voice leaving pathos quickly and striking against rage.
He stopped the sound with a sniff, then looked around and knew that I was
there.
And I wanted very much not to be.
I
squatted now behind the grating and looked back and up and down and couldn't
see any way out. Hunt, Lo Hawk had said.
The hunter can be a pretty pathetic creature.
He
swung his head again, tasting the air for me, his injured hand twitching high
on his belly.
(The hunted's not
so hot either.)
The
computer whisded a few notes of one of the ancient
tunes, some chorus from Carmen.
The bull-beast glanced at
it uncomprehending.
How was I to hunt him?
I
brought the crossbow down and aimed through the grate. It wouldn't mean
anything unless I got him in the eye. And he wasn't looking in the right
direction.
I
lowered the bow and took up my blade. I brought it to my mouth and blew. Blood
bubbled from the holes. Then the note blasted and went reeling through the
room.
He raised his head and
stared at me.
Up
went the bow; I aimed through the bars, pulled the trigger-Raging forward with
horns shaking, he got bigger and bigger and bigger
through the frame of stone. I fell back while the roar covered me, closing my
eyes against the sight: his eye gushed about my shaft. He grasped the bars
behind which I crouched.
Metal
grated on stone, stone pulled from stone. And then the frame was a lot bigger
than it had been. He hurled the crumpled grate across the room to smash into
the wall and send pieces of stone rolling.
Then he reached in and grabbed me, legs and
waist, in his fist, and I was being waved high in the air over his bellowing
face (left side blind and bloody) and the room arching under me and my head
flung from shoulder to shoulder and trying to point the crossbow down—one shaft
broke on the stone by his hoof a long way below. Another struck awfully close
to the shaft that Lo Hawk had shot into his side. Waiting for a wall of stone
to come up and jelly my head, I fumbled .my last arrow into the slot.
His
cheek was sheeted with blood. The last shot—and suddenly more
blood. The shaft struck and totally disappeared in the blind well of
bone and lymph. I saw the other eye cloud as though someone had overblown the
lens with powdered lime.
He dropped me.
Didn't throw me; just dropped. I grabbed the
hair on his wrist. It slipped through my hands, and I slid down his forearms
to the crook of his elbow.
Then
his arm began to fall. Slowly I turned upside down. The back of his hand hit
the floor, and his hind feet were clacking around on the stone.
He snorted, and I began to slide back down
his forearm toward his hand, slowing myself by clutching at the bristles with feet
and hands. I rolled clear of his palm and staggered away from him.
The thing in my thigh that
was sprained throbbed.
I stepped backward and
couldn't step any more.
He
swayed over me, shook his head, splattering me with his ruined eye. And he was
grand. And he was still
strong, dying above me. And
he was huge. Furious, I swayed with him in my fury,
my fists clutched against my hips, tongue stifled in my mouth.
He
was great and he was handsome and he still stood
there defying me while dying, scoffing at my bruises. Damn you, beast who would
be greater than—
One arm buckled, a hindleg
now, and he collapsed away from me, crashing.
Something in the fistful of darkness that were his nostrils thundered and roared—but softer, and
softer. His ribs rose to furrow his side, fell to rise again; I took up the bow
and limped to the bloody tears of his lips, fitted one final shaft. It followed
the other two into his brain.
His
hands jerked three feet, then fell in fists, (Boom! Boom!) relaxing now.
When
he was still, I went and sat on the base of the computer and leaned against the
metal casing. Somewhere inside it was clicking.
I hurt. Lots.
Breathing
was no fun any more. And I had, somewhen
during all this, bitten the inside of my cheek. And when I do that, it gets me
so mad I could cry.
I closed my eyes.
"That
was very impressive," someone said close to my right ear. "1 would love to see you work with a muleta. Olel Olel
First the veronica,
then the paso doble!"
I opened my eyes.
"Not that I didn't
enjoy your less sophisticated art."
I
turned my head. There was a small speaker by my left ear. The computer went on
soothingly:
"But
you are a dreadfully unsophisticated lot. All of you. Young, but tres charmant. Well, you've fought through this far. Is there anything you'd like to
ask me?"
"Yeah,"
I said. Then I breathed for a while. "How do I get out of here?"
There were a lot of archways in the wall, a lot of choices.
"That
is a problem. Let me see." The lights above me flickered over my lap, the
backs of my hands. "Now, of course, had we met before you entered, I could
have waved out a piece of computer tape and you would have taken the end and I
would have unwound it after you as you made your way into the heart to face
your fate. But instead, you have arrived here and found me waiting. What do you
desire, hero?"
"I want to go home," I said.
The computer went tsk-tsk-tsk. "Other than that."
"You really want to know?"
"I'm nodding sympathetically," it
said.
"I want Friza.
But she's dead."
"Who was Friza?"
I
thought. I tried to say something. With the exhaustion, all that came was a
catch in my throat that might have sounded like a sob.
"Oh."
After a moment, gently: "You've come into the wrong maze, you know."
"I have? Then what are you doing
here?"
"I
was set here a long time ago by people who never dreamed that you would come.
Psychic Harmony Entanglements and Deranged Response Association,
that was my department. And you've come down here hunting through my
memories for your lost girl."
Yes,
I may have just been talking to myself. I was very tired.
"How do you like it up there?"
PHAEDRA asked. "Where?"
"Up
there on the surface. I can remember back when there were humans. They made me.
Then they all went away, leaving us alone down here. And now you've come to
take their place. It must be rather difficult, walking through their hills,
their jungles, battling the mutated shadows of their flora and fauna, haunted
by their million year old fantasies."
"We try," I said.
"You're basically not equipped for
it," PHAEDRA went on. "But I suppose you have to exhaust the old
mazes before you can move into the new ones. It's hard."
"If
it means fighting off those things—" I jutted my chin toward the carcass
on the stone. "Yeah, it is."
"Well,
it's been fun. I miss the revueltas, the
maidens leaping over the horns and spinning in the air to land on the sweating
back, then vaulting to the sands! Mankind had style, babyl
You may get it yet, but right now your charm is a very
young thing."
"Where did they go, PHAEDRA?"
"Where
your Friza went, I suppose." Something musical
was happening behind my head within the metal. "But you aren't human and
you don't appreciate their rules. You shouldn't try. Down here we try to follow
what you're doing for a few generations, and questions get answered we would
never have even thought of asking. On the other hand, we sit waiting out centuries
for what would seem like the most obvious and basic bits of information about
you, like who you are, where you're from and what you're doing here. Has it
occurred to you that you might get her back?"
"Friza?" I sat up. "Where?
How?" La Dire's cryptic
statements came back.
"You're
in the wrong maze," PHAEDRA repeated. "And I'm the wrong girl to get
you into the right one. Kid Death along for a little while and maybe you can
get around him enough to put your foot in the door, finger in the pie, your two
cents in, as it were."
I
leaned forward on my knees. "PHAEDRA, you baffle me."
"Scoot," PHAEDRA said. "Which way?"
"Again. You've asked the wrong girl. Wish I could help. But I don't know. But
you'd better get started quickly. When the sim goes
down and the tide goes out, this place gets dark, and the gillies
and ghosties gather 'round, shouting."
I
heaved to my feet and looked at the various doorways. Maybe a
little logic? The bull-beast had come from the doorway over there. So
that's the one I went in.
The
long, long dark echoed with my breath and falling water. I tripped over the
first stairway. Got up and started climbing. Bruised my shoulder on the
landing, groped around and finally realized I had gotten off into a much
smaller passage that didn't seem like
it was going anywhere.
I
took up my machete and blew out the last of the blood. The tune now winding
with me lay notes over the stone like mica flakes that would do till light
came.
Stubbed
my toe.
Hopped, cursed, then
started walking again alone with the lovely, lovely sounds. "Hey-"
"—Lobey, is—"
"—is
that you?" Young voices came from behind stone. "Yes! Of course it's
me!" I turned to the wall and put my hands against the rock. "We
snuck back—" "—to watch and Lo Hawk—"
"—he
told us to go down into the cave and find you—" "—cause he thought
you might be lost." I pushed my machete back into my scabbard. "Fine. Because I am."
"Where are you?"
"Right
here on the other side of this—" I was feeling around the stones again,
above my head this time. My fingers came on an opening. It was nearly three
feet wide. "Hold on!" I hoisted myself up, clambered onto the rim,
and saw faint light at the end of a four-foot tunnel. I had to crawl through
because there wasn't room to stand.
At the other end I stuck my head out and
looked down at the upturned faces of the Bloi
triplets. They were standing in a patch of light from the roof.
2-Bloi rubbed his nose with
the back of his fist and sniffed.
"Oh," 1-Bloi
said. "You were up there."
"More
or less." I
jumped down beside them.
"DamnI"
3-Bloi said. "What happened to you?" I was speckled with bull's eye,
scratched, bruised, and limping.
"Come on," I
said. "Which way is out?"
We
were only around the corner of the great cave-in. We joined Lo Hawk on the
surface.
He stood (remember, he had a cracked rib that
nobody was going to find out about till the next day) against a tree with his
arms folded. He raised his eyebrows to ask me the question he was waiting with.
"Yeah," I said.
"I killed it. Big deal." I was sort of
tired.
Lo
Hawk shooed the kids ahead of us back to the village. As we tromped through-the
long weeds, suddenly we heard stems crash down among themselves.
I almost sat down right
there.
It
was only a boar. His ear could have brushed my elbow.
That's all.
"Come on." Lo
Hawk grinned, raising his crossbow.
We
didn't say anything else until after we had caught and killed the pig. Lo
Hawk's powered shaft stunned it, but I had to hack it nearly in half before it
would admit it was dead. After el toro? Easy. Bloody to the shoulders, we trudged back
finally, through the thoms,
the hot evening.
The
head of the boar weighed fifty pounds. Lo Hawk lugged it on his back. We'd cut
off all four hams, knotted them together, and I carried two on each shoulder,
which was another two hundred and seventy pounds. The only way we could have
gotten the whole thing back was to have had Easy along. We'd nearly reached the
village when he said, "La Dire noticed that business with Friza and the animals. She's seen other things about you
and others in the village."
"Huh? Me?" I asked. "What
about me?"
"About
you, Friza, and Dorik the kage-keeper."
"But
that's silly." I'd been walking behind him. Now I drew abreast. He glanced
across the tusk. "You were all born the same year."
"But we're
all—different."
Lo
Hawk squinted ahead, then looked down. Then he looked
at the river. He didn't look at me.
"I can't do anything
like the animals or the pebble."
"You can do other
things. Le Dorik can do still others."
He
still wasn't looking at me. The sun was lowering behind copper crested hills.
The river was brown. He was silent. As clouds ran the sky, I dropped behind
again, placed the meat beside me, and fell on my knees to wash in the silted water.
Back
at the village I told Carol if she'd dress the hams she could have half my
share. "Sure," but she was dawdling over a bird's nest she'd found. "In a minute."
"And hurry up,
huh?"
"All
right. All right. Where are you in such a rush to?"
"Look,
I will polish the tusks for you and make a spearhead for the kid or something
if you will just
keep off my back!"
"Well, I—look, it's
not your kid anyway. It's—"
But
I was sprinting toward the trees. I guess I must have still been upset. My legs
sprint pretty fast.
It
was dark when I reached the kage. There was no sound
from behind the fence. Once something blundered against the
wire, whined. Sparks and a quick shadow. I
don't know which side it came from. No movement from Le Dorik's
shack. Maybe Dorik was staying inside the kage on some project. Sometimes they mated in there, even
gave birth. Sometimes the offspring were functional. The Bloi
triplets had been bom in the kage.
They didn't have too much neck and their arms were long, but they were quick,
bright ten-year-olds now. And 2-Bloi and 3-Bloi are
almost as dexterous with their feet as I am. I'd even given Lo 3-Bloi a couple
of lessons on my blade, but being a child he preferred to pick fruit with his
brothers.
After
an hour in the dark, thinking about what went into the kage,
what came out, I went back to the village, curled up
on the haystack behind the smithy and listened to the hum from the power-shack
until it put me to sleep.
At
dawn I unraveled, rubbed night's grit out of my eyes, and went to the corral.
Easy and Little Jon got there a few minutes after. "Need any help with the
goats this morning?"
Little
Jon put his tongue in his cheek. "Just a second," he said and went
off into the comer.
Easy shuffled
uncomfortably.
Little
Jon came back. "Yeah," he said. "Sure we need help." Then
he grinned. And Easy, seeing his grin, grinned too.
Surprise! Surprise, little ball of fear
inside me! They're smiling! Easy hoisted up the first bar of the wooden gate, and the goats bleated forward and put their chins over
the second rung. Surprise!
"Sure," Easy said. "Of course
we need you. Glad to have you back!" He cuffed the back of my head and I
swiped at his hip and missed. Little Jon pulled out the other rung, and we
chased the goats across the square, out along the road, and then up the meadow.
Just like before. No, not just.
Easy
said it first, when the first warmth pried under the dawn chill. "It's not
just like before, Lobey. You've lost something."
I struck a dew shower from low willow fronds
and wet my face and shoulders. "My appetite," I said. "And maybe a couple of pounds."
"It
isn't your appetite," Little Jon said, coming back from a tree stump.
"It's something different."
"Different?"
I repeated "Say, Easy, Little Jon, how am I different?"
"Huh?"
Little Jon asked. He flung a stick at a goat
to get its attention. Missed. I picked up a small
stone that happened underfoot. Hit it. The goat turned blue eyes on me and
galumphed over to see why, got interested in something else halfway over and
tried to eat it. "You got big feet," Little Jon said.
"Naw. Not that," I said. "La Dire has
noticed something different about me that's important;
something different about me the same way there was about. . . Friza."
"You make music,"
Easy said.
I
looked at the perforated blade. "Naw," I
said. "I don't think it's that. I could teach you to play. That's another
sort of being different than she's looking for. I think."
Late
that afternoon we brought the goats back. Easy invited me
to eat and I got some of my ham and we attacked Little Jon's cache of fruit.
"You want to cook?"
"Naw,"
I said.
So Easy walked down to the comer of the
power-shack and called toward the square, "Hey, who wants to cook dinner
for three hard-working gentlemen who can supply food, entertainment, bright
conversation— No, you cooked dinner for me once before. Now don't push, girls! Not you either. Whoever taught you how to season? Uh-uh, I remember
you, Strychnine Lizzy. O.K. Yeah,
you. Come on."
He
came back with a cute, bald girl. I'd seen her around but she'd just come to
the village. I'd never talked to her and I didn't know her name. "This is
Little Jon, Lobey, and I'm Easy. What's your name again?"
"Call me Nativia."
No, I'd never talked to her before. A shame
that situation had gone on for twenty-three years. Her voice didn't come from
her larynx. I don't think she had one. The sound began a whole lot further down
and whispered out from a cave with bells.
"You
can call me anything you like," I said,
"as much as you want."
She laughed, and it sounded among the bells.
"Where's the food and let's find a fireplace."
We
found a circle of rocks down by the stream. We were going to get cookery from
the compound but Nativia had a large skillet of her
own so all we had to borrow were cinnamon and salt.
"Come
on," Little Jon said when he came back from the water's edge. "Lobey, you gotta be entertaining.
Well converse."
"Now, hey—" Then I said to myself
"aw, so what," lay down on my back and began to play my machete. She
liked that because she kept smiling at me as she worked.
"Don't you got no children?" Easy asked.
Nativia was greasing the skillet with a lump of ham
fat.
"One in the kage down at Live Briar. Two with a man in Ko"
"You travel a lot,
yeah?" Little Jon asked.
I
played a slower tune that came from far away, and she smiled at me as she
dumped diced meat from a palm frond into the pan. Fat danced on the hot metal.
"I
travel." The smile and the wind and the mockery in her voice were
delightful.
"You
should find a man who travels too," Easy suggested. He has a lot of homey
type advice for everybody. Gets on my nerves sometimes.
Nativia shrugged. "Did once.
We could never agree on what direction to go in. It's his kid in the kage. Guy's name was Lo
Angel. A beautiful man. He could just never make up
his mind where he wanted to go. And when he did, it was sever where I wanted.
No . . ." She pushed the browning meat across the crackling bottom. 1 like good, stable, settled men who'll be there when I get
back."
I
began to play an old hymn—BiU Bailey Won't You Please Come Home. I'd learned it from a 45 when I was a kid. NatJvia knew it too because she laughed in the middle of
slicing a peach.
That's
me," she said. "Bill La Bailey. That's the
nickname Lo Angel gave me."
She
formed the meat into a ring around the edge of the pan. The nuts and vegetables
went in now with a little salt water and the cover clanked on.
"How far have you traveled?" I asked,
laying my knife on my stomach and stretching. Overhead, behind maple leaves,
the sky was injured in the west with sunset, shadowed by east and night.
"I'm going to travel soon. I want to know where there is to go."
She
pushed the fruit onto one end of the frond. "I once went as far as the
City. And I've even been underground to explore the source-cave."
Easy and Little Jon got very quiet.
"That's
some traveling," I said. "La Dire says I have to travel because I'm
different."
Nativia nodded. "That's why Lo Angel was
traveling," she said, pushing back the lid again. Pungent steam ballooned
and dispersed. My mouth got wet. "Most of the ones moving were different.
He always said I was different too, but he would never tell me how." She
pushed the vegetables into a ring against the meat and filled the center with
cut fruit. Cinnamon now over the whole thing. Some of the powdered spice caught the flame that tongued the pan's rim and
sparks bloomed. On went the cover.
"Yeah," I said. "La Dire won't
tell me either."
Nativia looked surprised. "You mean you don't
know?"
I shook my head.
"Oh, but you can—" She stopped.
"La Dire is one of this town's elders, isn't she?" "That's
right."
"Maybe she's got a reason not to tell
you. I talked to her Just a little while the other day; she's a woman of great
wisdom."
"Yeah," I said, rolling on my side.
"Come on, if you know, tell me."
Nativia looked confused. "Well, first you tell
me. I mean what did La Dire say?"
"She
said I would have to go on a journey, to kill whatever killed Friza."
"Friza?"
"Friza was
different, too." I began to tell her the story. A minute into it, Easy burped, pounded his chest and complained about being
hungry. He obviously didn't like the subject. Little Jon had to get up and when
he wandered off into the bushes, Easy went after him, grunting, "Call me
when it's finished. Dinner, I mean."
But Nativia
listened closely and then asked some questions about Friza's
death. When I told her about having to take a trip with Le Dorik,
she nodded. "Well, it makes a lot more sense now."
"It does?"
She nodded again. "Hey, you guys, dinner's . . . ready?" "Then can't you tell me ... P"
She
shook her head. "You wouldn't understand. I've done a lot more traveling
than you. It's just that a lot of different people have died recendy, like Friza died. Two
down at
Live
Briar. And I've heard of three more in the past year. Something is going to
have to be done. It might as well get started here" She pushed the cover
off the pan again: more steam.
Easy
and Litde Jon, who had been walking back up the
stream, began to run.
"Elvis
Presley!" Little Jon breathed. "Does that smell good!"
He hunkered down by the fire, dribbling.
Easy's adenoids began to ratde.
When a cat does it, it's purring.
I
wanted to ask more, but I didn't want to annoy Easy and Little Jon; I guess I
had acted bad with them, and they were pretty nice about it as long as I let it
he.
A
frond full of ham, vegetables, and spiced fruit made me stop thinking about
anything except what wasn't in my belly, and I learned that a good deal of my
metaphysical melancholia was hunger. Always is.
More conversation, more food, more entertainment. We went to sleep right there by the stream,
stretched on the ferns. Toward midnight when it got chilly we rolled into a
pile. About an hour before dawn I woke.
I
pulled my head from Easy's armpit (and Nativia's bald head moved immediately to take its place)
and stood up in the star dark. Little Jon's head gleamed at my feet. So did my
blade. He was using it for a pillow. I slipped it gently from under his cheek.
He snorted, scratched himself, was still. I started
back through the trees in the direction of the kage.
Once I looked up at the branches, at the
wires that ran from the power-shack to the fence. The black lines overhead, or the sound of the stream, or memory took me.
Halfway, I started playing. Someone began to whistle along with me. I stopped.
The whisde didn't.
Where
is he then? In a song?
Jean
Genet/The Screens
God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son.' Abe
said, 'God, you must be puttin me onT
Bob Dt/Zan/Highway 61
Revisited
hove is
something which dies and when dead it rots and becomes soil for a new love . .
. Thus in reality there is no death in love.
Par Lagerkvist/The Dwarf
"Le Dorik?" I said. "Dorik?"
"Hi," came a voice from the dark. "Lobey?"
"Lo Lobey," I said. "Where aire you?"
"Just
inside the kage."
"Oh. What's the
smell?"
"Whitey,"
Dorik said. "Easy's
brother. He died. I'm digging a grave. You remember Easy's
brother—"
"I
remember." I said. "I saw him by the fence yesterday. He looked
pretty sick."
"That land never last
long. Come in and help me dig."
"The fence . .."
"It's off. Climb over."
"I don't like to go in the kage," I said.
"You
never used to mind sneaking in here when we were kids. Come on, I've got to
move this rock. Lend a foot."
"That
was when we were kids," I said. "We did a lot of things when we were
kids we don't have to do now. It's your job. You dig."
"Friza used to come in here and help me, tell me all about
you.
"Friza used to .. ." Then I said, Tell?" "Well, some of us
could understand her." "Yeah," I said. "Some of us
could."
I
grabbed the wire mesh near the post but didn't start climbing.
"Actually," Dorik
said, "I was always sort of sad you never came around. We used to have
fun. I'm glad Friza didn't feel the way you did. We
used to—"
"—to do a lot of things, Dorik. Yeah, I know. Look, nobody ever bothered to
tell me you weren't a girl till I was fourteen, Dorik.
If I hurt you, I'm sorry."
"You
did. But I'm not. Nobody ever did get around to telling Friza
I wasn't a boy. Which I'm sort of glad of. I don't
think she would have taken it the same way you did, even so."
"She
came here a lot?"
"All
the time she wasn't with you."
I
sprang over the wire, swung over the top, and dropped to the other side.
"Where's that damn rock you're trying to move?"
"Here-"
"Don't
touch me," I said. "Just show me."
"Here,"
Dorik repeated in the darkness.
I grabbed the edge of the stone, shelved in
the dirt. Roots broke, dirt whispered down, and I rolled the stone out.
"How's the ldd, by the way?" I asked.
I
had to. And damn, Dorik, why were the next words the
ones I was hurting with hoping I wouldn't hear?
There
was a shovel by the post. I jammed it into the grave. Damn Le Dorik.
"Mine
and Friza's," Dorik
went on after a moment, "will probably be up for review by the doctors in
another year. Needs a lot of special training, but she's
pretty functional.
Probably
will never have a La, but at least she won't have to be in here."
"That's
not the kid I meant." The shovel clanged on another rock.
"You're
not asking about the one that's all mine." There were two or three pieces
of ice in that sentence. Dorik flicked them at me,
much on purpose. "You mean yours and mine." As if
you didn't know, you androgynous bastard. "He's in here for life,
but he's happy. Want to go see him—"
"No."
Three more shovelsful of dirt.
"Let's bury Whitey and get out of here."
"Where
we going?"
"La
Dire, she said you and me have to take a trip together to destroy what killed Friza."
"Oh,"
Dorik said. "Yes." Dorik
went over to the fence, bent down. "Help me."
We
picked up the bloated, rubbery corpse and carried it to the hole. It rolled
over the edge, thumping.
"You
were supposed to wait till I came for you," Dorik
said.
"Yeah. But I can't wait. I want to go now." "If I'm going with you,
you're waiting." "Why?"
"Look, Lobey,"
Dorik said, "I'm kage-keeper
and I got a kage to keep."
"I don't care if everything in that kage mildews and rots. I want to get out and get
going!"
"I've got to train a new keeper, check
over the education facilities, make sure of the food
inventories and special diets, last minute shelter maintenance—"
"Damn it, Dorik,
come on."
"Lobey, I've
got three kids in here. One's yours, one belongs to a girl you loved. And
one's all mine. Two of them, if they're loved and taken care of and given a lot
of time and patience may someday come out."
"Two of them, yeah?" My breath suddenly got lost in my chest and
didn't seem to be doing any good. "But not mine. I'm going."
"Lobey!"
I stopped, straddling the
fence.
"Look,
Lobey, this is the real world you're living in. It's
come from something; it's going to something: it's changing. But it's got right
and wrong, a way to behave and a way not to. You never wanted to accept that,
even when you were a kid,
but until you do, you won't be very happy."
"You're talking about
me when I was fourteen," I said.
"I'm talking about you
now. Friza told me a lot—"
I jumped over the fence and
started through the trees.
"Lobey!"
"What?"
I kept walking. "You're scared of me." "No."
Til show you-"
"You're
pretty good at showing people things in the dark, aren't you? That's how you're
different, huh?" I called over my shoulder.
I crossed the stream and started up the
rocks, mad as all Elvis. I didn't go toward the meadow, but around toward the
steeper places, slapping leaves and flipping twigs as I barreled through the
dark. Then I heard somebody come on tlirough the
shadow, whistling.
There
are none here except madmen; and few there are who know this world, and who
know that he who tries to act in the ways of others never does anything, because
men never have the same opinions. These do not know that he who is thought wise
by day will never be held crazy by night.
Niccolo MachiaveUl/Letter to Francesco Vittori
i ]
Experience reveals to him in every object, in
every event, the presence of something else.
Jean-Paul Sartre/Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr
I stopped. The sound of dry leaves under
feet, ferns by a shoulder, approached me from behind, stopped. The hills* rim
had begun to gray.
"Lobey?" I
"You
changed your mind about coming?" i
A
sigh.
"Yes."
"Come on, then." We started
walking. "Why?"
"Something happened."
Dorik didn't say what. I didn't ask.
"Dorik," I said a httle later, "I feel something toward you very close
to hate. It's as close to hate as what I felt for Friza
was close to love."
"Neither's close enough to worry about now. You're too
self-centered, Lobey. I hope you grow up."
"And
you're going to show me how?" I asked. "In the
dark?"
"I'm showing you now." 1
Morning,
while we walked, leaked up vermilion. WitM
light, my eyes grew surprisingly heavy, stones in
my head!
"You've been working all night," I volunteered.
"I've only
had a
few hours sleep myself. Why don't we lie down for a low
hours?"
"Wait till it gets light enough so you
know I'm here." Which was an odd answer. Dorik was a grayed silhouette heside
me now.
When
there was enough red in the east and the rest of the sky was at least blue, I
started looking for a place to fall out. I was exhausted and every time I
turned to look at the sun, the world swam with tears of fatigue.
"Here,"
Dorik said. We'd reached a small stone hollow by the
cliff's base. I dropped into it, Dorik too. We lay
with the blade between us. I remember a moment of gold light nlong the arm and back curved toward me before I slept.
I touched the hand touching
my face, held it still enough to open
my eyes under it. Lids snapped back. "Dorik—?" Nativia
stared down at me.
My
fingers intertwined with hers, hammocked by her webs.
She looked frightened, and her breath through spread lips stopped my own.
"Easy!" she called up the slope. "Lfttle
Jon! Here he is!"
I sat up. "Where'd Dorik go ... ?"
Easy came loping into sight
and Little Jon ran after.
"La
Dire," Easy said. "La Dire wants to see you . . . before you go. She
and Lo Hawk have to talk to you."
"Hey,
did anybody see Le Dorik around here? Odd thing to run off—"
Then
I saw this expression cracking through Little Jon's miniature features like
faults in black rock. "Le Dorik's dead,"
Little Jon said; "that's what they wanted to tell you."
"Huh?"
"Before
sunup, Just inside the kage,"
Easy said. "He was lying by the grave for my brother, Whitey. Remember my
brother—"
"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I
helped dig it— Before sunup? That's impossible. The
sun was up when we went to sleep, right here." Then I said,
"Dead?"
Little
Jon nodded. "Like Friza. The
same way. That's what La Dire said."
I
stood up, holding my blade tight. "But that's impossible!" Somebody
saying, Watt
till it gets light enough so you'll know I'm here. "Le Dorik was with me after sunrise.
That's when we lay down here to sleep."
"You
slept with Le Dorik after Le Dorik was dead?" Nativia
asked, wonderingly.
Bewildered,
I returned to the village. La Dire and Lo Hawk met me at the source-cave. We
spoke together a bit; I watched them thinking deeply about things I didn't understand,
about my bewilderment.
"You
are a good hunter, Lo Lobey," Lo Hawk said at
last, "and though a bit outsized below the waist, a fair specimen of a
man. You have much danger ahead of you; I've taught you much. Remember it when
you wander by the rim of night or the edge of morning." Apparency Le Dorik's death had
convinced him there was something to La Dire's suppositions,
though I understood neither side of the argument nor the bridge between. They
didn't enlighten me. "Use what I have taught you to get where you are
going," Lo Hawk went on, "to survive your stay, and make your way
back."
"You
are different." This is what La Dire said. "You have seen it is
dangerous to be so. It is also very important. I have tried to instruct you in
a view of the world large enough to encompass the deeds you will do as well as
their significance. You have learned much, Lo Lobey.
Use what I have taught you too."
With
no idea where I was going, I turned and staggered away, still dazed by Dorik's death before sunrise. Apparendy
the Bloi triplets had been up all night fishing for
blind-crabs in the mouth of the source-cave stream. They'd come back while it
was still dark, swinging their hand-beams and joking as they walked up from the
river—Dorik behind the wire in a net of shadow,
circled with their lights, face down at the grave's edgel
It must have been just moments after I first left.
I
wheeled through the brambles, heading toward the noon, with one thought
clearing, as figures on a stream bed clear when you brush back the bubbles a
moment: if Le Dorik, dead, had walked with me a while
("I'm showing you now, Lobey."), walked
through dawn and gorse, curled on a stone under new sunlight, then Friza too could travel with me. If I could find what killed
those of us who were different, but whose difference gave us a reality beyond
dying—
A slow song now on my blade to mourn Dorik;
and the beat of my feet on earth in journey. After a few hours of such mourning, the heat
had polished me with sweat as in some funeral dance.
While day leaned over the hills I passed the
first red flowers, blossoms big as my face, like blood bubbles nested in
thorns, often resting on the bare rock. No good to stop here. Carnivorous.
I
squatted on a broken seat of granite in the yellowing afternoon. A snail the
size of my curled forefinger doffed his eyes at a puddle big as my palm. Half
an hour later, climbing down a canyon wall when yellow had died under violet I
saw a tear in the rock: another opening into the source-cave. I decided on nighting it there, and ducked in.
Still
smells of humans and death. Which is good. Dangerous nnimals avoid it. I stalked inside, padding on all fours.
Loose earth became moss, became cement underfoot. Outside, night, sonic lace of
crickets and whining wasps I would not make on my knife,
was well into black development.
Soon I touched a metal track, turned, and
followed it with my hands . . . over a place where dirt had fallen, across a
scattering of twigs and leaves, then down a long slope. I was about to stop,
roll against the cave wall where it was drier, and sleep, when the track split.
I stood up.
When I shrilled on my blade, a long echo came
from the right: endless passage there. But only a stubby resonance from the
left: some sort of chamber. I walked left. My hip brushed a door jamb.
Then
a room glowed suddenly before me. The sensor circuits were still sensitive.
Grilled walls, blue glass desk, brass light fixtures, cabinets, and a
television screen set in the wall. Squinting in the new light I walked over.
When they still work, the colors are nice to watch: they make patterns and the
patterns make music in me- Several people who had gone exploring the
source-cave had told me about them (night fire and freakishly interested
children knotted around the flame and the adventurer) and I'd gone to see one
in a well explored arm two years back. Which is how I learned
about the music.
Color
television is certainly a lot more fun than this terribly risky genetic method
of reproduction we've taken over. Ah well. It's a lovely world.
I
sat on the desk and tried knobs till one clicked. The screen grayed at me,
flickered, streamed with colors.
There
was static, so I found the volume nob and turned it
down ... so I could hear the music in
colors. Just as I raised my blade to my mouth, something happened.
Laughter.
First
I thought it was melody. But it was a voice laughing. And on
the screen, in chaotic shimmerings, a face. It
wasn't a picture of a face. It was as if I was just looking at the particular
dots of melody-hue that formed the face, ignoring the rest. I would have seen
those features on any visual riot: Friza's face.
The voice was someone else's.
Friza dissolved. Another face replaced hers: Dorik's. The strange laughter again.
Suddenly there was Friza on one side of the screen,
and Dorik on the ofher. Centered: the boy who was laughing at me. The picture
cleared, filled, and I lost the rest of the room. Behind him, crumbled streets,
beams jutting from the wrecks of walls, weeds writhing; and all lit with
flickering green, the sun white on the reticulated sky. On a lamp-post behind him
perched a creature with fins and white gills, scraping one red foot on the
rust. On the curb was a hydrant laced with light and verdigris.
The
boy, a redhead—redder than the Blois, redder than blood glutted
blossoms—laughed with downcast eyes. His lashes were gold. Transparent skin
caught up the green and fluoresced with it; but I knew that under normal light
he would have been as pale as Whitey dying.
"Lobey," in the laughter and his hps
uncurtained small teeth—many too many of them. Like
the shark's mouth, maybe, I'd seen in La Dire's book,
rank on rank of ivory needles. "Lobey, how you gonna find me, huh?"
"What
. . . ?" and expected the illusion to end with my voice.
But
somewhere that naked, laughing boy still stood with one foot in the gutter
filled with waving weeds. Only Friza and Dorik were gone.
"Where are you?"
He
looked up and his eyes had no whites, only glittering gold and brown. I'd seen
a few like that before, eyes. Unnerving, still, to look at a dog's eyes in a
human face. "My mother called me Bonny William. Now they all call me Kid
Death." He sat on the curb, hanging his hands over his knees. "You're
gonna find me, Lobey, kfll me like I killed Friza and Dorik?"
"You? You, Lo Bonny William-"
"Not
Lo. Kid Death. Not Lo Kid."
"You
killed them? But . . . why?" Despair unvoiced my words to whispers.
"Because they were different. And I am more different than any of you. You scare me, and when I'm frightened"— laughing again—"I
kill." He blinked. "You're not looking for me, you know. I'm
looking for you."
"What do you
mean?"
He
shook shocked crimson from his white brow. "I'm bringing you down here to
me. If I didn't want you, you'd never find me. Because I do want you, there's
no way you can avoid me. I can see through the eyes of anyone of this world, on
any world where our ancestors have ever been: so I know a lot about many things
I've never touched or smelled. You've started out not knowing where I am and
running toward me. You'll end, Lo Lobey"—he
raised his head—"fleeing my green home, scrabbling on the sand like a
blind goat trying to keep footing at a chimney edge—"
"—how do you know
about—"
"—you'll
fall and break your neck." He shook a finger at me, clawed like Little
Jon's. "Come to me, Lo Lobey." "If I
find you, will you give me back Friza?"
"I've already given you back Le Dorik for a
little while." "Can
you give me back Friza?"
"Everything
I ldll I keep. In my own private kage." His moist laughter.
Water in a cold pipe, I think. "Kid
Death?" "What?"
"Where are you?"
The sound snagged on ivory
needles.
"Where are you from,
Kid Death? Where are you going?"
The long fingers raveled like linen rope
snaring gold coins. He pushed weeds away from the gutter grill with his foot.
"I broiled away childhood in the sands of an equatorial desert kage with no keeper to love me. Like you, lively in your
jungle, I was haunted by the memories of those who homed under this sun before
our parents' parents came, took on these bodies, loves, and fears. Most of
those around me in the kage died of thirst. At first
I saved some of my fellows, bringing water to them the way Friza
threw the stone—oh yes, I saw that too. I did that for a while. Then for a
while I killed whoever was put in the kage with me,
and took the water directly from their bodies. I would go to the fence and
stare across the dunes to the palms at the oasis where our tribe worked. I
never thought to leave the kage, back then, because
like mirages on the glistering I saw through all the worlds' eyes—I saw what
you and Friza and Dorik saw,, as I see what goes all over this arm of the galaxy. When
what I saw frightened me, I closed the eyes seeing. That's what happened to Friza and Dorik. When I am still
curious about what's going on through those eyes, more curious than frightened,
I open them again. That's what happened with Dorik."
"You're strong,"
I said.
"That's
where I come from, the desert, where death shifts in the hot gritty bones of
the Earth. And now? I am going further and further
into the sea." Raising his eyes now, his red hair floated back in the
shivering green.
"Kid
Death," I called again; he was much further away. "Why were you in
the kage? You look more functional than half the Lo
and La of my village."
Kid
Death turned his head and looked at me from the corner of his eyes. He mocked.
"Functional? To be bora on a
desert, a white-skinned redhead with gills?"
The spreading, drinking, miniature mouth of
the shark washed away. I blinked. I couldn't think of anything else so I took
papers out of the filing cabinet, spread them under the desk and lay down,
tired and bewildered.
I
remember I picked up one page and spelled my way through a paragraph. La Dire
had taught me enough to read record labels, when for a while I had foraged
about the village archives:
Evacuate
upper levels with all due haste. Alarm system will indicate radiation at
standard levels. Deeper detection devices are located ...
Most
of the words were beyond me. I halved the paper with toes and quartered it with
fingers, let the pieces fall on my stomach before I picked up my machete to
play myself to sleep.
What,
then, is noble abstraction? It is taking first the essential elements of the
thing to be represented, then the rest in the order of importance (so that
wherever we pause we shall always have obtained more than we leave behind) and
using any expedient to impress what we want upon the mind without caring about
the mere literal accuracy of such expedient.
John Ruskin/The Stones of Venice
A poem is a machine for making choices.
John
Ciardi/How Does
a Poem Mean
Hours after—I figure it could have been two,
it could have been twelve—I rolled from under the desk and came up grunting,
yawning, scratching. When I stepped into the hall the
light faded.
I
didn't go back the way I'd come but headed forward again. There are lots of
breakthroughs into the upper levels. I go till I see morning and climb out.
About half an hour later I see a three foot stretch of it (morning) in the
ceiling, behind black leaves, and leap for it. Good jumping power in those
hams.
I
scrambled out on crumbling ground and tame brambles, tripped on a vine, but all
in all did pretty well. Which is to avoid saying "on the
whole." Outside was cooL
misty. Fifty yards by, the lapping edge of a lake flashed. I walked through the
tangle to the clear beach. Chunked rock became gravel, became sand. It was a
big lake. Down one arm of the beach things faded into reeds and swamp and
things. Across, there was a gorse covered plain. I had
no idea where I was. But I didn't want to be in a swamp, so I walked up the other way.
Thrash,
thrash, snap!
I stopped.
Thrashl Just inside the jungle something churned and fought. The fighting was at
the point where one opponent was near exhausted: activity came in momentary
spurts. (HissssssI) Curiosity, hunger, devilment sent
me forward with high machete. I crept up a slope of rock, looked over into a
glade.
Attacked
by flowers, a dragon was dying. The blossoms jeweled his scales, thorns tangled
his legs. As I watched, he tried again to tear them off with his teeth, but
they scurried back, raking briars across his hide, or whipped them at his
runny, yellow eyes.
The
lizard (twice as big as Easy and man-branded on his left hinder haunch with a
crusty cross) was trying to protect his external gill/lung arrangement that
fluttered along his neck. The plants had nearly immobilized him, but when a
bloom advanced to tear away his breath, he scraped and flailed with one free
claw. He mauled a good many of the blossoms and their petals scattered the torn
earth.
The
cross told me he wouldn't hurt me (even crazed, the lizard once used to man
becomes pathetic, seldom harmful) so I jumped down from the rock.
A
blossom creeping to attack emptied an air-bladder inches from my foot, "Sssssss ..." in surprise.
I
hacked it, and nervous ooze (nervous in the sense that its nerves are composed
of the stuff) belched greenly to the ground. Thorns flailed my legs. But I told
you about the sldn down there. I just have to watch
out for my belly and the palms of my hands; feet are fine. With my foot I
seized a creeper from the lizard's shoulder and pulled it out far
enough—stained teeth go clik-clik-clik popping from the dragon's skin where they had been gnawing—to get my
blade under, twist... and ... rip!
Nerve dribbled the dragon's hide.
Those
flowers communicate somehow (differentiy perhaps) and
strove for me, one suddenly rising on its tendrils and leaping, "Sssssss ..." I twiddled my blade in its brain.
I
shouted encouragement to the dragon, threw a brave grin. He moaned reptflianly. Lo Hawk should see me do proud his skill.
His mane brushed my arm, his teeth
crunched a flower while tendrils curled from the comers of his mouth. He chewed
a while, decided he didn't like it, spat thorns. I pried off two more: his foot
came free.
"Sssssss ..." I looked to the right.
Which
was a mistake because it was coming from the left.
Mistakes like that are a
drag. Long and prickly wrapped my ankle and tried to jerk me off my
feet. Fortunately you just can't do that. So then ft sank lots of teeth into my
calf and commenced chewing. I whirled and snatched white petals (this one an
albino) which came away gendy in my hand. Crunch, crunch, still on my calf. My sword hand was up. I brought it down but
it got caught in a net of brambles. Something scratched the back of my neck. Which ain't so tough.
Neither
is (come to think): the small of my back, under my chin, between my legs,
armpits, behind my ears—I was quickly cataloging all the tender places now.
Damn flowers move just slow enough to give you time to think.
Then
something long and hot sang by my shin. Petals snapped into the air. The plant
stopped chewing and burped nervously down my ankle.
Pinnnnng near my hand, and my hand pulled free. I staggered, hacked another
briar away. A bloated rose slithered down the dragon's leg and crawled for
cover. They communicate, yes, and the communication was fear and retreat.
The music, though! Lord,
the musicl
I whirled to look up on the rock.
Morning had gotten far enough along to rouge
the sky behind him. He flicked a final encumbering flower from the beast, "Sssssss . . . blopl" and
coiled his whip. I rubbed my calf. The dragon moaned, off key.
"Yours?" I thumbed over my shoulder at the beast
"Was." He breathed deeply and the flat, bony chest sagged with his breathing,
the ribs opening and closing like blinds. "If you come with us, he's
yours—to ride, anyway. If you don't, he's mine again."
The dragon rubbed his gills ingenuously
against my hip.
"Can you handle a
dragon whip?" the stranger asked me.
I
shrugged. "The only time I ever even saw one of these before was when some
herders got off their trail six years ago." We'd all climbed up Beryl-Face
and watched them drive the herd of lizards back through Green-glass pass. When
Lo Hawk went to talk to them, I went with him, which' is where I found out
about branding and the gentle monsters.
The
stranger grinned. "Well, it's gone and happened again. I judge we're about
twenty-five kilometers off. You want a job and a lizard to ride?"
I looked at the broken
flowers. "Yeah."
"Well,
there's your mount, and your job is to get him up here and back with the herd,
first."
"Oh."
(Now, lemme see; I remember the herders perched
behind the lumps of the beasts' shoulders with their feet sort of tucked into
the scaly armpits. My feet? And holding on to the two
white whisker type things that grew back from the gills: Gee ... Haw? Giddiapl)
We
floundered in the mud about fifteen minutes with instructions shouted down, and
I learned cuss words I hadn't ever heard from that guy. Toward the end we were
both sort of laughing. The dragon was up and on the beach now, and he had quite
unintentionally thrown me into the water-again.
"Hey,
you think I'm going to really learn how to ride that thing?"
With
one hand he was helping me up, with the other he was holding my mount by the
whiskers, with another he was recoiling his whip, and
with the fourth he just scratched his woolly head. His hair was Little Jon
color. "Don't give up. I didn't
do too much better when I started. Up you go."
Up I
went, and stayed on this time for a staggering run up and down the water's
edge. I mean it looks graceful enough from the ground. It feels like staggering. On stilts.
"You're getting the
hang of it."
"Thanks,"
I said. "Say, where is the herd; and who are you?"
He
stood ankle deep in the lake's lapping. Morning was bright enough now to gem
his chest and shoulders with drops from my splashing. He smiled and wiped his
face. "Spider," he said. "And I didn't catch your name . . .
P"
"Lo
Lobey." I rocked happily behind the scaly humps.
"Don't
say Lo to nobody herding," said Spider. "No need for it."
"Wouldn't
even have thought of it if it weren't for my village ways," I said.
"Herd's
off that way." He swung up behind me on the dragon.
Amber
haired, four handed, and slightly hump-backed, Spider was seven feet of bone
slipped into six feet of skin. Tightly. All tied in
with long, narrow muscles. He was burned red, and the red burned brown but
still glowing through. And he laughed like dry leaves crushed inside his chest.
We circled the lake silently. And, oh man, the music!
The
herd, maybe two hundred and fifty dragons moaning about (I was to learn that
this was a happy sound), milled in a dell beyond the lake.
Youth had romanticized the herders
in my
memory. They were moüey. I see why you don't go around
Lo-ing and La-ing and Le-ing herders. Two
of them—I still don't see how they managed to
stay on their dragons. But I
came on friendly.
One ldd with a real
mind: you could tell by
the way
his green eyes glittered at you,
as well
as his
whip skill, and the sure way
he handled
dragons. Only he was mute.
Was it
this that upset me and made
me think of Friza? You
have a job to do.. ..
There was
another guy who would have
made Whitey look like a total
norm. He had some glandular
business that made him smell bad
too. And he wanted to
tell me his life story
(no motor control of
the mouth
so he
sort of splattered when he got
excited).
I wish
Green-eye could have talked instead
of Stinky.
I wanted to
learn where he'd been, what
he'd seen—he knew some good songs.
Dragons get lost at night. So
you round
them up in the morning. I'd been rounded up
along with the stray animals.
At breakfast I gathered
from Stinky that I was
a replacement
for somebody who had
come to a bad, sad,
and messy
end the previous afternoon.
"Oddest people survive out
here," Spider mused. "Oddest ones don't. She looked a
lot more
normal' than you. But' she ain't here now.
Just goes to show you."
Green-eye blinked at me
from under all his black
hair, caught me watching him, and
went back to splicing his
whip.
"When are those dragon eggs gonna finish baking?" Knife asked, pawing at the fireplace
stones with gray hands.
Spider kicked at him
and the
herder scuttled away. "Wait till we all eat." But in a few
minutes he crawled back and
was rubbing against the
stones. "Warm," he muttered apologetically, when Spider started to kick him
again, "I like it warm."
"Just keep off the food."
"Where
do you take these to?" I indicated the herd. "Where do you bring them
from?"
"They
breed in the Hot Swamp, about two hundred kilometers west of here. We drive
them down this way, across the Great City and on to Branning-at-sea.
There the sterile ones are slaughtered; the eggs are removed from the females,
inseminated, then we bring the eggs back and plant them in the swamp."
"Branning-at-sea?" I asked. "What do they do with them
there?"
"Eat
most. Use others for work. It's quite a fantastic place for someone born in the
woods, I would imagine. I've been back and forth so many times it's like home.
I've got a house and a wife and three lads there, and another family back in
the Swamp."
We
ate eggs, fried lizard fat, and thick cereal, hot and filling, with plenty of
salt and chopped peppers. When I finished I began to play my blade.
That
music!
It was a whole lot of tunes at once, many the
same, but starting at different times. I had to pick one strand out and play
it. A few notes into it, I saw Spider staring at me, surprised. "Where
did you hear that?" he asked.
"Just made it up, I guess."
"Don't be silly."
"It
was just running around
my head. All confused, though."
"Play it again."
I
did. This time Spider began to whisde one of the
other melodies that went along with it so that they glittered and jumped
against each other.
When we finished he said, "You're
different, aren't you?"
"So
I've been told," I said. "Say, what's the name of that song anyway?
It's not like most of the music I know."
"It's TCodaly's Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello.'
Morning
wind shook the gorse. "The what?" I asked.
Behind us dragons moaned.
"You
got it out of my head?" Spider said questioningly. "You couldn't have
heard it before unless I was going around humming. And I can't hum a crescendo
of triple stops."
"I got it from
you?"
"That
music's been going through my mind for weeks. Heard it at a
concert last summer at Branning-at-sea, the night
before I left to take the eggs back to the swamp. Then I discovered an
LP of the piece in the music section of the ruins of the ancient library at
Haifa."
"I
learned it from you?" and suddenly all sorts of things cleared up, like
how La Dire knew I was different, like how Nativia
could tell I was different when I started playing BUI Bailey. "Music," I said. "So that's
where I get my music from." I put the blade's tip on the ground and leaned
on it
Spider shrugged.
"I
don't think I get all of it from other people," I said, frowning.
"Different?" I ran my thumb along the blade's edge and skipped my
toes over the holes.
"I'm different
too," Spider said.
"How?"
"Like this." He closed his eyes and
all his shoulders knotted.
My machete jerked from my hand, pulled from
the ground, and spun in the air. Then it fell point first to quiver in the
shank of a log near the fire. Spider opened his eyes and took a breath.
My mouth was open. So I
closed it.
Everybody else thought it
was very funny.
"And
with animals," Spider said. "How?"
"The dragons. To a certain point I can keep them calm,
keep them more or less together, and steer dangerous creatures away from
us."
"Friza," I said. "You're like Friza."
"Who's
Friza?"
I looked down at my knife. The melody which I
had mourned her with was mine. "Nobody," I said, "anymore."
That melody was mine! Then I asked, "Have you ever heard of Kid
Death?"
Spider
put down his food, brought all his hands in front of him, and tilted his head.
His long nostrils flared till they were round. I looked away from his fear. But
the others were watching me so I had to look back.
"What
about Kid Death?" Spider asked.
"I
want to find him and—" I flung my blade in the air and twirled it as
Spider had, but my hand propelled. I seized it from its fall with my foot.
"—Well, I want to find him. Tell me about him."
They laughed. It started in Spider's mouth, then was coming all sloppy from Stinky, a low hiss from
Knife, grunts and cackles from the others, ending in Green-eye's green eye, a
light that went out as he looked away. "You're going to have a hard
time," Spider said finally, "but"—he rose from the fire
—"you're headed in the right direction."
"Tell
me about him," I said again.
"There's
a time to talk about the impossible, but it's not when there's work to
do." He got up, reached into a canvas sack and tossed me a whip.
I
caught it mid-length.
"Put
your ax away," Spider said. "This sings when it flies." His lash
lisped over my head.
Everyone
went to his mount, and Spider reeled a bridle
and stirrups from the
gear sack that fitted those
humps and scales neatly, buckling around
the forelegs;
I see
why he'd
made me get the
feel of things bareback. The
semi-saddle and leg-straps make dragon riding almost
nice.
"Head them on through that way,"
he yelled,
and I
imitated the herders around me
as they
began the drive.
Dragons swarmed
in sunlight.
Oiled whips snapped and glistened over
the scales,
and the
whole world got caught
up in
the rhythmic
rocking of the beast between my
legs, trees and hills and
gorse and boulders and brambles all
taking up the tune and
movement as a crowd will begin
clapping and stomping to a
beat; the jungle, my audience, applauded
the beat
of surging
lizards.
Moaning. Which meant they were
happy.
Hissing sometimes. Which meant watch it.
Grunting and cussing and shouting. Which meant
the herders were happy too.
I learned an incredible
amount of things that morning,
lunging back and forth
between the creatures: five or
six of
them were the leaders
and the
rest followed. Keep the leaders
going in the right direction
and you
had no
problem. Dragons tend to
go right.
You get
more response if you snap
them on the back
haunches, I later learned; nerve
clusters control their rear-end
transmission that's bigger than their
brains.
One of
the lead
dragons kept on wanting to
go back
and bother an overweight female (ovarian
tumor that kept her loaded down with sterile eggs,
Spider explained to me) and
it was all we could do
to keep
them apart. I spent a
lot of
time (imitating Green-eye) scouting the edge of
the herd
to worry the creatures back together
who kept
getting curious about things in completely
irrelevant directions.
I began to learn what I
was doing
when about twenty dragons got stuck
in a
mintbog (a slushy
quicksand bog covered with huge bushes of windy mint, right? Mintbog). Spider, by himself, drove the rest of the herd around in
a circle, three whips popping, while the other five of us went sloshing back
and forth through the mint to drive the dragons out before they got stuck.
"There
shouldn't be too many more of those," Spider shouted when we were charging
along again. "Well be crossing the City in a little while if we're not
too far off course. I've been swinging us westward."
My arm was sore.
Once I got twenty seconds of calm riding time
beside Green-eye: "Isn't this a pretty stupid way to waste your life,
fellow?"
He grinned.
Then
two very friendly dragons came galumphing and moaning between us. Sweat slopped
into my eyes and my armpits felt oiled. The harness made it a little easier on
my inner thighs; they got raw slow stead of quick. I could hardly see and was
playing it more by ear than eye when Spider called, "Back on course! City up ahead!"
I looked up but fresh sweat flooded 'my eyes
and the heat made eveiything waver. I drove dragons.
The gorse lessened, and we started down.
Earth
crumbled under their claws. With no vegetation to blunt the temperature, the
sun stuck gold needles in the backs of our necks. Reflected
heat from the ground. At last, sand.
The
dragons had to slow. Spider paused beside me to thumb sweat from his eyes.
"We usually take McClellan Avenue," he told me as he lodked across the dunes. "But I think we're closer to
Main Street. This hits McClellan a few miles out. Well stop at the intersection
and rest until nightfall." The dragons hissed out across the City sands.
Swamp creatures, they were not used to this dryness. As we plowed the
ancient place, silent and furious
with hundreds of beasts, I remember
crossing a moment of untuned horror, when through void buff
I imagined
myself surrounded of a sudden, crowded
by millions,
straited by walls,
sooty, fuming, roaring with the
dread, dead old race of
the planet.
I flailed my whip
and beat
away the notion. The sun
ground its light into
the sand.
Two dragons began to
annoy each other and I
flicked them apart. They snatched at
my lash
indignantly, missed. My breath filed my
throat. Yet, as the two
moved away, I realized I was
grinning. Alone, we toiled through
the day,
content and terrified.
Slipped from the
night waters of the Adriatic
and now
we skirt down the
strait toward Piraeus. At the
horizon right and left monstrously beautiful mountains gnaw the
sky. The ship is
easy on the morning. The
speakers give up French, English, and
Greek pop music. Sun silvers the hosed deck, burns
over the smokestack. Bought deck passage;
big and
bold last night I walked
into a cabin and slept beautifully.
Back outside this morning I wonder
what effect Greece will have
on TEL
The central subject of
the book
is myth.
This music is so appropriate for the world I
float on. I was aware
how well it fitted the capsulated
life of New York. Its
torn harmonies are even
more congruent with the rest
of the
world. How can I
take Lobey into the center of
this bright chaos propelling these sounds?
Drank late with the Greek sailors
last night; in bad Italian
and worse
Greek we talked about
myths. Taiki learned the story of
Orpheus not from school
or reading
but from
his aunt
in Eleusis. Where shall I go
to learn
it? The
sailors my age wanted to hear
pop English
and French
music on the portable radio. The
older ones wanted to hear
the traditional
Greek songs. "Demotic songs!" exclaimed Demo. "All
the young
men in
the words
want to die as soon
as possible because love has treated
them badlyT
"Not so with
Orpheus," Taiki said, a little mysteriously,
a little high.
Did Orpheus
want to live after he
lost Eurydice the second time? He
had a very modern choice to
make when he decided to look
back. What is Us musical essence?
Author's Joumal/Guli of Corinth, November 1965
J drive fine dragons for a fine dragon lord, a lord of fine dragons and his dragon horde.
Green-eye sang that silently as we dropped
from our mounts. For the first time in my life I caught words as well as
melody. It surprised me and I turned to stare. But he was loosening the harness
on his beast.
The
sky was blue glass. West, clouds smudged the evening with dirty yellow. The
dragons threw long shadows on the sand. Coals glowed in the makeshift
fireplace. Batt was cooking already.
"McClellan and
Main," Spider said. "Here we are."
"How can you tell?" I asked.
"I've been here
before."
"Oh."
The
dragons had more or less decided we were really stopping. Many lay down.
My
mount (whom I had inadvertendy named something
unprintable; a day's repetition had stabilized the monicker.
Therefore we must call him: My Mount) nuzzled my neck affectionately, nearly
knocked me down, then dropped his chin to the sand, folded his forelegs, and
let his hind parts fall where they might. That's how dragons do it. Sit down I
mean.
Ten steps and I didn't think I would walk
again. I tied my whip around my waist, went as close to the food as I could
without stepping on anybody, and sat. The exhausted muscles of my legs sagged
like water bags. Supplies and equipment were piled to one side. Spider lay down
on top of them with one hand hanging down over the edge. I stared at his hand
across the fire: because it was in front of me, that's
all. And I learned a few things about Spider.
It was large, hung from a knobby wrist. The
skin between thumb and forefinger was cracked like stone, and the ridges of his
knuckles were filled with sweat dampened dirt. A bar of callous banded the
front of his palm before the abruptness of his fingers—that was all hard dragon
work. But also, on the middle finger at the first knuckle was a callous facing
the forefinger. That comes from holding a writing tooL
La Dire has such a callous and I asked her about it once. Third,
on the tips of his fingers (but not his thumb. It was a left hand) there
were smooth shiny spots: those you get ^from playing a stringed instrument,
guitar, violin, maybe cello? Sometimes when I play with other people I notice
them. So Spider herds dragons. And he writes. And he plays music. . . .
While
I sat there, it occurred to me how hard breathing was.
I began to think about
trees.
I had a momentary nightmare that Batt was going to give us something as difficult to eat as hardshell crabs and steamed artichokes.
I leaned on Green-eye's
shoulder and slept
I think he slept too.
I
woke when Batt lifted the cover from the stew pot The odor pried my mouth open, reached down my throat, took
hold of my stomach and twisted. I wasn't sure if it was pleasurable or painful.
I just sat, working my jaws, my throat aching. I leaned forward over my knees
and clutched sand.
Batt ladled stew into pans, stopping now and then
to shake hair out of his eyes. I wondered how much hair was in the stew. I
didn't care, mind you. Just curious. He passed the
steaming tins and I rested mine in the hollow of my crossed legs. A charred
loaf of bread came around. Knife broke open a piece and the fluffy innards
popped through a gold streak on the crust. When I twisted some off, I realized
the fatigue in my arms and shoulders and almost started laughing. I was too
tired to eat, too hungry to sleep. With the paradox both sleeping and eating
left the category of pleasure, where I'd always put them, and became duties on
this crazy job I'd somehow gotten into. I sopped
gravy on my bread, put it into my mouth, bit, and trembled.
I
shoved down half my meal before I realized it was too hot. Hungry like I was
hungry, hungry beyond need—it's frightening to be that hungry.
Green-eye
was shoving something into his mouth with his thumb.
That was the only other human thing I was
aware of during the meal till Stinky spluttered, "Gimme
some morel"
When
I got my seconds, I managed to slow down enough to look around. You can tell
about people from the way they eat. I remember the dinner Nativia
had cooked us. Oh, eating were something else back
then—a day ago, two days?
"You
know," Batt grunted, watching his food go,
"you got dessert coming."
"Where?" Knife asked, finishing his second helping
and reaching out of the darkness for the bread.
"You
have some more food-food first," Batt said, " 'cause I'm damned if you're gonna
eat up my dessert that fast." He leaned over, swiped Knife's pan from him,
filled it, and those gray hands closed on the tin edge and withdrew into the
shadow again. The sound of dogged chewing.
Spider,
silent till now, looked about with blinking silver eyes. "Good stew, cook."
Batt leered.
Spider who herds dragons; Spider who writes; Spider who has the multiplicated music of Kodaly in his head—good man to
receive a compliment from.
I
looked from Spider to Batt and back. I wished I had said Good stew because it was, and because saying it made Batt grin like that. What I did come out with, the words
distorted by that incredible lash of hunger, was: "What's dessert?"
I guess Spider was a bigger person than me.
Like I say, that sort of hunger is scary.
Bart took a ceramic dish out of the fire with
rags. "Black berry dumplings. Knife, reach me the run sauce."
I heard Green-eye's breath change tempo. My
mouth got wet all over again. I watched, examined Batt spooning dumplings and berry filling onto the pans.
"Knife, get your
fingers outl"
".
. . just wanted to taste." But the gray hand retreated. Through the dusk
firelight caught on a tongue sliding along a lip.
Batt handed him a plate.
Spider was served last. We waited for him to
begin, though, now that the bottom of the pit was lined.
"Night . . . sand . . . and
dragons," Stinky muttered. "Yeah." Which was very apt.
I
had just taken my blade out to play when Spider said, "You were asking
about Kid Death this morning."
"That's
right" I lay the blade in my lap. "You had something to say about
him?" The others quieted.
"I did the Kid a
favor, once," Spider mused.
"When
he was in the desert?^ I asked, wondering what sort of
person you would have to be to be different and doing Kid Death favors.
"When
he had just come out of the desert," Spider said. "He was holed up in
a town."
"What's a town?"
I asked.
"You know what a
village is?"
"Yeah. I came from one."
"And
you know what a city is." He motioned around at the sand. "Well a
village grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a town; then the towns grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a city. But
this was a ghost town. That means it was from a very old time, from the old
people of the planet. It had stopped growing. The buildings had all broken
open, sewers caved in, dead leaves fled up the streets, around the stubs of
street-lamp bases; an abandoned power station, rats, snakes, department
stores—these are the things that are in a town.
Also the lowest, dirtiest outcasts of a dozen species who are vicious with a viciousness beyond what intelligence can conceive.
Because if there were a brain behind it, they would all be luxuriant,
decadent lords of evil over the whole world instead of wallowing in the junk
heap of a ghost town. They are creatures you wouldn't
put in a kage."
"What did you do for
him?" I asked.
"I killed his
father."
I frowned.
Spider
picked at a tooth. "He was a detestable, three-eyed,
three hundred pound worm. I know he'd murdered at least forty-six people. He
tried to kill me three times while I was bumming through the town. Once with poison, once with a wrench, once with a grenade.
Each time he missed and got somebody else. He'd fathered a couple of dozen, but
still a good number less than he'd killed. Once, when I was on fair terms with
him, he gave me one of his daughters. Butchered and dressed her himself. Fresh
meat is scarce in town. He simply didn't count on one of his various kaged offspring whom he'd abandoned a thousand miles away
following him up from the desert. Nor did he count on that child's being a
criminal genius, psychotic, and a totally different creature. The Kid and I
met up in town there where his father was living high as one could live in that
dung pile. The Kid must have been about ten years old. I'm not going to forget
that.
"I
was sitting in a bar, listening to characters brag and boast, while a wrestling
match was going in the comer. The loser would be dinner. Then this skinny carrottop wanders in and sits down on a pile of rags. He
looked down most of the time so that you looked at those eyes of his through
finer veils of gold. His skin was soap white. He watched the fight, listened to
the bragging, and once made a design
in the dirt with his toe. When the talk got boring, he scratched his elbow and
made faces. When the stories got wild and fascinating, he froze,
his fingers tied together, and head down. He listens like someone blind. When
the stories were through, he walked out. Then someone whispered, That was Kid Death! and everybody got quiet. He already had quite a reputation."
Green-eye
had moved a little closer to me. There was a chill over the City.
"A
litde later while I was taking a walk outside,"
Spider went on, 1 saw him swimming in the lake of the Town Park.
Hey, Spider man, he called me from the water.
I walked over and squatted
by the pool's edge. Hi,
Kid.
You gotta kill my old man for me. He reached from the water and grabbed my
ankle. I tried to pull away. The Kid leaned back till his face was under water,
and bubbled. You gotta do
me this little favor, Spider. You have to.
A leaf stuck to his arm. If you say so, Kid.
He
stood up in the water now, hair lank down his face, scrawny, white, and wet. I say so.
Mind
if I ask why? I
pushed the hair off his forehead. I wanted to see if he was real: cold fingers
on my ankle; wet hair under my hand.
He
smiled, ingenuous as a corpse. I don't mind. His hps, nipples, the cuticles over his claws were shriveled. There's a whole lot of hate left on this world, Spider man. The stronger you are, the
more receptive you are to the memories that haunt these mountains, these
rivers, seas and jungles. And I'm strong! Oh, we're not human, Spider. Life and
death, the real and the
irrational aren't the same as
they were- for the poor race
who willed us
this world. They teU us young
people, they even told me,
that before our parents' parents
came here, we were not concerned
with love, life, matter and
motion. But we have taken
a new
home, and we have to
exhaust the past before we can
finish with the present. We
have to live out the human
if we
are to
move on to our own
future. The past terrifies me. That's
why I must kill it—why you must kill him
for me.
Are you
so tied
up with
their past, Kid?
He nodded. Untie me,
Spider.
What happens
if I don't?
He
shrugged. TU have to
kill you—aU. He sighed. Under the sea
it's so silent... so silent, Spider. He whispered, Kill him!
Where is
he?
He's waddling along
the street
while the moonlit gnats make dust around his head,
his heel
sliding in the trickle of
water along the gutter
that runs from under the
old church
well; he stops and
leans, panting, against the moss-He's
dead, I said. I opened my eyes. 1 dislodged a slab of concrete from the
beams, so that it slid
down-See you around sometime. The Kid grinned and pushed backward into the
pool. Thanks. Maybe
TU be
able to do something for you
someday, Spider.
Maybe you
will, I said. He sank in the silvered scum. I went back to the bar. They were roasting dinner."
After
a while I said, "You must have lived in
town a fair while."
"Longer than I'd like to admit,"
Spider said. "If you call it living." He sat
up and glanced around the fire. "Lobey,
Green-eye, you two circle the herd for the first
watch. In three hours wake Knife and Stinky. Me and Batt will take the last
shift."
Green-eye rose beside me. I stood too as the
others made ready to sleep. My Mount was dozing. The moon was up. Ghost lights
ran on the humped spines of the beasts. Sore-legged, stiff-armed, I climbed
a-back My Mount and with Green-eye began to circle herd. I swung the whip
against my shin as we rode. "How do they look to you?"
I didn't
expect an answer. But Green-eye rubbed his stomach with a grimy hand.
"Hungry? Yeah, I guess they are in all
this sand." I watched the slender, dirty youngster sway behind the scaled
hump. "Where are you from?" I asked. He smiled quickly at me.
I was born of a lonely mother with neither father nor sister nor brother. I looked up surprised.
At the waters she waits for me my mother, my
mother at Branning-at-sea. "You're from Branning-at-sea?"
I asked. He nodded.
"Then
you're going home." He nodded again.
Silent,
we rode on till at last I began to play with tired fingers. Green-eye sang some
more as we jogged under the moon.
I learned that his mother was a fine lady in Branning-at-sea, related to many important political
leaders. He had been sent away with Spider to herd dragons for a year. He was
returning at last to his mother, this year of wandering and work serving as
some sort of passage rite. There was a great deal in the thin, bushy haired
boy, so skilled with the flock, I didn't understand.
"Me?" I asked when his eye inquired
of me in the last of the moonlight. "I don't have any time for the finery
of
Branning-at-sea as you describe it 111 be glad to see it, passing. But I got things to do." Silent inquiry.
"I'm
going to Kid Death to get Friza, and stop what's
killing all the different ones. That probably means stopping Kid Death."
He nodded.
"You
don't know who Friza is," I said. "Why are
you nodding?"
He cocked his head oddly, then
looked across the herd. I am different so
I bring
words to singers when
I sing.
I nodded and thought about Kid Death. "I
hate him," I said. "I have to learn to hate him more so I can find
him and kill him."
There is no
death, only love. That one arrived sideways. '
"What was that again?"
He
wouldn't repeat it Which made me think about it more.
He looked sadly out from the work-grime. At the horizon, the fat moon darkened
with clouds. Strands of shadow through the thatch of his hair widened over the
rest of his face. He blinked; he turned away. We finished our circuit, chased
back two dragons. The moon, revealed once more, was a polished bone joint
jammed on the sky. We woke Knife and Stinky, who rose and moved to their
dragons.
The coals gave the only color. And for one
moment when Green-eye crouched to stare at some pattern snaking the ashes, the
light cast up on his single-eyed face. He stretched beside the fire.
I
slept well, but a movement before dawn roused me. The moon was down. Starlight
paled the sand. The coals were dead. One dragon hissed. Two moaned. Silence. Knife and Stinky were returning. Spider and Batt were getting up.
I drifted off and woke again when only one slop of blue lightened the eastern dunes. Batt's dragon came around the fireplace. Spider's lumbered
after him. I rose on my elbows.
"Keeping you up?"
Spider asked.
"Huh?"
"I was running over
the Kodaly again."
"Oh."
I could hear it waning across the chill sand. "Naw." I got to my feet. They were about to
start around again. "Just a second. Ill go around with you. There's
something I want to ask you. I'd have been up in a little while anyway."
He didn't wait but I swung on my dragon and
caught up.
He
laughed sofdy when I reached his side. "Wait
till you've been out here a few more days. You won't be so ready to give up
that last few minutes sleep."
"I'm too sore to sleep," I said,
though the jogging was beginning to loosen stiff me. The coolness had set my
joints.
"What did you want to
ask me?"
"About
Kid Death."
"What about him?"
"You say you knew him.
Where can I find him?"
Spider
was silent. My Mount slipped in the road and caught his balance again before he
answered. "Even if I could tell, even if telling you would do any good,
why should I? The Kid could get rid of you like that." He popped his whip
on the sand. Grains flew. "I don't think the Kid would appreciate my going
around telling people who want to kill him where to find him."
"I
don't suppose it would make much difference if he's as strong as you say he
is." I ran my thumb over the machete's mouthpiece.
Spider
shrugged some of his shoulders. "Maybe not. But,
like I say, the Kid's my friend."
"Got you under his thumb too, huh?"
It's difficult to be cutting with a cliche. I tried.
"Just about," Spider said.
I
flicked my whip at a dragon who looked like he was
thinking of leaving. He yawned, shook his mane, and lay back down. "I
guess in a way he's even got me. He said I would try to find him until I
had learned enough. Then I'd try to run away."
"He's
playing with you," Spider said. He had a mocking smile.
"He's really got us all tied up."
"Just about,"
Spider said again.
I frowned. "Just about isn't all," I said.
"Well,"
Spider said in some other direction than mine, "there are a few he can't
touch, like his father. That's why he had to get me to kill him."
"Who?"
"Green-eye is one. Green-eye's mother is
another."
"Green-eye?" In my repetition of the name I'd asked a question. Perhaps he didn't
hear. Perhaps he chose not to answer.
So I asked another. "Why did Green-eye
have to leave Branning-at-sea? He half explained to
me last night, but I didn't quite get it."
"He has no father," Spider said. He
seemed more ready to talk of this.
"Can't they run a paternity check? The
traveling folk-doctors do it all the time in my village."
"I didn't say they didn't know who his
father was. I said he had none."
I frowned.
"How are your genetics?"
"I can draw a dominance chart," I
said. Most people, even from the tiniest villages, knew their genetics, even if
they couldn't add. The human chromosome system was so inefficient in the face
of the radiation level that genetics was survival knowledge. I've often
wondered why we didn't invent a more compatible method of reproduction to go
along with our own three way I-guess-you
d-call-it-sexual devision. Just
lazy. "Go on," I said to Spider.
"Green-eye had no father,"
Spider repeated.
"Parthenogenesis?" I asked. "That's impossible. The sex distmguishing chromosome is carried by the male. Females and androgynes only cany genetic equipment for producing other females.
He'd have to be a girl, with haploid chromosomes, and sterile. And he
certainly isn't a girl." I thought a moment. "Of course if he were a
bird, it would be a different matter. The females carry the sex distinguishing
chromosomes there." I looked out over the herd. "Or
a lizard."
"But he's not,"
Spider said.
I agreed. "That's amazing," I said,
looking back toward the fire where the amazing boy slept.
Spider nodded. "When he was bom, wise men came from all over to examine him. He is
haploid. But he's quite potent and quite male, though a rather harried life has
made him chaste by temperament."
"Too
bad."
Spider
nodded. "If he would join actively in the solstice orgies or make some
appeasing gesture in the autumnal harvest-celebrations, a good deal of the
trouble could be avoided."
I raised an eyebrow. "Who's to know if he
takes part in the orgies? Don't you hold them in the dark of the moon in Branning?"
Spider
laughed. "Yes. But at Branning-at-sea, it's
become a rather formal business; it's carried on with artificial insemination.
The presentation of the seed—especially by the men of important families—gets
quite a bit of publicity."
"Sounds very dry and
impersonal."
"It is. But efficient. When a town has more than a million people in
it, you can't just turn out the lights and let everybody run wild in the
streets the way you can in a small village. They tried it that way a couple of
times, back when Branning-at-sea was much smaller,
and even then the results were—"
"A million people?" I said. "There are a million people in Branning-at-sea?"
"Last
census there were three million six hundred fifty thousand."
I whistled. "That's a
lot."
"That's more than you can imagine."
I
looked across the herd of dragons; only a couple of hundred.
"Who
wants to take part in an orgy of artificial insemination?" I asked.
"In a larger society," Spider said,
"things have to be carried on that way. Until there's a general balancing
out of the genetic reservoir, the only thing to do is keep the genes mixing,
mixing, mixing. But we have become clannish, more so
in places like Branning-at-sea than in the hills. How to keep people from having no more than one child by the same
partner. In a backwoods settlement, a few nights of license take care of
it, pretty much. In Branning, things have to be
assured by mathematical computation. And families have sprung up that would be
quite glad to start doubling their children if given half a chance. Anyway,
Green-eye just goes about his own business, occasionally saying very upsetting
things to the wrong person. The fact that he's different and immune to Kid
Death, from a respected family, and rather chary of ritual observances makes
him quite controversial. Everybody blames the business on his partheno-genetic birth."
"They
frown on that even where I come from," I told Spider. "It means his
genetic structure is identical with his mother's. That will never do. If that
happens enough, we shall all return to the great rock and the great roll in no
time.''
"You
sound like one of those pompous fools at Branning."
He was annoyed.
"Huh? That's just what
I've been taught."
"Think
a little more. Every time you say that, you bring Green-eye a little closer to
death."
"What?"
"They've
tried to kill him before. Why do you think he was sent away?"
"Oh," I said.
"Then why is he coming back?"
"He
wants to." Spider shrugged. "Can't very well stop
him if he wants to."
I
grunted. "You don't make Branning-at-sea sound
like a very nice place. Too many people, half of them crazy, and they don't
even know how to have an orgy." I took up my blade. "I don't have
time for nonsense like that."
The music dirged from Spider. I played light piping sounds.
"Lobey."
I looked back at him.
"Somethings happening, Lobey,
something now that's happened before, before when the others were here. Many of
us are worried about it. We have the stories about what went on, what resulted
when it happened to the others. It may be very serious. All of us may be
hurt."
"I'm
tired of the old stories," I said, "their stories. We're not them;
we're new, new to this world, this life. I know the stories of Lo Orpheus and
Lo Ringo. Those are the only ones I care about. I've
got to find Friza."
"Lobey—"
"This
other is no concern of mine." I let a shrill note. "Wake your
herders, Spider. You have dragons to drive."
I galloped My Mount forward. Spider didn't call again.
Before the sun hit apogee the edge of the
City cleft the horizon. As I swung my whip in the failing heat, I permu-tated Green-eye's last words, beating out thoughts in
time: if there were death, how might I gain Friza?
That love was enough, if wise and articulate and daring. Or thinking of La
Dire, who would have amended it (dragons clawed from the warm sand to the leafy
hills), there is no death, only rhythm. When the sand reddened behind us, and
the foundering beasts, with firmer footing, hastened, I took out my knife and
played. The City was behind us.
Dragons loped easy now across the gorse. A stream ribboned
the knolly land and the beasts stopped to slosh their
heads in the water, scraping their hind feet on the bank, through grass,
through sand, to black soil. The water lapped their knees, grew muddy as they
tore the water-weeds. A fly bobbed on a branch, preening the crushed prism of
his wing (a wing the size of my foot) and thought a linear, arthropod music. I
played it for him, and he turned the red bowl of his eye to me and whispered
wondering praise. Dragons threw back their heads, gargling. There is no death. Only music.
Whanne, as he strod alonge the shakeynge lee,
The roddie levynne glesterrd on hys headde;
Into hys hearte the azure vapoures spreade;
He wrythde arounde yn drearie
demie payne;
Whanne from his lyfe-bloode
the rodde lemes were fed,
He felle an hepe of ashes on the playne.
Thomas Chatterton/Englysh
Metamorphosis
"Now there's a quaint taste," said Durcet. "Well, Curval, what
do you think of that one?"
"Marvelous," the President replied;
"there you have an individual who wishes to make himself familiar with the
idea of death and hence unafraid of it, and who to that end has found no better
means than to associate it with a libertine idea ..."... Supper was served, orgies
followed as usual, the household retired to bed.
he Marquis de Sade/The 120 Days of Sodom
... each bubble contains a complete eye of water.
Samuel
Greenburg/The Glass Bubbles
Then to the broken land ("This'-Spider
halted his dragon in the shaley afternoon—"is
the broken land." He flung a small flint over the edge. It chuckled into
the canyon. Around us the dragons were craning curiously at the granite, the
veined cliffs, the chasms) slowing our pace now. Clouds dulled the sun. Hot fog
flowed around the rocks. I worked one muscle after another against the bone to
squeeze out the soreness. Most of the pain (surprise) was gone. We meandered
through the fabulous, simple stones.
The dragons made half time
here.
Spider said it was perhaps
forty kilometers to Branningat-sea. Wind heated our
faces. Glass wound in the rocks. Five dragons began a scuffle on the shale. One
was the rumored female. Green-eye and me came at them
from opposite sides. Spider was busy at the head of the herd; the scuffle was
near the tail. Something had frightened them, and they went plopping up the
slope. It didn't occur to us something was wrong; this was the sort of thing
that Spider (and Friza) were supposed to be able to
prevent (Oh, Friza, 111 find you through the echo of all mourning stones, all praising trees 1). We followed.
They
dodged through the boulders. I shouted after them. Our whips chattered. We
couldn't outrun them. We hoped they would fall to fighting again. We lost them
for a minute, then heard their hissing beyond the
rocks, lower down.
Clouds smeared the sky; water varnished the
trail ahead. As M. M. crossed the wet rock, he slipped.
I
was thrown, scraping hip and shoulder. I heard my blade clatter away on the
rock. My whip snarled around my neck. For one moment I thought I'd strangle. I
rolled down a slope, trying to flail myself to a halt, got
scraped up more. Then I dropped over the edge of something. I grabbed out with
both hands and feet. Chest and stomach slapped stone. My breath went off
somewhere and wouldn't go back into my lungs for a long time. When it did, it
came roaring down my sucking throat, whirled in my bruised chest. Busted ribs? Just pain. And roar again with- another breath. Tears
flooded my sight.
I
was holding onto a rock with my left hand, a vine with my right; my left foot
clutched a sapling none too securely by the roots. My right leg dangled. And I
just knew it was a long way down.
I rubbed my eye on my shoulder and looked up:
The
hp of the trail above me.
Above that, angry sky.
Sound? Wind through gorse somewhere. No music.
While
I was looking it started to rain. Sometimes painful catastrophes happen. Then
some litde or even pleasant thing follows it, and you
cry. Like rain. I cried.
"Lobey."
I looked again.
Kneeling on a shelf of stone a few feet above
me to the right was Kid Death. "Kid . . . r
"Lobey," he said, shaking wet hair back from his forehead,
"I judge you can hold on there twenty-seven
minutes before you drop over the edge from exhaustion. So I'm going to wait
twenty-six minutes before I do anything about saving your life. OX?"
I coughed.
Seeing
him close, I guessed he was sixteen or seventeen, or maybe a baby-faced twenty.
His skin was wrinkled at his wrists, neck, and under his arms.
Rain
kept dribbling in my eyes; my palms stung, and what I was holding onto was
getting slippery.
"Ever
run into any good westerns?" He shook his head. "Too
bad. Nothing I like better than westerns." He rubbed his forefinger
under his nose and sniffed. Rain danced on his shoulders as he leaned over to
talk to me.
"What
is a 'western'?" I asked. My chest still hurt. "And you mean you're
really going to make—" I coughed again, "—me
hang here twenty-six minutes?"
"It's
an art-form the Old Race, the humans, had before we came," Kid Death said.
"And yes, I am. Torture is an art-form too. I want to rescue you at the
last minute. While I'm waiting, I want to show you something." He pointed
up to the rim of the road I'd rolled over.
Friza looked down.
I stopped breathing. The
pain in my chest exploded, my wide eyes burned with rain. Dark face, slim wet
shoulders, then watch her turn her head (gravel sliding under my belly, the
whiplash still around my neck and the handle swinging against my thigh) to
catch rain in her mouth. She looked back and I saw (or did I hear?) her wonder
at life returned, and confusion at the rain, these twisted rocks, these clouds.
Glory beat behind those eyes above me. Articulate, she would have called my
name: saw me, now, impulsively reached her hand to me
(did I hear her fear?). "Friza!"
That was a scream.
You and I know the word I screamed. But
nobody else hearing the rough sound my lungs shoved up would have recognized
it.
All
this, understand, in the instant it takes to open your eyes in the rain, lick a
drop from your hp, then focus on what's in front of you and realize it's somebody
you love about to die and he tries to scream your name. That's what Friza did there on the road's hp.
And I kept screaming.
What Kid Death did between us was giggle.
Friza began to search right and left for a way to
get down to me. She rose, disappeared, was back a
moment later, bending a sapling over the edge of the road.
"No, Friza!"
But she started to climb down, dirt and tiny
stones shooting out beneath her feet. Then, when she was hanging at the very
end, the line of her body arcing dark on the rock, she grabbed the whip
handle—neither with hands nor feet, but rather as she had once thrown a pebble,
as Spider had once pushed over a chunk of cement; she grabbed the handle from
where it hung against my thigh, pulled it, lifted it, straining till rain
glistened on her sides, knotted the handle around the sapling above the first
fork. She started to climb back, jerk of an arm, away a moment, jerk, away,
jerk, reaching handhold by handhold toward the road. It kept on going through
my head, here she wakes from how many days' death with
only a moment to glory before plunging into the rescue of the life nmning out below her. She was doing it to save me. She
wanted me to grab hold of the whip and haul myself to the tree, then by the
tree haul myself to the road. I hurt and loved her, held on and didn't fall.
Kid
Death was still chuckling. He pointed at the apex of the bent tree.
"Break!" he whispered.
It did.
She
fell, throwing the branch away from her in one instant; clutching at the stone
she fell, snatched at the length of leather dangling from my neck, then let it
go.
She
let it go because she knew damn well it would have pulled me from the cliff
face.
"Baaa—baaa!" Kid Death said. He was imitating a goat.
Then he giggled again.
I
slammed my face against the shale. "Frizal" No, you couldn't understand what I howled.
Her
music crashed out with her brains on the rocks of the canyon floor a hundred
feet below.
Rock. Stone. I tried to become the rock I hung against. I tried to
be stone. Less blasted by her double death I would have dropped. Had she died
in any other act than trying to save me, I would have died with her. But I
couldn't let her faiL
My heart rocked. My heart rolled.
Numb,
I dangled for some timeless time, till my hands began to slip.
"All
right. Up
you go."
Something
seized my wrist and pulled me up, hard. My shoulders rang like gongs of pain
under my ears. I was hauled blind over gravel. I blinked and breathed. Somehow
Kid Death had pulled me up on the ledge with him.
"Just
saved your life," Kid Death said. "Aren't you glad you know me?"
I began to shake. I was going to pass out
"You're
just about to yell at me, *You killed her!' " Kid Death said. "I killed her again is what
really happened. And I may have to do it a third time before you get the
idea—"
I
lunged, would have gone off and over. But he caught me with one strong, wet hand,
and slapped me with the other. The rain had stopped.
Maybe he did more than slap
me.
The Kid turned and started scrambling up to
the lip of the trail. I started after him. I climbed.
Dirt
ripped under my fingers. It's good about my nail chewing, because otherwise I
wouldn't have had any nails left. From the ledge it was possible to get back
up. Kid Death leaped and bounded. I crawled.
There's
a condition where every action dogs one end. You
move/breathe/stop to rest/start again with one thing in mind. That's how
I followed. Mostly on my belly. Mostiy
with my breath held. I'm not too sure where I went. Things didn't clear up till
I realized there were two figures in front of me: the moist, white redhead. A black thatch of hair, grimy Green-eye.
I
lay on a rock, resting, is how it was, in the fog of fatigue and endeavor, when
I saw them.
Kid
Death stood with his arm around Green-eye's shoulder at the precipice. The sky
in front of them swam vio-lentiy.
"Look,
pardner," Kid Death was saying; "we've got
to come to some sort of agreement. I mean, you don't think I came all the way
out here just to rusde five dragons from my friend
Spider?
That's just to let him know I'm still running. But you.
You and I have to get together. Haploid! You're totally outside my range. I
want you. I want you very much, Green-eye.
The dirty herder shrugged
from under the moist fingers.
"Look," Kid Death
said and gestured at the crazy sky.
As I
had first seen the Kid's face in the glittering screen in the source-cave, I
saw in the raveling clouds: a plain surrounded by a wire fence (a kage?) but inside a soaring needle wracked with struts and
supports. I got some idea how big it was when I realized the stone blocks by
the fence were houses, and the dots moving around were men and women.
"Starprobe,"
the Kid said. "They're on the verge of discovering the method the humans
used to get from planet to planet, star to star. They've been delving in the
ruins, tasting the old ideas, Belong the bits of metal and wire now for ten
years. It's almost finished." He waved his hand. Rolling in place of the
scene now was water and water: an ocean. On the water, metal pontoons formed a
floating station. Boats plied back and forth. Cranes dropped a metal cabinet
toward the ocean floor. "Depth gauge," the Kid explained. "Soon
we shall be able to do more than dream across the silt of the ocean floor, but
take these bodies to the fond of the world as they did." Another wave of
the hand and we were looking underground. Segmented worms, driven by women with
helmets. "Rock-drilL going on now in the place
they called Chile." Then, at a final motion, we were looking at myriad
peoples all involved in labor, grinding grain, or toiling with instruments
gleaming and baffling
and complex.
"There," said Kid Death, "there are the deeds and doings of all
the men and women and androgynes on this world to remember
the wisdom of the old ones. I can hand you the wealth produced by the hands of
them all." Green-eye's green eye widened. "I can guarantee it. You
know I can. All you have to do is join me."
The
white hand had landed on Green-eye's shoulder. Again he shrugged from under it.
"What
power do you have?" Kid Death demanded. "What can you do with your difference! Speak to a few deaf men, dead men,
pierce the minds of a few idiots?" I suddenly realized the Kid was very
upset. And he wanted Green-eye to agree with him.
Green-eye started to walk
away.
"Hey, Green-eye!" Kid Death bellowed. I saw his stomach sink
as the air emptied from his chest. His claws knotted. Green-eye glanced back.
"That
rock!" The Kid motioned toward a chunk at the cliff's edge. "Turn
that there rock into something to eat."
Green-eye rubbed his dirty
finger behind his ear.
"You've
been on this dragon drive now twenty-seven days. You've been away from Branning-at-sea a few days short of a year. Turn that log into a bed, like you used to sleep in at your
mother's palace. You're a Prince at Branning-at-sea
and you smell like lizard droppings. That puddle, make it an onyx bath with
water any one of five temperatures controlled by a lever with a copper rat's
head on the tip. You've got callouses on your palms
and your legs are bowing from straddling a dragon's hump. Where are the dancers
who danced for you on the jade tiles of the terrace? Where are the musicians
who eased the evenings? Turn this mountain-top into a place worthy of
you—"
I
think this is when Green-eye looked up and saw me. He started for me, only
stopped to pick up my machete that was lying at the foot of the rock, then vaulted up beside me.
On
the cliff edge the Kid had gotten furious. He quivered,
teeth meshed tight, fists balled against his groin. Suddenly he whirled and
cried something—
Thunder.
It
shocked me and I jerked back. Green-eye ignored it and tried to help me sit up.
At the cliff's edge, Kid Death shook his arms. lightning
flared down the clouds. The leaves bleached from black to lavender. Green-eye
didn't even blink. Thunder again; then someone flung buckets of water.
Herder
dirt turned to mud on Green-eye's shoulder as he helped me down the slope.
Something wasn't right inside me. Things kept going inside me. The rain was
cold. I was shivering. Somehow it was easier just to relax, not to hold on...
Green-eye
was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes to the rain and the first thing I did
was reach out for my blade. Green-eye held it out of reach; he was glaring at
me.
"Huh
. . . ? Wha ..."
My fingers and toes tingled. "What happened?" Rain stung my ears, my hps.
GreenTeye was crying, his hps
snarling back from his white teeth. Rain streaked the dirt on his face, sleeked
down his hair; he kept shaking my shoulder, desolate and furious.
"What happened?"
I asked. "Did I pass out . . . P"
You
died! He stared at me,
unbelievingly, angry, and streaming. God damn it, Lobey! Why did you have to die!
You just gave up; you just decided it wasn't worth it, and you let the heart
stop and the brain blank! You died, Lobey! You died!
"But I'm not dead
now...."
No. He helped me forward. The music's going on again. Come on.
Once
more I reached for my blade. He let me have it. There was nothing to hack at. I
just felt better holding it. It was raining too hard to play.
We
found our mounts moaning in the torrent and flinging their whiskers around
happily. Green-eye helped me up. Astride a wet dragon, saddle or no, is as
difficult as riding a greasy earthquake. We finally found the herd up ahead,
moving slowly through the downpour.
Spider rode up to us. "There you are! I
thought we'd lost you! Get over to the other side and keep them out of the
prickly pears. Makes them drunk and you can t handle them."
So we rode over to the other side and kept
them out of the prickly pears. I kept phrasing sentences in my head to tell
Spider about what happened. I chewed over the words, but I couldn't gnaw them
into sense. Once, when the pressure of disbelief grew so large I couldn't hold
it, I reined my dragon around and dashed across the muddy slope toward Spider.
"Boss, Kid Death is riding with—"
I'd
made a mistake. The figure who turned wasn't Spider. Red hair slicked the white
brow. Needle teeth snagged the thunder that erupted from behind the mountains
as he threw back his head in doomed laughter. Naked on his dragon, he waved a
black and silver hat over his head. Two ancient guns hung holstered at his hip,
with milky handles glimmering. As his dragon reared (and mine danced back) I
saw, strapped to his bare, clawed feet, a set of metal cages with revolving
barbs that he heeled into his beast's bloody flank,
cruelly as a flower.
Dazed,
I punched rain from my eyes. But the illusion (with veined temples gleaming
with rain) was gone. Gagging on wonder, I rode back to the rim of the herd.
Jean Harlow? Christ,
Orpheus, Billy the Kid, those
three I can understand.
But what's
a young
spade writer like you doing all
caught up with the Great
White Bitch?
Of course I
guess it's pretty obvious.
Gregory Corso/In conversation
It is not
that love sometimes makes mistakes,
but that
it is, essentially, a mistake. We
fall in love when our
imagination projects nonexistent perfections onto another person. One day
the phantasmagoria
vanishes, and with it love dies.
Ortega y Gasset/On Love
Exhaustion numbed me; routine kaged me. It had stopped raining almost an hour before I
realized it And the land had changed.
We
had left the rocks. Wet shrubs and briars fell before the dragons' claws. To
our left, a strip of gray ground ran along with us, just down a small slope.
Once I asked Stinky, "Are we following that funny strip of stone down
there?"
He
chuckled and sputtered, "Hey, Lobey, that's the
first paved road I bet you ever seen. Right?"
"I guess so," I
said. "What's paved?"
Knife, who was riding by, snickered. Stinky
went off to do something else. That was the last I heard of it. Three or four
carts trundled by on the road before it struck me what the damn thing was used
for. Very clever. When the next one came by, I
remembered to stare. It was late afternoon. I was so tired all the world's
wonders might have bounced on the bells on my eyes without leaving a picture.
Most of the carts were pulled by four or six
legged animals that I was vaguely familiar with. But new animals are not
strange sights when your own flock might lamb any monster. One made me start,
though.
It
was low, of black metal, and had no beast at all before or behind. It purred
along the road ten times the speed of the others and was gone in smoke before I
had time to really see it. A few dragons who had
ignored the other vehicles shied now and hissed. Spider called to me as I
stared after it, "Just one of the wonders of Branning-at-sea."
I turned back to calm the
offended lizards.
The next time I glanced at the road I saw the
picture. It was painted on a large stand mounted by the pavement, so that all
who passed could see it. It was the face of a young woman with cotton white
hair, a childish smile, her shoulders shrugged. She had a small chin, and green
eyes that looked widened by some pleasant surprise. Her hps
were slighdy opened over small, shadowed teeth.
THE DOVE
SAYS, "ONE IS nice? NINE OH TEN ABE SO MUCH
nicer!"
I
spelled out the caption and frowned. Batt was within
hollering distance so I hollered. "Hey, who's that?"
"The
Dove!" he howled, shaking the hair back from his
shoulders. "He wants to know who the Dove is!" and the rest of them
laughed too. As we got closer and closer to Branning-at-sea
I became the butt of more and more jokes. I stuck closer to Green-eye; he
didn't make fun of me. The first evening wind blew on the small of my back, the
back of my neck and dried the sweat before more sweat rolled. I was staring
dutifully at dragon scales when Green-eye stopped and pointed ahead. I looked
up. Or rather down.
We
had just crested a hill and the land sloped clear and away to—well, if it were
twenty meters away it was a great toy. If it was twenty kilometers away it was
great. Paved roads joined in that white and aluminum confusion at the
98 if
purple
water. Someone had started building it, and it had gotten out of hand and
started building itself. There were grand squares where cactuses and palms grew
and swayed; occasional hills where trees and lawns ranged about single
buildings; many sections of tiny houses shoved and jammed on twisting streets.
Beyond, from glazed docks ships plied the watery evening through the harbors.
"Branning-at-sea,"
Spider said, beside me. "That's it."
I blinked. The sun laid our shadows forward,
warmed our necks, arid blazed in the high windows. "It's large," I
said.
"Right
down there"—Spider pointed; I couldn't follow because there was so much to
look at, so I listened—"is where we take the herd. This whole side of Branning lives off the herding business. The seaside
survives through fishing and trade with the islands."
The
others gathered around us. Familiar with the magnificence and squalor below,
they grew silent as we went down.
We
passed another signboard by the road. This time the Dove was shown from another
angle, winking through the twilight.
THE DOVE SATS,
"THOUGH TEN ABE NICE, NINETY-NINE
OB A HUNDRED ABE so
MUCH NICEbI"
As I
looked, fights came on above the twenty foot high face. The huge, insoucient expression leaped at us. I must have looked
surprised because Spider thumbed toward it and said, "They keep it lighted
all night so passersby can read what the Dove has to say." He smiled as
though he were telling me something slightly off-color. Now he coiled his whip.
"Well camp down on the plateau there for the evening and go into Branning at dawn." Twenty minutes later we were
circling the herd while Batt fixed dinner. The sky
was black beyond the ocean, blue overhead. Branning
cast up fights of its own, sparkling like sequins fallen on the shore.
Perhaps
it was less violent terrain, perhaps it was Spider's calm, but the dragons were
perfectly still.
Afterward,
I lay down, but didn't sleep. Along with Knife I had mid-watch. When Green-eye
shook my shoulder with his foot, I rolled to standing; anticipatory excitement
kept me awake. I would leave the herders; where would I go next?
Knife and I circled the herd in opposite directions.
As I rode I reflected: to be turned loose by my
lonesome in the woods is a fairly comfortable situation. Turned loose among
stone, glass, and a few million people is something else. Four-fifths of the
herd slept. A few moaned toward Branning, less bright
than before, still a sieve of light on the sea. I reined my mount to gaze at
the—
"Hey up there, dragon man!"
I looked down the bank.
A hunchback had stopped his dog cart on the
road. "Hi down there."
"Taking
your lizards into Branning at dawn?" He grinned.
He dug beneath the leather flap over the cart and pulled out a melon. "You hungry, herder?" He broke it open and made to
hurl me half.
But
I slung down from my mount and he held. I scrambled down to the road.
"Hey, thank you Lo stranger."
He laughed. "No Lo for
me."
Just
then the dog, looking back and forth between the man and me, began to whine.
"Me. Me. Me hungry. Me."
The
hunchback handed me my half, then ruffled the dog*s ears. "You had your
dinner."
"Ill share mine," I said.
The
hunchback shook his head. "He works for me and I feed him."
He
broke apart his piece and tossed the piece to the animal, who
drove his snout into it, chomping. As I bit into my melon, the stranger asked
me, "Where are you from, dragon man?"
I gave him the name of my village.
"And this is your first time to Branning-at-sea."
"It is. How could you tell?"
"Oh."
He grinned over a crowd of yellow teeth. "I came to Branning-at-sea
a first time myself. There are a few things that set you off from the natives
down there, a couple of points that make you different—"
"Different?"
He raised his hand. "No offense
meant." "None taken."
The
hunchback chuckled once more as I took a sweet wet mouthful.
"What's
diamond here is dung there," he pronounced sagely. "No doubt the Dove
said that at one time or another."
"The Dove," I said. "She's La
Dove, isn't she?"
He
looked surprised. "The Lo, La, and Le is
confusing here. No." He scraped the rind with his front teeth and spun it
away. "Diamond and dung. I gather it worked in
your town like it did in mine. Lo and La and Le titles reserved for potent normals and eventually bestowed on potent function-als?"
"That's the way it is."
"Was. It
was that way in Branning-at-sea. It's not the way it
is now. So little is known about difference in the villages
that nobody gets angry at being called such."
"But
I am different," I said. "Why should I be angry? That's the way it
is."
"Again,
that's the way it was in Branning. Not the way it is
now. A third time: diamond and dung. I just hope your backwoods don't get you
into trouble. Mine got me half a dozen thrashings when I first got to Branning-at-sea, fifteen years ago. And even then the place
was much smaller than it is now." He looked down the road.
I
recalled what Spider had said about titling herders. "How does it work
now?" I asked. "I mean here? At Bran-ning-at-sea?"
"Well"—the hunchback hooked his
thumbs under his belt —"there are about five families that control eveirything that goes on in Branning-at-sea,
own all the ships, take in rent on half the houses, will probably pay your
salary and buy up those dragons. They, along with fifteen or twenty
celebrities, like the Dove, take Lo or La when you address them in person. And
you'll find some pretty non-functional people with those tides."
"Well,
how am I to know them then, if their obvious functionality doesn't
matter?"
"You'll know them if you run into
them—but it's not very likely you will. You can spend a lifetime at Branning-at-sea and never have to Lo or La once. But if you
go about titling everyone you meet, or bridling when someone doesn't use a tide
to you, you'll be taken for a fooL or crazy, or at
best recognized as a village lout."
"I'm not ashamed of my
village!"
He
shrugged. "I didn't suggest you were. Only trying to
answer your questions."
"Yes. I understand. But what about difference?"
The
hunchback put his tongue in his cheek, then took it
out. "At Branning-at-sea difference is a private
matter. Difference is the foundation of those buildings, the pilings beneath
the docks, tangled in the roots of the trees. Half the place was built on it.
The other half couldn't live without it. But to talk about it in pubhc reveals you to be ill-mannered and vulgar."
"They
talk about it." I pointed back to the herd. "I mean the other dragon
drivers."
"And they are vulgar. Now if you hang
with herders all the time—and you can spend your life that way if you want —you
can talk about it all you want."
"But I am
different—" I began again.
Having
told me once, his patience with me and the subject ended.
"—but
I guess I better keep it to myself," I finished. "Not a bad
idea." He spoke sternly.
But
how could I tell him about Friza? How could I search
if our differences were secret? "You," I said after embarrassed silence. "What do you do at Branning-at-sea?"
The
question pleased him. "Oh, I run a little meeting place where the tired
can sit, the hungry can eat, the thirsty can drink, and the bored can find
entertainment." He ended his pronouncement by flinging his red cape back
over his misshapen shoulder.
"Ill
come and visit you," I said.
"Well," mused the hunchback, "not many herders
come to my place; it's a bit refined. But after you've been in Branning-at-sea for a while and you think you can behave
yourself, come around with some silver in your wallet. Though 111 take most of
it away from you, you'll have a good time."
"Ill be sure to come," I said.
I was thinking of Kid Death. I was journeying down the long night. I was
searching out Friza. "What's your name and where
can I find you?"
"My
name is Pistol, but you can forget that. You'll find me at the Pearl—the name
of my place of business."
"It sounds
fascinating."
"The
most fascinating thing the likes of you have ever seen," he said modestly.
"Can't pass that up. What are you doing out on the paved road this late?"
"Same
as yourself; going to Branning-at-sea."
"Where are you going
from?"
"My outland friend, your manners are
incredible. Since you ask, I come from friends who live outside Branning. I brought them gifts; they gave me gifts in
return. But since they are not friends of yours, you shouldn't inquire after
them."
Tm sorry." I felt slighdy
rankled at this formality I didn't understand.
"You don't understand all this, do
you?" He softened a little. "But when you've worn shoes a while and
kept your navel covered, it will make more sense. I tell you all this now, but
a year in Branning-at-sea will jack up my jabber with
meaning."
"I don't intend to stay a year."
"You
may not. Then, you may stay the rest of your life. It's that sort of place. It
holds many wonders and the wonders may hold you."
"I'm
passing," I insisted. "The death of Kid Death is at the end of my
trip."
He
got the oddest look. "I tell you, woodsboy,"
he admonished, "forget rough herders' talk. Don't swear by nightmares to
your betters."
"I'm not swearing. The redheaded pest rides
with this herd to plague Green-eye and me."
Hunched Pistol decided that the oaf (who was
me) was beyond tutoring. He laughed and clapped my shoulder. That vulgar streak
in him that had first prompted him to open conversation came out again.
"Then good luck to you, Lo Dirty-face and may the different devil die soon
and by your hand."
"By my knife," I corrected, drawing
my machete for him to see. "Tliink
of a song." "What?"
"Think
of some song. What music do they play at your pearl?"
He frowned, and I played.
His
eyes widened, then he laughed. He leaned against his
wagon, slapped his stomach. The thing inside me that laughs or cries laughed
with him a while. I played. But when his humor was past my understanding, I
sheathed my machete.
"Dragon driver,'* he explained through
his laughter, "I have only two choices, to mock your ignorance, or assume
that you mock me."
"As
you said to me, no offense meant. But I wish you'd explain the joke."
"I have, several times. You
persist." He examined my puzzlement. "Keep your differences to yourself. They are your affair, nobody else's."
"But it's only
music."
"Friend, what would you think of a man
you just met who, three minutes into the conversation, announced the depth of
his navel?"
"I don't see the
point."
He beat his forehead with his fingers.
"I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear,
though, I can't remember when." He pendulumed
between humor and exasperation faster than I followed.
"Look,"
I said. "I don't see the pattern in your formality. What I do see I don't
like-"
"It's
not for you to judge," Pistol said. "You can accept it, or you can go
away. But you can't go around disregarding other people's customs, joking with
the profane, and flaunting the damned."
"Will
you please tell me what customs I've disregarded, what
I've flaunted? I've just said what was on my mind."
His
country face hardened again (hard country faces I was to become used to in Branning). "You talk about Lo Green-eye as if he rode
by you among the lizards and you hail Kid Death as though you yourself have
looked down his six-gun."
"And where"—I was angry—"do
you think Green-eye is? He's sleeping by the coals up there." I pointed up
the rise. "And Kid Death-"
Fire
surprised us and we whirled. Behind us in flame, he stood up and smiled. As he
pushed back the brim of his hat with the barrel of his gun, red hair fell.
"Howdy, pardners," he snickered. Shadow
from grass and rock jogged on the group. Where flame slapped his wet skin,
steam curled away.
"Ahhhhhhh-ahhhh—ahhhh-eeeeee\" That
was Pistol. He fell against his cart, his jaw flopped down. He closed it to
swallow, but it fell open again. The dog growled. I stared.
The
fire flared, flickered, dimmed. Then only the smell of
leaves. My eyes pulsed with the afterimage and rage. I looked around me.
Pulsing darkness moved with my eyes. Behind it, on the rise by the road, the
light from the road lamp brushing his knees, was
Green-eye. He rubbed the tiredness out of his face with his fist. Kid Death had
gone to wherever he goes.
The cart started behind me.
Pistol
was still trying to get seated and at the same time guide the dog. I thought he
was going to fall. He didn't. They trundled away. I climbed up to Green-eye's
side. He looked at me . . . sadly?
In
the light up from the road, his sharp cheekbones were only shghtly
softened by wisps of adolescent beard. His shadowed socket was huge.
We
went back to the fire. I lay down. Sleep pawed my eyes down and the balls
beneath my lids exploded till dawn with amazing dreams of Friza.
Came back to the house early. They have brought wine for New Year. There
were musicians down in the white city. I remember a year and a half ago when I
finished The
Fall of The Towers, saying
to myself, you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are too old
to get by as a child prodigy: your accomplishments are more important than the
age at which they were done; still, the images of youth plague me, Chatter-ton,
Greenburg, Radiguet. By the end of
TEII hope to have excised them. Billy the Kid is the last to go. He
staggers through this abstracted novel like one of the mad children in Crete's
hills. Lobey Will hunt you
down, BUly. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will
return to Delos to explore the ruins around the Throne of Death in the center
of the island that faces the necropolis across the water on Rhenia.
Author's Joumal/Mykaaos, December 1965
Throughout
most of the history of man the importance of ritual has been clearly recognized,
for it is through the ritual acts that man establishes his identity with the
restorative powers of nature or makes and helps effect his passage into higher
stages of personal development and experience.
Masters & Houston/The Varieties
of Psychedelic Experience
The lights of Branning
were yellow behind mist and brambles as night made blue, wounded retreat
through the chill. Sun streaked the east while there were still stars in the
west. Batt blew up the fire. Three dragons had
strolled down to the pavement, so I rode down and ran them back. We ate with
grunts and silences.
This close to the sea morning was damp.
Beyond Branning, boats floated like papers toward the
islands. To My Mount then, and the jerky, gentle trail down. Hisses left and
right as we prodded them, but soon they were stomping and pawing in easy
convergence.
Spider saw them first. "Up ahead. Who
are they?"
People
were running along the road; behind them, people walked. The road lights, tuned
to an earlier month and longer night, went out.
Loosely curious, I rode to the head of the
herd. "They're singing," I called back.
Spider looked uncomfortable. "You can
hear the music?"
I nodded.
His
head was still; the rest of his body swayed under his face. He switched his
whip handle from hand to hand to hand; it was a quiet, beautiful way to be
nervous, I thought. I played the melody for him 'because the sound hadn't
reached us yet.
"They're singing
together?"
"Yes," I told
him. "They're chanting."
"Green-eye,"
Spider called. "Stay by me."
I put down my blade.
"Is there anything wrong?"
"Maybe,"
Spider said. "That's the family hymn of Green-eye's line. They know he's
here."
I looked questioningly.
"We
wanted to get him back to Branning quietly." He
flapped his dragon on the gills. "I just wonder how they found out he was
coming in this morning."
I
looked at Green-eye. Green-eye didn't look at me. He was watching the people
along the road. I couldn't think of anything else to do, so I started to play.
I didn't want to tell Spider about the man in the dog cart last night.
The voices reached us.
At which point I decided I better tell him
anyway. He didn't say anything.
Suddenly
Green-eye urged his dragon ahead. Spider tried to restrain him. But he slipped
beneath one hand after the other. Worry perched on his amber eyebrows.
Green-eye's mount stomped ahead.
"You don't think he should go to
them?" I asked.
"He
knows what he's doing." The people were thick on the road. "I
hope."
I
watched them come, remembering Pistol. His terror must have spread over
nighttime Branning like harbor oil. Dragons herded
down the road; people herded up.
"What will
happen?"
"They'll
praise him," Spider said, "now. Later, who knows?" "To
me," I said. "I mean what's going to happen to me." He was
surprised.
"I've
got to find Friza. Nothing changes. I've got to destroy
the Kid. It's still the same."
I
recalled the look on Pistol's face when he'd fled the Kid. Spider's face—I was
shocked at the recognition—twisted under the same fear. But there was so much
more in the face: a strength rode the same muscles as
terror. Yes, Spider was a large man.
"I
don't care about Green-eye, or anyone else." My words were carapaced with belligerence. "I'm going down to get Friza; and I'm going to come up with her again."
"You—"
he began. Then his width accepted me. "I wish you good luck." He
looked again after Green-eye swaying ahead of us toward the crowds. So much of
him rode ahead with the boy. I didn't realize how much of him fingered with me.
"You've done your job, then, Lobey. When we turn
the herd in, you'll be paid—" He stopped. Some other thought. "Come
to my house for your pay."
"Your
house?"
"Yes.
My home in Branning-at-sea."
He coiled his whip and kneed his dragon.
We passed another signboard. The white-haired
woman with the cool hps and warm eyes looked moodily
at me as I rode by.
the dove sats, "why
have ninety-nine when nine thousand abe there?"
I turned away from her mocking and wondered
how many people swarmed up through the morning. They lined the road. As they
recognized the young herder, their song crumbled into cheering. We entered the
crowd.
A
jungle is a myriad of individual trees, vines, bushes; passing through, you see
it, however, as one green mass. Perceiving a crowd works the same way: first
the single face here (the old woman twisting her green shawl), there (the blinking
boy smiling over a missing tooth) and following (three gaping girls protecting
one another with their shoulders). Then the swarms of elbows and ears, tongues
scraping words from the floor of the mouth and flinging them out "—move!" "Ouchl Get your-" "-I can't see-" "Where
is he? Is that him—" "No!"
"Yes—" while the backs of the dragons undulated through the clumps
of heads. They cheered. They waved their fists in the air before the gate. My
job is over, I thought. People jostled My Mount. "Is that him? Is
that—" The dragons were unhappy. Only Spider's calming kept them
peacefully heading forward. We crowded through the gate at Branning-at-sea.
At which point a lot of things happened.
I
don't understand all of them. In the first few hours a lot were tilings that would happen to anybody who had never seen
more than fifty people together at once thrust into alleys, avenues and squares
that trafficked thousands. The dragon herd left me (or I left it) to stumble
about with my mouth open and my head up. People kept bumping into me and
telling me to "Watch it!" which is exactly what I was trying to do;
only I was trying to watch it all at the same time. Which
would be difficult even if it kept still. While I watched one part of
it, another part would sneak up behind me and nearly run me down. Here's
fragmenting for you:
The
millions' music melded to a hymn like when your ears ring and you're trying to
sleep. In a village you see a face and you know it—its mother, its father, its
work, how it curses, laughs, lingers on one expression, avoids
another. Here one face yawns, another bulges with food; one scarred, one
longing with what could be love, one screaming: each among a thousand, none
seen more than once. You start to arrange the furniture in your head to find a
place for these faces, someplace to dump all these quarter emotions. When you
go through the gate at Branning-at-sea and leave the
country, you retreat to the country for your vocabulary to describe it: rivers
of men and torrents of women, storms of voices, rains of fingers and jungles of
arms. But it's not fair to Bran-ning. It's not fair
to the country either.
I
stalked the streets of Branning-at-sea dangling my unplayable
knife, gawking at the five story buildings till I saw the buildings with
twenty-five stories. Gawked at them till I saw a building with so many stories
I couldn't count, because around halfway up (around ninety) I kept losing
myself while people jostled me.
There were a few beautiful streets where
trees rubbed their leaves over the walls. There were many filthy ones where
garbage banked the sidewalk, where the houses were boxes pushed together,
without room for movement of air or people. The people stayed, the air stayed;
both grew foul.
On the walls were flayed posters of the Dove.
Here there were others also. I passed some kids elbowing each other around one
such poster that wrinkled over a fence. I squeezed among them to see what they
looked at.
Two
women gazed idiotically from swirling colors. The caption: "these two identical
twins are not the same.'
The youngsters giggled and shoved another.
Obviously I missed something about the sign. I turned to one boy. "I don't
get it."
"Huh?" He had freckles and a
prosthetic arm. He scratched his head with plastic fingers. "What do you
mean?"
"What's so funny about
that picture?"
First
disbelief: then he grinned. "If they're not the same," he blurted,
"they're different!"
They all laughed. Their
laughter was filigreed with the snicker that let you know when laughter's
rotten.
I
pushed away from them. I searched for music; heard none. After the listening
stops, after the searching—when these sidewalks and multitudes •will not bear
your questions any more: that's what lonely is, Friza.
Clutching my knife, I made my headlong way through evening, isolated as if I
had been lost in a city.
The shingled tones of the Kodaly cello
sonata! I swung around on my heels. The flags were clean and unbroken. There
were trees on the corner. The buildings slanted high behind brass gates. The
music unraveled in my head. Blinking, I looked from gate to gate. I chose.
Faltering, I walked up the short marble steps and struck my machete hilt on the
bars.
The
clang leaped down the street. The sound scared me but I struck again.
Behind
the gate the brass studded door swung in. Then there was a dick in the lock and
the gate itself rattled loose. Cautiously, I started the walk that led to the
open door. I squinted in the shadow at the doorway, then
went inside, blind from the sun and alone with the music.
My eyes accustomed to the
dimmer light: far ahead was a window. High in dark stone, a dragon twisted
through lead tesselations.
"Lobeyr
But I have this against thee, that
thou didst leave thy first love.
The Revelation
of Joftn/Chapter 2, verse 4
My trouble is,
such a subject cannot be
seriously looked at without intensifying itself toward a center
which is beyond what I, or
anyone else, is capable of
writing of . . .
Trying to write it in
terms of moral problems alone is more than I
can possibly
do. My
main hope is to state the
central subject and my ignorance
from the start.
James Agee/Letter to Father Flye
Where is this
country? How does one get
there? If one is born lover
with an innate- philosophic bent, one will get there.
PloUnus/The Intelligence, the Idea, and Being
Spider looked up from the desk where he'd
been reading. "I thought that would be you."
In
shadow behind him I saw the books. La Dire had owned some hundred. But
the shelves behind him went from floor to ceiling. J
"I want. .. my money." My eyes came back to the desk.
"Sit down,"
Spider said. "I want to talk to you."
"About what?" I asked. Our voices echoed. The music was nearly silent. "I have
to be on my way to get Friza, to find Kid
Death."
Spider
nodded. "That's why I suggest you sit down." He pressed a button, and
dust motes in the air defined a long cone of light that dropped to an onyx
stool before the desk. I sat slowly, holding my blade. As he had once shifted
the handle of his dragon whip from hand to hand, now he played with the
bleached, fragile skull of some rodent. "What do you know about mythology,
Lobey?"
"Only
the stories that La Dire, one of the elders of my village, used to tell me. She
told all the young people stories, some of them many times. And we told them to
each other till they sank into memory. By then there were other children for
her to tell."
"Again, what do you know about mythology?—I'm
not asking you what myths you know, nor even where they came from, but why we
have them, what we use them for."
"I
. . . don't know," I said. "When I left my village, La Dire told me
the myth of Orpheus."
Spider held up the skull
and leaned forward. "Why?"
"I don't. .." Then I thought. "To guide
me?"
I
could offer nothing else. Spider asked, "Was La Dire different?"
"She
was—" The prurience that had riddled the laughter of the young people
gaping at the poster came back to me; I did not understand it, still I felt the
rims of my ears grow hot. I remembered the way Easy, Litde
Jon, and Lo Hawk had tried to brake my brooding over Friza; and how La Dire had tried, her attempt like
theirs—yet different. "Yes," I confessed, "she was."
Spider
nodded and rapped his rough knuckles on the desk. "Do you understand
difference, Lobey?"
"I
live in a different world, where many have it and many do not. I just
discovered it in myself weeks ago. I know the world moves toward it with every
pulse of the great rock and the great roll. But I don't understand it."
Through
the eagerness on his drawn face Spider smiled. "In that you're like the
rest of us. All any of us knows is what it is not."
"What isn't it?" I asked.
"It isn't telepathy; it's not
telekinesis—though both are chance phenomena that increase as difference
increases. Lo-bey, Earth, the world, fifth planet
from the sun—the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust:
it's changing, Lobey. It's not the same. Some people
walk under the sun and accept that change, others
close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears and deny the world with their
tongues. Most snicker, giggle, jeer and point when they think no one else is
looking—that is how the humans acted throughout their history. We have taken
over their abandoned world, and something new is happening to the fragments,
something we can't even define with mankind's leftover vocabulary. You must
take its importance exactly as that: it is indefinable; you are involved in it;
it is wonderful, fearful, deep, ineffable to your explanations, opaque to your
efforts to see through it; yet it demands you take journeys, defines your
stopping and starting points, can propel you with love and hate, even to seek
death for Kid Death—"
"—or
make me make music," I finished for him. "What are you talking about,
Spider?"
"If
I could tell you, or you could understand from my inferences, Lobey, it would lose all value. Wars and chaoses and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them
ended an age and began another for our hosts, our ghosts called Man. One was
Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's
perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the
observer influences the thing he perceives."
"I'm familiar with
it," I said.
"The
other was Goedel, a contemporary of Einstein, who was
the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster
realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any closed mathematical system—you may read 'the real world with its immutable laws of logic'—there are an infinite
number of true theorems—you may read 'perceivable, measurable ■phenomena'—which, though
contained in the original system, can not
be deduced
pom it—read 'proven with ordinary or
extraordinary logic* Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth
than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio. There are an infinite number
of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein
defined the extent of the rational. Coedel stuck a
pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it
held still long enough for people to know it was there. And the world and
humanity began to change. And from the other side of the universe, we were
drawn slowly here. The visible effects of Einstein's theory leaped up on a
convex curve, its production huge in the first century after its discovery,
then leveling off. The production of Goedel's law
crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of
intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe with
ships and projection forces that are still available to anyone who wants to
use them—"
"Lo
Hawk," I said. "Lo Hawk went on a j'oumey
to the other worlds—"
"—and when the line of Goedel's law eagled over Einstein's, its shadow fell on a
deserted Earth. The humans had gone somewhere else, to no world in this
continuum. We came, took their bodies, their souls—both husks abandoned here
for any wanderer's taking. The Cities, once bustling centers of interstellar
commerce, were crumbled to the sands you see today. And they were once greater
than Branning-at-sea."
I
thought a moment. "That must have taken a long time," I said slowly.
"It has," Spider
said. "The City we crossed is perhaps thirty thousand years old. The sun
has captured two more planets since the Old People began here."
"And the source-cave?" I suddenly asked. "What was the
source-cave?"
"Didn't you ever ask
your elders?"
"Never thought
to," I said.
"It's
a net of caves that wanders beneath most of the planet, and the lower levels
contain the source of the radiation by which the villages, when their
populations become too stagnant, can set up a controlled random jumbling of
genes and chromosomes. Though we have not used that for
almost a thousand years. Though the radiation is still
there. As we, templated on man, become more
complicated creatures, the harder it is for us to remain perfect: there is
more variation among the normals and the kages fill with rejects. And here you are, now, Lobey."
"What
does this all have to do with mythology?" I was weary of his monologue.
"Recall my first question."
"What do I know of mythology?"
"And
I want a Goedelian, not an Einsteinian
answer. I don't want to know what's inside the myths, nor how they clang and
set one another ringing, their glittering focuses, their limits and genesis. I
want their shape, their texture, how they feel when you brush by them on a dark
road, when you see them receding into the fog, their weight as they leap your
shoulder from behind; I want to know how you take to the idea of carrying three
when you already bear two. Who are you, Lobey?"
"I'm
. . . Lobey?" I asked. "La Dire once called
me Ringo and Orpheus."
Spider's chin rose. His fingers, caging the
bone face, came together. "Yes, I thought so. Do you know who I am?"
"No."
Tm Green-eye's Iscariot. I'm Kid Death's Pat Garrett. I'm Judge Minos
at the gate, whom you must charm with your music
before you can even go on to petition the Kid. I'm every traitor you've
imagined. And I'm a baron of dragons, trying to support two wives and ten
children."
"You're a big man,
Spider."
He nodded. "What do you know of
mythology?"
"Now
that's the third time you've asked me." I picked up my blade. From the
grinding love that wanted to serenade his silences—the music had all stopped—I
leaned the blade against my teeth.
"Bite through the shells of my meanings,
Lobey. I know so much more than you. The guilty have
the relief of knowledge." He held the skull over the table. I thought he
was offering it to me. "I know where you can find Friza.
I can let you through the gate. Though Kid Death may loll me, I want you to
know that. He is younger, crueler, and much stronger. Do you want to go
on?"
I
dropped my blade. "It's fixed!" I said. "Ill
fail! La Dire said Orpheus failed. You're trying to
tell me that these stories tell us just what is going to happen. You've been
telling me we're so much older than we think we are; this is all schematic for
a reality I can't change! You're telling me right now that I've failed as soon
as I start."
"Do you believe
that?"
"That's what you've said."
"As
we are able to retain more and more of our past, it takes us longer and longer
to become old; Lobey, everything changes. The
labyrinth today does not follow the same path it did at Knossos fifty thousand
years ago. You may be Orpheus; you may be someone else, who dares death and
succeeds. Green-eye may go to the tree this evening, hang there, rot, and
never come down. The world is not the same. That's what I've been trying to
tell you. It's different"
"But-"
"There's just as much suspense today as
there was when the first singer woke from his song to discover the worth of the
concomitant sacrifice. You don't know, Lobey. This
all may be a false note, at best a passing dissonance in the harmonies of the
great rock and the great roll."
I thought for a while. Then
I said, "I want to run away."
Spider
nodded. "Some mason set the double-headed labrys
on the stones at Pheistos. You carry a two edge knife
that sings. One wonders if Theseus built the maze as
he wandered through it."
"I
don't think so," I said, defensive and dry. "The stories give you a
law to follow—"
"—that
you can either break or obey." "They set you a goal—"
"—and
you can either fail that goal, succeed, or surpass
it."
"Why?"
I demanded. "Why can't you just ignore the old stories? I'll go on plumb
the sea, find the Kid without your help. I can ignore
those tales!"
"You're
living in the real world now," Spider said sadly. "It's come from
something. It's going to something. Myths always fie in the
most difficult places to ignore. They confound all family love and
hate. You shy at them on entering or exiting any endeavor." He put the
skull on the table. "Do you know why the Kid needs you as much as he needs
Green-eye?"
I shook my head.
"I do."
"The Kid needs
me?"
"Why do you think
you're here?"
"Is the reason . . . different?"
"Primarily. Sit back and listen." Spider himself leaned back in his chair. I
stayed where I was. "The Kid can change anything in the range of his intelligence.
He can make a rock into a tree, a mouse into a handful of moss. But he cannot
create something from nothing. He cannot take this skull and leave a vacuum.
Green-eye can. And that is why the Kid needs Green-eye."
I remembered the encounter on the mountain
where the malicious redhead had tried to tempt the depthless vision of the
herder-prince.
"The other thing he
needs is music, Lobey."
"Music?"
"This
is why he is chasing you—or making you chase him. He
needs order. He needs patterning, relation, the knowledge that comes when six
notes predict a seventh, when three notes beat against one another and define a
mode, a melody defines a scale. Music is the pure language of temporal and
co-temporal relation. He knows nothing of this, Lobey.
Kid Death can control, but he cannot create, which is why he needs Green-eye.
He can control, but he cannot order. And that is why he needs you."
"But
how-?"
"Not
in any way your village vocabulary or my urban refinement can state. Differently, Lobey. Things passing
in a world of difference have their surrealistic corollaries in the present.
Green-eye creates, but it is an oblique side effect of something else. You
receive and conceive music; again only an oblique characteristic of who you
are—"
"Who am IP"
"You're .. . something else."
My
question had contained a demand. His answer held a chuckle.
"But
he needs you both," Spider went on. "What are you going to give himf"
"My
knife in his belly till blood floods the holes and leaks out the mouthpiece.
Ill chase the sea-floor till we both fall on sand.
I—" My mouth opened; I suddenly sucked in dark air so hard it hurt my
chest. "I'm afraid," I whispered. "Spider, I'm afraid."
"Why?"
I looked at him behind the evenly blinking
lids of his black eyes. "Because I didn't realize I'm alone in this."
I slid my hands together on the hilt. "If I'm to get Friza,
I have to go alone—not with her love, but without it. You're not on my
side." I felt my voice roughen, not with fear. It was the sadness that
starts in the back of the throat and makes you cough before you start crying.
"If I reach Friza, I don't know what 111 have,
even if I get her."
Spider
waited for my crying. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. So after a while
he said, "Then I guess I can let you through, if you really know
that."
I looked up.
He nodded to my silent
question.
"There's
someone you must go to see. Here." He stood up.
In his other hand was a small sack. He shook it. Inside coins clinked. He flung
the sack toward me. I caught it.
"Whor
"The
Dove."
"The one whose
pictures I've seen? But who—"
"Who is the
Dove?" asked Spider. "The Dove is Helen
of Troy, Star Anthim,
Mario Montez, Jean Harlow." He
waited.
"And
you?" I asked. "You're Judas and Minos and
Pat Garrett? Who are you to her?"
His snort
was contemptuous and amused. "If the Dove is Jean Harlow I'm Paul
Burn."
"But
why-?"
"Come on, Lobey.
Get going."
"I'm
going," I said. "I'm going." I was confused. For much the same
reasons you are. Though not exactly the
same. As I walked to the door I kept glancing back at Spider. Suddenly
he tossed the skull gendy. It passed me, hovered a moment,
then smashed on the stones and Spider laughed. It was a friendly laugh, without
the malicious flickering of fish scales and flies' wings that dazzled the
laughter of the Kid. But it nearly scared me to death. I ran out the door. For
one step bone fragments chewed at my instep. The door slammed behind me. The
sun slapped my face.
Leave
Crete and come to this holy temple.
Sappho /Fragment
This
morning I took refuge from the thin rain in a teahouse with the dock workers.
Yellow clouds moiled outside above the Bosphorus.
Found one man who spoke French, two others who spoke Greek. We talked of
voyages and warmed our fingers on glasses of tea. Between the four of us we
had girdled the globe. The radio over the stove alternated repetitive Turkish
modulations with Aznavour and the Beatles. Lobey starts the last leg of his journey. I cannot follow
him here. When the rain stopped, I walked through the waterfront fish market
where the silver fish had their gUls pulled out and
looped over their jaws so that each head was crowned with a bloody flower. A street of wooden houses wound up the hill into the city. A
fire had recently raged here. Few houses had actually burned down, but high
slabs of glittering carbon leaned over the cobbles where the children played
with orange peels in the mud. I watched some others chase a redheaded boy. His
face was wet; he tripped in the mud, then fled before
me. The heels had been trod down in his shoes. Perhaps on rewriting I shall
change Kid Death's hair from black to red. Followed the wall
of Topkapi palace, kicking away wet leaves from the
pavement. I stopped in the SuUanahmet Jammi. The blue designs rose on the dome above me. It was
restful. In a week another birthday, and I can start
the meticulous process of overlaying another filigree across the novels
palimpsest. The stones were cold under my bare feet.
The
designs keep going, taking your eyes up and out of yourself. Outside I put on
my boots and started across the courtyard. In the second story of the old
teahouse across the park I sat in a corner away from the stove and tried to
wrestle my characters toward their endings. Soon I shall start again. Endings
to be useful must be inconclusive.
Author's Journal/Istanbul, March 1966
What
are your qualifications? Dare you dwell in the East where we dwell? Are you
afraid of the sun? When you hear the new violet sucking her way among the gods,
shall you be resolute?
Emily Dickinson/Letter to K. S. Turner
The Pearl surprised me. A million people is too many to sort an individual from a slum. But the
established classes are all the more centralized. There in the furious evening
I saw the sign down the street. I looked in my purse. But Spider would have
given me enough.
Black
doors broke under a crimson sunburst. I went up the stairs beneath the orange
lights. There was perfume. There was noise. I held my sword tight. Tackheads had worn away the nap of the carpet with the
tugging of how many feet. Some one had painted a trompe VoeU still life on the left wall: fruit, feathers,
and surveying instruments on crumpled leather. Voices, yes.
Still, at the place where the auditory nerve connects to the brain and sound
becomes music, there was silence.
To?" inquired the dog at the head of the
steps.
I was baffled. "Lo Lobey,"
I told bis cold face, and grinned at it. It stayed
cold.
And on the balcony across the crowded room
where her party was, she stood up, leaned over the railing, called, "Who
are you?" with contralto laughter spilling her words.
She
was pretty. She wore silver, a sheath Vd
deeply between small breasts. Her mouth seemed used to emotions, mostiy laughter I guessed. Her hair was riotous and bright
as Litde Jon's. The person she was calling to was me. "Um-hm. You, silly. Who are you?"
It
had slipped my mind that when somebody speaks to you, you answer. The dog
coughed, then announced. "Eh . . . Lo Lobey is
here." At which point everyone in the room silenced. With the silence I
learned how noisy it had been. Glasses, whispers, laughter, talk, feet on the floor, chair legs squeaking after them: I wished
it would start again. In a doorway on the side of the room where two serpents
twined over the transom, I saw the fat, familiar figure of the hunchback
Pistol. He was obviously coming from somewhere to see what was wrong; he saw
me, closed his eyes, took a breath, and leaned on the doorjamb.
Then
the Dove said, "Well, it's about time, Lo Lobey.
I thought you'd never get here. Pistol, bring a
chair."
I
was surprised. Pistol was astounded. But after he got his mouth closed, he got
the chair. With drawn machete I stalked the Dove among the tables, the flowers,
the candles and cut goblets; the men with gold chained dogs crouching at their
sandals; the women with jeweled eyelids, their breasts propped in cages of
brass mesh or silver wire. They all turned to watch me as I went.
I
mounted a stairway to the Dove's balcony. One hip against the railing, she held
out her hand to me. "You're Spider's friend," she beamed. She made
you feel very good when she talked. "Pistol"—she twisted around;
wrinkles of light slid over her dress—"put the seat by mine." He did
and we sat on the brocade cushions.
With the Dove in front of me it was a little
difficult to look at anyone else. She leaned toward me, breathing. I guess
that's what she was doing. "We're supposed to talk. What do you want to talk
about?"
Breathing
is a fascinating thing to watch in a woman. "Eh . . . ah . . . well ..." I pulled my attention forcefully
back to her face. "Are nine thousand really that much better than
ninety-nine?" (You think I knew what I was talking about?) She began to
laugh without making any sound. Which is even more
fascinating.
"Ah!"
she responded, "you must try it and find out."
At
which point everybody started talking again. The Dove still watched me.
"What do you do?" I asked. "Spider says you're supposed to help
me find Friza."
"I
don't know who Friza is."
"She
was—" The Dove was breathing again, "—beautiful too."
Her
face passed down to deeper emotion. "Yes," she said.
"I
don't think we can talk about it here." I glanced at Pistol, who was still
hovering. "The problem isn't exacdy the same as
you might think."
She
raised a darkened eyebrow.
"It's
a bit. .."
"Oh,"
she said, and her chin went up. "But you?" I
said. "What do you do? Who are you?" Her-eyebrow arch grew more
acute. "Are you serious?" I nodded.
In confusion she looked to the people around
her. When no one offered to explain for her, she looked back at me. Her hps opened, touched; her lashes dipped and leaped.
"They say I'm the thing that allows them all to go on loving."
"How?" I asked.
Someone
beside her said, "He really doesn't know?" From the other side:
"Doesn't he knew about keeping confusion in the
trails-fertile?"
She placed a finger perpendicular to her hps. They quieted at the sound of her sigh. "Ill have to tell him. Lobey —this is your name."
"Spider
told me to talk to you ..." I
offered. I wanted to fix myself by informative hooks to her world.
Her
smile cut guys. "You try to make things too simple. Spider.
The great Lord Lo Spider? The
traitor, the false friend, the one who has already signed Green-eye's death
decree. Don't concern yourself with that doomed man. Look to yourself, Lobey. What do you want to know—"
"Death decree—"
She
touched my cheek. "Be selfish. What do you want?" "Frizal" I half stood in my seat.
She
sat back. "Now 111 ask you a question, having not
answered yours. Who is Friza?"
"She
. . ." Then I said, "She was almost as beautiful as you.
Her
chin came down. Light, light eyes darkened and came down too. "Yes."
That word came with the sound of only the breath I had been watching, without
voice. So much questioning in her face now made her
remembered expression caustic.
"I . . ." The wrong word. "She ..."
A fist started to beat my ribs. Then it stopped, opened, reached up into my
head, and scratched down the inside of my face: forehead and cheeks burned. My
eyes stung.
She caught her breath.
"I see."
"No you don't," I
got out. "You don't."
They
were watching again. She glanced right, left, bit her
hp as she looked back. "You and I are . . . well, not quite the
same."
"Huh?...
oh. But-Dove-"
"Yes, Lobey?"
"Where
am I? I've come from a village, from the wilds of nowhere, through dragons and
flowers. I've thrown my Lo, searching out my dead girl, hunting a naked cowboy
mean as Spider's whip. And somewhere a dirty, one-eyed prince is going to . . .
die while I go on. Where am I, Dove?"
"This
close to an old place called Hell." She spoke quickly. "You can enter
it through death or song. You may need some help to find your way out."
"I look for my dark
girl and find you silver."
She
stood and blades of fight struck at me from her dress. Her smooth hand swung by
her hip. I grabbed it with my rough one. "Come," she said.
I came.
As
we descended from the balcony she leaned on my arm. "We are going to walk
once around the room. I suppose you have the choice either of listening, or
watching. I doubt if you can do both. I couldn't, but try." As we started
to circuit the room, I beat my shin with the flat of my sword.
"We
are worn out with trying to be human, Lobey. To
survive even a dozen more generations we must keep the genes mixing, mixing, mixing."
An
old man leaned his belly on the edge of his table, gaping at the girl across
from him. She licked the comer of her mouth, her eyes wonderous
and blue and beautiful. Her cheekbones mocked him.
"You
can't force people to have children with many people. But we can make the idea
as attractive"—she dropped her eyes—"as possible."
At
the next table the woman's face was too loose for the framing bone beneath. But
she laughed. Her hand wrinkled over the smooth fingers of the young man across
from her. She gazed enviously from lined eyes at his quick lids, dark as olives
when he blinked, his hair shinier than hers, wild where hers was coiffed in
high laquer.
"Who am I, Lobey?"
she suggested—rather than asked— rhetorically. "I'm the key image in an
advertising campaign. I'm the good/bad wild thing whom everybody wants, wants
to be like—who prefers ninety-nine instead of one* I'm the one whom men search
out from seeding to seeding. I'm the one whom all the women style their hair
after, raise and lower their hems and necklines as mine raise and lower. The
world steals my witticisms, my gestures, even my mistakes, to try out on each
new lover."
The
couple at the next table had probably forgotten most of what it was like to be
forty. They looked happy, wealthy and content. I was envious.
"There was a time," the Dove went
on, pressing the back of my hand with her forefinger, "when
orgies and artificial insemination did the trick. But we still have a jelling
attitude to melt. So, that's what I do. Which leaves you, I
gather, with another question."
The youngsters across from us clutched each
other's hands and giggled. Once I thought that twenty-one was the responsible
age; it had to be, it was so far away. Those kids could do anything and were
just learning how, and were hurt and astounded and deliriously happy at once
with the prospects.
"The
answer"—and I looked back at the Dove—Ties with the particular talent I
have that facilitates my job."
The
finger that had pressed my hand now touched my hps.
She pouted for silence. With her other hand she lifted my sword. "Play, Lobey?"
"For
you?"
She
swept her hand around the room. "For them."
She turned to the people. "Everybody! I want you
to be quiet I want you to hear. You must be still—"
They stilled.
"—and listen."
They listened. Many leaned their elbows on
the table. The
Dove turned to me and nodded. I looked at my
machete.
Across
the room Pistol was holding his head. I smiled at him. Then I sat down on the
edge of an empty table, toed the holes, fingered them.
I
blew a note. I looked at the people. I blew another one. I laughed after that
one.
The youngsters laughed too.
I blew two notes, down, then shrill.
I
started to clap my hands, a hard, slow rhythm. I made the melody with feet
alone. The kids thought that was pretty funny too. I rocked on the table edge,
closed my eyes, and clapped and played. In the back somebody began to clap with
me. I grinned into the flute (difficult) and the sound brightened. I remembered
the music I'd gotten from Spider. So I tried something I'd never done before. I
let one melody go on without my playing it, and played another instead. Tones
tugged each other into harmony as they swooped from clap to clap. I let those
two continue and threaded a third above them. I pushed the music into a body swayer, a food shaker, till fingers upon the tablecloth
pounced on the pattern. I played, looking hard at them, weighing the weight of
music in them, and when there was enough, I danced. Movements repeated
themselves; making dances is the opposite of taking them. I danced on the
table. Hard. I whipped them with music. Sounds peeled
from sounds. Chords fell open like sated flowers. People called out. I shrilled
my rhythms at them down the hollow knife, gouged sound down their spines the
way you pith a frog. They shook in their seats. I put into the music a fourth
line, dissonant to lots and lots of other notes. Three people had started
dancing with me. I made the music make them. Rhythm buoyed their jerking. The
old man was shaking his shoulders at the blue eyed girl. Clap. The youngster
shook shoulder—Clap—to shoulder. The older couple held hands very tighdy. Clap. Sound banked behind—Clap—itself. Silence a
moment. Clap. Then loosed through the room; like dragons in the gorse, wild,
they moaned together, beat their thighs and bellies to four melodies.
On the raised dais, where the Dove's table
had been, somebody opened the wide windows. The wind on my sweaty back made me
cough. The cough growled in the flute. A breeze in a closed room lets you know
how hot it is. The dancers moved to the balcony. I followed them. The tiles
were red and blue. The gold evening streamed with blue wounds. One or two
dancers rested on the railing. My sword fell from my lips as I gazed around
the—
It
caught me across the eyes. The silver dress rippled in the wind. But it wasn't
the Dove. She raised dark knuckles to her brown cheek, her full mouth parting
in a sigh. She blinked, brushed her hand across her hair, searching through the
dancers. One and another of them hid her a moment, stepping away.
Dark Friza—
Friza returned and turning among the
dancers-Beautiful and longed for Friza, found-Once I
was so hungry that when I ate I was frightened. The same fear now. Only more. The music played itself. The blade hung in my
hand. Once Friza had thrown a pebble— I began to run
the maze of dancers.
She
saw me. I caught her shoulders; she clutched me, cheek on my neck, breast on my
breast, her arms hard across my back. Her name swam in my head. I know I hurt
her. Her fists on my back hurt me. My eyes were wide and tearing. I wanted to
be open to everything about her. Nothing shook in her. I held all her slim
strength. My arms tightened, relaxed, tightened again.
Across
the park below was a single tree, wintered by the insane sun. Roped from the
crotch, one arm to each fork, head so far forward the neck had to be broken,
dangled Green-eye. Blood from a rope cut glittered along his arm.
She
twisted in my arms, looked at me, at what I was looking at; quickly she put
her hands over my eyes. Alone in her dark hands, I recognized the music. Polyphonized now and danced by strangers, it was the
mourning song of the girl who shielded my eyes now, played for the garroted
prince.
Under
the music, a voice whispered, "Lobey, be careful."
It was the Dove's voice. "Do you want to look that closely?"
The fingers stayed over my face.
"I
can look down your head like a hall. You died, Lobey.
Somewhere in the rocks and rain, you died. Do you want to look at that closely—"
"I'm no ghost!"
"Oh, you're real, Lobey!
But perhaps—"
I twisted my head again,
but darkness followed.
"Do you want to know
about the Kid?"
"I want to know
anything that'll help me kill him."
"Then
listen. Kid Death can bring back to life only the ones he himself takes from
it. He can only keep the belly buttons he harvests. But do you know who brought
you back from—"
"Take your hands away."
"You've
got a choice to make, Lobey, quick!" the Dove
whispered. "Do you want to see what's in front of you? Or do you want to
see only what you saw before?"
"Your hands. I can't see anything with your hands in front of my ..." I stopped, horrified at what I
had just said.
"I'm
very talented, Lobey, in what I do." Light
seeped in, as gendy the pressure released. "I've
had to perfect that talent to survive. You can't ignore the laws of the world
you've chosen—"
I took the wrists and pulled the hands down.
The Dove's hands resisted just a moment, then fell.
Green-eye was still roped to the tree below me.
I
grabbed the Dove's arms. "Where is she?"
I looked about the terrace. I shook her and she pulled back against the rail.
"I
become the thing you love, Lobey. That's part of my
talent. That's how I can be the Dove."
I shook my head. "But you—"
She rubbed her shoulder. Her hand slid under
the silver cloth. It shifted with her fingers.
"And they—" I gestured toward the
dancers. The youngsters, still holding hands, were pointing into the park and
giggling. "They call you La Dove."
She
cocked her head, brushing back silver hair. "No, Lobey." She shook her head. "Who told you
that, Lobey? Who told you that? I'm Le Dove."
I
got chills. The Dove extended a slim hand. "Didn't you know? Lobey, you mean you didn't—"
I backed away, raising my sword.
"Lobey, we're not humanl We live on their planet, because they destroyed it. We've
tried to take their form, their memories, their myths.
But they don't fit. It's illusion, Lobey. So much of it. He brought you back: Green-eye. He's the one
who could have brought back, really brought back your Friza."
"Green-eye . . . ?"
"But
we're just not the same as they were, Lobey.
We're—" I turned and ran from the balcony.
Inside,
I overturned a table, whirled at the barking dog. "Lo Lobeyl"
He sat on the dais where the Dove's party had been. "Come. Have you been
enjoying the floor show here at the Pearl?"
Before
I could say anything, he nosed a switch in the wall. The floor began to rotate.
Through my hysteria I realized what was happening. The floor was two panes of
polarized
plastic,
one above the other. The top one turned; the lower one was still. As they
reached transparency, I saw figures moving below in the crevices of the stone,
down below the chair and table legs.
"The
Pearl is built over one of the corridors for the kage at Branning-at-sea. Look:
they weave there among the crags, that one falling, that other, clinging to the
wall, chewing his tongue and drooling blood. We have no kage-keeper
here. The old computer system the humans used for Psychic Harmony
Entanglements and Deranged Response Associations takes care of their illusions.
Down there is a whole hell full of gratified desire—"
I
flung myself on the floor, pressing my face against the transparency.
"PHAEDRA!" I screamed. "PHAEDRA, where is she?"
"Hi, baby!" Lights glittered below
me from the shadow. A couple with many too many arms stood in a quiet embrace
beneath the flickering machine.
"PHAEDRA-!"
"It's still the wrong maze, baby. You
can find another illusion down here. She'll follow you all the way to the door,
but when you turn around to make sure she's there, you'll see through it all
again, and you'll leave alone. Why even bother to go through with it?" The
voice was thinned through the plastic floor. "Mother is in charge of
everything down here. Don't come playing your bloody knife around me. You've
got to try and get her back some other way. You're a bunch of psychic
manifestations, multi-sexed and incorporeal, and you—you're all trying to put
on the limiting mask of humanity. Turn again, Lobey.
Seek somewhere outside the frame of the mirror—"
"Where-"
"Have you begged at
the tree?"
Below me the lost drooled
and lurched and jabbered in the depths of the kage
beneath PHAEDRA's flickering. I pushed away. The dog barked as I reached the
door.
I
missed a stair and grabbed the banister four steps down. The building hurled me
into the park. I caught my balance. Around the plaza metal towers roared with
spectators dancing on the terraces, singing from crowded windows.
I
stood before the tree and played to him, pleading. I hung chords on a run of
sevenths that begged his resolution. I began humbly, and the song emptied me,
till there was only the pit. I plunged. There was rage. It was mine, so I gave
him that. There was love. That shrilled beneath the singing in the windows.
Where
his forearm had been lashed to the branch, the bone had broken. His hand sagged
away from the bark—
—And
nothing. I shrieked, as outrage broke. With the hilt in both hands, I plunged
the point in his thigh, sank it to the wood. I screamed again and wrenched
away, quivering.
In
pity for man's darkening thought He walked that room and issued thence In
Galilean turbulence; The Babylonian starlight brought a fabulous, formless darkness in.
William Butler Yeats/Song from a Play
I
have heard that you will give 1000 dollars
for my body which as I understand, it means as a witness . . . if it was so as
I could appear in court, I would give the desired information, but I have
indictments against me for things that happened in the Lincoln County War, and
am afraid to give myself up because my enemies would kill me.
William
H. Bonney (Billy the Kid)/ Letter to Gov. Wallace
I seek with garlands to redress that wrong.
Andrew
Marvel/The Coronet
The sea broke. Morning ran over the water. I
walked along the beach alone. There were a lot of shells around. I kept on
thinking, just a day before we rode into Branning on
dragons. Now his life and my illusion were gone. Behind me Branning-at-sea
diminished on the dawn. The point of my machete scarred the sand again and
again as I walked.
I
was not tired. I'd walked all night. But something had wound the ends of
fatigue so tight I couldn't stop. The dawn beach was beautiful. I climbed a
dune crested with long, lisping grasses.
"Hey,
Lobey."
Whatever it was unwound and shook like sprung
clockworks.
"How you been?"
He
was sitting on a log jammed into the moist earth at the bottom of the dune. He
squinted up at me, brushed back his hair. The sun flamed the crystals on his
shoulder, his arm: salt.
"I been waiting a long, long time." He scratched his
knee. "How are you?"
"I don't know," I
said. "Tired."
"Are
you going to play?" He pointed up at my sword. "Come on down."
"I don't want
to," I said.
Sand
trickled from the soles of my feet. I looked down, just as a piece of dune fell
away beneath me. I staggered. Fear jogged loose. I fell, and began to claw at
the sand. While the Kid chuckled, I slipped down the slope. At the bottom, I
whirled. The Kid, still sitting on the log, looked down at me.
"What
do you want?" I whispered. "You've lost Green-eye. What do you want
from me?"
The
Kid rubbed his ear, smihng over many small teeth.
"I need that." He pointed to my machete. "Do you think Spider
would really—" He stopped. "Spider decided Green-eye, you, and me couldn't stay alive in the same world; it was too
dangerous. So he signed the death decree and had Green-eye strung up while you
played him out, and I cried beneath the sea where you can't see tears; is that
what you believe?"
"I don't... I don't know."
"I
believe that Green-eye lives. I don't know. I can't follow him like I can the
rest of you. He could be dead." He leaned forward and bared his teeth.
"But he's not."
I pushed my back against
the sand.
"Give me your
sword."
I pulled back my arm. Suddenly I swung
forward and hacked at him. He dodged. Wood splintered.
"If
you hit me," he said, "I suppose it would be unpleasant. I do bleed.
But if I can tell what you're thinking, well then, attempts to get rid of me
like that are really fruitless." He shrugged, smiling gendy.
He reached out and touched the blade.
My hand jumped. He took the machete, fingered
the holes. "No," he sighed. "No, that doesn't do me any
good." He held it out to me again. "Show me how?"
I
took it from him because it was mine and I didn't like him holding it.
He
scratched his right heel with his left foot. "Come on. Show me. I don't
need the knife. I need the music inside. Play, Lobey."
He nodded.
Terrified, I put the handle
to my mouth.
"Go on."
A note quavered.
He leaned forward, gold lashes low. "Now
I'm gonna take everything that's left." His
fingers snared one another. He curled his toes, tearing the earth with claws. Another note. I began a third-It was a sound and a motion
and a feeling all at once. It was a loud snap: the Kid arched his back and grabbed his neck; the feeling was terror
going a few degrees further than I thought it could. Spider, from the top of
the dune shouted, "Keep playing, damn id"
I squawked through the
blade.
"As
long as you make music, he can't use his mind for anything else!"
The
Kid was standing. The dragon whip lashed over my head. Blood lanced down his
chest. He stumbled back over the driftwood, fell. I scrambled aside, managing
to keep my feet under me—a trifle easier for me than most other people. I was
still getting some sort of noise out of the blade.
Spider, his whip singing,
came crabwise down the dune.
The Kid flipped to his belly under the lash
and tried to crawl. The gills under the hair falling over his neck spread.
Spider cut his back open, then yelled at me,
"Don't stop playing!"
The Kid hissed and bit the ground. He rolled
to his side, sand on his mouth and chin. "Spider . . .
aw, Spider. Stop it! Don't, please . . . don—" The whip opened his
cheek and he clutched his face.
"Keep playing, Lobey! Damn it, or hell kill
me!"
Overblown at the octave, my
notes jabbed the morning.
"Ahhhhh . . . no, Spider man. Don't hurt me no morel" His speech
slurred on his bloody tongue. "Don't—ahhhhhh— it hurts. It hurts! You're supposed to be my friend, Spider!— naw, you're supposed to be my'.
. ." Sobs for a while. The whip cut the Kid again
and again.
Spider's
shoulders ran with sweat. "Okay," he said. He coiled his lash,
breathing hard.
My
tongue was sore, my hands numb. Spider looked from me to the Kid. "It's
over," he said.
"Was it... necessary?" I asked.
Spider just looked at the
ground.
There
was a thrashing in the bush. A length of thorn coiled over the sand, dragging a
blossom.
Spider
started up the slope. "Come on," he said. I followed him. At the top
I looked back. A bouquet clustered over the corpse's head, jostling for eyes
and tongue. I followed Spider down.
At
the bottom he turned to me. Then he frowned. "Snap out of it, boy. I just
saved your life. That's all."
"Spider ... ?"
"What?"
"Green-eye
... I think I've figured something
out." "What? ... Come on,
we have to get back." "Like the Kid; I can bring back the ones I've
killed myself."
"Like
in the broken land," Spider said. "You brought yourself back. You
let yourself die, and you came back. Green-eye is the only one who can bring
your Friza back—now."
"Green-eye,"
I said again. "He's dead."
Spider
nodded. "You killed him. It was that last stroke of your
.. ." He gestured toward
my machete.
"Oh,"
I said. "What's going on back at Branning-at-sea?"
"Riots."
"Why?"
"They're hungry for their own
future." For a moment I pictured
the garden of the Kid's face. It made me ill.
"I'm
going back," he said. "Are you coming?"
The
sea receded and froth spiraled the sand.
I
thought for a while. "Yes. But not now."
"Green-eye
will"—Spider mashed something into the sand with his foot—"wait, I
suppose. And the Dove too. The Dove leads them in the
dance, now, and won't be so ready to forgive you for the choice you made."
"What
was it?"
"Between the real and—the rest." "Which did I choose?"
Spider pushed my shoulder, grinning.
"Maybe you'll know when you get back. Where you off
to?" He started to turn. "Spider?"
He looked back.
"In my village there was a man who grew
dissatisfied. So he left this world, worked for a while on the moon, on the
outer planets, then on worlds that were stars and stars away. I might go
there."
Spider nodded. "I did that once. It was
all waiting for me when I got back."
"What's it going to be
like?"
"It's
not going to be what you expect." He grinned, then
turned away.
"It's
going to be ... different?" He
kept walking down the sand.
As
morning branded the sea, darkness fell away at the far side of the beach. I
turned to follow it.
CLASSICS OF GREAT SCIENCE-FICTION from ACE BOOKS
F-356
(400) THE TIME AXIS
by Henry Kuttner
F-364 (40)2) THE MIGHTIEST MACHINE
by John W. Campbell F-372 (400) SPACEHOUNDS OF IPC
by Edward E. Smith F-375 (400) THE WORLDS OF ROBERT A. HEINLEIN M-142 (450) DOPPELGÄNGERS by H. F. Heard A-8 (750) SILVERLOCK
by John Myers Myers
M-143 (450) ISLANDS OF SPACE
by John W. Campbell G-586 (500) HAWK OF THE WILDERNESS
by William L. Chester F-400 (400) JAN OF THE JUNGLE
by Otis
Adelbert Kline
F-406 (400) TAMA, PRINCESS OF MERCURY
by Ray Cummings M-152 (450) KING OF THE WORLD'S EDGE
by H. Warner Munn M-153 (450) THE WEAPON MAKERS
by A. E. van Vogt M-154 (450) INVADERS FROM THE INFINITE
by John W. Campbell F-422 (400) SWORD OF RHIANNON
by Leigh Brackett F-426 (400) THE GENETIC GENERAL
by Gordon R. Dickson F-429 (400) THE WORLD JONES MADE
by Philip K. Dick
Available from Ace Books, Inc. (Dept. MM), 1120 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10036. Send price indicated, plus 50 handling
fee.
SAMUEL R.
DELANY has also written for Ace Books:
THE JEWELS OF APTOR |
(F-173) |
* CAPTIVES OF THE FLAME |
(F-199) |
* THE TOWERS OF TORON |
(F-261) |
* CITY OF A THOUSAND SUNS (F-322) |
|
THE BALLAD OF BETA-2 |
(M-121) |
EMPIRE STAR (M-139) |
|
BABEL-17
(F-388) |
* Composing the trilogy of The Fall of the Towers.
F-titles 400 M-titles 450
"Delany's work is comparable only to that of Sturgeon, Ballard, Vonnegut, and Cordwainer Smith."
- JUDITH MERRIL
THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION is o novel of a strange far future when this
world of , Einsteinian laws, having intersected with
a universe.following a different set of rules, has
changed—changed strangely, wonderfully, incredibly.
This Is the story of
Lobey, an alien
Orpheus, and his adventures across a weird
sumptuous world, marvelously haunted.
Along his questing trail, he meets Spider,
the driver of dragons; Kid Death, the red- A
headed killer from the sea; the Dove, fabu-
lous love image of a world obsessed; Green-
eye, victim of a ritual invented by a race
dead for millenia; and Friza
—the dark,
silent girl Lobey searched for over deserts,
through jungles of carnivorous flowers,
from a quiet village to a furious city, to the
shores of death, and beyond. ^