All I can say is that, like some diplomat himself, he was as obliging to me as I was to him, with only one or two quizzical and good-natured inquiries, while I managed to drink his semen and induced his rectum to drink, as it were, mine—he held me with hard arms and legs and said: “Oh …” And, minutes later, “You’re a very interesting woman.”
“So are you,” I said, though it was more camaraderie than critical judgment.
“Have you ever thought how vulnerable we are here?” she (as I could only bring myself to call her now) asked, coiling up wires and pushing machines about the partitioned flooring. “This isn’t a world, you know—though we all try to pretend it is. But it could go up like that—” She touched an electrode to some metal plate, so that it sparked and snapped—“and we’d all be gone, except the dozen or so of us who could get to the nearest ship.” She pulled a strap of her coveralls over one hard and dirty shoulder. “Ten thousand people gone, like that—with only a few hundred getting out.”
“Yes.” I raised an eyebrow. (Do you see, with the frequency of such speculations why I discounted those of my employer1 on that other—what was its name? Yes, Nepiy—world?) “I suppose.”
“And yet—” She stood—“we never do. It’s probably because here we have no Family, no Sygn.”
“You know—” I smiled, recalling how worried the women of Nepiy and fifty other worlds had been—“for Cultural Fugue to take place, you have to have a culture …”
“True,” she offered.
“I bet you grew up right in the middle of the Family.”
“And your world was a Sygn world, wasn’t it?”
“True,” I returned. “At least my part of it.” While both of us wondered how we knew, she went with me to another well-lighted corridor in the rhisome of corridors that webbed Kantor’s three little worlds. “Odd,” I said as we walked, “but just a while ago, someone mentioned a whole world to me that recently got destroyed. Just a few women survived.”
(You’ve been looking. You’ve been listening. No, I knew neither Korga’s name nor his world’s, yet I had heard of them, and had already passed the information on.)
“Mmmm,” said my tall mechanic, as if she’d been given something fine to eat. “Was it a Family world, or with the Sygn?”
“They didn’t say,” I said.
We turned another corner.
So she said: “This will take you back where you want to go.” Then, with the goodwill and self-confidence only people who know for sure they are largely liked by lots of women can show, she said: “A whole world …!” Then she made a funny little hand motion (which, I suspect, would have meant the same as if I’d shaken my head) and turned away.
Broad, breezy, full of detours, underpasses, and overhangs, the hallways I walked back down to ground level through were an allegory of the informative complexities that Free-Kantor both was and was made for.
And the overload hum was still going on!
That I’ve never known to happen. Information overload in a major GI sorting system is something that’s supposed to stop after a second or two, maybe ten at the very most, certainly no more than ten minutes. This jam finally concluded with a sudden burst that brought me up short over the large red and blue plastic panels of the water fountain where I’d just bent to drink, with the declaration:
In Arachnia as it is spoken on Nepiy, “she” is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of “woman.” The ancient, dimorphic form “he,” once used exclusively for the genderal indication of males (cf. the archaic term man, pl. men), for more than a hundred-twenty years now, has been reserved for the general sexual object of “she,” during the period of excitation, regardless of the gender of the woman speaking or the gender of the woman referred to.
Which is to say, on Nepiy “he” meant exactly what it did on my own home world or, indeed, here, at Kantor, far off it.
But somehow during the overload, the question had become misfiled or misplaced in my own mind, so that for a moment I felt as if I were being given the answer to a perfectly irrelevant query instead of what, an hour before, I’d asked.
The disorientation, even more than an hour of oppressive hum from the overload, completely struck me away from the feeling that, I realized as it ceased, was probably the reason why I’d come to Free-Kantor in the first place, braving all her inconveniences: here I was in the center of the night—which now, while the water bob-bled slowly over the huge, plastic sheets, changed to the conviction that, lost in darkness eternal, I was (at least for the moment) nowhere at all!
TWO
The Flower and the Web
1.
ONE OF MY EARLIEST memories—
But I must interrupt to ask: does the above disorientation and estrangement return me to this early moment in the mode of terrified retreat, or do I come to it through a broad and relaxed sense of disinterested aesthetic contrast? Both terror and aesthetics no doubt fuel memory to spear night and time to that morning thirty (standard) years before, but in what form, combination, interplay? Perhaps the answer is in the account itself. Or is it likely that women are just more complex than can be made out by starlight alone?
—the memory: crawling the soft nursery loam between the furry bodies of my schoolmates, some of whom were beginning to get dark scales on their backs; being licked a lot and occasionally licking (though it struck me even then as silly), I wondered at all those tongues that spoke so much better than mine but said such silly things: “The sunlight tailing, oh, my goodness! You’re not a shell, oh
{A house?
{never! You’re not my goodness either. Ha! Ha! … That’s
{Never will you taste like a shell or good either!” called
laughter, and this is sun, and this is sand …” (How many dozen evelm playwrights have used the speech of the nursery to lend poetry, poignance, and whimsy to politics and passion?) Crawl a little. Sniff a claw (or a hand); sit back and laugh. Listen. Look. Crawl. For all our world, I suppose we looked—as real adults of both species are always pointing out—like innumerable miniatures rehearsing the movements that will go into future homework3 along the corridors of some shadowed run, trough to trough, statue to statue. Finally I got to an area where a naked (like me) human (like me) male (like me) was kneeling in the dirt. Through the leaves above the nursery’s plastic roof, Iiriani light dappled the unfamiliar figures. Differences between us? Well, the child was two years or so older than I, and at that age such seems an eternity of wisdom and power. The hair was yellow and smooth. (Mine: rough and nappy, the color of wet sand.) The face was round, with bright brown eyes not deep at all in the friendly face. (Mine: the lightest tan, they peer from non-epicanthic caves.) As I watched, he—and I can say that honestly now—dug up handful after handful of dirt. I remember thinking how pale and strong his hands were. Perhaps six? Maybe seven? Myself, I couldn’t have been more than five.
The child was an appalling nail-biter, which is a habit humans can have and evelmi, as far as my experience of their claws goes, cannot. The dirt had darkened his knuckles and put a black line about the wrecks of those nails, harried back from the grubby crowns toward cuticles that had thickened in defense against even more gnawing. He looked up and smiled.
I smiled back and watched, fascinated, while he patted and pawed the hulk of some marvelous sand castle to shape. At that age, I did not know that at one time perhaps a fifth of the human race had such pale skins and such colored and textured hair—and were called Caucasian, nor that over the six thousand worlds today well over half have such marvelous eyes as his, once called Mongolian. The other children, some human, some evelm, whispered and gamboled around us …
Sometimes I think I watched him only a moment; sometimes I think I stared at him an age.
Then: a black claw descended, like the huge limb of some mechanized sculpture falling into activity.
The youngster looked up to grin at some hovering parent (like mine):
rough and grainy where they emerged from the bark-black hide, becoming metal smooth as they curved to needle tips, iron-colored talons spoke only to me of distance but not of specific origin.
The child reached up.
Claw and hand grappled—
I couldn’t have watched that juncture more than a moment. Even then I knew the tussle of a parent picking up a child to go off somewhere into the city—home, for me.
But for him? Really, then, I knew little of the two kinds of flesh joined there, or of the disparate organic body chemistries that, some places on my world, sunder the species and at others are the parameters about which everything that is human and everything that is evelm are in play.
They were gone.
I was left, amidst the other children, furred or fleshed, fingered or clawed, to tell myself endless stories over the next years as to why, for a few hours, that child had been there. The most obvious answer? He and a parent had been passing through Morgre and the child had simply been left off at the nursery to play a while. But not a year standard has gone by when, in some lone moment, I haven’t enhanced on some recomplication of a human child’s and a black-scaled beast’s adventuring together across my world, during which, momentarily, I glimpsed an instant of it: their joined hands within a strange nursery under leaf-shadowed light.
2.
A GRANDMOTHER OF MINE was an Industrial Diplomat. So was one of my mothers. But though two of my female siblings share the vocation, I am the only male of my ripple to take on Industrial Diplomacy as my primary profession—a profession1 I sometimes slip into thinking of as the Dyeths’ traditional calling now for three of our seven waves. And suddenly this memory—recent, adult, insistent, yet trivial:
Walking across the green terraces, home from some job1 or other, both eager to see them and uneasy over the prospect of all that food and fellow feeling, as the oestern court’s black and silver wall rose on its humming treads to reveal some visiting aunt, who turned ponderously behind the Dyethshome ampitheater’s ornate railing, a long fork waving from one midclaw, to call first with one tongue, then with another: “But of course!” going from vibrant basso to treble: “I know you! You’re one of my marvelous little human relatives! Now you’re …?” and couldn’t remember my name to save herself.
But with this interruption, among all possible streaming memories, I find myself turning to another, again, earlier.
The true possibility of my becoming an Industrial Diplomat (Marq Dyeth, auntie! Marq Dyeth!) no doubt goes back at least to the year I spent offworld with my grandmother Genya. Well under one percent of the population of any world will ever set foot on any other. Vaurine tours satisfy the wanderlust of the rest. Still, we could; and she thought it was a Good Thing. So we went a star away and I waited on the wet moon, called Senthy, of a gas giant that, itself, had no name but only a number, while Genya snarled and unsnarled herself from the Web, and I mooned about the rust-blotched plates of the administrative hangars’ tall doors outside the new space port, mumbling over lessons fed directly into my mind by a voice with a strange accent and prompted by visual aids—the image of some locally engineered amphibious kangaroo stopping you on the crumbly black path—whose colors always seemed too intense for the green clouded horizon against which they were projected.
A year later we were back on Velm, in the Fayne-Vyalou, at Morgre, Genya happy to be home and angry at the Web policies that had made the return so precipitate; and I settled into a more usual routine—usual for someone like me in a situation like mine on my particular world. In my particular place on it. Only now I’d had a year to see how unusual, in universal terms, my usual could be. Certainly such knowledge ripened me for the memory I wish to recount:
Twelve years old, then, and studying with the tracers, I find this persists as strongly as the memory from the nursery. An apprentice, I was assigned to accompany some older cadets down into one of Morgre’s lower interlevels. I remember cables moving above us. I remember echoing breaths and wide wings. I remember mica glimmering in the rock walls under the burning purple of the shoulder lamps.
A manufacturing union had used the upper shelves of this space for storing several tons of corrosive muck that should have been carried out to the desert months before. Turned out to be more corrosive than they’d thought. Next thing, the report arrived that it had dripped, dripped, dripped, trickled, then poured down through the eaten-away container bottoms and shelving onto some V-lifts, ratchet diggers, and transport sleds stored below. Most of them had been ruined, and tracers1, roused from their sleep before dawn, had come in, tasted, tested, and foamed the place with blacklime to neutralize the corrosion. Now our group of tracers2, cadets (and one apprentice: me), were coming to dig out what had to be dug and send what had been tagged, with little green plastic disks, swinging off on the salvage lines thrumming in the dark. Two males, both of us human, were among the winged females and neuters that day. I guess people notice such things, but where do you learn it’s not necessary to comment on them?
Not, apparently, where the other human male was from. This one? About twenty-five—possibly thirty. It was certainly old enough to me, and the behavior was that which I would later come to associate with many humans from my world’s north. A tracer], this male had taken a temporary job2 here while traveling in the south. Oh, there was much of making it clear that our friend’s sexual tastes were for the greater winged neuters, with much bantering apology to the smaller, gorgeously winged females, allowing how, on the part of our world she came from (Katour?), interracial heterosexuality was, indeed, the most prevalent perversion; but she was different and liked them big … at the same time, demonstrating much parental affection for me, as a young human: hugs, jokes, her rough black gloves with their simulated steel claws on my shoulder a lot. (She’d had scales set permanently into the flesh of her muscular back, which, as I had never seen that before, I found it both intriguing and mildly repulsive.) Boisterous, bumptious, and—to perhaps a third of the women there—charming in one way or another. Still, as far as anything I might have considered true intercourse there was nothing for me.
In purple glimmer, we found the mucky mess.
“Here, yes. You, little one,” the woman in charge said with one tongue: and with two others:
{“You hold this, Dyeth.”
{“I mean hold the light here.”
So I did, leaning against some unsteady slab of peeling plastic, while the rest slopped forward among sticky industrial units. The foreign male pulled off her gloves, which chartered up to her belt on little chains wound into spring pulleys there—
Then somebody knocked against something; something started to topple.
“Catch it! … Hey, watch—! … What the—! … Hold it! Hold—” from a good many more tongues than cadets.
My beam was focused on tight, and it swung up to catch claw after claw reaching to hold back something large, metallic, and filthy. Among the claws, slipping and pushing, a pair of human hands grasped the riveted edge. Big, soiled fingers: another nail biter, he—wouldn’t you know? I thought it just like that, the shift in pronoun coming just that simply, with a warmth and pleasure flowering in the danger that had already begun to resolve:
“Yeah, steady! steady! … We got it … No, just a—There, there, now! … There it is!” in multiple, languid bassos, with the occasional human pitch cutting through.
Among the evelmi claws that moved about his (yes, that’s what I thought), over his, or that, now reaching for another grip, his moved over, one claw had three of its talons smashed from some former accident, so that they were just splintered bits of horn sticking from the black hide. It kind of made me wince, and I wondered which of the women that claw belonged to.
As they settled back upright whatever it was that had almost fallen, I twisted the light beam into a wider circle, so that it expanded to include the dark-scaled heads, the rearing arms, the wings, the midlegs supporting the metal further down its runny side. And suddenly I stopped�
�thinking? Breathing? Something unquestioned and headlong within me had come up short:
The human hands were not the foreign male’s—who was standing, I saw now, a little ways away, head shaking, neck rubbing, the gloves back on, as if replaced to fend the anxiety of nearly being crushed.
A muscular, human female, whom I’d hardly noticed among the several in the group, let her big hand slip from the dirty metal plate, to laugh with relief among the rest. And the claw with the broken talons belonged to a wingless male, who backed away on hind legs now, turning a bony head and tasting the air with this tongue and that, the three sections of her black-scaled chest heaving, the front four legs peddling the darkness among the gesticulations of the other tracer2 cadets …
The foreign male stood, grinning, dirty …
In a kind of shock, I waited with them while they dug out machines and muck, while they pulled weighing scales up. I helped position refuse crates on them till I was told I was too young to do that and had better just watch. And come on, Dyeth, hold that light up now. Later, I went to the run I’d frequented since I’d been back home, because it welcomed both youngsters and oldsters, and stalked those dim halls the whole evening with a desperation I’ve heard adults say is common among the excitable youth, though I’ve never felt it to the same extent before or since. I searched up and down its mile and a half for hours, and only stopped when I found what I assumed, from their dirt and daykits, to be some returned dragon hunters who’d come here and had, drugged on what I didn’t know, fallen asleep in an alcove. The human male in the party, who I rolled over on his back, was stocky (like me), bearded and hairy (like I would someday be), and not much taller than I was, with thick hands still stained with the sands from outside the city. When I finished with him, only half-responsive in his interrupted sleep, he folded those hands around my chest; and I slept against the stranger for an hour, while claws padded about us, a tongue now tasting my foot, my ear, my hands, or his; and all that watched us were the statues’ faces, some with eyes, some without.
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 54