“This?” I ran my hand down the chain from my belt.
Three tongues out and one of them, I knew, tasting the taints and feints that humans could communicate through body odor alone if our olfactory systems had not fallen by the evolutionary wayside, Santine regarded us with the steadfast attention it had taken me years to learn did not (when she did it) mean offense, and to which Alsrod seemed all but oblivious in a way that made me wonder about her. But she was from another world …
“This—” I turned the leather binding over to the ground-glass screen; on the back was a set of finger-tab switches, set within gemmed circles—“is what they used to call a book.” It was a beautifully worked object, well read (the leather around the controls was worn smooth), and no bigger than my palm. “My friend Santine here just returned it to me, earlier this afternoon.”
Santine nodded, licked, and watched.
Alsrod blinked at me some more, considering, I suppose, whether to go into another song, another dance. Finally, she said: “I know it’s a book. We have a whole library full at home. What’s it a book about? Unless—” Her large eyes lowered—“I have broached yet one more of the infinitude of topics my ignorance of your laws, land, and life would bar to any polite transgressions from a poor—”
“Oh, now,” I told her. “Of course it’s all right to ask!” A library of books on Zetzor? This one was an odd offworld object that had somehow gotten into a basement at Dyethshome. I’d found it as a child just back from my first year offworld at Senthy. As far as I knew, it was the only book, at least of this particular technotype, on my world. “It’s a volume of Vondramach Okk. The poems, not the religious tracts. Apparently she used to joke that since nobody ever took the poetry of political rulers seriously, it didn’t matter what language she wrote it in. So she used her own made-up one. This book contains all her privately published volumes of verse, a selection of her letters, her complete private journals, about six contrasting critical studies, and an official biography—as well as a lot of allied papers and documents that don’t get too political.”
Alsrod stepped around me to see; I touched a playback button. The screen became pink haze, above which formed the most frequently reproduced holo of Okk: sixty-seven standard years old, tall, black-skinned, and gawky, she wore a maroon cape, blown back from a naked shoulder. Her breasts, emptied with age, hung against her ribs. Belt aslant sharp hips, she stood, in dark pants and darker boots, on a lime-pocked ledge, gazing pensively (and poetically) down on some absent landscape, one hand on her waist, one lost in the red folds of her cape, jaw, ear, one shoulder, and belt buckle roughed by a sun thrice the size of Quorja or Iiriani.
“From what I’ve studied of your local culture, however, in preparation for my coming—” One hand holding her opposite elbow, Alsrod gazed at the twenty-five centimeter figure glowing above the book plate—“I would have thought that was a piece of theater, or perhaps a sculpture—if you hadn’t told me, that is, it was a book.”
That made me laugh. I hefted the object in my hand: the image above it stayed steadier than its projector lying in my palm. “I can see that. It does have a stage, I suppose. And half the statuary you see about today is some kind of image projection. But this is just one of the book’s illustrations. Besides, it’s not a technofact of our world—at least it’s not common to this area of it.”
“And I never knew Okk wrote,” Alsrod added. “I mean poems. What an interesting-looking woman. And you must think so too.” She blinked rapidly at me.
I nodded. “Most of the holograms we have of her come from the years she was in exile on Pretania. Like this. Once before, one story has it, she actually ordered all visual reproductions—of anything—destroyed over a whole world. There were too many of her, and she didn’t like the slant of her nose or something. Or maybe she just felt she’d become too recognizable. Another ruler would have dealt with the situation by having her own features altered—and she did that too, from time to time. But on Pretania, when it seemed, at least for a while, her political career was over, apparently she stopped caring who took pictures—and wrote her baker’s dozen greatest poems.”
It’s easy to read, in that image, the aging poet pondering the coming stanza of one of her brooding, crepuscular cynghanedds. The biography, however, tells us that the fifteen planets she had finally annexed three years before had, through the successful revolt of the Regunyi, just dropped to twelve. She was much more likely contemplating the coming battle of Granger-9 where, in a six-month interstellar encounter, the Pretania exile would end and she would sweep into her grip five new worlds (one of which would destroy itself in CF within the year). I wondered what Alsrod saw in it.
“Was she a major or minor writer?”
I smiled. “Personally, among poets, she’s my favorite. There’re a good number of study-groups devoted to her work, here and on many other worlds. But there are many thousands of poets neither of us will ever hear of with greater followings among people who, themselves, have never heard of her. In her youth, actually, she was quite stout. Only in her last decades, on Abnerangc, Pretania, and Tartouhm, did she develop that gaunt and austere appearance most of us associate with her today.”
“She was an impressive-looking woman,” Santine said appreciatively, as I’ve heard her say a dozen times in as many years.
“I’ve studied many major—and minor—poets on my world,” Alsrod announced; she inclined her head to add: “What poems did she write?”
With my middle finger I pressed another switch on the book back, already set at one of her most accessible lyrics—the third from that sumptuous second volume, Lyroks. Runes formed above the screen; Vondramach faded. “One of the things that makes her particularly interesting is that the language she invented—actually she made it up when she was a girl on that large macro-life station where she spent a good part of her invalid childhood—employed both a phonetic and an ideographic writing system as well as a whole series of shiftrunes—”
“Shiftrunes?”
“Letters that are pronounced one way on their first occurrence in a text, another on their second, another on their third, and so on in a fixed sequence. It gives the poet an interesting technique to exploit: she can have pairs of words that alliterate visually but not phonetically as well as pairs that alliterate phonetically but not visually. And she can play the two off against each other. At any rate, most of Okk’s really interesting work is written in this language: the two epic-length pieces, the Onerokritika and the Energumenika, as well as the series of lyrics and love poems, Hermione at Buthrot. And of course both the early and late satires. If you like, I’ll give you the access code and you can take half a minute, learn the language from GI, then take a look at some of the poems in the original—”
“I’m afraid that my impetuous youngest sister—” Nea Thant stepped up behind Alsrod. She placed her metal-covered hands not on Alsrod’s shoulders but centimeters above them—“as this is her first trip to your world, has not been rendered compatible with your local General Information service—”
“I was going to get it done last week,” Alsrod said, “but I guess that was when Mickey and me were off on that—” Then, assailed by astonishment, her hands raised to, but did not touch, her face. She rocked her head from side to side, intoning, while aluminum jangled: “Oh, repentance! Oh, regret! Oh, retribution for the way of life a youth indulges among rocks and ice and icemoss!”
“Really,” I said, “it’s probably just as well. I mean, here at a party more than likely isn’t the place you’d want to go off in the corner to sit for half an hour with a—”
“But you are the host!” declared Alsrod. Her arms jangled to her sides. “I want to submerge myself in your world, your life! Your interests for the duration of my stay are mine! Your theater, your sculpture! Please tell me about your grandmother, Gylda Dyeth!” With Nea behind her projecting her fixed smile above her head, Alsrod’s intensity fairly glittered. “I mean, she was a great friend of Vondramach’s wasn’t
she? Vondramach was the one who gave her all this—” she swept her hands about, indicating all around—“Dyethshome?”
Beyond us, the column glimmered.
“Yes.” I smiled again, because some of what had been mysterious had become clear for me—we’d been through this in one way or another with every Thant as we’d met them, though it still surprised me, I suppose. “I’ll tell you, if you’d like.”
“Oh, please, yes. It’s your work2 anyway. You said you liked your work2.”
“I do.” The Thants have always been excited by the connection between Vondramach and Dyeth, the older just as much as the younger. Yet it still shocks me when that excitement erupts so blatantly. “What would you like to know?”
“How they met? What did they do? How did they part? And then you must tell me about the stream which runs from them to you!”
I laughed, thinking how much I enjoyed the story, yet how much it always seemed that any time it’s told to the Thants, the tale was doomed to misunderstanding. Yet enjoyment won out. “All right. My seven-times great-grandmother, Gylda Dyeth, came to Velm when she was nineteen standard years old on a colony ship of eight thousand from a world called Klaven that I have never seen, but that a goodly number of the inhabitants at the time thought was on the verge of Cultural Fugue.”
“But it wasn’t,” said Alsrod, who no doubt had already received one version or another of the tale from her siblings and parents, if not from her home world’s GI.
“True. Eventually Klaven managed to get itself together again—but not before a number of its inhabitants had also managed to get themselves a new home, Gylda among them. She’d probably been some kind of free-agented professional1 before she came here, though we don’t have much information about that period of her life. On Velm, she lived a while in the north, didn’t like it, moved to the south, and did. At one point, however, she was up on our smaller moon, Arvin—”
“Ah,” Alsrod sighed, “moons—yes, wonderful, tiny, attenuated moons, where night and gravity are stretched nearly to the breaking.”
It had so much the sound of a quote from some poet I’d ought to have read, I didn’t even bother to ask GI to identify the allusion.
“Moons,” Alsrod repeated. “We don’t have any moons around Zetzor. It’s a great sadness to me.”
“Well, we have two,” I said. “Moons are smaller than worlds. People stay closer together on moons. Vondramach Okk and her entourage were en route from one star to another, when she stopped at Arwin’s relay station. In spite of her security, she and Gylda met. The middle-aged tyrant was much impressed with the young woman colonist and hired her right there. Gylda worked for Vondramach over the next half-dozen years, traveling with her and without her about the galaxy, with a freedom that, from all reports, was rather like yours with your government’s gift of unlimited space-fare. At the end of her services—”
“—Vondramach gave her Dyethshome!” Alsrod supplied, looking about the high-ceilinged court. “As a reward for her faithfulness!”
“I’ve always suspected it was a bit more complicated than that.” I looked about my home. “Vondramach was one of the great proponents of the Family. Gylda was an adherent of the Sygn—as was most of Velm at the time. It probably wouldn’t have made that much difference to them, as both of them were personally very tolerant, but one of Gylda’s major reasons for retiring was that she wanted to raise children for a while. Sometime before she left Klaven, she’d suffered several massive radiation contacts. She had so many smashed and shattered chromosomes only a complex enzyme therapy kept her from blooming into rampant malignancies three or four times a week. She’d been sterilized when very young—probably under unpleasant conditions. Because of that old radiation bout, she couldn’t be cloned. But Gylda had a kind of single-mindedness—not unlike Vondramach’s, I flatter myself in thinking. She had all of Dyethshome to let kids run around in; and believe me, that’s some running. When she came back to Morgre and moved in here, she adopted two human females, Lane and Neza, and a human male, Vrach, from the north of our world. They’d been orphaned in the early conflicts between the native evelm and human colonists. She brought them up, here at Dyethshome, while she collected the art works and cultural artifacts that gave this place its purpose in the culture of Morgre. Over the next fifteen years, Gylda and her three children survived all seven visits Vondramach paid her—I mention it because not everyone did. When Vondramach came to visit, she brought not only her entourage but her whole lifestyle, which included assassination attempts, strategic murders, political intrigues and factional hugger-mugger of precisely the sort Gylda had left her services to get away from. On Vondramach’s sixth visit the killing of Secretary Argenia occurred right there in Dyethshome’s north court at a formal supper party of a hundred guests. Today we hardly ever use it—I’m sure the custom goes back to the Argenia assassination. Visiting students are the only ones who ever go in there now. There was never any doubt in Gylda’s mind that Vondramach herself was responsible for the murder. On her seventh visit, Gylda suggested that Vondramach not come back. This time there was quite an argument. But the tyrant refrained from bombing Dyethshome, blowing up Morgre, and blighting the land for a hundred kilometers in all directions—all things she was quite capable of doing when she got riled. But she never returned. Five years later she was overthrown. Three years after that, she was dead. And Gylda went on with her life here. The only one of Gylda’s children interested in raising more children was the male, Vrach. Vrach Dyeth and her lover, another human male, Orgik Korm, took over Dyethshome. They had two male children cloned from the germ-plasm of a friend of theirs on store in a local plasm-bank, a former lover of both of them, who had been killed some years before in a local mountain slide up in the Myaluths. These clone-twins, Cyar and Hashe, began the third wave of Dyeths to live here at Dyethshome. Vrach and Orgik later adopted a human female also from the north, named Jekk, which completed that wave’s ripple. There’s some unpleasantness connected with Hashe, the details of which I don’t really know. She went off and did something nobody approved of, but what it was I’m not sure. Jekk and Cyar decided, when they were in their late fifties, they wanted to carry on with Dyeths for another ripple. Both of them had jobs2 as evelmian ethnologists. They worked with an ethnological commune that was then helping the native evelmi who were fleeing from the north—human/evelm relations have always been strained up there. Dyethshome was given over to their ethnological commune, so that the place became a laboratory as well as a museum in those years, and all the humans and evelmi who worked here became the next ripple of Dyeth parents: Gubba, Rhis, and Wee are some of the names of those adults. And their children—all adopted and all native evelmi, included Kee’fa, Jatch’jat, another Vrach, Large Maxa, Ari, and Liji … Gylda lived a dozen years into this fourth nonhuman ripple of the Dyeth stream. She was very pleased about it, too. People often wonder why evelm/human relations have been so much better in the south. Myself, I think it’s because both populations are smaller here—and we always have the north’s appalling example to instruct us. Ari was the first of that ripple to decide on more children, and she brought in as a child one of my own grandmothers, Genya, who, as an adult, joined with Large Maxa from the generation before, who’s also parenting for this generation as well—but you know, evelmi mature more slowly than humans and live longer. So actually numbering ripples beyond this point gets confusing. The point is, however, there are no direct egg-and-sperm relations between any ripple of parents and any ripple of children at Dyethshome—nor have there ever been, since Gylda began the stream, seven ripples ago.”
“But when there are so many paths and parameters,” Alsrod declared, or rather, as I recognized a few words into it, quoted, “along which and around which women—young, old, human, evelm, male, female, and neuter—can develop both community and communion to be passed on to others, why should you restrict yourselves to direct egg-and-sperm relations? That’s wonderful!”
“Well,”
I said. “It may not be all that wonderful, but it’s the way our particular nurture stream worked out. More than half the streams here in Morgre have used direct genetic reproduction in some form or another at least once a ripple, since their founding. Perhaps in Gylda’s time there was active resentment against it as a method. It smacked too much of Family Life, which had already proved disastrous in the north. But there isn’t today. Egg-and-sperm relations between stream ripples? Myself, I like to think of it as a method we just haven’t gotten around to yet.”
“And now you must tell her why you call it a stream—instead of a family with a small ‘f’,” Fibermich said, stepping up beside her sister, with great approval beaming in her face.
“Well, I—”
Fibermich immediately darted away again.
“Oh, please,” said Alsrod, while I looked after her. “I want you to say it!”
I laughed again. “If you’re really interested. But I know you know it already. All right. Velm is a very dry world. Water is rare here. The propagation of nurture has always been highly respected among the evelm. But none of their local languages ever developed a general term for reproductive lines. ‘Stream’ was the term they used for their educational paths, their universities, which extend all over the planet. When the human and evelm cultures melded, here in the south, the appropriation of the educational sign to the nurturing situation was one result.”
“And now,” declared Nea, peering at me over her young sister’s shoulder, “you must tell her the conceptual ways in which a stream differs from a family.”
“Perhaps we should leave that till …” Even someone who likes to talk as much as I do and works2 at it eventually feels a sense of occasional strain when running on too much. “I mean, I’m sure Alsrod already knows it, so that—”
“But I must hear it in your own voice,” Alsrod exclaimed. “It’s what I have come light years for!”
“All right,” I said once more. “But there’re so many ways that a stream differs from a family, I don’t know where to start. The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions. It’s also a conceptual structure as well, a model through which to see many different situations. The Family has always been quite loose in applying that system to any given group of humans or nonhumans, breeding or just living together, so that you can have lots of fathers, lots of mothers, lots of sons; and any woman of any age or any gender can always fill any of the roles; I’m sure the right Family analyst could reinterpret our nurture stream or your reproductive commune as a classical ‘family’ without an eyeblink, just by assigning one or more parts to one or more women. But if we agreed to the model, no doubt we’d begin to stabilize the power structure it controls. But there’re other power structures that can apply to nurturing groups. For instance, in the Family structure, the parents are seen to contain and enclose the children, to protect them from society. In the stream structure, the children are the connection between the parents and the society. To become a parent is to immediately have your child change your relation to society. Suddenly you have to deal with nurseries, nutrition coops, study-groups—a whole raft of social institutions. Because most children don’t generate from within streams, the stream structure conceives of all children as gifts from society, as gifts to society. In the stream structure—”
The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One Page 59