The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  I rose beside him in a column of light.

  4.

  HE SAT ON THE cushioned bench along the chamber’s rear, bare feet on the floor, elbows on his knees, bright and bald hands hanging down between. He stared at his toes for all the world as if he were about to pick one.

  Out on the stage, three students sat and two stood, all laughing at a joke one of the algae-farmers2 had just told. Off to the side in about row twelve, another student was bent over some mechanical gizmo, putting her in touch with a local orchestral performance, or a parent’s admonitions to pay attention to what she ate during the length of her stay, or some other student who could only visit Dyethshome in yaurine projection and wanted an in vivo supplementary account.

  “Rat Korga …?” I said; and to say the name of your perfect erotic object is always to say it for the first time, even when it is the fiftieth repeated shriek and you are half blind with terror on the crags of a world so far away its night is virtually without stars. He looked up at me, and the eyes he wasn’t born with were human and green. He frowned a little. The light about me from the entrance column dimmed. Then the frown seemed to crack away (as all changes of expression registered on his large-pored, pitted face). He smiled a little:

  “Marq Dyeth …?” Then, nervously and surprisingly, he stood.

  He was so tall.

  Iiriani was below the back wall of our glass-roofed chamber. But neither he, I, nor the chamber walls around us cast any shadow over the sloping seats—like those creatures in the folk tales of a temperate geosector on another world (I can’t remember which, damn it!) who, by such shadowlessness, signal mutually murderous intents.

  His rough, unringed fingers came to touch my arm—and stopped an inch off, as though he were I and I were Maxa.

  I said: “I’m sorry I waited so long to come.”

  “If you had come earlier—” His voice was rust rough and mauled by accent—“I would not have been ready.”

  I guess that’s those decimals.

  I said: “Come with me,” and stepped back onto the limen plate. (If he had touched me, would I have fallen to the ground …?) He stepped forward onto the plate with me. And his left nipple was centimeters above my right eye. I wanted to lean my head back and lick it—not from desire but from that idiocy always there to subvert desire and render it ludicrous. Our human heat was a third creature beveling between us.

  We rose—or dropped—into the floor.

  Did Korga think, the first time, that the halls and underground corridors I led him through were more familiar to me than to him? (Home is a complicated place? Well, Dyethshome is more complicated than most.) Some near lightless passages we walked through; through some, bright with intricate ceiling fixtures, we were carried along by moving floors with ornate rails whose gilded newels bore likenesses of great evelmi and humans forgotten for a century, dead for two. In one such, as his arm almost brushed mine, the milky wall glowed green. (The creamy liquor of the local worm …) Small Maxa was running along beside us. From time to time the white coins of her fingertips, the small saucers of her knees pressed to the other side of the pane, as if she could actually see us: “Marq …? Marq, where are you? Please, Marq, come see my mine! You promised, Marq …” Behind her, in the wall screen, I could see where she’d done a formidable job of construction in one of our old playrooms. Korga looked at me.

  I smiled. “She wants to take up mining as her profession1,” I explained, and wondered whether he understood—or if I should tell him—how difficult her disability might make that on some parts of our world. But we turned into another corridor without a call-wall. And somehow we were standing on the metal circle that would become the entrance to my room.

  Korga said: “Marq Dyeth …” Both accent and injury kept me from knowing if it were exhortation or interrogation. And because, with either inflection, I hadn’t the slightest idea what he meant, after a moment’s silence, I said:

  “This is my room. It’s very far away …” When he said nothing, I activated the column.

  5.

  THE MYALUTHS WERE PROFLIGATE with Iiriani-set.

  He followed me across the carpet. Blinding gold had wedged down between the hills. Morgre’s park levels, ten kilometers off, were a tracing of girders. In the city, a few early lights, green and blue, battled for visibility. The hills were steel-colored; the sky was indigo and flame, the Hyte-wr, black and purple under its fumes’ unraveling lace.

  I walked to the desk, pushed aside things that clicked or just toppled, turned to face him, and sat.

  The overhead lamp came on. One and another, the little spheres in the orrery swung their shadows across my hairy shoulder, down my snarled arms. (I hadn’t activated the contraption, but sometimes it just starts up when I near it in certain moods.) He stopped by the bed, watching me.

  I turned to look over the rail, beyond the tufted stones. Suddenly I got the strangest sensation that he was no longer behind me. I turned back.

  He was. (It’s that reconstruction memory …)

  As I looked, his eyes came up and caught mine—still green.

  They questioned a moment. Then he sat down, hands beside his hips on the mat. The way his high knees jackknifed—and he sort of bent forward now—he looked even taller than when he was standing. He brought his hands in. He opened his mouth, closed it again. Then he said, his voice even rougher than before: “Please … please, I need you to—”

  I stood. “I will,” I said, because I knew at least this much about him. “You … you don’t have to ask me, because I …”

  It was brief, intense—satisfying? More dizzying, I think. On my bed, on the carpet, and on the bed again; there was a short time—or perhaps it was a long one—when we were quiet and very aware of one another. My feelings oscillated (and I could feel his feelings sometimes lagging behind mine, sometimes moving ahead) from warmth to misgiving to warmth.

  We lay on the bed; and his hand on my chest was a stone outcrop on uneven giltgorse. His rough hair, with something reddish in it, was the hue of split tolgoth pith. Knees? Mine were much closer to my eyes than his. Stones? Crags? Hills at two distances. His cheek, near my face, was the slope of the Reya’j’as Plateau (north, in R-16), which had been peppered with meteors a million and a half years ago, and among whose craters, thousands of years gone, evelmi once gathered to perform mysteries whose significance even they have forgotten. My own breath against his neck came back to strike my face like a hotwind eroding the prehistorical escarpments of the oest to their characteristic roundness. The line between his arm and my chest was the crevice of some sunken -wr, the near bank, mine, heavy with growth, the far one, his, notably sparse.

  I stayed a long time in that landscape, wondering what he would say when he next spoke, wondering what I should say if I spoke first, whether I should let him speak before me. I thought of: Among the thousands of males I’ve bedded, at least a dozen times somebody has said to me, “You’ll have to meet so-and-so. You’ll just love him!” But this has got to be the strangest route I’ve ever traveled to end up sleeping with someone. And didn’t say it. I glanced at him instead; he shifted mountains, planes, -wr.

  Green and ivory, his eyes blinked.

  Then I asked: “What world are you …?”

  He looked down. “Mmmm …?” It rumbled in the muscle and bone under my ear. “World? Where was I …?”

  My ear was on his arm. So I moved my head a little to hear better.

  “… I was remembering a black river. A great river. Under the ground, and lit by golden torches stapled to the rocks. Children in boats, rowing, were terrified because the slimy mantichorion might surge up from the black waters and upset their boat—not a real place.” He chuckled. “It’s in a … text. From my world … no, I don’t know if it’s from my world or not. It may have been brought there. Nothing important.” He glanced down. “You? Where are you, now …?”

  “Underground rivers,” I said. “That sounds like someplace in the north of this worl
d—where I’m afraid I haven’t spent too much time.” I pushed up on an elbow. “Up there, you know, sex between women of the same gender—or of different species—is illegal. At least it used to be until a hundred years or so ago. If it is now, frankly, I don’t know. My grandparents told me about it.” I laughed and put my head back to nuzzle his strong armpit. (Mine, in this heat, with so much more hair, smelled so much less. More genetic divergence within our world-sundered species?) He said:

  “On my world, sex between males was illegal until you were twenty-seven, although it went on pretty constantly anyway. What was completely illegal on my world was sex between a person your height and a person of mine. For all genders.”

  I pushed up on my elbow again. “Whatever for?”

  Sometime in the past minute, the light had dropped below the refraction threshold of his artificial eyes. The balls were glass-filled caves in which small machines sparkled. Korga smiled briefly around them, then looked up at a star in the forking offshoots of a fire-cactus. The cactus arms, knobby and black above us, hugged a star in its blue patch. He raised his ringed hand to nick his middle fingernail three or four times on his bottom teeth. “It was a law—a law that, today, I understand. Thanks to the Web. But all I understood when I was a youngster, living off the refuse of a city whose name I still cannot say properly even in my own language, was that I wanted, and was not allowed, to hold a little, hairy male to me whose head I could look down at, to bend my face down to his when he looked up, to rub my mouth and eyes in his hair when he looked down.” He looked at me, no smile now; and there are worlds which have tales of demons with hollow eyes. “I had chances to do it, or do things close enough to it.” He looked away. “But I have learned more about why my world was the way it was in the time since it has been gone than I ever knew while I lived on it.”

  “Rat, were you persecuted for your sexual predi—… well, I mean—” (The first I was ever aware one could be was on Senthy with Egri and Genya; there all sadomasochism was hunted out and punished with barbaric single-mindedness; especially if concert was written out or clearly specified by verbal contract, which their authorities considered the ultimate disease. It was Genya who, as we left that moon in disgust, first pointed out to ten-year-old me how, even as it was suppressed, sadomasochism there was encouraged by every private park and public building around the polar ocean we lived on: all were designed to suggest some weapon or mangle in common use by the local fisherwomen; all were invariably labeled with some written plaque of prohibitions.) “I mean, were you ever legally—”

  “Five or six times I was caught and reprimanded, or put in a detention house.”

  Will sex between humans ever lose its endlessly repeated history? “Did it stop you from having sex?”

  “For a week—perhaps even for a few months, the first time.” He moved a little, his whole body. “Finally, I had no sex at all.”

  During my first three years as an ID, I thought my job1 was not to be surprised at the universe’s human variety. Later I realized that it was not to be surprised that nonstop surprises would henceforth be my life.

  “If you had asked me, on my world,” Korga said, “whether my five or six run-ins with our laws over sexual infractions had anything to do with my choosing to give sex up for what I thought would be the rest of my life, I would have said no. I had had too many other run-ins for too many other reasons so that the sexual ones seemed the least of it. If you asked me here, however, lying with you like this, I could not say for sure.” His rough hand, with its heavy jewels, moved an inch over his belly, then rested. “One burden of all of this new knowledge is that old certainties crumble beneath it. But this—” He watched me with eyes it was hard to believe could see—“is the first time I have lain down to make love with another person since I was … nineteen standard years old.”

  I swung my feet off the mat and down to the rug and looked back to where this male who was at least forty standard years of age had not moved. “Oh, come on.” No, he had not become anyone else, and yet—“I can’t believe that anyone who is my …” Calling someone your perfect erotic object to his face seemed suddenly to express the perfection it stood for much too imperfectly. I took a breath. “How many times … eh, standing up since then?”

  He shrugged. “Three … four. Once with a woman who stole me from my work station. Once before that and once after, with some others …”

  “What about before … before you were nineteen?”

  “A few hundred times—as compared to the few thousand you said.”

  “Oh.” Our geosector has no particular prohibition about virginity; but I had just gotten a little insight into those worlds that have—the ones that forbid it totally. “It’s still hard for me to believe.”

  “They told me,” he said, “you had probably been to bed with several thousand males. They told me you went to bed with males the way I did when I was … before my anxiety was terminated. Only for you it was not illegal. They also told me that if I’d lived a more ordinary life on Rhyonon, I might have gone to bed with a comparable number of men—thousands, rather than the hundred or so I did—and I would probably feel very different about your going to bed with them than I do.” Once more the empty eyes came back to me. “Don’t you ever persecute people here for their sex?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I mean, I told you, a long time ago, in the north—”

  “The language,” he said. “That’s what I mean.”

  I frowned.

  “I lived on a much younger world, on which—they told me in the Web—we spoke a much older language. We had ‘men’ and ‘women,’ ‘bitches’ and ‘dogs.’ The men were all male and were called ‘he’ and the women were female and called ‘she’—”

  “I know the word ‘man,’” I said. “It’s an archaic term. Sometimes you’ll read over it in some old piece or other.”

  “To take those distinctions away is a kind of …” He mused a moment—“… persecution.”

  “Perhaps to someone who’s used to them …” I said. “We just have different—”

  But he chuckled, briefly and for no more than three syllables. “On my world ‘he’ was what everyone, male or female, wanted to be … perhaps the males thought they were a little closer to it. On your world and, I have been told, on the vast majority of others, ‘he’ is what everyone, male and female, wants to have. Perhaps all of us are equally far away from that.”

  “You don’t like that I’ve gone to bed with as many people as I have—or the way we talk about it?”

  “I don’t think about it.”

  “Mmm.” I pondered. “You know, if you’d lived a more ordinary life on Rhyonon, you wouldn’t be here. How do you feel about … me?”

  He didn’t smile. How long did it take me to understand he really did find things funny, but that humor for him—or for his world, I still don’t know which—was simply the most private of emotions? He said: “They told me, and told me again, and told me yet again: I must remember that I am not on my world, I am on yours.” The bedding whispered, shifted; he sat up beside me, where I was sitting, at the edge. His naked knees were above mine and wide apart. His eyelids smiled above me. “They also told me that when I don’t know what to do, I should do what the person nearest me does—while I decide the questions I need to ask.” He was quiet a moment; then he let out a long breath. “I never knew there was this much to know.”

  I started to ask what he meant. But he lay his ringed hand on my knee.

  We looked at it.

  The flesh was thick and dry. Through my thigh hair about them, I could feel wide palm and broad fingers, unsure of their own weight, now adding a little to it, now taking a little away. I thought: it feels more like warm stone than the bone-and-meat-filled hide it is. I reached out two fingers. My own hands have always struck me as very ordinary: the fairly small, somewhat fleshy hands of a fairly small, somewhat hairy fellow who only uses them for manual labor one job2 out of three; and, wonderful as I’
ve always found nail-biting in others, I’ve never been able to sustain the habit myself, so gave up trying long ago. I put my middle fingertip on wide copper set around both edges with green stone chips, some opaque, some glassy, the metal between geometrically embossed. The ring one further forward bunched his broad knuckle skin before it, wrinkled as a big knot or a small brain. Spreading my fingers wide, I touched my forefingertip to his forenail—side to side twice the width of my thumb. It emerged from beneath the cuticle bank, thickened against as much gnawing as the horn, went on the distance of the paler moon and that distance again, before the support structure broke down (I cannot say “was undermined” because all that could be had been, and then been bitten away); for this distance again, it clutched at the quick, its edges pitted so smally and myriadly it presented the regularity of the endlessly attacked border, marked by the dirt of an unknown task3. The crown rose and curved away, twice the length of the nail itself, as it did on all his fingers, thrice, on thumb and little. As my fingertips moved on its upper surface, the heavy crown seemed of equal hardness—and clearly of greater endurance—with the horn. That surface bore the swirls and lines—fainter of course, and interrupted, and scarred—that, below, would let his finger print. I moved my hand, feeling the textures, copper, stone, nail, skin; and thought about the mechanics through which we locate beauty. By art, we can only do it through a disinterested precision which represses, while it mimes, all the interest that impels it. And we can only hope the difference between the repressed and the represented will read as intensity.

  His hand was beautiful.

  Korga said: “You see now: what my fingers hold is not only what my life has become since my world’s death. You may find in their scars, if you look, all the poverty of the time before.”

  “Does that hurt?” I asked. “Does it worry you?”