The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

by Samuel R. Delany

  “The dawn of space travel …” Has that phrase already been loosed in these pages? (Certainly anyone familiar with any of the numerous histories of the Web will likely have encountered, somewhere or other, the equally common apothegm: “The dawn of space travel is the dawn of woman.”) To look at any such generalization closely, however, is to ensnare oneself in endless confusion: woman, space travel, morning—none are simple concepts; none have simple histories. And put in any combination, their complexities multiply. The dawn of space travel, for example, appears as a phrase in a number of old Earth texts dating from well before humans even reached their own moon, which makes it a bit problematic deciding just what it was supposed to refer to. Later commentators, of course, used the phrase to refer exclusively to humanity’s interplanetary ventures within its own solar system, so that dawn, in that particular metaphor, is associated with precisely that fount of solarcentricism my alien acquaintance mentioned in the light of Aurigae. Still later commentators used it to mean the first hundred-fifty years standard of interstellar travel. At any rate, in the light of the suns of six-thousand-plus worlds, “dawn” becomes (another) rather fuzzy-edged phenomenon. Add to this the extreme locality of the use of morning/dawn as a metaphor for commencement/birth, and the whole notion crumbles. Indeed, on those sections of those worlds where morning is a metaphor for beginnings, or is associated with creativity—as it is throughout the oestern half of the Fayne-Vyalou (the Fayne half) which is, on my world, my home-—someone like myself is usually and quickly comfortable. Not that other meanings of other phenomena are similarly consistent, but such a metaphor is a point of contact from which consistency can be constructed. Even on those parts of those worlds where morning is traditionally a metaphor for death, termination, and destruction—such as Veyed on equatorial Pyrel, where, due to tidal forces in the magma just under the surface, the tremendous quakes that crack the gray-brown rock are almost always a morning occurrence (“The high towers come down at dawn …” begins a Veyedishke epic song-cycle that still makes me weep)—the simple inversion provides the logical correspondence point among the further complexities by which the culture manifests its conceptual systems. Yet when any set of signs is loosed from a world, it always surprises how much their form and significance may change. (In a sense, keeping clear the sense of the changing tastes throughout those changes is the ID’s prime job1.) Words, the Web, woman, world—all of these have their nebulous position in a cloud of shifting meanings.

  But are you ever more aware of the shifts, the displacements, the uncertainties that, together, make up what we call meanings, than you are when you are on no world, but rather half-asleep on some freighter or shuttle between them, or relaxing on some station circling above dim scimitars of dawn and evening, the bright and black alternates of day and night on the planetary disk below, while you search for some morning lost light-years away?

  Through half-conscious dozing, I became aware of yellow fading slowly to green, while hearing the first three digits of my home-mail routing number recited in my sister Alyxander’s voice, followed by the sudden stench of burnt plastic—

  I sat up in the dark, while restraining straps pulled gently at my knees and shoulders. My call number had rung and, only half thinking, I’d answered.

  I was wondering where I should go, but there was a faint bong: and off in the dimness, a woman looked up from her desk.

  “Marq Dyeth.” She didn’t smile.

  After a moment I said: “Japril.” Could I say that she was not whom I was expecting to see?

  “Marq,” she said, “I’m sorry, but our experiment didn’t work. Marta, Ynn, and I conferred, and we all agreed: it was just too dangerous. That’s why we took Rat away. She had to go, Marq. If there’d been any way to let the two of you—”

  “What?” I said. “What? What? What? What—?” There was the length of a breath or three between each. The third cracked shrilly. And two of them were whispered so quietly my lips didn’t even brush sound. Japril waited out them all. Yet each felt as stupid in my mouth as the whole cascade of flustered interrogation would have read without pacing, dynamics, or inflection, as all I’d nearly managed to forget in my search for a forgotten morning now raged back. “Why—?”

  “You saw how your city reacted, Marq. Cultural Fugue was only … who knows how far away. You’ve seen the response from his merely leaving and returning to the place over one day.”

  “Japril,” I said, with the articulation born of a despair that was too total to be experienced as such, “a world is a big place. And a city is a very small one—”

  “I’m sorry. We can’t have the two of you there,” she said. “We can’t have the two of you together yet.”

  “What …?” It stuttered in my mind, unanswerable.

  “How do you feel?”

  Which seemed the most preposterous and idiotic of questions she might have asked then. “I don’t feel anything—or rather, I feel as if some giant claw has come down and ripped away all feeling …” Trickling into the wound was the little spill of language, already tuned to that surprising degree of articulation that had nothing to do with him, me. I looked at my shadowed hands. “I’m in a kind of shock. I suppose I’m too numb to notice particular symptoms.” I looked up at her. “It’s like the switches in my head that allow the proper emotions to come through to let me function have been shorted closed or else jammed and smashed that way, so that I believe I can function, yes, but without nuance or color to what I perceive or do. From time to time I suppose women look at me and flick one tongue or another as if trying to figure out whether I’m really there or not. And I think perhaps they’re right to doubt. Japril—” I moved suddenly forward in my restraining web.

  She jumped a little.

  “—you know that even for an ordinary, human, homosexual male, my sexual map is somewhat unusual. In general youth and fine features have never been particularly attractive to me. And what in most is a genital focus, in me seems to be divided between hands, genitals, certain facial features, feet—”

  “It was bitten nails and pockmarks, if I recall—”

  “Bitten nails in humans and strong claws in evelmi,” I said. Pitted human skin and a particular dark shade of evelm scales—they go together, somehow. In me. But Japril, do you know what any of that means? I mean, can you know anything about my home, my world, the universe in which I live? It’s a beautiful universe, Japril, wondrous and the more exciting because no one has writ-ten plays and poems and built sculptures to indicate the structure of desire I negotiate every day as I move about in it. It’s a universe where hands and faces are all luminous, all attractive, all open for infinite contemplation, not only the ones that are sexual and obsessive but the ones that are ordinary and even ugly, because they still belong to the categories where the possibility of the sexual lies. It’s a universe where what is built, what is written, what has been made, makes hands hold the beauty they do; and what is thought, or felt, or wondered over is marvelous because someone has clutched their hands, or held them very still, or merely moved them slightly during the thinking or feeling of it—Oh, no: don’t think I find all bitten nails attractive and all unbitten ones without interest. I have half a dozen categories within each of these groupings, now for the shape of the thumb’s first joint, now for the fullness or stubbiness of the little finger, now by width or narrowness of knuckle, now by the thickness of cuticle, among which, in my journeys from one to the other, desire—or repulsion—may surprise me at any turn. And yet the revealed line between quick and crown remains the border on one side of which, far more than the other, desire lies. But I say I have categories of hand, of nail, of finger? I have ways of categorizing whole geosectors: this one or the other on this world or that. I know on the hot area of Ice-Mond IX, where social decorum insists all women wear light, white gloves in public, the habit of nail-biting turns out to be much more pervasive in both females and males than in the Fodrath Sector of Clinamen 14, where, if you ask some woman w
ho does indulge the habit, she will tell you, laughing, of a parent making her sit on her hands as a child whenever she raised her fingers to her mouth. You see, besides the coordinates the Web lays out for us, I have my own map of the universe, where (though I only visited it for a day) Trynid is privileged because near its northern pole all the human children have retractable metal claws grafted into their fingertips on both hands, while only twenty kilometers to the south, where the custom of enclawing has not been taken up, nearly three out of five by my count of both adults and children gnaw on their own. Oh, I speculate on causes, run through correlations—but what I’m talking about, Japril, is information, some of it logical, some of it mythical, some of it in error, and much of it, yes, no doubt merely wrong or right. But it’s information beautiful yet useless to anyone but me, or someone like me, information with an appetite at its base as all information has, yet information to confound the Web and not to be found in any of its informative archives.”

  “Mmmm,” Japril said. “I wouldn’t doubt it.” “My universe, Japril, is marked by the tips of claws and fingers at every point, touched by them everywhere, you might say—and could only say it of mine, but not, at least in the same way, of some handful of worlds where breasts or buttocks or baskets were the marked monuments to lust. Fingertips organize my movement through any crowd, become points of frustration when, say, a thumb is hidden in a fist by a passing human or a claw is submerged in a foot-trough the moment I happen to glance over at an evelm, where a chin was turned out of the light, or shadows lay too thickly over some great woman lumbering by on all sixes. Hands and claws told for me endless stories of the origins and labors of the women who bear them; but more important, they made tales unnecessary because each could inscribe its own present lyric by any one of a myriad gestures made before me. Oh yes, beauty passed me going up on any number of lifts, as I was going down; yes, I wondered why I could not know the bearers of them all. But everyone I knew, everyone I know, even you, Japril, I could identify if, say, I only saw a finger. A small universe to live in? Oh, no! It extended between stars and other worlds, wherever there were humans and a good many aliens besides. It’s a rare universe, Japril, a rich universe, an extraordinarily generous universe in its pleasures and sadnesses and passing ecstasies to dazzle; and a walk down any human or evelm street was as wonderful as a trip to the night’s rim and back—walks and trips that have now lined how many light-years with as much pleasure as I had learned to read in the running of my own city. I used to think, Japril, that were I ever to excrete some text on my life the way, say, my seven-times great-grandmother did in her memoirs—oh, nothing so diffuse, I hope—still, the pleasure, the joy, the value for others would be the revelation of all my world’s marvels and corners and hues of horn and chitin, all that make it private, rich, terrible, and familiar—”

  “Sounds obsessive,” Japril said. “How did you ever manage to get any work done?”

  “The question for me, Japril,” I said, “is how any of the rest of you ever found energy to work in your gray, gray universe. But I suppose your universe is finally no grayer than mine, controlled and mapped by whatever gives it reasonable form to you. Perhaps the greatest generosity of my universe is that in so much it’s congruent with the worlds of others, which I suppose is finally just one with the generosity of my evelm parents, who thought my unique position among humans quite charming and were proud of it, and my human parents, who from time to time worried if, as distinct from more usually sexually oriented males, gay or straight, I might not encounter some social difficulty, say, of the same sort as I might have had in some societies had I been a nail-biter myself. But both spoke, both agreed on who I was, that I was a ripple that shored their stream, so that their universe, with all its idiosyncratic wonder, unique to my eyes, has still, always, seemed a part of mine—at least it was until you thrust him into my world—this male who, by all rights, should not even be alive; who, as far as I can tell, is hardly prepared to live, but whose knuckles and nails and mouth and knees and jaw and genitals and the ridges of his shoulders, the horn of his foot, the hollow above his clavicle, the width of his thumb, and the ligament lining behind his knee, and a certain roughness to his voice resolve all the dispersed yearnings that have mauled me, happy, through my universe—so pleased at its variety of satisfactions and fruitful distress—within the integrity of a single body.

  “And now you’ve taken him away …” I took a breath. “Desire isn’t appeased by its object, Japril, only irritated into something more than desire that can join with the stars to inform the chaotic heavens with sense. To remove the agent of such astonishment after it’s been dropped, like some heavy, hot isotope into an already smoldering and ancient pile …? What you’ve done is strike all amazement and logic from the set, Japril! You’ve stolen—you’ve practically destroyed—my home. The soiled hand of a working woman, whether it ends in evelm horn or human, means nothing now. Reticulations of scale or pit? Fingers can’t point to anything anymore. And without such indications—oh, I still walk where I walked, look where I looked, but where I saw what once seemed wonderful, I see so little now—I feel so little. And the little I feel mocks all I know there is to be felt. I’ll masturbate, and not enjoy it. I’ll couple in the runs and feel no pleasure and, even less, no community when this one whispers, ‘Thank you,’ or that one presses my arm afterwards with some gesture habit has made me read as caring. And as for individual sexual relations, they are inconceivable. You see—”

  She looked startled again; and I’d felt my voice tense.

  “You’ve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It’s as though I cannot even remember what I once desired! All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself—and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely mystified—at least that’s what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart, Japril. In a single gesture you’ve turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you’ve shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don’t have it.”

  “It’s a silly thing to say, I know,” Japril said, nervously. “But you love Rat Korga, don’t you? And Rat loves—”

  “Love …?”

  She blinked.

  “A silly thing? To say? Japril, it’s idiotic! I was only with him for the single turn of a world between its suns—a third of which time I slept. And in the time I was awake, I wasn’t in any state near level-headed or responsible enough to negotiate the rapids of desire at the confluence level of love. In love? How could I know? But given the situation, is it so much to have wanted time enough to find out?”

  “It wasn’t so much. But sometimes what’s little in local terms overwhelms in the larger view—” Suddenly she reached over to slip something out of one of her sleeve pockets—was it a small gold bar, with knobs at both ends?

  “Japril—” I took another breath, and realized that my chest hurt in the straps around me. “What, what, what do you want from me? What now—?”

  “I wanted to—to see you. To talk to you. But—I’m sorry, Marq.” She stood up from her desk. “Good morning.”

  And she—and the desk—vanished, leaving me in the confused dimness of my harness, my drugs, my ignorance. Where, among all the six thousand and their many moons, might she have been that she could end our interview with, “Good morning”? A good morning? A bad morning? A morning whose badness is organized by everyone’s exp
ectations of good? A night without edges or end, where one can only throw memory back onto the round, simple surfaces of worlds, whose meager rotations create the temporal interruptions, morning and night, to which we fix the cyclic expectations of renewal, commencement, ending, beginning.

  Good morning?

  Nowhere, I suppose, does the metaphor crumble as spectacularly as it does on Klyvos, about which I had heard for several years before a job1 took me there. Klyvos keeps a single face towards its sun and is therefore surrounded by an unmoving band of half-light: really, whether you call it dawn or evening, you still distort the part it plays in this world’s conceptual pattern. In that unchanging shadow-band, storms constantly crash and flicker over uneven orange hills at the equator, or over black fissured ice-fields in the north, or along green glaciers to the south. Its dozen native races, though none has ever reached true technological competency, would travel there, nevertheless, from both night side and day side, now to conduct violent intertribal rituals, now to hold genocidal intratribal war. Klyvos is a world of thousands on thousands of sublanguage groups, mostly native, but—now humans have been there for three hundred years—many human ones as well. Almost all, however, contain some cognate of “chyani,” which is their oldest root for that eternal circle of morning. And in one culture after another, it serves as a metaphor for chaos, for violence leading to no end, for Cultural Fugue itself—not so much destruction ending in death, but rather the perpetual and unremitting destruction of both nature and intelligence run wild and without focus, where anything so trivial and natural as either death or birth is irrelevant.