Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

  He nodded.

  "I'm going to call you Kid, then. That'll do you for a name. You can be-The Kid, hey?"

  Three gifts, he thought: armor, weapon, title (like the prisms, lenses, mirrors on the chain itself). "Okay ..." with the sudden conviction this third would cost, by far, the most. Reject it, something warned: "Only I'm not a kid. Really; I'm twenty-seven. People always think I'm younger than I am. I just got a baby face, that's all. I've even got some white hair, if you want to see-"

  "Look, Kid-" with his middle fingers, Tak pushed up his visor-"we're the same age." His eyes were large, deep, and blue. The hair above his ears, no longer than the week's beard, suggested a severe crew under the cap. "Any sights you particularly want to see around here? Anything you heard about? I like to play guide. What do you hear about us, outside, anyway? What do people say about us here in the city?"

  "Not much."

  "Guess they wouldn't." Tak looked away. "You just wander in by accident, or did you come on purpose?"

  "Purpose."

  "Good Kid! Like a man with a purpose. Come on up here. This street turns into Broadway soon as it leaves the waterfront."

  "What is there to see?"

  Loufer gave a grunt that did for a laugh. "Depends on what sights are out." Though he had the beginning of a gut, the ridges under the belly hair were muscle deep. "If we're really lucky, maybe-" the ashy leather, swinging as Loufer turned, winked over a circular brass buckle that held together a two-inch-wide garrison-"we won't run into anything at all! Come on." They walked.

  ". .. kid. The Kid ..."

  "Huh?" asked Loufer.

  "I'm thinking about that name."

  "Will it do?"

  "I don't know."

  Loufer laughed. "I'm not going to press for it, Kid. But I think it's yours."

  His own chuckle was part denial, part friendly.

  Loufer's grunt in answer echoed the friendly.

  They walked beneath low smoke.

  There is something delicate about this Iron Wolf, with his face like a pug-nosed, Germanic gorilla. It is neither his speech nor his carriage, which have their roughness, but the way in which he assumes them, as though the surface where speech and carriage are flush were somehow inflamed.

  "Hey, Tak?" "Yeah?"

  "How long have you been here?" "If you told me today's date, I could figure it out. But I've let it go. It's been a while." After a moment, Loufer asked, in a strange, less blustery voice: "Do you know what day it is?"

  "No, I ..." The strangeness scared him. "I don't." He shook his head while his mind rushed away toward some other subject. "What do you do? I mean, what did you work at?"

  Tak snorted. "Industrial engineering."

  "Were you working here, before ... all this?"

  "Near here. About twelve miles down, at Helmsford. There used to be a plant that jarred peanut butter. We were converting it into a vitamin C factory. What do you do-? Naw, you don't look like you do too much in the line of work." Loufer grinned. "Right?"

  He nodded. It was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly. And, anyway, the rush had stopped.

  "I was staying down in Helmsford," Loufer went on. "But I used to drive up to the city a lot. Bellona used to be a pretty good town." Tak glanced at a doorway too dark to see if it was open or shut.

  "Maybe it still is, you know? But one day I drove up here. And it was like this."

  A fire escape, above a street lamp pulsing slow as a failing heart, looked like charred sticks, some still aglow.

  "Just like this?"

  On a store window their reflection slid like ripples over oil.

  "There were a few more places the fire hadn't reached; a few more people who hadn't left yet-not all the newcomers had arrived."

  "You were here at the very beginning, then?"

  "Oh, I didn't see it break out or anything. Like I say, when I got here, it looked more or less like it does now."

  "Where's your car?"

  "Sitting on the street with the windshield busted, the tires gone-along with most of the motor. I let a lot of stupid things happen, at first. But I got the hang of it after a while." Tak made a sweeping gesture with both hands-and disappeared before it was finished: they'd passed into complete blackness. "A thousand people are supposed to be here now. Used to be almost two million."

  "How do you know, I mean the population?"

  "That's what they publish in the paper."

  "Why do you stay?"

  "Stay?" Loufer's voice neared that other, upsetting tone. "Well, actually, I've thought about that one a lot. I think it has to do with-I got a theory now-freedom. You know, here-" ahead, something moved-"you're free. No laws: to break, or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become-" they neared another half-lit lamp; what moved became smoke, lolling from a window sill set with glass teeth like an extinguished jack-o-lantern-"exactly who you are." And Tak was visible again. "If you're ready for that, this is where it's at."

  "It must be pretty dangerous. Looters and stuff."

  Tak nodded. "Sure it's dangerous."

  "Is there a lot of street mugging?"

  "Some." Loufer made a face. "Do you know about crime, Kid? Crime is funny. For instance, now, in most American cities-New York, Chicago, St. Louis-crimes, ninety-five per cent I read, are committed between six o'clock and midnight. That means you're safer walking around the street at three o'clock in the morning than you are going to the theater to catch a seven-thirty curtain. I wonder what time it is now. Sometime after two I'd gather. I don't think Bellona is much more dangerous than any other city. It's a very small city, now. That's a sort of protection."

  A forgotten blade scraped his jeans. "Do you carry a weapon?"

  "Months of detailed study on what is going on where, the movements and variations of our town. I look around a lot. This way."

  That wasn't buildings on the other side of the street: Trees rose above the park wall, black as shale. Loufer headed toward the entrance.

  "Is it safe in there?"

  "Looks pretty scary." Tak nodded. "Probably keep any criminal with a grain of sense at home. Anybody who wasn't a mugger would be out of his mind to go in there." He glanced back, grinned. "Which probably means all the muggers have gotten tired of waiting and gone home to bed a long time ago. Come on."

  Stone lions flanked the entrance.

  "It's funny," Tak said; they passed between. "You show me a place where they tell women to stay out of at night because of all the nasty, evil men lurking there to do nasty, evil things; and you know what you'll find?"

  "Queers."

  Tak glanced over, pulled his cap visor down. "Yeah."

  The dark wrapped them up and buoyed them along the path.

  There is nothing safe about the darkness of this city and its stink. Well, I have abrogated all claim to safety, coming here. It is better to discuss it as though I had chosen. That keeps the scrim of sanity before the awful set. What will lift it?

  "What were you in prison for?"

  "Morals charge," Tak said.

  He was steps behind Loufer now. The path, which had begun as concrete, was now dirt. Leaves hit at him. Three times his bare foot came down on rough roots; once his swinging arm scraped lightly against bark.

  "Actually," Tak tossed back into the black between them, "I was acquitted. The situation, I guess. My lawyer figured it was better I stayed in jail without bail for ninety days, like a misdemeanor sentence. Something had got lost in the records. Then, at court, he brought that all out, got the charge changed to public indecency; I'd already served sentence." Zipper-jinglings suggested a shrug. "Everything considered, it worked out. Look!"

  The carbon black of leaves shredded, letting through the ordinary color of urban night.

  "Where?" They had stopped among trees and high brush.

  "Be quiet! There . . ."

  His wool shushed Tak's leather.
He whispered: "Where do you ... ?"

  Out on the path, sudden, luminous, and artificial, a seven-foot dragon swayed around the corner, followed by an equally tall mantis and a griffin. Like elegant plastics, internally lit and misty, they wobbled forward. When dragon and mantis swayed into each other, they-meshed!

  He thought of images, slightly unfocused, on a movie screen, lapping.

  "Scorpions!" Tak whispered.

  Tak's shoulder pushed his.

  His hand was on a tree trunk. Twig shadows webbed his forearm, the back of his hand, the bark. The figure neared; the web slid. The figures passed; the web slid off. They were, he realized, as eye-unsettling as pictures on a three-dimensional postcard-with the same striations hanging, like a screen, just before, or was it just behind them.

  The griffin, furthest back, flickered:

  A scrawny youngster, with pimply shoulders, in the middle of a cautious, bow-legged stride-then griffin again. (A memory of spiky, yellow hair; hands held out from the freckled, pelvic blade.)

  The mantis swung around to look back, went momentarily out:

  This one, anyway, was wearing some clothes-a brown, brutal looking youngster; the chains he wore for necklaces growled under his palm, while he absently caressed his left breast. "Come on, Baby! Get your ass in gear!" which came from a mantis again.

  "Shit, you think they gonna be there?" from the griffin.

  "Aw, sure. They gonna be there!" You could have easily mistaken the voice from the dragon for a man's; and she sounded black.

  Suspended in wonder and confusion, he listened to the conversation of the amazing beasts.

  "They better be!" Vanished chains went on growling.

  The griffin flickered once more: pocked buttocks and duty heels disappeared behind blazing scales.

  "Hey, Baby, suppose they're not there yet?"

  "Oh, shit! Adam .. . ?"

  "Now, Adam, you know they're gonna be there," the dragon assured.

  "Yeah? How do I know? Oh, Dragon Lady! Dragon Lady, you're too much!"

  "Come on. The two of you shut up, huh?"

  Swaying together and apart, they rounded another corner.

  He couldn't see his hand at all now, so he let it fall from the trunk.. "What... what are they?"

  "Told you: scorpions. Sort of a gang. Maybe it's more than one gang. I don't really know. You get fond of them after a while, if you know how to stay out of their way. If you can't . . . well, you either join, I guess; or get messed up. Least, that's how I found it."

  "I mean the ... the dragons and things?"

  "Pretty, huh?" "What are they?"

  "You know what is it a hologram? They're projected from interference patterns off a very small, very low-powered laser. It's not complicated. But it looks impressive. They call them light-shields."

  "Oh." He glanced at his shoulder where Tak had dropped his hand. "I've heard of holograms."

  Tak led him out of the hidden niche of brush onto the concrete. A few yards down the path, in the direction the scorpions had come from, a lamp was working. They started in that direction.

  "Are there more of them around?"

  "Maybe." Tak's upper face was again masked. "Their light-shields don't really shield them from anything-other than our prying eyes, from the ones who want to walk around bare-assed. When I first got here, all you saw were scorpions. Then griffins and the other kinds started showing up a little while ago. But the genre name stuck." Tak slid his hands into his jean pockets. His jacket, joined at the bottom by the zipper fastener, rode up in front for non-existent breasts. Tak stared down at them as he walked. When he looked up, his smile had no eyes over it. "You forget people don't know about scorpions. About Calkins. They're famous here. Bellona's a big city; with something that famous in any other city in the country, why I guess people in L.A., Chicago, Pittsburgh, Washington would be dropping it all over the carpet at the in cocktail parties, huh? But they've forgotten we're here."

  "No. They haven't forgotten." Though he couldn't see Tak's eyes, he knew they had narrowed.

  "So they send in people who don't know their own name. Like you?"

  He laughed, sharply; it felt like a bark.

  Tak returned the hoarse sound that was his own laughter. "Oh, yeah! You're quite a kid." Laughter trailed on.

  "Where we going now?"

  But Tak lowered his chin, strode ahead.

  From this play of night, light, and leather, can I let myself take identity? How can I recreate this roasted park in some meaningful matrix? Equipped with contradictory visions, an ugly hand caged in pretty metal, I observe a new mechanique. I am the wild machinist, past destroyed, reconstructing the present.

  "Tak!" she called across the fire, rose, and shook back fire-colored hair. "Who'd you bring?" She swung around the cinderblock furnace and came on, a silhouette now, stepping over sleeping bags, blanket rolls, a lawn of reposing forms. Two glanced at her, then turned over. Two others snored at different pitches.

  A girl on a blanket, with no shirt and really nice breasts, stopped playing her harmonica, banged it on her palm for spit, and blew once more.

  The redhead rounded the harmonica player and seized Tak's cuff, close enough now to have a face again. "We haven't seen you in days! What happened? You used to come around for dinner practically every night. John was worried about you." It was a pretty face in half light

  "I wasn't worried." A tall, long-haired man in a Peruvian vest walked over from the picnic table. "Tak comes. Tak goes. You know how Tak is." Around the miniature flames, reflected in his glasses, even in this light his tan suggested chemicals or sunlamps. His hair was pale and thin and looked as if day would show sun streaks. "You're closer to breakfast time than you are to dinner, right now." He - John? - tapped a rolled newspaper against his thigh.

  "Come on. Tell me, Tak." She smiled; her face wedged with deeper shadows. "Who have you brought John and me this time?" while John glanced up (twin flames slid off his lenses) for hints of dawn.

  Tak said: "This is the Kid."

  "Kit?" she asked.

  "Kid."

  "K-y-d-d . . . ?"

  --.

  . . . d," she added with a tentative frown. "Oh,

  Kidd." If Tak had an expression you couldn't see it.

  He thought it was charming, though; though something else about it unsettled.

  She rared her shoulders back, blinking. "How are you, Kidd? Are you new? Or have you been hiding out in the shadows for months and months?" To Tak: "Isn't it amazing how we're always turning up people like that? You think you've met everybody in the city there is to meet. Then, suddenly, somebody who's been here all along, watching you from the bushes, sticks his nose out-"

  "That's how we met Tak," John said. To Tak: "Isn't it, Tak?"

  Tak said: "He's new."

  "Oh. Well," John said, "we've got this thing going here. Do you want to explain it to him, Mildred?"

  "Well, we figure-" Mildred's shoulders came, officially, forward. "We figure we have to survive together some way. I mean we can't be at each other's throats like animals. And it would be so easy for a situation like this-" He was sure her gesture, at 'this', included nothing beyond the firelight-"to degenerate into something . . . well, awful! So we've set up I guess you'd call it a commune. Here, in the park. People get food, work together, know they have some sort of protection. We try to be as organic as possible, but that's getting harder and harder. When new people come into Bellona, they can get a chance to learn how things operate here. We don't take in everybody. But when we do, we're very accepting." There was a tic somewhere (in him or her, he wasn't sure, and started worrying about it) like a nick in a wire pulled over an edge. "You are new? We're always glad when we get somebody new."

  He nodded, while his mind accelerated, trying to decide: him? her?

  Tak said: "Show him around, Milly."

  John said: "Good idea, Mildred. Tak, I want to talk to you about something," tapping his newspaper again. "Oh, here. Maybe you w
ant to take a look at this?"

  "What? Oh ..." You couldn't worry so much about things like that! Often, though, he had to remind himself. "Thanks." He took the folded paper.

  "All right, Tak." John, with Tak, turned away. "Now when are you going to start those foundations for us? I can give you-"

  "Look, John." Tak put his hand on John's shoulder as they wandered off. "All you need is the plans, and you can-"

  Then they were out of earshot.

  "Are you hungry?"

  "No." She was pretty.

  "Well, if you are-come, let's go over here-we start cooking breakfast soon as it gets light. That's not too far off."

  "You been up all night?" he asked.

  "No. But when you go to bed at sundown, you wake up pretty early."

  "I have."

  "We do a lot of work here-" she slipped her hands into her back pockets; her jeans, torn short, were bunched high on her thighs-"during the day. We don't just sit around. John has a dozen projects going. It's pretty hard to sleep with people hammering and building and what all." She smiled.

  "I've been up; but I'm not tired. When I am, I can sleep through anything." He looked down at her legs.

  As she walked, light along them closed and crossed. "Oh, we wouldn't mind if you really wanted to sleep. We don't want to force anybody. But we have to maintain some kind of pattern, you understand."

  "Yeah, I understand that." He'd been flipping the newspaper against his own thigh. Now he raised it.

  "Why do you go around wearing an orchid?" she asked. "Of course, with the city in the state it's in, I guess it makes sense. And really, we do accept many life styles here. But..."

  "Some people gave it to me." He turned the rolled newspaper around.

  SERIOUS WATER

  He let the tabloid fall loose.

  SHORTAGE THREATENS

  The date said Tuesday, February 12, 1995. "What the hell is that?"

  She looked concerned. "Well, there's not very many people around who know how to keep things running. And we've all been expecting the water to become a real problem any day. You have no idea how much they used when they were trying to put out the fires."