The Complete Series

by Samuel R. Delany

  In thanking him for his generous words, I made only the most modest correction of what still seemed the exaggerations of someone only over-anxious to speak well of me. The man considered himself my supporter—my friend. There was no need to make him out before his peers as either a liar or a fool. (Among those who knew me and my family, surely some recalled my age at my parents’ deaths.) But even the modesty of my corrections soon joined the tale itself: many times over the next years, I would hear that, though as a youth I had, indeed, confronted my parents with such an ultimatum, I was too self-effacing to admit it—another sign of my high character.

  It was only the most minor annoyance.

  But to repeat: my parents were dead by the time of my trip. And I received no invitation to court, nor was I really expecting one. Why? Well, I lived in Kolhari, in Neveryóna, not in the country: I have, and have had, many relatives at the court all my life. Even by my fifteenth year, I’d been through the great Eagle Gates many times, now to stay for a weekend with one earl, now for two weeks with another duchess, now to visit this young, provincial cousin in for his own official visit, now to attend a party honoring that one; I had gone riding and picnicking on the royal grounds more times than I and my two younger sisters had fingers and toes among us; and I’d already spent more time with, or at least within sight of, my third cousin twice removed (whose reign is awesome and adamantine) than many folk have who’ve lived at court for years. I’d already gained most of the experiences and benefits provincial nobles must travel to the city for. To skip my officially sponsored stay deprived me of very little. And by the time I was seventeen, everyone at court and pretty much everyone in my family simply assumed that, for all practical purposes, I had been.

  Indeed, I’m sure that is what my uncle assumed.

  As a practicing wise man, I’m concerned with mastering truth. To insist on such petty details, however, about what is, after all, only one’s own personality seems to discredit the enterprise. Isn’t it unseemly to dwell with such intensity on so minor a misprision of my personal history—especially one to my benefit?

  Yet, annoy me it did.

  A decade later, the school was becoming real; and various of the city’s finer men and women who supported me from time to time would come to consult with me about my plans. One day I found myself in conversation with an intelligent young man from a successful merchant family. My noble friends still had their reservations about these alliances of mine within the world of trade, and my friends among merchants and tradesmen were aware of the nobles’ misgiving. Yet I felt, finally, both sides respected me for trying to bridge the gap between the classes, whatever their personal reservations.

  The young man and I had gotten down from his wagon to stroll a bit along the palm-lined avenue that runs between Neveryóna and Sallese. It was a warm spring evening. Behind the palms the wall of the old Aldamir Estate was topped with coppery light beneath a sky smeared over in the west with gray and violet clouds. A tall brown fellow, who’d done much traveling for his father, the young man wanted to identify his adult travels with my youthful ones; and I was happy to let him. As we ambled along the orange dust of the shoulder beside mud-mortared flags, he said to me with the pleasantest smile: ‘Years ago I heard a story from a friend of mine that, as a boy, when the time came for you to make the noble’s traditional visit to court, you told your parents that you refused, and proposed instead that you go traveling. Were they really as pleased with your decision as people say?’ He smiled at me, his green eyes in that earth-dark face suggesting relatives three or four generations back from the Ulvayn Islands, which he himself, no doubt, had never known by name. ‘There was no prospect of court in a childhood such as mine,’ he added. ‘Still, my father is such a stickler for tradition, I’m sure that if there had been, he would never have put up with such a suggestion from me!’

  I looked at this intelligent, merchant’s son. I remember I had a very strong sense of what, I thought, he wanted to hear from me: some speculation on the contrasting personalities of the aristocrats and tradesmen of Nevèrÿon. Doubtless, he both romanticized the nobility some—and disdained us. But that particular evening he was ready for some aristocratic speculation about how, perhaps, we nobles were sometimes more liberal with our children than his own hardheaded and practical relatives. And I also thought, while I walked with him: What nonsense! He’s far too smart a boy really to want that kind of drivel!—even if, this evening, he thinks he does. I also thought: He’s not of my class. He’s encumbered with none of the fables that weigh down the Nevèrÿon nobility like sinkers on a fishnet. Speak the truth to him directly, simply, firmly. What better ears than his to hear it! ‘I’ve even heard the story myself,’ I told him, chuckling. ‘Alas, there’s nothing to it. There was never any talk of my going to court. With young nobles who actually live here in Kolhari, this is sometimes the case. My parents were dead by the time I was of age for my official court sojourn—and my uncle, who’d taken me in at my father’s death, had too many of his own problems to think about such things. When I proposed my trip about the country to him, I saw it as a chance to get me out of his way; and, though I’m sure he liked me well enough, I suspect that’s how he saw it too and was at least a little grateful to me for wanting to leave just then. I took my trip. And I did not officially visit court—though I’d visited it unofficially many times. But the story of that brave and intelligent youth who conscientiously replaced one with the other by a concerted declaration of intent to his parents—parents who were, after all, in my case, quite dead at the time—is only a fable. I simply do not deserve the praise usually heaped on that so astute, so well deserving, but finally nonexistent lad.’

  There was no flicker in my young companion’s green-eyed smile—no sign he’d misunderstood, or disbelieved. We talked about the new school’s location (it was his father who’d just volunteered to sell me two of the Sallese buildings and to speak on my behalf to the owner of the third, as well as to supervise the necessary renovations); we discussed the benefits of travel to students, the nature of intellectual inquiry, the necessity of theoretical knowledge in practical matters.

  And we returned to his cart, where he drove me back to my gate.

  Some three days later, my secretary rushed in to halt before my chair. Light fell in slant lines through the shutters over his agitated face: ‘Master, people are saying the most appalling things about you! Now it’s been decided that the school buildings are definitely to be located not in Neveryóna but in the artisans’ district, it’s rumored you’ve been telling the merchants that you completely deny your noble connections. They even say you’ve been spreading falsehoods about your parentage, saying they were not really of the noble class! The other nobles who have been sponsoring you have heard of this and, of course, resent your pandering to the merchants’ prejudices; and the merchants themselves think you are trying to play them for fools!’

  I was, of course, bewildered, and tried to figure what, indeed, could be the basis of such a tale. It took me three days of careful inquiry among both merchants and nobles to learn what had happened.

  The tale had gone around that I’d told some merchant youth that, as a child, I had not been allowed to go to court because my parents were dead! This, I had explained to the trusting young man (according to the rumor), was some sort of tradition among local nobles! But the next person to whom this youth—clearly the merchant’s son with whom I’d been talking that evening on the avenue—recounted his version of my story happened to be a noble himself, who knew (quite rightly) there had never been any such tradition among noblemen of Nevèrÿon and that I was of no such disempowered class: in much consternation, he’d explained all this to the young man, while decrying my falsehoods. And the two of them had gone on to speculate on what my motives could possibly be for such outlandish prevarication!

  Though among a few people with whom it mattered I was able to set things more or less aright, the incident still remains for me a sign of the pr
essure toward misunderstanding that haunts all social communion:

  For in this city there is still a monster all expect me to speak of as ‘I.’

  ‘I’ was a youth who, at his invitation to court, refused to go and proposed to his parents (some say his uncle!) a trip across the country instead.

  Sometimes, today, ‘I’ am too modest to talk of this essentially admirable act.

  At others, however, ‘I’ simply deny it for my own exploitative ends.

  And it is ‘I,’ they think, who lives in this city, runs this school, teaches these children, and is respected or criticized for it by the populace.

  5.221 Placing Benjamin’s quotation from Baudelaire in a fantasy context produces a very different effect from placing the same quotation in an SF context. And both effects are distinct from that which would result from placing it within an example of the literary genre Todorov called ‘the Fantastic’—or, indeed, placing it in a piece of ‘scientific’ literary naturalism, e.g., Zola, or Sinclair Lewis.

  In both paraliterary contexts, the Baudelaire dialogizes heatedly with the text. In both literary contexts, the Baudelaire merely approves or condemns the specific narrative tropes that evince what is usually called ‘the plot.’ To create true dialogue there, beyond this near-mute judgment, would require real critical violence.5.23 My detractors in Neveryóna (many, after all, my relatives) say that by situating the school where I have, I’ve made both the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge a craft or trade, the Master explained. They see this as debased and appalling in these so unaristocratic times. But suppose I had located the school in one of the available Neveryóna estates? Would it have been any better to have made the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge an aristocratic accomplishment?

  5.3 ‘Now let me restate what you have said.’ The minister pulled his hands to the edge of the stone table. ‘First you tell me that of the hundred-thirty-seven persons who have so far been reported to have the disease, all are male…? Then you cast your eyes down, become nervous, and tell me, well, they are not all male…? Lord Vanar I am, of course, personally acquainted with. Should I assume, then, that this is a way of saying that those men with the disease are men who, in the eyes of many, might be considered less than male…? If that is the case, then it is a truly astonishing illness!’ Outside the small, high window, the sky was hot silver. ‘Our position does not, however, afford us such coyness. We must observe this carefully and be prepared to act…’

  6. with a thumbnail, nudged and nipped the dark, beneath bark’s brown the yellow wood beneath green, copper under oil the ashy slate

  stepped into hip-high troughs with hides floating, nudged them with poles while the gray gunk you waded in took the hairs off the leather later on the sandy ledge examined his newly hairless thigh.

  Zadyuk had never worked in the tanning troughs but he had six months at seventeen.

  Nari her hem hiked up and dripping among her tubs, the yard she worked her women in awash with lye shrill shouts

  something else to scrape away apparent color loved color because it appeared wove wires in the warp stretched thin, beat flat as foil

  threw it away if they broke (once) put it up after that and sold it cheaper this pain poled through and poked by his arm’s prod, his knee’s pole, under pain only more would make it different from everything else and he didn’t believe that comfortable positions when you’re sick as rare as beauty when you’re not working well his workshop.

  was it necessary to feel a little superior to friends to love them

  that anxiety he wished the workshop hide hanging behind the planks in wait for summer to be at the shop not opened wasn’t closed

  nothing superior now

  resting on his bed and not entirely there, he skidded about a circle of words surrounding a fire finger brushing its char on the side of some terra-cotta pot when he was six, skimmed years and alleys and facts that fell in a turbulence that was more its swing and rhythm than its settle) when he was seventeen (and stop watching the small furious woman who had been his mother die, as a fourteen-year-old he’d thought the happiest death would be one like hers at the end where you were too exhausted by the facts of dying, the hour by hour bargain with pain, the moment by moment barter for breath, bargains and barters you always came out on the short end of, to fear

  fear of death was something you indulged if you were healthy, perceptive, alert dying took up too much of your diminished strength

  afraid before, among so many weeks of illness, what once had been fear now only rose to annoyance

  sunlight wedged in the window corner lay on jamb and sill like a lock of hair from a certain lively afternoon hour pausing outside to catch her breath, where voices talked of traffic, boiled grain and pepper smell, of what was happening across the street he’d always thought cluttered, convenient, and picturesque

  to lie here in his room was to be sick but not that sick

  when he was that sick he was usually someplace else

  6.01 ‘Shannon decided that English is about 50 percent redundant when we consider samples of eight letters at a time. If the length of the sample is increased, the redundancy is much greater. For sequences of up to 100 letters it rises to approximately 75 percent. The figure is even higher in the case of whole pages or chapters, where the reader is able to get an idea of the long-range statistics of a text, including its theme and literary style. This means, Shannon said, that much of what we write is dictated by the structure of the language and is more or less forced upon us. Only what little is left is of our own free choosing.’

  —Jeremy Campbell

  Grammatical Man

  6.1 On the raised paving stone beyond the mouth of the Bridge of Lost Desire, on the speakers’ platform at both old and new markets, at corners in the business district along Black Avenue, on the waterfront and in the central squares of the ethnic neighborhoods, Imperial criers, wearing the sign of the Royal Eagle on breast and back, shouted:

  ‘There is danger in Kolhari of plague. To date there have been seventy-nine probable deaths—and of the several hundred who have contracted it, no one has yet recovered. We advise care, caution, and cleanliness, and Her Majesty, whose reign is brave and beneficent, discourages the indiscriminate gathering of crowds. This is not an emergency! No, this is not an emergency! But it is a situation Her Majesty feels might develop into one.’

  And on the bridge and in the market and on the street corners and in the yards, people gathered, heard, glanced at their neighbors, and dispersed quickly.

  6.11 ‘Once the plague is established in the city, the regular forms collapse. There is no maintenance of roads and sewers, no army, no police, no municipal administration. Pyres are lit at random to burn the dead, with whatever means are available. Each family wants to have its own. Then wood, space, and flame itself growing rare, there are family feuds around the pyres, soon followed by a general fight, for the corpses are too numerous. The dead already clog the streets in ragged pyramids gnawed at by animals around the edges. The stench rises in the air like a flame. Entire streets are clogged by the piles of dead. Then the houses open and the delirious victims, their minds crowded with hideous visions, spread howling through the streets. The disease that ferments in their viscera and circulates throughout their entire organism discharges itself in tremendous cerebral explosions. Other victims, without buboes, delirium, pain, or rash, examine themselves proudly in the mirror, in splendid health, as they think, and then fall dead with their shaving mugs in their hands, full of scorn for other victims.

  ‘Over the poisonous, thick, bloody streams (color of agony and opium) which gush out of the corpses, strange personages pass, dressed in wax, with noses long as sausages and eyes of glass, mounted on a kind of Japanese sandal made of double wooden tablets, one horizontal, in the form of a sole, the other vertical, to keep them from the contaminated fluids, chanting absurd litanies that cannot prevent them from sinking into the furnace in their turn. These ignorant doctors betray on
ly their fear and their childishness.

  ‘The dregs of the population, apparently immunized by their frenzied greed, enter the open houses and pillage riches they know will serve no purpose or profit…The last of the living are in a frenzy: the obedient and virtuous son kills his father; the chaste man performs sodomy upon his neighbors. The lecher becomes pure. The miser throws his gold in handfuls out the window. The warrior-hero sets fire to the city he once risked his life to save. The dandy decks himself out in his finest clothes and promenades before the charnel house. Neither the idea of an absence of sanctions nor that of imminent death suffices to motivate acts so gratuitously absurd on the part of men who did not believe death could end anything. And how explain the surge of erotic fever among the recovered victims who, instead of fleeing the city, remain where they are, trying to wrench a criminal pleasure from the dying or even the dead, half crushed under the pile of corpses where chance has lodged them…’

  6.12 Artaud’s bit of feuilletonage noire about the plague (above) is basically the image Ken Russell mounted so vividly in his film The Devils.

  This ‘plague’ has the same politically reactionary relation to the reality of present-day urban epidemics that Elias Canetti’s description of the violent, hostile, mindless mob in Crowds and Power has to the two most common manifestations of the contemporary urban crowd: the Audience and the Protest.

  6.2 ‘You mean to tell me—’ and the minister placed his hands on his brocaded lap beneath the stone table—‘that among the more than three-hundred-fifty persons with the disease so far reported by our inspectors, which till now we assumed were all males, and homosexual males at that, there are at least seven women? and five children under the age of four?’ Outside the high small window, the evening had fallen into a brilliant cobalt. ‘So far, there have been seventy-five deaths and, to date, no recoveries. I am afraid we are past the time of preparation and observation. We must act.’ The minister turned to the head of the table. ‘Your Highness, let me propose…’