The Einstein Intersection

by Samuel R. Delany

  Spider, silent till now, looked with blinking silver eyes. “Good stew, cook.”

  Batt leered.

  Spider who herds dragons; Spider who writes; Spider who has the multiplicated music of Kodaly in his head—good man to receive a compliment from.

  I looked from Spider to Batt and back. I wished I had said Good stew because it was, and because saying it made Batt grin like that. What I did come out with, the words distorted by that incredible lash of hunger, was: “What’s dessert?”

  I guess Spider was a bigger person than me. Like I say, that sort of hunger is scary.

  Batt took a ceramic dish out of the fire with rags. “Blackberry dumplings. Knife, reach me the rum sauce.”

  I heard Green-eye’s breath change tempo. My mouth got wet all over again. I watched—examined Batt spooning dumplings and berry filling onto the pans.

  “Knife, get your fingers out!”

  “. . . just wanted to taste.” But the gray hand retreated. Through the dusk firelight caught on a tongue sliding along a lip.

  Batt handed him a plate.

  Spider was served last. We waited for him to begin, though, now that the bottom of the pit was lined.

  “Night . . . sand . . . and dragons,” Stinky muttered.

  “Yeah.” Which was very apt.

  I had just taken my blade out to play when Spider said, “You were asking about Kid Death this morning.”

  “That’s right.” I lay the blade in my lap. “You had something to say about him?” The others quieted.

  “I did the Kid a favor, once,” Spider mused.

  “When he was in the desert?” I asked, wondering what sort of person you would have to be to be different and doing Kid Death favors.

  “When he had just come out of the desert,” Spider said. “He was holed up in a town.”

  “What’s a town?” I asked.

  “You know what a village is?”

  “Yeah. I came from one.”

  “And you know what a City is.” He motioned around at the sand. “Well a village grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a town; then the town grows bigger and bigger till it becomes a City. But this was a ghost town. That means it was from a very old time, from the old people of the planet. It had stopped growing. The buildings had all broken open, sewers caved in, dead leaves fled up the streets, around the stubs of street- lamp bases; an abandoned power station, rats, snakes, department stores—these are the things that are in a town. Also the lowest, dirtiest outcasts of a dozen species who are vicious with a viciousness beyond what intelligence can conceive. Because if there were a brain behind it, they would all be luxuriant, decadent lords of evil over the whole world instead of wallowing in the junk heap of a ghost town. They are creatures you wouldn’t put in a kage.”

  “What did you do for him?” I asked.

  “Killed his father.”

  I frowned.

  Spider picked at a tooth. “The Kid’s dad was a detestable, three-eyed, three-hundred-pound worm. I know he’d murdered at least forty-six people. He tried to kill me three times while I was bumming through the town. Once with poison, once with a wrench, once with a grenade. Each time he missed and got somebody else. He’d fathered a couple of dozen, but still a good number less than he’d killed. Once, when I was on fair terms with him, he gave me one of his daughters. Butchered and dressed her himself. Fresh meat is scarce in town. He simply didn’t count on one of his various kaged offspring whom he’d abandoned a thousand miles away following him up from the desert. Nor did he count on that child’s being a criminal genius, psychotic, and a totally different creature. The Kid and I met up in town there where his father was living high as one could live in that dung pile. The Kid must have been about ten years old.

  “I was sitting in a bar, listening to characters brag and boast, while a wrestling match was going in the corner. The loser would be dinner. Then this skinny carrottop wanders in and sits down on a pile of rags. He stared down most of the time so that you looked at those eyes of his through finer veils of gold. His skin was soap white. He watched the fight, listened to the bragging, and once made a design in the dirt with his toe. When the talk got boring, he scratched his elbow and made faces. When the stories got wild and fascinating, he froze, his fingers tied together, and head down. He listens like someone blind. When the stories were through, he walked out. Then someone whispered, That was Kid Death! and everybody got quiet. He already had quite a reputation.”

  Green-eye had moved a little closer to me. There was a chill over the City.

  “A little later while I was taking a walk outside,” Spider went on, “I saw him swimming in the lake of the Town Park.

  Hey, Spiderman, he called me from the water.

  I walked over and squatted by the pool’s edge. Hi, kid.

  You gotta kill my old man for me. He reached from the lake and grabbed my ankle. I tried to pull away. The Kid leaned back till his face was under water, and bubbled, You gotta do me this little favor, Spider. You have to.

  A leaf stuck to his arm. If you say so, Kid.

  He stood up in the water now, hair lank down his face, scrawny, white, and wet. I say so.

  Mind if I ask why? I pushed the hair off his forehead. I wanted to see if he was real: cold fingers on my ankle; wet hair under my hand.

  He smiled, ingenuous as a corpse. I don’t mind. His lips, nipples, the cuticles over his claws were shriveled. There’s a whole lot of hate left on this world, Spiderman. The stronger you are, the more receptive you are to the memories that haunt these mountains, these rivers, seas, and jungles. And I’m strong! Oh, we’re not human, Spider. Life and death, the real and the irrational aren’t the same as they were for the poor race who willed us this world. They tell us young people, they even told me, that before our parents’ parents came here, we were not concerned with love, life, matter, and motion. But we have taken a new home, and we have to exhaust the past before we can finish with the present. We have to live out the human if we are to move on to our own future. The past terrifies me. That’s why I must kill it—why you must kill him for me.

  Are you so tied up with their past, Kid?

  He nodded. Untie me, Spider.

  What happens if I don’t?

  He shrugged. I’ll have to kill you—all. He sighed. Under the sea it’s so silent . . . so silent, Spider. He whispered, Kill him!

  Where is he?

  He’s waddling along the street while the moonlit gnats make dust around his head, his heel sliding in the trickle of water along the gutter that runs from under the old church wall; he stops and leans, panting, against the moss—

  He’s dead, I said. I opened my eyes; I dislodged a slab of concrete from the beams, so that it slid down—

  See you around sometime. The Kid grinned and pushed backward into the pool. Thanks. Maybe I’ll be able to do something for you someday, Spider.

  Maybe you will, I said. He sank in the silvered scum. I went back to the bar. They were roasting dinner.”

  After a while I said, “You must have lived in town a fair while.”

  “Longer than I’d like to admit,” Spider said. “If you call it living.” He sat up and glanced around the fire. “Lobey, Green-eye, you two circle the herd for the first watch. In three hours wake Knife and Stinky. Me and Batt will take the last shift.”

  Green-eye rose beside me. I stood too as the others made ready to sleep. My Mount was dozing. The moon was up. Ghost lights ran on the humped spines of the beasts. Sore- legged, stiff-armed, I climbed a-back My Mount and with Green-eye began to circle the herd. I swung the whip against my shin as we rode. “How do they look to you?”

  I didn’t expect an answer. But Green-eye rubbed his stomach with a grimy hand.

  “Hungry? Yeah, I guess they are in all this sand.” I watched the slender, dirty youngster sway behind the scaled hump. “Where are you from?” I asked.

  He smiled quickly at me.

  I was born of a lonely mother

  with
neither father nor sister nor brother.

  I looked up surprised.

  At the waters she waits for me

  my mother, my mother at Branning-at-sea.

  “You’re from Branning-at-sea?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Then you’re going home.”

  He nodded again.

  Silent, we rode on till at last I began to play with tired fingers. Green-eye sang some more as we jogged under the moon.

  I learned that his mother was a fine lady in Branning-at-sea, related to many important political leaders. He had been sent away with Spider to herd dragons for a year. He was returning at last to his mother, this year of wandering and work serving as some sort of passage rite. There was a great deal in the thin, bushy haired boy, so skilled with the flock, I didn’t understand.

  “Me?” I asked when his eye inquired of me in the last of the moonlight. “I don’t have any time for the finery of Branning-at-sea as you describe it. I’ll be glad to see it, passing. But I got things to do.”

  Silent inquiry.

  “I’m going to Kid Death to get Friza, and stop what’s killing all the different ones. That probably means stopping Kid Death.”

  He nodded.

  “You don’t know who Friza is,” I said. “Why are you nodding?”

  He cocked his head oddly, then looked across the herd.

  I am different so I bring

  words to singers when I sing.

  I nodded and thought about Kid Death. “I hate him,” I said. “I have to learn to hate him more so I can find him and kill him.”

  There is no death, only love.

  That one arrived sideways.

  “What was that again?”

  He wouldn’t repeat it. Which made me think about it more. He looked sadly out from the work-grime. At the horizon, the fat moon darkened with clouds. Strands of shadow through the thatch of his hair widened over the rest of his face. He blinked; he turned away. We finished our circuit, chased back two dragons. The moon, revealed once more, was a polished bone joint jammed on the sky. We woke Knife and Stinky, who rose and moved to their dragons.

  The coals gave the only color. And for one moment when Green-eye crouched to stare at some pattern snaking the ashes, the light cast up on his single-eyed face. He stretched beside the fire.

  I slept well, but a movement before dawn roused me. The moon was down. Starlight paled the sand. The coals were dead. One dragon hissed. Two moaned. Silence. Knife and Stinky were returning. Spider and Batt were getting up.

  I drifted off and woke again when only one slop of blue lightened the eastern dunes. Batt’s dragon came around the fireplace. Spider’s lumbered after him. I rose on my elbows.

  “Keeping you up?” Spider asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I was running over the Kodaly again.”

  “Oh.” I could hear it coming across the chill sand. “Naw.” I got to my feet. They were about to start around again. “Just a second. I’ll go around with you. There’s something I want to ask you. I’d have been up in a little while anyway.”

  He didn’t wait, but I swung on my dragon and caught up.

  He laughed softly when I reached his side. “Wait till you’ve been out here a few more days. You won’t be so ready to give up that last few minutes’ sleep.”

  “I’m too sore to sleep,” I said, though the jogging was beginning to loosen stiff me. The coolness had set my joints.

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  “About Kid Death.”

  “What about him?”

  “You say you knew him. Where can I find him?”

  Spider was silent. My Mount slipped in the road and caught his balance again before he answered. “Even if I could tell, even if telling you would do any good, why should I? The Kid could get rid of you like that.” He popped his whip on the sand. Grains flew. “I don’t think the Kid would appreciate my going around telling people who want to kill him where to find him.”

  “I don’t suppose it would make much difference if he’s as strong as you say he is.” I ran my thumb over the machete’s mouthpiece.

  Spider shrugged some of his shoulders. “Maybe not. But, like I say, the Kid’s my friend.”

  “Got you under his thumb too, huh?” It’s difficult to be cutting with a cliché. I tried.

  “Just about,” Spider said.

  I flicked my whip at a dragon who looked like he was thinking of leaving. He yawned, shook his mane, and lay back down. “I guess in a way he’s even got me. He said I would try to find him until I had learned enough. Then I’d try to run away.”

  “He’s playing with you,” Spider said. He had a mocking smile.

  “He’s really got us all tied up.”

  “Just about,” Spider said again.

  I frowned. “Just about isn’t all.”

  “Well,” Spider said in some other direction than mine, “there are a few he can’t touch, like his father. That’s why he had to get me to kill him.”

  “Who?”

  “Green-eye is one. Green-eye’s mother is another.”

  “Green-eye?” In my repetition of the name I’d asked a question. Perhaps he didn’t hear. Perhaps he chose not to answer.

  So I asked another. “Why did Green-eye have to leave Branning-at-sea? He half explained to me last night, but didn’t quite get it.”

  “He has no father,” Spider said. He seemed more ready to talk of this.

  “Can’t they run a paternity check? The traveling folk- doctors do it all the time in my village.”

  “I didn’t say they didn’t know who his father was. I said he had none.”

  I frowned.

  “How are your genetics?”

  “I can draw a dominance chart with the best of them,” I said. Most people, even from the tiniest villages, knew their genetics, even if they couldn’t add. The human chromosome system was so inefficient in the face of the radiation level that genetics was survival knowledge. I’ve often wondered why we didn’t invent a more compatible method of reproduction to go along with our own three way I-guess-you’d-call-it-sexual devision. Just lazy. “Go on,” I said to Spider.

  “Green-eye had no father,” Spider repeated.

  “Parthenogenesis?” I asked. “That’s impossible. The sex distinguishing chromosome is carried by the male. Females and androgynes only carry genetic equipment for producing other females. He’d have to be a girl, with haploid chromosomes, and sterile. And he certainly isn’t a girl.” I thought a moment. “Of course if he were a bird, it would be a different matter. The females carry the sex distinguishing chromosomes there.” I looked out over the herd. “Or a lizard.”

  “But he’s not,” Spider said.

  I agreed. “That’s amazing,” I said, looking back towards the fire where the amazing boy slept.

  Spider nodded. “When he was born, wise men came from all over to examine him. He is haploid. But he’s quite potent and quite male, though a rather harried life has made him chaste by temperament.”

  “Too bad.”

  Spider nodded. “If he would join actively in the solstice orgies or make some appeasing gesture in the autumnal harvest celebrations, a good deal of the trouble could be avoided.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Who’s to know if he takes part in the orgies? Don’t you hold them in the dark of the moon in Branning?”

  Spider laughed. “Yes. But at Banning-at-sea, it’s become a rather formal business; it’s carried on with artificial insemination. The presentation of the seed—especially by the men of important families—gets quite a bit of publicity.”

  “Sounds very dry and impersonal.”

  “It is. But efficient. When a town has more than a million people in it, you can’t just turn out the lights and let everybody run wild in the streets the way you can in a small village. They tried it that way a couple of times, back when Branning-at-sea was much smaller, and even then the results were—”

  “A million people?”
I said. “There are a million people in Branning-at-sea?”

  “Last census there were three million six hundred fifty thousand.”

  I whistled. “That’s a lot.”

  “That’s more than you can imagine.”

  I looked across the herd of dragons; only a couple of hundred.

  “Who wants to take part in an orgy of artificial insemination?” I asked.

  “In a larger society,” Spider said, “things have to be carried out that way. Until there’s a general balancing of the genetic reservoir, the only thing to do is to keep the genes mixing, mixing, mixing. But we have become clannish, more so in places like Branning-at-sea than in the hills. How to keep people from having no more than one child by the same partner. In a backwoods settlement, a few nights of license take care of it, pretty much. In Branning, things have to be assured by mathematical computation. And families have sprung up that would be quite glad to start doubling their children if given half a chance. Anyway, Green-eye just goes about his own business, occasionally saying very upsetting things to the wrong person. The fact that he’s different and immune to Kid Death, from a respected family, and rather chary of ritual observances makes him quite controversial. Everybody blames the business on his parthenogenetic birth.”

  “They frown on that even where I come from,” I told Spider. “It means his genetic structure is identical with his mother’s. That will never do. If that happens enough, we shall all return to the great rock and the great roll in no time.”

  “You sound like one of those pompous fools at Branning.” He was annoyed.

  “Huh! That’s just what I’ve been taught.”

  “Think a little more. Every time you say that, you bring Green-eye a little closer to death.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve tried to kill him before. Why do you think he was sent away?”

  “Oh,” I said. “Then why is he coming back?”

  “He wants to.” Spider shrugged. “Can’t very well stop him if he wants to.”

  I grunted. “You don’t make Branning-at-sea sound like a very nice place. Too many people, half of them crazy, and they don’t even know how to have an orgy.” I took up my blade. “I don’t have time for nonsense like that.”