Einstein Intersection. Samuel R. Delany

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      Low; first slow; I closed my eyes, feeling each note in the quadrangle of shoulder blades and buttocks pressed on the rock. Notes came with only the meter of my own breathing, and from beneath that, there was the quickening of the muscles of my fingers and toes that began to cramp for the faster, closer dance of the heart’s time. The mourning hymn began to quake.

      “Lobey, when you were a boy, you used to beat the rock with your feet, making a rhythm, a dance, a drum. Drum, Lobey!”

      I let the melody speed, then flailed it up an octave so I could handle it. That means only fingers.

      “Drum, Lobey!”

      I rocked to my feet and began to slap my soles against the stone.

      “Drum!”

      I opened my eyes long enough to see the blood spider scurry. The music laughed. Pound and pound, trill and warble, and La Dire laughed for me too, to play, hunched down while sweat quivered on my nape, threw up my head and it dribbled into the small of my back, while I, immobile above the waist, flung my hips, beating cross rhythms with toes and heels, blade up to prick the sun, new sweat trickling behind my ears, rolling the crevices of my corded neck.

      “Drum, my Lo Ringo; play, my Lo Orpheus,” La Dire cried. “Oh, Lobey!” She clapped and clapped.

      Then, when the only sound was my own breath, the leaves, and the stream, she nodded, smiling. “Now you’ve mourned properly.”

      I looked down. My chest glistened, my stomach wrinkled and smoothed and wrinkled. Dust on the tops of my feet had become tan mud.

      “Now you’re almost ready to do what must be done. Go now, hunt, herd goats, play more. Soon Le Dorik will come for you.”

      All sound from me stopped. Breath and heart too, I think, a syncopation before the rhythm resumed. “Le Dorik?”

      “Go. Enjoy yourself before you begin your journey.”

      Frightened, I shook my head, turned, fled from the cave mouth.

      Le—

      Suddenly the wandering little beast fled, leaving in my lap—O horror—a monster and misshapen maggot with a human head.

      “Where is your soul that I may ride it!”

      Aloysius Bertrand, “The Dwarf”

      Come ALIVE! You’re in the PEPSI generation!

      Current catchphrase (Commercial)

      —Dorik.

      An hour later I was crouching, hidden, by the kage. But the kage-keeper, Le Dorik, wasn’t around. A white thing (I remember when the woman who was Easy’s mother flung it from her womb before dying) had crawled to the electrified fence to slobber. It would probably die soon. Out of sight I heard Griga’s laughter; he had been Lo Griga till he was sixteen. But something—nobody knew if it was genetic or not—rotted his mind inside his head, and laughter began to gush from his gums and lips. He lost his Lo and was placed in the kage. Le Dorik was probably inside now, putting out food, doctoring where doctoring would do some good, killing when there was some person beyond doctoring. So much sadness and horror penned up there; it was hard to remember they were people. They bore no title of purity, but they were people. Even Lo Hawk would get as offended over a joke about the kaged ones as he would about some titled citizen. “You don’t know what they did to them when I was a boy, young Lo man. You never saw them dragged back from the jungle when a few did manage to survive. You didn’t see the barbaric way complete norms acted, their reason shattered bloody by fear. Many people we call Lo and La today would not have been allowed to live had they been born fifty years ago. Be glad you are a child of more civilized times.” Yes, they were people. But this is not the first time I had wondered what it feels like to keep such people—Le Dorik?

      I went back to the village.

      Lo Hawk looked up from re-thonging his cross-bow. He’d piled the power cartridges on the ground in front of the door to check the caps. “How you be, Lo Lobey?”

      I picked a cartridge out with my foot, turned it over. “Catch that bull yet?”

      “No.”

      I pried the clip back with the tip of my machete. It was good. “Let’s go,” I said.

      “Check the rest first.”

      While I did, he finished stringing the bow, went in and got a second one for me; then we went down to the river.

      Silt stained the water yellow. The current was high and fast, bending ferns and long grass down, combing them from the shore like hair. We kept to the soggy bank for about two miles.

      “What killed Friza?” I asked at last.

      Lo Hawk squatted to examine a scarred log: tusk marks. “You were there. You saw. La Dire only guesses.”

      We turned from the river. Brambles scratched against Lo Hawk’s leggings. I don’t need leggings. My skin is tough and tight. Neither does Easy or Little Jon.

      “I didn’t see anything,” I said. “What does she guess?”

      An albino hawk burst from a tree and gyred away. Friza hadn’t needed leggings either.

      “Something killed Friza that was non-functional, something about her that was non-functional.”

      “Friza was functional,” I said. “She was!”

      “Keep your voice down, boy.”

      “She kept the herd together,” I said more softly. “She could make the animals do what she wanted. She could move the dangerous things away and bring the beautiful ones nearer.”

      “Bosh,” said Lo Hawk, stepping over ooze.

      “Without a gesture or a word, she could move the animals anywhere she wanted, or I wanted.”

      “That’s La Dire’s nonsense you’ve been listening to.”

      “No. I saw it. She could move the animals just like the pebble.”

      Lo Hawk started to say something else. Then I saw his thoughts backtrack. “What pebble?”

      “The pebble she picked up and threw.”

      “What pebble, Lobey?”

      So I told him the story. “And it was functional,” I concluded. “She kept the herd safe, didn’t she? She could have kept it even without me.”

      “Only she couldn’t keep herself alive,” Lo Hawk said. He started walking again.

      We kept silent through the whispering growth, while I mulled. Then:

      “Yaaaaaa—” on three different tones.

      The leaves whipped back and the Bloi triplets scooted out. One of them leaped at me and I had an armful of hysterical, redheaded ten-year-old.

      “Hey СКАЧАТЬ