Samuel Delany: Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

Trying not to hit people with my briefcase, I ducked between the hub and the bub. When I saw my first ordinary policeman I tried very hard to look like somebody who had just stepped up to see what the rumpus was.

It worked.

I turned down Ninth Avenue, and got three steps into an inconspicuous but rapid lope—

“Hey, wait! Wait up there…”

I recognized the voice (after two years, coming at me just like that, I recognized it) but kept going.

“Wait! It’s me, Hawk!”

And I stopped.

You haven’t heard his name before in this story; Maud mentioned the Hawk, who is a multi-millionaire racketeer basing his operations on a part of Mars I’ve never been (though he has his claws sunk to the spurs in illegalities throughout the system) and somebody else entirely.

I took three steps back towards the doorway.

A boy’s laugh there: “Oh, man. You look like you just did something you shouldn’t.”

“Hawk?” I asked the shadow.

He was still the age when two years’ absence means an inch or so taller.

“You’re still hanging out around here?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

He was an amazing kid.

“Look, Hawk, I got to get out of here.” I glanced back at the rumpus.

“Get.” He stepped down. “Can I come too?”

Funny. “Yeah.” It makes me feel very funny him asking that. “Come on.”

By the street lamp, half a block down, I saw his hair was still pale as split pine. He could have been a nasty-grimy: very dirty black denim jacket, no shirt beneath; very ripe pair of black-jeans—I mean in the dark you could tell. He went barefoot; and the only way you can tell on a dark street someone’s been going barefoot for days in New York is to know already. As we reached the corner, he grinned up at me under the street lamp and shrugged his jacket together over the welts and furrows marring his chest and belly. His eyes were very green. Do you recognize him? If by some failure of information dispersal throughout the worlds and worldlets you haven’t, walking beside me beside the Hudson was Hawk the Singer.

“Hey, how long have you been back?”

“A few hours,” I told him.

“What’d you bring?”

“Really want to know?”

He shoved his hands into his pockets and cocked his head. “Sure.”

I made the sound of an adult exasperated by a child. “All right.” We had been walking the waterfront for a block now; there was nobody about. “Sit down.” So he straddled the beam along the siding, one foot dangling above the flashing black Hudson. I sat in front of him and ran my thumb around the edge of the briefcase.

Hawk hunched his shoulders and leaned. “Hey…” He flashed green questioning at me. “Can I touch?”

I shrugged. “Go ahead.”

He grubbed among them with fingers that were all knuckle and bitten nail. He picked two up, put them down, picked up three others. “Hey!” he whispered. “How much are all these worth?”

“About ten times more than I hope to get. I have to get rid of them fast.”

He glanced down at his hanging foot. “You could always throw them in the river.”

“Don’t be dense. I was looking for a guy who used to hang around that bar. He was pretty efficient.” And half the Hudson away a water-bound foil skimmed above the foam. On her deck were parked a dozen helicopters—being ferried up to the Patrol Field near Verrazano, no doubt. But for moments I looked back and forth between the boy and the transport, getting all paranoid about Maud. But the boat mmmmed into the darkness. “My man got a little cut up this evening.”

Hawk put the tips of his fingers in his pockets and shifted his position.

“Which leaves me up tight. I didn’t think he’d take them all but at least he could have turned me on to some other people who might.”

“I’m going to a party later on this evening”—he paused to gnaw on the wreck of his little fingernail—“where you might be able to sell them. Alexis Spinnel is having a party for Regina Abolafia at Tower Top.”

“Tower Top… ?” It had been a while since I palled around with Hawk. Hell’s Kitchen at ten; Tower Top at midnight—

“I’m just going because Edna Silem will be there.”

Edna Silem is New York’s eldest Singer.

Senator Abolafia’s name had ribboned above me in lights once that evening. And somewhere among the endless magazines I’d perused coming in from Mars I remember Alexis Spinnel’s name sharing a paragraph with an awful lot of money.

“I’d like to see Edna again,” I said offhandedly. “But she wouldn’t remember me.” Folk like Spinnel and his social ilk have a little game, I’d discovered during the first leg of my acquaintance with Hawk. He who can get the most Singers of the City under one roof wins. There are five Singers of New York (a tie for second place with Lux on Iapetus). Tokyo leads with seven. “It’s a two Singer party?”

“More likely four…if I go.”

The inaugural ball for the mayor gets four.

I raised the appropriate eyebrow.

“I have to pick up the Word from Edna. It changes tonight.”

“All right,” I said. “I don’t know what you have in mind but I’m game.” I closed the case.

We walked back towards Times Square. When we got to Eighth Avenue and the first of the plastiplex, Hawk stopped. “Wait a minute,” he said. Then he buttoned his jacket up to his neck. “Okay.”

Strolling through the streets of New York with a Singer (two years back I’d spent much time wondering if that were wise for a man of my profession) is probably the best camouflage possible for a man of my profession. Think of the last time you glimpsed your favorite Tri-D star turning the corner of Fifty-seventh. Now be honest. Would you really recognize the little guy in the tweed jacket half a pace behind him?

Half the people we passed in Times Square recognized him. With his youth, funereal garb, black feet and ash pale hair, he was easily the most colorful of Singers. Smiles; narrowed eyes; very few actually pointed or stared.

“Just exactly who is going to be there who might be able to take this stuff off my hands?”

“Well, Alexis prides himself on being something of an adventurer. They might just take his fancy. And he can give you more than you can get peddling them in the street.”

“You’ll tell him they’re all hot?”

“It will probably make the idea that much more intriguing. He’s a creep.”

“You say so, friend.”

We went down into the sub-sub. The man at the change booth started to take Hawk’s coin, then looked up. He began three or four words that were unintelligible through his grin, then just gestured us through.

“Oh,” Hawk said, “thank you,” with ingenuous surprise, as though this were the first, delightful time such a thing had happened. (Two years ago he had told me sagely, “As soon as I start looking like I expect it, it’ll stop happening.” I was still impressed by the way he wore his notoriety. The time I’d met Edna Silem, and I’d mentioned this, she said with the same ingenuousness, “But that’s what we’re chosen for.”)

In the bright car we sat on the long seat; Hawk’s hands were beside him, one foot rested on the other. Down from us a gaggle of bright-bloused goo-chewers giggled and pointed and tried not to be noticed at it. Hawk didn’t look at all, and I tried not to be noticed looking.

Dark patterns rushed the window.

Things below the gray floor hummed.

Once a lurch.

Leaning once; we came out of the ground.

Outside, the city tried on its thousand sequins, then threw them away behind the trees of Ft. Tryon. Suddenly the windows across from us grew bright scales. Behind them the girders of a station reeled by. We got out on the platform under a light rain. The sign said TWELVE TOWERS STATION.