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

“That’s all right. I don’t need to see them yet. In fact, I’d rather not. I have something to propose to you. I would certainly be interested in what you have if they are, indeed, as Hawk has described them. But I have a guest here who would be even more curious.”

That sounded odd.

“I know that sounds odd,” Alexis assessed, “but I thought you might be interested simply because of the finances involved. I am an eccentric collector who would offer you a price concomitant with what I would use them for: eccentric conversation pieces—and because of the nature of the purchase I would have to limit severely the people with whom I could converse.”

I nodded.

“My guest, however, would have a great deal more use for them.”

“Could you tell me who this guest is?”

“I asked Hawk, finally, who you were and he led me to believe I was on the verge of a grave social indiscretion. It would be equally indiscreet to reveal my guest’s name to you.” He smiled. “But indiscretion is the better part of the fuel that keeps the social machine turning, Mr. Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson…” He smiled knowingly.

I have never been Harvey Cadwaliter-Erickson, but then, Hawk was always an inventive child. Then a second thought went by, vid., the tungsten magnates, the Cadwaliter-Ericksons of Tythis on Triton. Hawk was not only inventive, he was as brilliant as all the magazines and newspapers are always saying he is.

“I assume your second indiscretion will be to tell me who this mysterious guest is?”

“Well,” Alex said with the smile of the canary-fattened cat, “Hawk agreed with me that the Hawk might well be curious as to what you have in there,” (he pointed) “as indeed he is.”

I frowned. Then I thought lots of small, rapid thoughts I’ll articulate in due time. “ The Hawk?”

Alex nodded.

I don’t think I was actually scowling. “Would you send our young friend up here for a moment?”

“If you’d like.” Alex bowed, turned. Perhaps a minute later, Hawk came up over the rocks and through the trees, grinning. When I didn’t grin back, he stopped.

“Mmmm…” I began.

His head cocked.

I scratched my chin with a knuckle. “… Hawk,” I said, “are you aware of a department of the police called Special Services?”

“I’ve heard of them.”

“They’ve suddenly gotten very interested in me.”

“Gee,” he said with honest amazement. “They’re supposed to be effective.”

“Mmmm,” I reiterated.

“Say,” Hawk announced, “how do you like that? My namesake is here tonight. Wouldn’t you know.”

“Alex doesn’t miss a trick. Have you any idea why he’s here?”

“Probably trying to make some deal with Abolafia. Her investigation starts tomorrow.”

“Oh.” I thought over some of those things I had thought before. “Do you know a Maud Hinkle?”

His puzzled look said “no” pretty convincingly.

“She bills herself as one of the upper echelon in the arcane organization of which I spoke.”

“Yeah?”

“She ended our interview earlier this evening with a little homily about hawks and helicopters. I took our subsequent encounter as a fillip of coincidence. But now I discover that the evening has confirmed her intimations of plurality.” I shook my head. “Hawk, I am suddenly catapulted into a paranoid world where the walls not only have ears, but probably eyes, and long, claw-tipped fingers. Anyone about me—yea, even very you—could turn out to be a spy. I suspect every sewer grating and second-story window conceals binoculars, a tommygun, or worse. What I just can’t figure out is how these insidious forces, ubiquitous and omnipresent though they be, induced you to lure me into this intricate and diabolical—”

“Oh, cut it out!” He shook back his hair. “I didn’t lure—”

“Perhaps not consciously, but Special Services has Hologramic Information Storage, and their methods are insidious and cruel—”

“I said cut it put.” And all sorts of hard little things happened again. “Do you think I’d—” Then he realized how scared I was, I guess. “Look, the Hawk isn’t some small time snatchpurse. He lives in just as paranoid a world as you’re in now, only all the time. If he’s here, you can be sure there are just as many of his men—eyes and ears and fingers— as there are of Maud Hickenlooper.”

“Hinkle.”

“Anyway, it works both ways. No Singer’s going to— Look, do you really think I would—”

And even though I knew all those hard little things were scabs over pain, I said, “Yes.”

“You did something for me once, and I—”

“I gave you some more welts. That’s all.”

All the scabs pulled off.

“Hawk,” I said. “Let me see.”

He took a breath. Then he began to open the brass buttons. The flaps of his jacket fell back. The lumia colored his chest with pastel shiftings.

I felt my face wrinkle. I didn’t want to look away. I drew a hissing breath instead, which was just as bad.

He looked up. “There’re a lot more than when you were here last aren’t there?”

“You’re going to kill yourself, Hawk.”

He shrugged.

“I can’t even tell which are the ones I put there anymore.”

He started to point them out.

“Oh, come on,” I said, too sharply. And for the length of three breaths, he grew more and more uncomfortable, till I saw him start to reach for the bottom button. “Boy,” I said, trying to keep despair out of my voice, “why do you do it?” and ended up keeping out everything. There is nothing more despairing than a voice empty.

He shrugged, saw I didn’t want that, and for a moment anger flickered in his green eyes. I didn’t want that either. So he said: “Look… you touch a person, softly, gently, and maybe you even do it with love. And, well, I guess a piece of information goes on up to the brain where something interprets it as pleasure. Maybe something up there in my head interprets the information all wrong…”

I shook my head. “You’re a Singer. Singers are supposed to be eccentric, sure; but—”

Now he was shaking his head. Then the anger opened up. And I saw an expression move from all those spots that had communicated pain through the rest of his features, and vanish without ever becoming a word. Once more he looked down at the wounds that webbed his thin body.

“Button it up, boy. I’m sorry I said anything.”

Halfway up the lapels his hands stopped. “You really think I’d turn you in?”

“Button it up.”

He did. Then he said, “Oh.” And then, “You know, it’s midnight.”

“Edna just gave me the Word.”

“Which is?”

“Agate.”

I nodded.

He finished closing his collar. “What are you thinking about?”

“Cows.”

“Cows?” Hawk asked. “What about them?”

“You ever been on a dairy farm?”

He shook his head.

“To get the most milk, you keep the cows practically in suspended animation. They’re fed intravenously from a big tank that pipes nutrients out and down, branching into smaller and smaller pipes until it gets to all those high yield semi-corpses.”

“I’ve seen pictures.”

“People.”

“… and cows?”

“You’ve given me the Word. And now it begins to funnel down, branching out, with me telling others, and them telling still others, till by midnight tomorrow…”

“I’ll go get the-”

“Hawk?”

He turned back. “What?”

“You say you don’t think I’m going to be the victim of any hanky-panky with the mysterious forces that know more than we— Okay, that’s your opinion. But as soon as I get rid of this stuff, I’m going to make the most distracting exit you’ve ever seen.”