Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones Read online

  Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

  Samuel R. Delany

  Won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and Nebula Award for best Novelette in 1970.

  Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones

  by Samuel R. Delany

  Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant. Third quadrant if you please. I was born in ’fifty. Here it’s ’seventy-five.

  At sixteen they let me leave the orphanage. Dragging the name they’d hung me with (Harold Clancy Everet, and me a mere lad—how many monickers have I had since; but don’t worry, you’ll recognize my smoke) over the hills of East Vermont, I came to a decision:

  Me and Pa Michaels, who had belligerently given me a job at the request of The Official looking Document with which the orphanage sends you packing, were running Pa Michaels’ dairy farm, i.e., thirteen thousand three hundred sixty-two piebald Guernseys all asleep in their stainless coffins, nourished and drugged by pink liquid flowing in clear plastic veins (stuff is sticky and messes up your hands), exercised with electric pulsers that make their muscles quiver, them not half awake, and the milk just a-pouring down into stainless cisterns. Anyway. The Decision (as I stood there in the fields one afternoon like the Man with the Hoe, exhausted with three hard hours of physical labor, contemplating the machinery of the universe through the fog of fatigue): With all of Earth, and Mars, and the Outer Satellites filled up with people and what-all, there had to be something more than this. I decided to get some.

  So I stole a couple of Pa’s credit cards, one of his helicopters and a bottle of white lightning the geezer made himself, and took off. Ever try to land a stolen helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building, drunk? Jail, schmail, and some hard knocks later I had attained to wisdom. But remember this oh best beloved: I have done three honest hours on a dairy farm less than ten years back. And nobody has ever called me Harold Clancy Everet again.

  Hank Culafroy Eckles (red-headed, a bit vague, six foot two) strolled out of the baggage room at the spaceport carrying a lot of things that weren’t his in a small briefcase.

  Beside him the Business Man was saying, “You young fellows today upset me. Go back to Bellona, I say. Just because you got into trouble with that little blonde you were telling me about is no reason to leap worlds, come on all glum. Even quit your job!”

  Hank stops and grins weakly: “Well…”

  “Now I admit, you have your real needs, which maybe we older folks don’t understand, but you have to show some responsibility towards…” He notices Hank has stopped in front of a door marked men. “Oh. Well. Eh.” He grins strongly. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Hank. It’s always nice when you meet somebody worth talking to on these damn crossings. So long.”

  Out same door, ten minutes later, comes Harmony C. Eventide, six foot even (one of the false heels was cracked, so I stuck both of them under a lot of paper towels), brown hair (not even my hairdresser knows for sure), oh so dapper and of his time, attired in the bad taste that is oh so tasteful, a sort of man with whom no Business Men would start a conversation. Took the regulation ’copter from the port over to the Pan Am building (Yeah. Really. Drunk), came out of Grand Central Station, and strode along Forty-second towards Eighth Avenue, with a lot of things that weren’t mine in a small briefcase.

  The evening is carved from light.

  Crossed the plastiplex pavement of the Great White Way—I think it makes people look weird, all that white light under their chins—and skirted the crowds coming up in elevators from the sub-way, the sub-sub-way, and the sub-sub-sub (eighteen and first week out of jail I hung around here, snatching stuff from people—but daintily, daintily, so they never knew they’d been snatched), bulled my way through a crowd of giggling, goo-chewing school girls with flashing lights in their hair, all very embarrassed at wearing transparent plastic blouses which had just been made legal again (I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century) so I stared appreciatively; they giggled some more. I thought, Christ, when I was that age, I was on a God damn dairy farm, and took the thought no further.

  The ribbon of news lights looping the triangular structure of Communication, Inc., explained in Basic English how Senator Regina Abolafia was preparing to begin her investigation of Organized Crime in the City. Days I’m so happy I’m disorganized I couldn’t begin to tell.

  Near Ninth Avenue I took my briefcase into a long, crowded bar. I hadn’t been in New York for two years, but on my last trip through ofttimes a man used to hang out here who had real talent for getting rid of things that weren’t mine profitably, safely, fast. No idea what the chances were I’d find him. I pushed among a lot of guys drinking beer. Here and there were a number of well escorted old bags wearing last month’s latest. Scarfs of smoke gentled through the noise. I don’t like such places. Those there younger than me were all morphadine heads or feeble minded. Those older only wished more younger ones would come. I pried my way to the bar and tried to get the attention of one of the little men in white coats.

  The lack of noise behind me made me glance back-She wore a sheath of veiling closed at the neck and wrists with huge brass pins (oh so tastefully on the border of taste); her left arm was bare, her right covered with chiffon like wine. She had it down a lot better than I did. But such an ostentatious demonstration of one’s understanding of the fine points was absolutely out of place in a place like this. People were making a great show of not noticing.

  She pointed to her wrist, blood-colored nail indexing a yellow-orange fragment in the brass claw of her wristlet. “Do you know what this is, Mr. Eldrich?” she asked; at the same time the veil across her face cleared, and her eyes were ice; her brows, black.

  Three thoughts: (One) She is a lady of fashion, because coming in from Bellona I’d read the Delta coverage of the “fading fabrics” whose hue and opacity were controlled by cunning jewels at the wrist. (Two) During my last trip through, when I was younger and Harry Calamine Eldrich, I didn’t do anything too illegal (though one loses track of these things); still I didn’t believe I could be dragged off to the calaboose for anything more than thirty days under that name. (Three) The stone she pointed to…

  “… Jasper?” I asked.

  She waited for me to say more; I waited for her to give me reason to let on I knew what she was waiting for (when I was in jail Henry James was my favorite author. He really was.)

  “Jasper,” she confirmed.

  “—Jasper…” I reopened the ambiguity she had tried so hard to dispel.

  “… Jasper—” But she was already faltering, suspecting I suspected her certainty to be ill-founded.

  “Okay. Jasper.” But from her face I knew she had seen in my face a look that had finally revealed I knew she knew I knew.

  “Just whom have you got me confused with, Ma’am?”

  Jasper, this month, is the Word.

  Jasper is the pass/code/warning that the Singers of the Cities (who, last month, sang “Opal” from their divine injuries; and on Mars I’d heard the Word and used it thrice, along with devious imitations, to fix possession of what was not rightfully my own; and even there I pondered Singers and their wounds) relay by word of mouth for that loose and roguish fraternity with which I have been involved (in various guises) these nine years. It goes out new every thirty days; and within hours every brother knows it, throughout six worlds and worldlets. Usually it’s grunted at you by some blood-soaked bastard staggering into your arms from a dark doorway; hissed at you as you pass a shadowed alley; scrawled on a paper scrap pressed into your palm by some nasty-gri
my moving too fast through the crowd. And this month, it was: Jasper.

  Here are some alternate translations:

  Help!

  or

  I need help!

  or

  I can help you!

  or

  You are being watched!

  or

  They’re not watching now, so wove!

  Final point of syntax: If the Word is used properly, you should never have to think twice about what it means in a given situation. Fine point of usage: Never trust anyone who uses it improperly.

  I waited for her to finish waiting.

  She opened a wallet in front of me. “Chief of Special Services Department Maudline Hinkle,” she read without looking what it said below the silver badge.

  “You have that very well,” I said, “Maud.” Then I frowned. “Hinkle?”

  “Me.”

  “I know you’re not going to believe this, Maud. You look like a woman who has no patience with her mistakes. But my name is Eventide. Not Eldrich. Harmony C. Eventide. And isn’t it lucky for all and sundry that the Word changes tonight?” Passed the way it is, the Word is no big secret to the cops. But I’ve met policemen up to a week after change date who were not privy.

  “Well, then: Harmony. I want to talk to you.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  She raised one back and said, “Look, if you want to be called Henrietta, it’s all right by me. But you listen.”

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Crime, Mr… ?”

  “Eventide. I’m going to call you Maud, so you might as well call me Harmony. It really is my name.”

  Maud smiled. She wasn’t a young woman. I think she even had a few years on Business Man. But she used make-up better than he did. “I probably know more about crime than you do,” she said. “In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if you hadn’t even heard of my branch of the police department. What does Special Services mean to you?”

  “That’s right, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “You’ve been more or less avoiding the Regular Service with alacrity for the past seven years.”

  “Oh, Maud, really-”

  “Special Services is reserved for people whose nuisance value has suddenly taken a sharp rise… a sharp enough rise to make our little lights start blinking.”

  “Surely I haven’t done anything so dreadful that—”

  “We don’t look at what you do. A computer does that for us. We simply keep checking the first derivative of the graphed out curve that bears your number. Your slope is rising sharply.”

  “Not even the dignity of a name—”

  “We’re the most efficient department in the Police Organization. Take it as bragging if you wish. Or just a piece of information.”

  “Well, well, well,” I said. “Have a drink?” The little man in the white coat left us two, looked puzzled at Maud’s finery, then went to do something else.

  “Thanks.” She downed half her glass like someone stauncher than that wrist would indicate. “It doesn’t pay to go after most criminals. Take your big-time racketeers, Farnesworth, The Hawk, Blavatskia. Take your little snatch-purses, small-time pushers, housebreakers or vice-impresarios. Both at the top and the bottom of the scale, their incomes are pretty stable. They don’t really upset the social boat. Regular Services handles them both. They think they do a good job. We’re not going to argue. But say a little pusher starts to become a big-time pusher; a medium-sized vice-impresario sets his sights on becoming a full-fledged racketeer; that’s when you get problems with socially unpleasant repercussions. That’s when Special Services arrive. We have a couple of techniques that work remarkably well.”

  “You’re going to tell me about them, aren’t you.”

  “They work better that way,” she said. “One of them is hologramic information storage. Do you know what happens when you cut a hologram plate in half?”

  “The three dimensional image is… cut in half?”

  She shook her head. “You get the whole image, only fuzzier, slightly out of focus.”

  “Now I didn’t know that.”

  “And if you cut it in half again, it just gets fuzzier still. But even if you have a square centimeter of the original hologram you still have the whole image—unrecognizable, but complete.”

  I mumbled some appreciative m’s.

  “Each pinpoint of photographic emulsion on a hologram plate, unlike a photograph, gives information about the entire scene being hologrammed. By analogy, hologramic information storage simply means that each bit of information we have—about you, let us say-relates to your entire career, your overall situation, the complete set of tensions between you and your environment. Specific facts about specific misdemeanors or felonies we leave to Regular Services. As soon as we have enough of our kind of data, our method is vastly more efficient for keeping track—even predicting—where you are or what you may be up to.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “One of the most amazing paranoid syndromes I’ve ever run up against. I mean just starting a conversation with someone in a bar. Often, in a hospital situation, I’ve encountered stranger—”

  “In your past,” she said matter of factly, “I see cows and helicopters. In your not too distant future there are helicopters and hawks.”

  “And tell me, oh Good Witch of the West, just how—” Then I got all upset inside. Because nobody is supposed to know about that stint with Pa Michaels save thee and me. Even the Regular Service who pulled me, out of my mind, from that whirlibird bouncing towards the edge of the Pan Am never got that one from me. I’d eaten the credit cards when I saw them waiting, and the serial numbers had been filed off everything that could have had a serial number on it by someone more competent than I: good Mister Michaels had boasted to me, my first lonely, drunken night at the farm, how he’d gotten the thing in hot from New Hampshire.

  “But why”—it appalls me the cache’s to which anxiety will drive us—“are you telling me all this?”

  She smiled and her smile faded behind her veil. “Information is only meaningful when it is shared,“ said a voice that was hers from the place of her face.

  “Hey, look, I—”

  “You may be coming into quite a bit of money soon. If I can calculate right, I will have a helicopter full of the city’s finest arriving to take you away as you accept it into your hot little hands. That is a piece of information…” She stepped back. Someone stepped between us.

  “Hey, Maud—!”

  “You can do whatever you want with it.”

  The bar was crowded enough so that to move quickly was to make enemies. I don’t know—I lost her and made enemies. Some weird characters there: with greasy hair that hung in spikes, and three of them had dragons tattooed on their scrawny shoulders, still another with an eye patch, and yet another raked nails black with pitch at my cheek (we’re two minutes into a vicious free-for-all, case you missed the transition. I did) and some of the women were screaming. I hit and ducked, and then tenor of the brouhaha changed. Somebody sang, “Jasper!” the way she is supposed to be sung. And it meant the heat (the ordinary, bungling Regular Service I had been eluding these seven years) were on their way. The brawl spilled into the street. I got between two nasty-grimies who were doing things appropriate with one another, but made the edge of the crowd with no more wounds than could be racked up to shaving. The fight had broken into sections. I left one and ran into another that, I realized a moment later, was merely a ring of people standing around somebody who had apparently gotten really messed.

  Someone was holding people back.

  Somebody else was turning him over.

  Curled up in a puddle of blood was the little guy I hadn’t seen in two years who used to be so good at getting rid of things not mine.

  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?”