Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY

  “I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco

  “Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Dhalgren

  “Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem

  “A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review

  The Nevèrÿon Series

  “Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna

  “The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today

  “The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson

  “Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon

  “One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  “Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post

  “What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday

  Nova

  “As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction

  “A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time

  The Motion of Light in Water

  “A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson

  “Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby

  “The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches

  Neveryóna

  Or: The Tale of Signs and Cities

  Samuel R. Delany

  For Frank Romeo

  Contents

  1. Of Dragons, Mountains, Transhumance, Sequence, and Sunken Cities, or: The Violence of the Letter

  2. Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets, and Strangers

  3. Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns

  4. Of Fate, Fortune, Mayhem, and Mystery

  5. Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations

  6. Of Falls, Fountains, Notions, and New Markets

  7. Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions

  8. Of Models, Mystery, Moonlight, and Authority

  9. Of Night, Noon, Time, and Transition

  10. Of Bronze, Brews, Dragons, and Dinners

  11. Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries

  12. Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous

  13. Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis

  Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence

  Appendix B: Acknowledgments

  Preview: Flight from Nevèrÿon

  A Biography of Samuel R. Delany

  This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensibility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook: an imaginative exploitation of nonwhite cultures, whose moral life it drastically oversimplifies, whose wisdom it plunders and parodies. To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for ‘another form of civilization’ refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models because they are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the grounds that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering…

  SUSAN SONTAG, Approaching Artaud

  1. Of Dragons, Mountains, Transhumance, Sequence, and Sunken Cities, or: The Violence of the Letter

  …The modality of novelistic enunciation is inferential: it is a process within which the subject of the novelistic utterance affirms a sequence, as conclusion to the inference, based on other sequences (referential—hence narrative, or textual—hence citational), which are the premises of the inference and, as such, considered to be true.

  JULIA KRISTEVA,

  Desire in Language

  SHE WAS FIFTEEN AND she flew.

  Her name was pryn—because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.

  She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.

  The dragon turned a beaked head in air, jerking reins—vines pryn had twisted in a brown cord before making a bridle to string on the dragon’s clay-colored muzzle. (Several times untwisted vines had broken—fortunately before take-off.) Shrieking and joyful, pryn looked up at clouds and down on streams, off toward returning lines of geese, at sheep crowding through a rocky rift between one green level and another. The dragon jerked her head, which meant the beast was reaching for her glide’s height…

  On the ground a bitter, old, energetic woman sat in her shack and mumbled over pondered insults and recalled slights, scratching in ash that had spilled from her fireplac
e with a stick. That bitter woman, pryn’s great-aunt, had never flown a dragon, nor did she know her great-niece flew one now. What she had done, many years before, was to take into her home an itinerant, drunken barbarian, who’d come wandering through the town market. For nearly five months the soused old reprobate had slept on the young woman’s hearth. When he was not sleeping or incoherent with drink, the two of them had talked; and talked; and talked; and taken long walks together, still talking; then gone back to the shack and talked more. Those talks, the older woman would have assured her great-niece, were as wonderful as any flight.

  One of the things the barbarian had done was help her build a wooden rack on which stretched fibers might be woven together. She’d hoped to make some kind of useful covering. But the funny and fanciful notions, the tales and terrifying insights, the world lighted and shadowed by the analytic and synthetic richness the two of them could generate between them—that was the thing!

  One evening the barbarian had up and wandered off again to another mountain hold—for no particular reason; nor was the aunt worried. They were the kind of friends who frequently went separate ways—for days, even weeks. But after a month rumor came back that, while out staggering about one winter’s night, he’d fallen down a cliff, broken both legs, and died some time over the next three days from injury and exposure.

  The rack had not worked right away.

  The marshpool fluff that pryn’s great-aunt had tried to stretch out was too weak to make real fabric, and the sheared fleece from the winter coats of mountain nannies and billies made a fuzzy stuff that was certainly warm but that tore with any violent body movement. Still, the aunt believed in the ‘loom’ (her word for it in that long-ago distant language) and in the barbarian, whose memory she defended against all vilification. For hadn’t he also designed and supervised the construction of the fountains in the Vanar Hold, one of the three great houses around which fabled Ellamon had grown up? And hadn’t the Suzerain of Vanar himself used to nod to him on the street when they’d passed, and hadn’t the Suzerain even taken him into his house for a while—as had she? While her friends in other shacks and huts and cottages felt sorry for the young woman so alone now with her memories, it occurred to the aunt, as she sat before her fireplace on a dim winter’s afternoon, watching smoke spiral from the embers: Why not twist the fibers first before stringing them on the rack? The (also her word) ‘thread’ she twisted made a far smoother, stronger, and—finally!—functional fabric. And the loom, which had been a tolerated embarrassment among those friends to whom she was always showing it, was suddenly being rebuilt all over Ellamon. Women twisted. Women wove. Many women did nothing but twist thread for the weavers, who soon included men. That summer the aunt chipped two holes in a flat stone, wrapped the first few inches of twisted fibers through them, then set the stone to spin, helped on by a foot or a hand, thus using the torque to twist thread ten to twenty times as fast as you could with just your fingers. But with the invention of the spindle (not the aunt’s word, but an amused neighbor’s term for it), a strange thing happened. People began to suggest that neither she nor the long-dead barbarian were really the loom’s inventors; and certainly she could not have thought up thread twisting by herself. And when it became known that there were other towns and other counties throughout Nevèrÿon where weaving and spinning had been going on for years—as it had, by now, been going on for years at fabled Ellamon—then all the aunt’s claims to authorship became a kind of local joke. Even her invention of the spindle was suddenly suspect. And though he never claimed it for himself, the neighbor who’d named it was often credited with at least as much input into that discovery as the barbarian about whom the aunt was always going on must have had into the loom. For the barbarian turned out to have been quite a famous and fabled person all along, at least outside of Ellamon. And the spindle? Surely it was something she had seen somewhere. It was too useful, too simple, and just not the kind of thing you ‘thought up’ all alone. The aunt spun. The aunt wove. The aunt took in abandoned children, now of a younger cousin, now of a wayward niece, and, several years later, the grandson of a nephew. For wasn’t her shack the warmest in the village? When she had made it, she had filled every chink of it with a mixture of oil and mud, into which she had blown hundreds and hundreds of small air bubbles through a hollow reed; it would hold both warm air and cool air for more than twenty-four hours. (She had told the barbarian—whose name had been Belham—about her insulation method that first day in the market; and wasn’t that why he had consented to stay with her when the Suzerain of Vanar had put him out?) From all the looms of fabled Ellamon bolts of goats’ wool and dogs’ hair cloth and sheep wool rolled out, slower than smoke spiraling over winter embers. The great-aunt spoke little with her neighbors, loved her little cousins and great-nieces (and her great-nephew—seven years older than pryn—who had recently become a baker), and grew more bitter. What mountain pasturage there was about the High Hold was slowly given over to sheep, already prized for their thin but nourishing milk. (Sheep wool clearly made the strongest, warmest cloth. But that, alas, was not among the aunt’s particular discoveries.) And more and more milk-less, fleeceless dragons leapt from the pastures’ ledges and cliffs, with their creaking honks, to tear their wings on treetops and brambles decently out of sight.

  Because the slopes around Ellamon sported more rockweed than grass, the local shepherds never could raise the best sheep: Ellamon’s fabrics were never particularly fabled.

  Today pryn’s great-aunt was over eighty.

  The barbarian had slipped drunkenly down the cliff more than fifty years ago.

  Bound to the sky by vines twisted the same way her great-aunt still twisted goats’ fleece and marshpool fluff and dogs’ hair into thread that bound that bitter, old, energetic woman to the earth, pryn flew!

  Flying, she saw the crazily tilting mountains rise by her, the turning clouds above her, the rocking green, the green-licked rock. Some where below, sheep, bleating, wandered over another rocky rise. Wind rushed pryn’s ears to catch in the cartilages and turn around in them, cackling like a maiden turning from her shuttle to laugh at a companion’s scabrous joke. Air battered her eye sockets, as a wild girl pounds the wall of the room where she has been shut in by a mother terrified her child might, in her wildness, run loose and be taken by slavers. Air rushed pryn’s toes; her toes flexed up, then curled in the joy, in the terror of flight. Wind looped coolly about pryn’s arms, pushed cold palms against her kneecaps.

  They glided.

  And much of the space between pryn and the ground had gone.

  She had launched from a ledge and, through common sense, had expected to land on one. How else to take off once more? Somehow, though, she’d assumed the dragon knew this too.

  Trees a-slant the slope rose.

  She pulled on the reins, hard. Wings flopped, fluttered, flapped behind her knees; pryn leaned back in wind, searching for ledges in the mountains that were now all around.

  She glanced down to see the clearing—without a ledge any side! Treetops veered, neared.

  That was where they were going to land…? Leaves a-top a tall tree slapped her toes, stinging. She yanked vines. Dragon wings rose, which meant those green membranes between the long bones would not tear on the branches. But they were falling—no, still gliding. She swallowed air. The dragon tilted, beating back against her own flight—pryn rocked against the bony neck. Reins tight, she knuckled scales. Dragon muscle moved under her legs. A moment’s floating, when she managed to push back and blink. And blinked again—

  —because they jarred, stopping, on pebbles and scrub.

  A lurch: the dragon stepped forward.

  Another lurch: another step.

  She pulled on the reins again. The slow creature lurched another step and…halted.

  She craned to see the trees behind her. Above them, rock—

  ‘Hello!’

  The dragon took another step; pryn swung forward.

 
The woman, cross-legged across the clearing by the fireplace, uncrossed and pushed to one knee. ‘Hello, there!’ She stood, putting a hand on the provision cart’s rail. ‘That your dragon?’ The ox bent to tear up ragged rockweed; the cart rumbled for inches. The rail slipped under the woman’s palm.

  Swinging her leg over the dragon’s neck, pryn slid down scales, feeling her leather skirt roll up the backs of her thighs. On rough ground she landed on two feet and a fist—‘Yes…!’—and came erect in time to duck the wing that opened, beat once, then folded. ‘I mean—I rode it…’

  The woman was middle-aged, some red left in her hair. Her face was sunburned and freckled.

  With suspicion and curiosity, pryn blinked. Then, because she had flown, pryn laughed. It was the full, foaming laugh of a loud brown fifteen-year-old with bushy hair. It broke up fear, exploded curiosity, and seemed—to the woman, at any rate—to make the heavy, short girl one with the pine needles and shale chips and long, long clouds pulled sheer enough to see blue through.

  That was why the woman laughed too.

  The dragon swung her head, opened her beak, and hissed over stained, near-useless teeth, tiny in mottled gum.

  The girl stepped up on a mossy rock. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Norema the tale-teller,’ the woman said. She put both hands in the pocket of her leggings and took a long step across the burnt-out fireplace. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am pryn, the…adventurer, pryn the warrior, pryn the thief!’ said pryn, who had never stolen anything in her life other than a ground oaten cake from the lip of her cousin’s baking oven three weeks before—she’d felt guilty for days!

  ‘You’re going to have trouble getting that dragon to take off again.’

  The girl’s face moved from leftover laugh to scowl. ‘Don’t I know it!’

  The ox took another step. The cart’s plank wheels made brief noises among themselves and on small stones. The ox blinked at the dragon, which stood now, one foreclaw raised.