The Einstein Intersection (11 page)

I drifted off and woke again when
only one slop
of blue lightened the eastern dunes.
Batt’s
dragon came around the fireplace. Spider’s lumbered after him. I rose on my elbows.

“Keeping you up?” Spider asked.

“Huh?”

“I was running over the Kodaly again.”

“Oh.” I could hear it coming across the chill sand.
“
Naw
.”
I got to my feet. They were about to start around again.
“Just a second.
I’ll go around with you. There’s something I want to ask you. I’d have been up in a little while anyway.”

He didn’t wait but I swung on my dragon and caught up.

He laughed softly when I reached his side. “Wait till you’ve been out here a few more days. You won’t be so ready to give up that last few minutes’ sleep.”

“I’m too sore to sleep,” I said, though the jogging was beginning to loosen stiff me. The coolness had set my joints.

“What did you want to ask me?”

“About Kid Death.”

“What about him?”

“You say you knew him. Where can I find him?”

Spider was silent. My Mount slipped in the road and caught his balance again before he answered. “Even if I could tell, even if telling you would do any good, why should I? The Kid could get rid of you like that.” He popped his whip on the sand. Grains flew. “I don’t think the Kid would appreciate my going around telling people who want to kill him where to find him.”

“I don’t suppose it would make much difference if he’s as strong as you say he is.” I ran my thumb over the machete’s mouthpiece.

Spider shrugged some of his shoulders. “Maybe not But, like I say, the Kid’s my friend.”

“Got you under his thumb too, huh?” It’s difficult to be cutting with a
cliche
. I tried.

“Just about,” Spider said.

I flicked my whip at a dragon
who
looked like he was thinking of leaving. He yawned, shook his mane, and lay back down. “I guess in a way he’s even got me. He said I would try to find him until I had learned enough. Then I’d try to run away.”

“He’s playing with you,” Spider said. He had a mocking smile.

“He’s really got us all tied up.”

“Just about,” Spider said again.

I frowned. “Just about isn’t all.”

“Well,” Spider said in some other direction than mine, “there are a few he can’t touch, like his father. That’s why he had to get me to kill him.”

“Who?”

“Green-eye is one. Green-eye’s mother is another.”

“Green-eye?”
In my repetition of the name I’d asked a question. Perhaps he didn’t hear. Perhaps he chose not to answer.

So I asked another, “Why did Green-eye have to leave Branning-at-sea? He half explained to me last night, but I didn’t quite get it.”

“He has no father,” Spider said. He seemed more ready to talk of this.

“Can’t they run a paternity check? The traveling folk-doctors do it all the time in my village.”

“I didn’t say they didn’t know who his father was. I said he had none.”

I frowned.

“How are your genetics?”

“I can draw a dominance chart,” I said. Most people, even from the tiniest villages, knew their genetics, even if they couldn’t add. The human chromosome system was so inefficient in the face of the radiation level that genetics was survival knowledge. I’ve often wondered why we didn’t invent a more compatible method of reproduction to go along with our own three
way
I-guess-you’d-call-it-sexual
devision
.
Just lazy.
“Go on,” I said to Spider.

“Green-eye had no father,” Spider repeated.

“Parthenogenesis?”
I asked. “That’s impossible. The sex distinguishing chromosome is carried by the male. Females and
androgynes
only carry genetic equipment for producing other females. He’d have to be a girl, with haploid chromosomes, and sterile. And he certainly isn’t a girl.” I thought a moment. “Of course if he were a bird, it would be a different matter. The females carry the sex distinguishing chromosomes there.” I looked out over the herd.
“Or a lizard.”

“But he’s not,” Spider said.

I agreed. “That’s amazing,” I said, looking back towards the fire where the amazing boy slept.

Spider nodded. “When he was born, wise men came from all over to examine him. He is haploid. But he’s quite potent and quite male, though a rather harried life has made him chaste by temperament.”

“Too bad.”

Spider nodded. “If he would join actively in the solstice orgies or make some appeasing gesture in the autumnal harvest celebrations, a good deal of the trouble could be avoided.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Who’s to know if he takes part in the orgies? Don’t you hold them in the dark of the moon in Branning?”

Spider laughed. “Yes. But at Branning-at-sea, it’s become a rather formal business; it’s carried on with artificial insemination. The presentation of the seed-especially by the men of important families-gets quite a bit of publicity.”

“Sounds very dry and impersonal.”

“It is.
But efficient.
When a town has more than a million people in it, you can’t just turn out the lights and let everybody run wild in the streets the way you can in a small village. They tried it that way a couple of times, back when Branning-at-sea was much smaller, and even then the results were-“

“A million people?”
I said. “There are a million people in Branning-at-sea?”

“Last census there were three million six hundred fifty thousand.”

I whistled. “That’s a lot.”

“That’s more than you can imagine.”

I looked across the herd of dragons; only a couple of hundred.

“Who wants to take part in an orgy of artificial insemination?”
I asked.

“In a larger society,” Spider said, “things have to be carried on that way. Until there’s a general balancing out of the genetic reservoir, the only thing to do is to keep the genes mixing, mixing,
mixing
. But we have become clannish, more so in places like Branning-at-sea than in the hills.
How to keep people from having no more than one child by the same partner.
In a backwoods settlement, a few nights of license take care of it, pretty much. In Branning, things have to be assured by mathematical computation. And families have sprung up that would be quite glad to start doubling their children if given half a chance. Anyway, Green-eye just goes about his own business, occasionally saying very upsetting things to the wrong person. The fact that he’s different and immune to Kid Death, from a respected family, and rather chary of ritual observances makes him quite controversial. Everybody blames the business on his
parthenogenetic
birth.”

“They frown on that even where I come from,” I told Spider. “It means his genetic structure is identical with his mother’s. That will never do. If that happens enough, we shall all return to the great rock and the great roll in no time.”

“You sound like one of those pompous fools at Branning.” He was annoyed.

“Huh! That’s just what I’ve been taught.”

“Think a little more. Every time you say that, you bring Green-eye a little closer to death.”

“What?”

“They’ve tried to kill him before. Why do you think he was sent away?”

“Oh,” I said. “Then why is he coming back?”

“He wants to.” Spider shrugged.
“Can’t very well stop him if he wants to.”

I grunted. “You don’t make Branning-at-sea sound like a very nice place. Too many people, half of them crazy, and they don’t even know how to have an orgy.” I took up my blade. “I don’t have time for nonsense like that.”

The music
dirged
from Spider.
I played light piping sounds.

“Lobey.”

I looked back at him.

“Something’s happening, Lobey, something now that’s happened before, before when the others were here. Many of us are worried about it. We have the stories about what went on, what resulted when it happened to the others. It may be very serious. All of us may be hurt.”

“I’m tired of the old stories,” I said, “their stories. We’re not them; we’re new, new to this world, this life. I know the stories of Lo Orpheus and Lo
Ringo
. Those are the only ones I care about. I’ve got to find Friza.”

“Lobey-“

“This other is no concern of mine.” I let a shrill note. “Wake your herders, Spider. You have dragons to drive.”

I galloped My Mount forward. Spider didn’t call again.

Before the sun hit apogee the edge of the City cleft the horizon. As I swung my whip in the failing heat, I permutated Green-eye’s last words, beating out thoughts in time: if there were death, how might I gain Friza? That love was enough, if wise and articulate and daring. Or thinking of La Dire, who would have amended it (dragons clawed from the warm sand to the leafy hills), there is no death, only rhythm. When the sand reddened behind us, and the foundering beasts, with firmer footing, hastened, I took out my knife and played. The City was behind us.

Dragons loped easy now across the gorse.
A stream
ribboned
the
knolly
land and the beasts stopped to slosh their heads in the water, scraping their hind feet on the bank, through grass, through sand, to black soil. The water lapped their knees, grew muddy as they tore the water-weeds. A fly bobbed on a branch, preening the crushed prism of his wing (a wing the size of my foot) and thought a linear, arthropod music. I played it for him, and he turned the red bowl of his eye to me and whispered wondering praise. Dragons threw back their heads, gargling. There is no death.
Only music.

Whanne
, as he
strod
alonge
the
shakeynge
lee, The
roddie
levynne
glesterrd
on
hys
headde
; Into
hys
hearte
the azure
vapoures
spreade
; He
wrythde
arounde
yn
drearie
dernie
payne
;-
Whanne
from his
lyfe-bloode
the
rodde
lemes
were fed, He
felle
an
hepe
of ashes on the
playne
.

Thomas
Chatterton
/English Metamorphosis

“Now there’s a quaint taste,” said
Durcet
. “Well,
Curval
, what do you think of that one?”

“Marvelous,” the President replied; “there you have an individual who wishes to make himself familiar with the idea of death and hence unafraid of it, and who to that end has found no better means than to associate it with a libertine idea ...

”... Supper was
served,
orgies followed as usual, the household retired to bed.

Le Marquis de
Sade
/The 120 Days of
Sodom

...
each
bubble contains a complete eye of water.

Samuel Greenburg/
The
Glass Bubbles

Then to the broken land
(“This”-Spider halted his dragon in the
shaley
afternoon-“is the broken land.” He flung a small flint over the edge. It chuckled into the canyon. Around us the dragons were craning curiously at the granite, the veined cliffs, the chasms) slowing our pace now. Clouds dulled the sun. Hot fog flowed around the rocks. I worked one muscle after another against the bone to squeeze out the soreness. Most of the pain (surprise) was gone. We meandered through the fabulous, simple stones.

The dragons made half time here.

Spider said it was perhaps forty kilometers to Branning-at-sea. Wind heated our faces. Glass wound in the rocks. Five dragons began a scuffle on the shale. One was the
tumored
female. Green-eye and
me
came at them from opposite sides. Spider was busy at the head of the herd; the scuffle was near the tail. Something had frightened them, and they went plopping up the slope. It didn’t occur to us something was wrong; this was the sort of thing that Spider (and Friza) were supposed to be able to prevent (Oh, Friza, I’ll find you through the echo of all mourning stones, all praising trees!). We followed.

They dodged through the boulders. I shouted after them. Our whips chattered. We couldn’t outrun them. We hoped they would fall to fighting again. We lost them for a minute,
then
heard their hissing beyond the rocks, lower down.

Clouds smeared the sky; water varnished the trail ahead. As M. M. crossed the wet rock, he slipped.

I was thrown, scraping hip and shoulder. I heard my blade clatter away on the rock. My whip snarled around my neck. For one moment I thought I’d strangle. I rolled down a slope, trying to flail myself to a halt, got scraped up more. Then I dropped over the edge of something. I grabbed out with both hands and feet. Chest and stomach slapped stone. My breath went off somewhere and wouldn’t go back into my lungs for a long time. When it did, it came roaring down my sucking throat, whirled in my bruised chest. Busted ribs?
Just pain.
And roar again with another breath. Tears flooded my sight.

I was holding on to a rock with my left hand, a vine with my right; my left foot clutched a sapling none too securely by the roots. My right leg dangled. And I just knew it was a long way down.

I rubbed my eye on my shoulder and looked up:

The lip of the trail above me.

Above that, angry sky.

Sound ?
Wind through gorse somewhere. No music.

While I was looking it started to rain. Sometimes painful catastrophes happen. Then some little or even pleasant thing follows
it,
and you cry.
Like rain.
I cried.